For twenty years I have been a scientist* working in a sector dominated by artists. That doesn't make it lonely - as a result my colleagues and customers are quite probably more fun and maybe more capable of inspirational thinking - but... Read More

I'm not sure if Gartner does 'rock star' analysts but Nick Jones generates more buzz than most. Today at Symposium he contends that: Your Customers and Users are Revolting!   First Nick nails his audience by describing the session as a maverick... Read More

I'm in Bellevue attending Microsoft's Worldwide PR Summit, an annual meeting of its PR leads and key agencies from around the globe. Aside from back-to-back sessions on PR housekeeping matters, we also get insights from some of the... Read More

Being slightly reclusive by nature, last week's Microsoft Worldwide PR Summit was one of the few times I spend much time with counterparts from other PR agencies. Microsoft has a strong hand of agencies supporting it, so its interesting to compare notes... Read More

The Church of the Customer Blog has a post about putting Mentos into Diet Coke.  I read about this the other day but it's interesting the responses from the two companies. Mentos: "We are tickled pink by it," says Pete Healy, vice president... Read More

So the travelling army of Dutch football fans have been ordered to cheer on their national team in their pants by joyless FIFA executives. In by far the best story to have emerged from the early stages of the World Cup, Dutch brewer Bavaria (which... Read More

Commenting on Virgin Mobile giving away free kebabs at events, a colleague remarked, "Whatever next in advertising – Microsoft giving popcorn away at cinemas?"I think that this is a FANTASTIC idea. And not that far-out, considering what I fetched from... Read More

No sooner do I eulogise about the wonderful Web 2.0 opportunities to create new businesses from nothing, than I am reminded about how pesky some of these startups can be.  I just took a brave but fatally flawed approach (junk mail first, then... Read More

Nah, of course not. We all know where bears go... and Monday we finally got confirmation it was indeed as we suspected. On Monday Edelman broke its silence on the Wal-Mart blog story that has exercised the blogging and PR communities. I was travelling... Read More

Yesterday, sitting among a gathering of the great and the good of UK tech PR (well the ones that work for the client who had pulled us together into a meeting, five agencies no less, all proper players, all the top talent in the room). The topic of making... Read More

In this post BL Ochman continues to breathe life into the Edelman/Wal-Mart debacle (judging by the number of comments interest is tailing off). Here's a snippet: The theme here is PR agency cluelessness about new media. And here to the bandwagon response... Read More

Jason Calacanis thinks so. He is on a crusade to out PR/marketing agencies who he suspects are paying top Digg-ers to recommend clients products. He has called for support in outing these companies and even put up a nominal $100 reward for information... Read More

Following on from Andrew's post from LeWeb3 about delegates' discontent with the political agendas that hijacked the event, the explosion of discontent continues to ripple outwards through various blogs and posted images. I don't know Loic... Read More

Microsoft has sparked another ethics debate for bloggers (or is it the same debate coming round again?). Either way, its a very familiar question to anyone working in tech PR: what's a review machine and what's a freebie? Microsoft... Read More

The Inquirer offers a good perspective into the Microsoft blogging 'scandal'. If you don't have time to read the full story, the clue is in the headline: Microsoft Ferrari furore is a load of old tosh. Although the sub head is pretty good too: Bloggers... Read More

The excellent Response Source gives UK journalists a channel to reach out to PRs and ask questions for stories, get contact info and occasionally fish for gadgets and devices (strictly for review purposes or competition giveaways, of course).... Read More

The Outsell Report on click fraud has garnered a lot of headlines this week. $1.3bn is a very headline grabbing number but its not a new problem - either Click Fraud (Yahoo! and Google have both had problems) or its old world predecessors.  My... Read More

As many people did I watched the World Cup final last night.  One thing I noticed, other than the Zidane headbutt, were the adverts around the touchline. Most of them were the standard global brands using this for brand awareness but there were... Read More

