Putting the 'happy' back into content
Hardly a week goes by without another set of intimate images of a legendary music act being unearthed.
And normally I simply flick past disinterestedly. But the latest set of images of Elvis Presley from his early years are truly arresting.
Taken by young freelance photo journalist Alfred Wertheimer in 1956, they capture a 20-year-old Elvis before the height of his fame and when he was still stunningly beautiful.
You can see more of these fantastic photos in The New Yorker.
Earlier this week I went to a marketing/tech seminar called Connectivity Crossroads (cue cheesy image on left), run by the agency RAPP and Marketing Week.
The thrust of the event was how to deal with the fact that consumers are now ‘always-on’ – a buzzword that I’ve seen used on numerous occasions in the last 12 months.
What, for me, was most interesting was the realisation by many big companies that they are no longer in control, when it comes to the web.
Refreshingly, Eurostar’s Emma Harris spoke about the PR nightmare that surrounded the snow in Christmas 2009 and its effect on the Eurostar service and what they learned from it.
Gary Raucher from Philips also gave a speech about their current campaign and the lessons they learned from their previous brilliant, but ultimately-flawed clown commercial.
Most of us who work in the interweb already know that people are always connected to you and your brand. Social media is a wonderful way to reach out to your customers and users, but can also come back to bite you on the rear end, if you’re not careful.
At the top of the seminar, RAPP’s Rik Haslam emphasised that sometimes it’s not worth spending ages planning something and that you should just get out there and ‘do it’, which is a motto I thoroughly applaud. However, it’s also important to be prepared if things do wrong.
And herein lies the dilemma. The bigger the brand, the greater the risk to their reputation when things don’t go as smoothly as you’d like them to. Undeniably, brands need to be connecting with their audiences online, but there needs to be some sort of strategy and risk and response mechanism in place.
Back in February, Paperchase were undone by a Twitter campaign over a disputed design. Astonishingly, Paperchase weren’t even on Twitter at the time and had to join expressly to try and rescue the situation.
Going back to Eurostar, although they were on Twitter when the snow problems hit the headlines, they were tweeting from an account that advertised their current ad campaign, rather than a Eurostar-branded Twitter handle. This was another learning and one that, hopefully, most major companies have now learned.
So what is the lesson from all of this? There were many from the seminar, but ultimately it seems to me that it all comes back to good practice on social media and the web, as a whole.
– Engage, rather than broadcast
– Be normal: there are still brands out there who are way too corporate on social media
– Be open and honest
– Don’t be afraid to apologise if things go awry
– Seek help and advice from your customers, when and where necessary. You’ll earn far more respect
The Olympic Games have come early to St Albans in the form of a new outdoor teen and family activity zone in the city’s Verulamium Park.
Yesterday, we went to the park and saw the new Adizone in action for the first time. I say Adizone because adidas put up £75k (half) of the funding for this £150k initiative.
Apparently, the idea has already piloted in the likes of London boroughs Waltham Forest, Newham and Tower Hamlets, so the chance to do in St Albans was deemed a no-brainer.
But is it any good? The idea behind it is that it provides a maintenance-free place to do exercises for the whole family.
Certainly, yesterday, it was overrun with kids and their slightly-bemused parents testing out the equipment.
The unfortunate thing is that they’re all one-size-fits-all. Things like the lat pulldown machine don’t work particularly well, because the only resistance is your own body weight, created by the seat on which you sit.
In addition, the hand bike, seated bike and cross-trainer were all very stiff – something that will hopefully improve in time, although being exposed to the elements is likely to make this difficult.
What did seem to be good was the basketball-cum-football court. We saw a group of young kids having a kickabout when we left.
I think the real test of the this new exercise space will be what it looks like in two years’ time when the Olympics actually come round. It will need to be regularly maintained and checked, otherwise it could easily fall into disrepair. I have my doubts that this will happen.