Beginning Once upon a time I wrote this post about collective superstitions. I talked about the George & Lynne cartoon strip from The Sun newspaper, how it was linked to the fortunes of my college football team, and how I found this website selling original George & Lynne artwork whilst …
A friend of mine had a video of Deep Purple in concert in California. In a break between songs you can hear one of the band talking to a sound engineer. There’s an issue with the mixing desk. This goes on for a few seconds before another member of the …
What the frack is fracking? Fracking is an aggressive, invasive technique for extracting valuable raw materials out of hard to reach places. More specifically fracking is shorthand for hydraulic fracturing. Huge amounts (e.g. 8 million gallons) of carrier liquid and other substances are pumped at high pressure into underground rock …
“Don’t blow it all at once.” This is good advice, but there’s no point giving it. You watch your mother, their grandmother, give your child £20 for its birthday and you give the advice that you know won’t be heeded. Appreciating the benefit of delayed financial gratification has to be …
One is reminded of the Derek and Clive “This Bloke Came Up To Me” sketch, which we join half way through. Clive : I was watching a game against Arsenal, and this bloke came up to me and said “Hello”. Derek : Oh no… Clive : And I thought, “Christ!” …
I saw Bruce Springsteen play Wembley Stadium (the old one) in 1985. And I saw The Rolling Stones play Wembley Stadium in nineteen ninety something. Two big brands. Same platform. Both with access to an engaged community of 70 odd thousand fans. Two very different approaches. And two very different …
No names no pack drill in this post. I looked on yesterday as opportunity knocked. Opportunity knocked to create some high credibility, high visibility, on-brand noise for one of our clients. Trouble was that the opportunity in question was of the social media variety. Also known as the serendipitous, unforeseen, …
This is a harrowing piece of film which reveals the brutal break-them-down-and-build-them-back-up approach being used by some social media agencies and consultants to get traditional advertising clients to lose the message based, paid for interruption mindset and embrace conversation. For “save American lives” read “join the conversation.” For “let go …
So you think you’ve got a community, huh? Does your community engage with each other around a shared interest in you? Does your community believe that you’re interested in them as human beings rather than a sales channel? Foiled Cupcakes has that kind of community. Foiled Cupcakes is a delivery-only …
I finally got to play with my new Storify beta invitation. Unfortunately the embed option works on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but not here on wordpress.com. So you can read my first Storify story here. And you can see it embedded, along with my initial observations, in the Blonde blog here. …
