Nice Twitter Ghosting Disclosure From The Pirate Crew

I think we all agree that ghosting is a bit of a stupid thing. I tried it for while too help out time poor business people but it really doesn't wash with audiences nowadays.

The Discovery Channel people have obviously got the message with Deadliest Catch that people want to hear from Captain Johnathan the pirate not Casper the PR ghost. 

Very impressed to see this disclosure in the tweet.

It looks like a small thing but for me as a fan, it shows they understand I want to hear from him in first person and it builds trust. Nicely done. 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"><p>(Assistant here).The custom Time Bandit coupe for @capt_andy made by Slicks Garage. twitter.com/captjohnathan/…</p>&mdash; Johnathan Hillstrand (@captjohnathan) April 26, 2012</blockquote>

<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

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US Masters Pro Goes Social in China With Tencent Weibo

There are some pretty nice social activations coming out of the US Masters golf at the moment. 

I was especially pleased to see the Rory McIlroy WhoSay page with a Tencent Weibo link. 

Tencent Weibo is China's number one microblogging site. They have been making a play for English speaking celebrities to extend their reach outside of Asia and make sure they are positioned for Silicon Valley's run for their audience. As a student of Mandarin, I've been watching with interest (and also some fear at how rusty my Chinese has got) and having a play with a t.qq.com account in the hope that one day I can use it without Google translate. 

Sometimes it pays to remind ourselves that English is the third most spoken language in the world behind Mandarin and Spanish.  

Better brush up on my Chinese.

 

 

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Annual Awesome Easter Message With Limited Edition Colouring In Batman Thing

I was going to do my annual Easter message and then I started pondering. 

This time last year I was in Mt Eden prison on Easter Sunday. It was quite a moving experience for me being in a high security jail seeing the Chaplains ministering to those that have to be locked away from everybody else. 

I was there for work reasons on the contract management of prisons project. One day, I would like to write a book about the life changing experience I had there.

(I started writing a short story about the ghost that lives in the old special needs unit offices where I was but I kept freaking myself out writing at night, thinking he was going to be standing there looking at me).

The famous Dostoyevsky quote "The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" rings very true for me. 

I was only passing through and my human compass spun out. Things I thought I knew and had believed my whole life were laid out in front of me to make decisions about. Concepts of power, fear, redemption, forgiveness, good and evil come to life.  You realise how lucky you are not to have been raised in violence and brokenness. You realise that we all make mistakes and need someone to advocate for us. 

Today, I can only really restate what I said in an old Easter post and present to you this amazing colouring in activity. It has my Advocate and Batman in it and I love it. 

Happy Easter.

 

 

http://rocom.tumblr.com/

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YouTube Creator Fandom Farm

The focused strategy to actively drive content continues at Youtube with the acquisition of facilities to develop big gear Youtubers. 

"Purchased by Google Inc.in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, YouTube is trying to turn itself into a broadcaster of premium, original content.

YouTube said it would make the Playa Vista location an extension of its Next Lab facility in New York. The Lab, as it will be called, will focus on boosting the careers of YouTube's most popular content creators, offering them the chance to collaborate with industry experts and one another while using equipment provided by YouTube.

Once just a clearinghouse for amateur videos, YouTube in recent years began cultivating semiprofessional videographers, seeking to harness their grass-roots star power and helping them grow their audiences. Through its Partner Program, the San Bruno, Calif., company has invited more than 30,000 budding filmmakers to share in the revenue it collects from displaying ads alongside their videos.

Because videos produced by YouTube "partners" are generally higher quality and less likely to contain objectionable content, they also command higher advertising rates — seen as key to helping YouTube to reach its goal of becoming profitable. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has not said whether the video giant is in the black.

Playa Vista is among the Westside locations now attracting businesses in creative fields such as electronic media, entertainment, technology and advertising, said real estate broker Jeff Pion of CBRE Group Inc.

"I think people want to be in an environment that stimulates creativity," Pion said.

