Entries Tagged 'Miscellaneous' ↓

I am.

I’m absolutely fed up to the back teeth with sitting on uncomfortable chairs for hours in Costa Coffee with crawling, 5 quid an hour internet waiting for my next meeting. But I’ve found an alternative! Last week I finally went to check out The Hub in London. It’s a co-working space just behind Angel tube station in Islington.

It’s wonderful. The space is light, airy and big; the internet’s fast and best of all the people are lovely. Maria Glausier was hosting and did a great job of making me feel welcome; the few other people I spoke to there also made me feel like it’s my kind of place. It’s also very cheap - the first rung rate is a tenner for five hours which I think is a bargain.

As well as being a shared working space there’s a community aspect to the membership which in The Hub’s case centres around social and environmental businesses. I think this is a great idea and looking at the members’ photos on the wall I think I’m going to meet some interesting people as I start to go more often.

As you may have seen on this blog a few of us have been throwing around the idea of setting one of these up in Birmingham and the idea seems to have legs. I’ll keep you posted as things move forward.

(Imagery by Christian De Sousa from from the-hub.net)

From Seth’s Blog:

The two reasons people say no to your idea

“It’s been done before”
“It’s never been done before”

Even though neither one is truthful, accurate or useful, you need to be prepared for both.

Great stuff, as usual.

After finding out that Stef Lewandowski looks a bit like Sam Fox (apparently) I thought I’d give the “My Celebrity Lookalikes” viral a go.

It was going great to begin with - Val Kilmer, Matthew Fox from Lost, even Richard Gere. Not bad.

But then look what happens right at the end.

Please, someone tell me I don’t look like Maurice Gibb. Please!

How to make spam into art. Genius. Our friend John Xela from Birmingham / Manchester based Type Records is currently the featured artist on Allmusic.com, one of my all-time top ten websites - congrats John. New website launched today: Creative Birmingham. Definitely one for the RSS reader if you’re from round these parts .

I just wanted to congratulate Emily on a fantastic exhibition opening last night. Great attendance and everyone who came was very impressed.

The exhibition was an exploration of personal and documentary experiences of eating disorders and recovery.

I think it’s incredibly brave of Emily to have done this show and so publicly “come out” to everyone she knows about her past illness.
I think there is huge scope for the idea of using creative and artistic techniques as part of the process of recovery and this exhibition is fantastic example from which we can all learn.

The exhibition is on all week at Gallery No.9, Brindleyplace

More information here

Photos from the exhibition here

Here’s a draft of an article written for the IdeasFactory website. Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

(Target audience are independent creative people or small businesses)

—

Viral Marketing

Almost everyone now receives “viral” emails. Every day most people receive jokes, games and increasingly video content passed on by their friends.

But how could this sort of idea help you to promote yourself and what you do?

What is a viral?

A viral is any piece of content which people will like enough to send to their friends and colleagues, usually by email. If the content is good enough, the number of viewings grows exponentially until it’s been seen by a large number of people

Succincly put by Wikipedia, “It is word-of-mouth delivered and enhanced online”

Virals can comprise text, audio, video, games, imagery, animation or in fact any kind of digital content. You’ve probably had most types in your inbox this week.

Why are they useful?

The most successful users of viral marketing are large companies who have realised that the method is a cheaper and more effective alternative to traditional broadcast advertising. TV advertising costs a fortune, has to be delivered in video only, and is highly competitive.

However if the advert is good enough, why not release it virally? It costs almost nothing to release (all you have to do is email it to as many people as possible), it can be interactive, and it may in the end even be seen by more people than would watch a TV advert.

A good example of this is Budweiser’s Virtual Bartender game. Far more interactive and risque than any TV advert, it was an incredibly successful campaign.

A month after release, it had been played about ten million times for an average time of seven minutes. It’s still being played by hundreds of thousands of visitors a week. This is of far higher value to the company than a TV ad, probably cost far less to produce and almost nothing to distribute.

How can individuals and small businesses make the most of Viral Marketing?

The great thing is that if there’s no broadcaster necessary, you’re in just as good a position to release viral content as a much larger company (even if your budget is a bit smaller)

Anyone can use this technique, whatever it is that you do and whatever kind of budget and time you have. All you need is a bit of imagination.

The problem is that there’s a lot of viral content going around nowadays. The thing is to create something which is good enough to break through into people’s inboxes.

If you want some encouragement, a good place to start is the Lycos chart (http://viral.lycos.co.uk/) which displays some of the most successful viral content now in circulation. You’ll soon see how terrible most of it is. Hopefully this should give you some inspiration on how you can do it better.

Here are some basic rules for creating a successful viral campaign.

1. Create a piece of “killer” content. Something that provokes a reaction whether it’s funny, wierd or maybe even very sad. It doesn’t matter as long as someone who sees it will remember who you are, want to use your service or product, and / or will send it on to others who may do the same.

2 Whatever it is, make sure it links back to your website in some way and if possible encourages people to buy from or work with you.

3. Make it targetted and relevant. Sometimes making something which is relevant to a particular group of people (ideally your customers) works much better.

For example if you work mainly with Triumph enthusiasts, yoga teachers, or estate agents, make something that’s relevant to that group of people. In-jokes are always a good thing. People love receiving content which is relevant to them. The smaller the group you’re targetting, the more they’re likely to pass it on to everyone else they know who’s interested in the same subject.

4. If possible try to make sure that you have some way of tracking how many people have seen the content. The best way of doing this is by making sure that your content is on a web page somewhere which has some kind of statistics attached to see how many hits you’re getting. This is a much better idea than attaching your files directly to an email.

Now all that’s left to do is to send it on to as many people as possible, and see what happens.

Further reading

Kerb Viral Case Studies: Brighton based agency specialising in Viral Marketing Campaigns. Some excellent case studies on successful campaigns run for medium sized companies.

http://www.kerb.co.uk/THINKING/viral/

VW “Suicide Bomber” Advert:

A controversial advert made supposedly for Volkswagen. However the company denied any connection with the campaign.

http://www.jalopnik.com/cars/adspromotions/volkswagen-disavows-suicide-bomb-ad-viral-marketing-firm-connected-030734.php

I find myself to be continually amazed about how often creative people have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how to run their businesses.

As a team who went through the process of setting up a design agency, it was almost impossible for us to find any information on how others had set up and run similar businesses in the past. This meant we had to develop all of our own project, marketing, financial, organisational management and pricing procedures from scratch.

Whilst doing a session with a self employed friend recently, we worked out that because of a major mistake in the way she was counting the time spent on her projects, she was actually coming away from some projects having made less than four pounds an hour.

She immediately changed the way she costed her work and by the next week was making a hundred pounds a week more than she had been previously.

Surely practice as simple and basic as this, which is common to everyone within a particular field would be very easy to standardise and get down on paper, leaving people free to find creative ways to bend the “rules” to their own advantage?

To this day, no book has ever been released on how to run your own creative business. As a result, I find that many people I meet are making the same mistakes.

So how do we solve the problem? How about a creative enterprise Wiki? I have some more ideas on this which I’ll post up some time when I’ve had more of a chance to think about them.

Finally, here’s my blog. It’s taken me a while to get around to it but I’ve finally sorted it out (Thanks Charlotte for giving me the final kick up the bum that I needed!)

I don’t quite know where this is going to lead but I think the main thing for me is that it will help me to start writing, something that I’ve never really done before but definitely want to do a lot of in the future.

So, happy reading and please send me comments when you have time.