I've started taking mass transit to work recently, and when I arrive in Bellevue - a stone's throw away from Redmond - I see these ads on, and inside, the buses:They're advertising OpenOffice, a free, open-source office software suite from Sun Microsystems.... Read More

from OK/Cancel a cartoon titled "A conversation with marketing" ... Read More

I'm a fan of Forrester's work in pushing forward the evolution of the marketing function, marketing operations and particularly the better use of technology. We both sing from, more or less, the same hymn sheet. Peter Kim has written up some... Read More

Some ideas here from T-Mobile and Tiger beer on tactics for converting customers into evangelists from a story that ran on BBC online. Basically they ran 'underground' events for small (>500 people) customer groups, to create buzz around their brands,... Read More

A few posts ago I compared Sun's OpenOffice marketing strategy to dropping leaflets into enemy territory. Not too long after that, Slate Magazine's "Explainer" column explored the mechanics of leaflet-dropping in "The Secrets of Airborne Propaganda Distribution".... Read More

The Alternate Reality Gaming Network wonders if YouTube's lonelygirl15 is the innocent video diarist that she appears to be: The white-hot spark of a YouTube user named LonelyGirl15 has set the dry timber of the summer Internet community ablaze. Ostensibly... Read More

I like it when high tech gets wrapped up with the ancient. Freight containers washed to shore from the beached MSC Napoli have posed a moral dilemma for the UK. Local folk have asserted their 'privilege' to scavenge anything that comes to... Read More

Just back from the Government Leaders Forum (GLF) in Edinburgh. Hosted by Microsoft, the event brings together goverment figures from across Europe, including both technology policy makers and implementers. It may not quite be Davos, but when the coach... Read More

I missed this story in Saturday's Times Online but its subsequently stirred up a few comments at Church of the Customer and Slashdot. In outline terms, new EU consumer protection laws will prevent companies misrepresenting themselves as consumers.... Read More

Martin Moore starts the ball rolling here, Jeff Jarvis adds his bit - here - and the ..the world's leading... adds more of the same here. And my recent experiences are that they are bang on the money. Which is an uncomfortable point of view... Read More

Not literally obviously, that's a whole different topic - but The Sydney Morning Herald has a good summary of the implications for privacy in an online world. For a flavour here's the end game list of how one can build a picture of 'you' from public domain... Read More

Anti-marketing activist Pete Roberts (my description, not his), spotted what appears to be a viral campaign gone wrong. He spills the beans here on a purportedly 'grassroots' campaign to undermine Google's position as the Internet's leading search... Read More

One of the keys to success in blogging is commenting on other people's blogs, which is why I am not a successful blogger.* As I've taken on more projects within and without Metia I've gotten awful at commenting on other people's blogs. It's all I can... Read More

Wait, weren't MySpace and MTV just recently destroying the moral and intellectual fiber of the Republic? From Future Majority: Trumping even YouTube in interactivity, the forums will be held town-hall style in front of a live audience on yet-to-be-determined... Read More

Well, it’s all official – she’s a fake. Today the LA Times confirmed the rumours: Lonelygirl15 was merely an experiment in filmmaking by independent artists, much like Blair Witch Project. Despite the filmmakers coming clean, the blogosphere is still... Read More

Fascinating discussion between Jeff Jarvis and Richard Edelman debating the future of PR agencies and whether the traditional agency approach is sustainable in a social media enabled environment. Jeff floats the concept of The Inside Out Agency in... Read More

Here's one     -------------------------- and updated:... Read More

Whenever anyone asks me for examples of marketing campaigns I admire, my mind goes blank. Next time I'm asked, I'll remember to give credit to The Best Job in the World. Whoever at Queensland Tourism, or their agency, came up with the basic idea and... Read More

This is a bit of a me-centric post but then its not everyday you change the name of the company you founded 18 years ago (myself, Clare and Paul). So bear with it. Officially Monday we change our name. For eighteen years we have been Write Image, on... Read More

Apologies for this blog going further up the cul de sac of self interest but to answer some questions... When selecting a new name we specifically set ourselves the following six requirements: No puns No risk of legal trauma No flaky meaning to... Read More