Read the full article here

The 'lets make a fancy version of a cool kids content farm' is fascinating and it wil be interesting to see how it works and the sort of stuff that comes out of it. 

The epic pre-teen fandom around people such as Mitchell Davis could be the place to foster niche audiences that love the crap out of your brands. Either that or they will smell the adman a mile away and run. 

Many TV shows in the US are experiencing the 'niche fan' phenomena where they require less viewers than what used to be required to keep a show from being canned as the audiences fragment. 

Smart companies will be tracking these creators and getting in early on what could be a creative force that changes advertising.

Either that or it will suck. Humans are fickle.  

The utimate Youtuber guide (all 90-odd pages of it) has also been released so you can get a bit of sophistication into your handy cam moments. 

 

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I like this: Tap TM

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Untitled

The last couple of days, I've been at webstock and what a grand old time I had. 

 

It's been interesting to see the tribe of online creators grow as web apps extend content channels beyond simple, static websites. 

It pays to have goals at such things so mine were pretty simple: Photobomb The Oatmeal and Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Achievement unlocked. 

 

 

I know right? Just like Forrest Gump!

 

 

I also live tweeted quite a bit of Tony's preso as a form of note-taking and as a way of making fan-boi John Lai jealous that he wasn't there. Seemed to work. 

 

Jealous face..love his work RT @cjlambert: whoop tony is here @zappos #happiness #webstock

— John Lai (@IAmJohnLai) February 17, 2012

 

I live tweeted some of Tony's wisdom so here are some of the highlights for your viewing pleasure. 

Here are some tweets (is it weird to embed your own tweets? oh well)

whoop tony is here @zappos #happiness #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

"we take the money normally for paid advertising to grow the service culture so our customers advertise for us" @zappos #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

"how can company culture help us so customers tell more stories about us" @zappos #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

nice. @zappos hires are performance marked on how nice they are to taxi drivers during their recruitment process #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

"the gap between brand and company culture is becoming less and less with social media" @zappos #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

"we create thousands and thousands of customer stories, not mass advertising campaigns." @zappos #webstock

— courtney lambert (@cjlambert) February 17, 2012

You can get a copy of the preso by emailing tony@deliveringhappiness.com (note how the clever bugger picks up your email address rather than putting stuff in Slideshare-that's why he's a billionaire see). 

I'm also going to write up some ideas on community management from Slashdot founder and epic troll-slayer Rob Malda that I found interesting but I'll do that later. 

In the meantime, here are some photos. 

 

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I blogged about the Four P's oh yes I did.

I have come to the conclusion that people either know heaps about marketing or absolutely nothing the crap at all.

As a result of my amazing discovery I’m going to blog about REALLY BASIC THINGS. SOMETIMES IN CAPS, but usually in normal writing. 

No trust me it’s healthy. Sometimes we can forget that foundations and rush off and get tricky when some person solved all this stuff and wrote a book about it. Like Philip Kotler. 

 

 So we’re going to the do the Four P's

 

 Yes we bloody well are.

 

THE FOURS P's

 

(now sometimes there are five and sometimes there are seven but let’s stick to four because otherwise it defeats the whole point of trying to keep this simple).

 

 If you go on an intro to marketing course, anyone worth there salt will bash you over the head with a diagram like this pretty early on. Like day one.

 

Notice that the ‘promotion’ is only a quarter of the story.

Most people when they talk about ‘marketing’ are actually referring to the promotional strategy.  Everyone wants to jump into this bit and talk about campaigns and creative and branding and all that sexy stuff. Note also that the promotion includes all forms of communication from direct selling through to PR and social media. 

 

The product and it’s positioning (competitor environment and the value equation) get forgotten as everyone rushes off to play with logos and talk about ‘brand onions’.

 

The place is the distribution bit and where the transactions take place. It could be a McDonalds at the airport or a book being sold on Amazon.  How do you get your products and services to the target customers to transact?

 

Cool. Here's a wiki link

 

 

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