And still the train keeps going

Winding through the Siberian forests

Moleskine entry: April 16th, 2011

Growing up on the relatively small land mass known as the British Isles, I guess the longest single train ride you could take would be London to Edinburgh [8hrs, in December snow]. As such, you can’t really get your head around being on a train for four or five days.

It still blows my mind.

Wooden shacks and settlements pass slowly by as our track meanders around the northern border of Kazakhstan. Having been led through tree-soaked hills and over ancient oxbow lakes, the landscape is now quite barren – we are approaching Mongolia.

I slept for about ten hours last night, maybe twelve. We’re easily way ahead of Moscow time now and drinking ’til dawn is a pleasant experience. It’s 13:30 at the time of writing. The gentle clack-clack clack clack of the tracks below make an oddly comfortable sleeping companion and rest has come easy.

We’re living in two time zones.

Outside it’s 13:37.
Inside it’s 17:37.

It still blows my mind.

1000heads: Domino’s Pizza & Audiences

A comedic tale for the fast-food friendly amongst you –

It was Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK a little while a go and, for me personally, post-big birthday celebrations for someone dear. For breakfast/lunch/hangover-medicine, Domino’s Pizza was chosen (don’t judge) and, as I went through the ordering process, the social creative agency part of my brain refused to switch off;

“Now, wouldn’t it be awesome if I could share this order… I was out with a whole bunch of mates last night and the sheer comedy value of participating in hangover junk food is just too good not to share.”

And so it was, as I was greeted by the post-payment ‘your order is being prepared’ screen I was invited to share my order! “Yes!” I thought “that’s EXACTLY what I want to do!” – but alas, the only option available to me was Twitter.

Interesting.

OK, let’s be clear: I am entering into this from a fairly unique use-case position. I am (probably) not Dominos’ average customer. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that the average Domino’s customer may not even have a Twitter account yet (although given the recent News International debacle, that’s definitely changing) – in the UK at least. Conversely, Facebook usage is definitely country-wide and yet the ‘share this order to my wall’ button is strangely absent.

Odd.

Parking that for a second, the whole thing got me thinking about audiences. Often, when discussing word of mouth strategies with new clients, we first address the planning and optimisation; where are these users/customers/consumers [delete where preferable] in social media, what communities do they belong to?

An obvious example would be discovering that a footwear company has zero exposure on Twitter but a huge Flickr following of photographers (who love shooting their feet, as it were), and prescribing a strategy model to fit against that, ie: DON’T start a Twitter channel – at least not yet anyway – engage with your fans and advocates on their platform of choice (not yours).

Bringing this back to Domino’s, I don’t want to share my post-hangover pizza with my 7000+ followers, however my Facebook friends, many of whom who were out with me on that particular weekend and (perhaps rather tellingly) also not on Twitter – I’d definitely tell them. Hell, some of them might even be local enough to come ‘round and steal a slice.

My point is: you follow people on Twitter, you friend them on Facebook.

Do you want to share personal experiences with your followers or your friends? Or perhaps even both? Domino’s – it would seem – would prefer it if I chose the former. However, little ol’ me, I’d only really be interested in sharing with the latter.

Purchase sharing is still only in its fledgling stages (and will only get bigger), naturally some brands are more friend-friendly than others. When you’re ordering pizza this weekend, have a think about that –

When the time comes, who would you rather share with?

NB: This blog post only came to me after I had finished the original pizza. So the two pepperoni passions I ordered the other night were purely for research and screen capture purposes. Honest.

Zimbabwe Bungee Jump. In HD.

Victoria Falls Bridge

Two years ago I jumped off Victoria Falls Bridge in Zimbabwe (you can probably just about make out the ropes hanging down from the centre of the image above).

It was, without doubt, the most thrilling thing I have ever done in my entire life.

At the time, for some (typically me) reason, I shot the whole thing on my phone. That too, was awesome.

Earlier this week, I was sorting through one of my old hard drives and I found a bunch of files from my old HD video camera. One of which, was a full 2min video of the exact same jump, but shot from the bridge. I had forgotten that at the time, when I went up to do the jump, I’d handed my camcorder to the tour guide to look after for me.

The legend actually recorded the whole thing.

I didn’t even know I had it. Amazing.

^ Turn it up to HD

Just speechless really. I get such a rush just from watching it.

Best. Discovery. Ever.

 

 

1000heads: Haye vs Klitschko: The Case Study

The Challenge:
How do we use WOMTrak to help market both 1000heads and its insights and analysis suite?

The Insight:
1000heads excels at reactive work. Contemporaneous content will always get bigger pick up, so throughout June we planned to keep our eyes peeled for an event where we could do just that.

What We Did:
Working with a small but multi-talented team (and taking inspiration from an earlier 1000heads blog post) we would use the heavyweight championship boxing match between David Haye & Wladimir Klitschko as a test subject for our word of mouth analysis team. Tracking data before, during and after the fight would give us three groups of data, or ’rounds’, that we could give to our creative team and external design partners to build an infographic around.

1000heads is unique in this space in that we don’t just specialise in social media. We wanted the end result to not only demonstrate the power of our WOMTrak product, but also our speed & agility in turning projects around. We hadn’t attempted anything like this before and so the drive was there to not only get it right first time but to also somehow keep it uniquely 1000heads’.

The Result:


Things We Learnt

  1. Working the weekend is hard (but fun if the project means a lot)
  2. David Haye has a massive online following (and can mess with your data if you’re not careful)
  3. Twitter isn’t always right
  4. The Next Web is our friend
  5. Getting cut-through in the US on July 4th is nigh on impossible
  6. It’s amazing what Ukrainian fans will do for their prized champion
  7. Everything starts in a Moleskine (even the worst of design ideas)
  8. Not everyone likes an infographic
  9. Everything can be made better, there has to be a time when you say ‘No more. Publish.’
  10. Irrespective of the result, a good infographic will always get picked up

Overall the results (for what was fundamentally merely a test subject) were outstanding.

A 400% increase in blog traffic, a number of new business enquiries and of course, the proof that we have the team to produce this kind of work for all our clients, both old and new.

It should be said that, internally at least, we made our objectives clear from the outset: how can we use the latest news events to demonstrate our products, our creativity and ultimately our hard work and agility. I think I can quite safely say that when it came to answering the brief, our team stepped up and delivered.

Any questions?

 

 

Christmas in Siberia

Moleskine entry: April 15th, 2011

My watch says it’s April 15th but honestly, it could be any time. Officially we’re into our second full day of train travel and, at 12:25pm Moscow time, we’re all very hungover.
Also, we’ve established a constitution:

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Which so far have fared us well. Plus, to help pass the time (between the vodka and the beer) we’ve organised different things to look forward to throughout the week.

Last night was ‘dress fancy’ night. Seven of us in total ventured down to the restaurant car for an evening dinner and, for a time, we were the only ones there.

Much merriment was had…

Oly & Me

Oly & Me. Good lad.

Later, a fairly inebriated Mongolian woman came to join us at our table and, much to our shared amusement, we soon discovered that the only the only English that she knew was in the form of Christmas carols.

On a train, somewhere in deepest Siberia, in the middle of April, singing Christmas carols… with a drunk Mongolian.

Brilliant. I don’t even have a box for that but I’m ticking it anyway.

THAT WAS ONLY DAY ONE!