It seems to be timecapsule project week...

Only two days ago I was writing about the One Day on Earth project, and then yesterday I trip over Google/YouTube's equivalent project, "Life in a day", the premis being almost identical - people contribute footage of their lives, the interesting, the mundane, the fleeting, the ugly, the beautiful, it doesn't matter as long as it happens on a given day, in this case,  the 24th July 2010. The trump card for this project is not the noble  "doing good / charity" angle of One Day on Earth but the rather more shallow Gen Y-appealing celebrity & fame perspective, as the submissions will be edited by Ridley Scott (and a large team of helpers me thinks) & debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011.



The life in a day  project  is "made possible by LG" the electronics firm, so we'll give marks to LG for buying big thinking and the power of harnessing and focussing collaboration and content production. We won't give them any marks though for having a really rubbish LG.com site with a lousy flash-y country selector that I had to alter the size of my browser for to even find the United Kingdom from the drop down list of European countries, and then it didn't click through anyway. FAIL!  LG= Life's Good. Not on your website it's not, I can only hope your products deliver the promise rather better.

Whilst I'm on the LG theme though, they also recently announced that they'd be launching a tablet device this year based on the Android operating system.

The future's touchy feely :-)

If you don't ask....

A friend of mine spotted this image on a friend of theirs Facebook wall.  Thanks Mr B!

What a friendly way to acknowledge that there's otherwise dead time in your service delivery process, suggest positive ways to use that time and simultaneously encourage people to talk about your brand in social spaces.  Nice work Dominos Pizza.

It doesn't have to take hours or huge budgets to encourage people to interact with your brand or service.

Get thinking!  What little touches could you easily add?

UPDATE:  I've just seen this call out in my Facebook newsfeed from Walkers Crisps asking for photo contributions of crisp sandwiches  (you probably have to be English to truly appreciate them!)

Being charitable...

I'm doing my bit for charity this week, and I am shouting about it not because I want the recognition but because there are some great causes that are worthy of support, and digital spaces can really help amplify the reach of these initiatives.

I've made a donation to the British Royal Legion Poppy Appeal, and am wearing my new self-adhesive poppy with pride (no more pins, great!), but beyond that I've added a Poppy Twibbon to my icon on Twitter, spreading the news of my support for this great cause far and wide, publically, and in reality reaching far more people that way than the number of people I interact with in person in a week.

Have you got yours?  Easy to add (and remove for those of you that are jumpy) just click here.  Just make sure you stick some money in a donation box too!

Then, following on from Remembrance Day, there's BBC Children in Need. They've adopted a similar approach, allowing people to spread the word for them, by offering ways to sport a Pudsey Bear Bandana on your social profiles, in conjunction with a PayPal donation which makes the twibbon notion work harder. Smart. 

The nice chaps over at ETV have kindly sent a few of the guys in my office a cuddly Pudsey and are going to donate £1 for every photo they receive of Pudsey on his travels, so here's one I took this morning.

 
Pudsey and I will no doubt be sharing many adventures over the next few weeks as I'm happy to harness the genorosity of ETV for a great cause. These days, motivated by a good cause and equipped with a phone that takes photos it's incredibly easy to get people involved & creating content.

What could your brand do to harness the power of mobile as an always on hand device & to encourage consumers to get involved?  I loved this Yahoo campaign from the summer.

YouTube modifies logo today...

to yell about getting 1 billion views per day (albeit last time I looked at some numbers it's actually greater than that most days). 

Apparently the average (US) consumer watches  9.7 hours of online video content a month, and the average video is 3.7 minutes long.  The last figures I saw earlier in the summer also quoted that there are 20 HOURS of content uploaded to YouTube per MINUTE! 

So twaddle to all those people that don't believe that users are participating or generating content.  How can your brand harness people's interest in getting involved?

For the second year running Doritos (in the US) are running a UGC themed competition  called "crash the superbowl" for the chance to win $5m and create the ad used for their prestigious and highly competitive SuperBowl spots.  Interesting because I saw a similar execution for Hula Hoops (owned by a different company) who are running a UGC video competition at the minute too.  Have a look - there's a lot of people genuinely prepared to put in some serious effort and creating good material.

YouTube: A platform to celebrate diversity

The nice thing about the web is that there's a place for everyone.

A quote I read ages ago and unfortunately can't remember the source of, said something along the lines of "YouTube is just like a TV station, there's a few gems in amongst a heap of rubbish".  True enough, most TV stations have their peaktime gems and an awful lot of filler / repeat content, and indeed the parallels work well for YouTube.

I've just found this film that has cut together some of the popular YouTube hits and set it against a music track.  How many do you recognise?  Can't say the track particularly worked for me, but fair play to the band who have leveraged the video cut as a promotional platform.

Fancy Dress Fest

It's fancy dress music festival time with Bestival taking place on the Isle of Wight this weekend.
Photo credit to: louise-taziva via Flickr

For those of you going and who haven't quite got your outfit sorted, maybe you should take inspiration from this fun if gimmicky plaything from my buddies at Cartoon Network: Scooby-doo yourself.

Media's evolving...

There is no doubt the media landscape has changed irrevocably over the last few years, and will continue to do so. Many of the old models are being questioned and we're all trying to get our heads around this brave new digital world that's changing so fast we're running to keep up.

So with thanks to a friend of mine in the US who sent this to me, here's a well made piece of UGC (User Generated Content) that made me smile today and made some valid points along the way.

Grab a coffee, apply your headphones and watch for 8 minutes. Long by many video standards but a story well told



And if you still need convincing that publishing is in a tricky place, and old models have to change, read this article about USA Today's plans to attempt to monetise some of their digital content.