blog till you drop!
A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology
“I like snogging better than sex”
Nov 16th
Fear not, I am not going completely loopy and randomly blogging about sex!
As I was walking around Soho last night, I found this intriguing artwork on a Soho shop. As I was in the middle of Soho (the gay quarter in London, famous for its trendy bars, gay clubs and and sex shops), and as a typical jaded Londoner, I didn’t think much of it, until I came home and saw this comment from my friend Cristiano on my Flickr stream.
I quickly went onto the ifancyasnog.com website and found out that this shop in fact sells delicious-looking frozen yogurts for health-conscious consumers.
So far I find the concept really interesting: eye-catching slogans, a cool name, a healthy and interesting product sold at a time where consumers are increasingly health-conscious…
The icing on the cake for me was to find out that these guys are very much into social media with a blog, Facebook group, Flickr stream , as well as a YouTube and Vimeo channels. Good stuff!
Overall I think it’s a nice effort, but I think all of their social media presences could do with a little fine tuning, and plenty of conversations and engagement! I am happy to discuss my ideas with the Snog team should they be interested in getting a little advice!
According to ifancyasnog.com the Soho shop is due to open early next year but if you can’t wait to get your hands on a snog, head over to their other shop in South Kensington.
US elections and Social Media
Nov 6th
America made the world proud yesterday when it elected Barack Obama, America’s first black President. Regardless of what your political opinions are, this is a truly historic moment.
This year’s election was amazing in terms of the content that was created both online and offline.
There is a lot of cool stuff out there but I have decided to focus on the things that made me smile. Feel free to leave me a comment with any links/images that make you tick 
Advertising
Firstly this really cool advert – the message is pretty self-explanatory I guess
Then this campaign for the Times on the Tube back in September 2008, featuring Obama outside 10 Downing Street.
US Elections and Social Media
I was amazed at the amount of content that was created using social media over the last few months – Back Obama and John MacCain have managed to establish an online presence on all the major scapes – Twitter, Facebook (including Facebook apps), MySpace, YouTube as well Barack Obama’s official blog, thus reaching a wide variety of online audiences.
Kudos to Facebook for urging American Citizens to vote on November 4th…
I spotted this typo on the Sarah Palin Facebook supporter page (note the term ’supporter’ was used instead of fan). I have to admit the word ‘destory’ (see Obama’s economy policy) made me chuckle.
Twitter was a major source of information throughout the campaign. Not only was every user on the planet tweeting about voting and the election, Twitter also set up a separate, live-updated elections page that tracked every tweet mentioning election issues – I love the concept, and the Twittersphere is still strongly debating the elections right now!
The Canadian prank
Sarah Palin was recently tricked by a Canadian comedy duo known as The Masked Avengers, who somehow got a hold of the Governor and tricked her into believing that she was actually speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The fake Sarko mentions following the campaign with the help of his Special American Advisor, Johnny Hallyday and tells Palin that his singer wife Carla Bruni wrote a song in her honour entitled ‘Du rouge a levres sur une Cochonne’ (Lipstick on the lips of a pig)
The origins of Twitter?
Oct 9th
I got thinking about Twitter today (hat tip to Simon D.) and started doing some research about its origins – I came across both this interview and this photo by Jack Dorsey.
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Reading the Twitter homepage, made me think about the different tools I have used to stay in touch with my friends and family over the years:
- I used to be a heavy MSN Messenger user when I moved to the UK – the status bar allowed me to let my family and friends know what I was up to
- In early 2000, texting revolutionised the way we used mobile phones. Updating your friends of your wherebouts had never been easier!
- Then came MySpace and Facebook; both have status bars, a nice easy way to update dozens of people at the same time
- And then came Twitter, asking a simple question, what are you doing?
This timeline (and time-consuming exercise!) has made me realise that Twitter is in fact, a repackaged MSN Messenger Windows Live Messenger.
The way we communicate and need to communitate is radically changing… I wonder what Maslow would think about that 