You mean you haven't heard of Jonathan Coulton? C'mon! Surely you've heard his music on podcasts like the Little Gray Book Lectures, or Escape Pod.Or you've spotted his CafePress t-shirts.Maybe you've read his blog, where he collaborates with his readers... Read More

A soundbite from Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI), the New York based media focused investment bank, taken from a discussion of 2008 and look ahead to 2009, by Wilma Jordan.  We are especially bullish on marketing services, because we anticipate... Read More

Wikiscanner matches the IP ranges of various companies with edits to Wikipedia that were made from those IP addresses. This information was always available for anyone to see, but going through all of the pages and edit histories and... Read More

CubeVoice...okay, CubeVoice is like Twitter, except you identify yourself as an employee of your company and carry on text conversations with your colleagues and interested outsiders in public. These conversations are aggregated and displayed in a Twitter... Read More

Fig 1. Expect next year's gripping sequel, Naked Came The Stranger To Facebook As social networking becomes more widespread as a tool for keeping in touch with with friends, family, business associates, and nice people you bump into at... Read More

Marketer David Berkowitz was surprised (and none too pleased) to discover that Blockbuster was using his name and likeness in advertisements that appeared on his friends' Facebook profiles. Berkowitz later found himself unintentionally endorsing an application... Read More

Readers of the BBC News Website are invited to submit questions for Microsoft's Chairman, who will answer them at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Maybe someone will ask him, "If I give my personal data to a social network,... Read More

After I posted about Twitter-connected citizens posting updates on the Iowa caucus, I talked about the event online (using Twitter, natch) with James Geluso, city goverment reporter at the Bakersfield Californian. I asked James if he'd write a guest post for... Read More

We all know the rules for writing on the Web, don't we? It's all in Jakob Nielsen: keep it short, highlight your key words, insert meaningful sub-headings, use bulleted lists, etc. and so on. People don't read, they scan. We must write for scanners.... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

I really liked this post by Jennifer Leggio describing her least favourite social media marketing campaigns so far this year. The old rules rule so to speak. Don't make lame gags about sex and death (House, Quiznos), don't insult your audience... Read More

Having started this theme, I'd better follow the story through.  The New York Times (thanks Steve) has a piece here on the next stage in the Microsoft Bill'n Jerry ad campaign. Sounds like it's taking a direction I wasn't expecting - confronting... Read More

Take a look here. Give that man a multi-million dollar ad budget. ... Read More

UK ad agency, Beattie McGuiness Bungay (BMB), is in a spot of trouble over its Carling iPint application for the iPhone (illustrated in action above). US based developer Hottrix has slapped a $12.5m law suit on the agency and client Molson... Read More

Recently, in a dead laptop battery on a plane moment, I was thinking to myself how has the drive towards technology and community affected marketing? Is there a formula or equation that I could devise to show this?I started from the commonly held view... Read More

eMarketer lifts some interesting data from TNS on the online activities of UK internet users in an article on Advertising on UK Social Networks. As ever data throws up some curiousities - 76% have used online banking, but only 16% have viewed, or contributed... Read More

Something about the juxtaposition of junk food and social networks appeals. Bin out 10 Facebook friends and get to gorge on junk food with Whopper Sacrifice. Hat tip to Wade.... Read More

Of course, there's too much entrepreneurial talent, client equity and available cash swilling about in the world of ad agencies, to doubt that many of them will indeed succeed in making the necessary transition. But it will be interesting to see... Read More

Neil Davey, Editor of the excellent MyCustomer.com rehashes a Net Promoter critique in this piece today. Its slightly old news (I'm sure I saw this debate being aired a long time back, but it appears to have resurfaced recently in another... Read More

At the end of last summer while lying by the pool I received a call from a client talking about a virtual launch that they were thinking about doing. They were in Seattle and I was on holiday in Spain and I didn't really think too much about it until... Read More

ComScore reckons Google is losing its lustre. Apparently Facebook frenzy has topped out and is slip sliding downhill. While investor Roger Ehrenberg worries about the lack of a strategy for monetization of audiences in social networks. Alternatively,... Read More

Following on from the US launch for three of Microsoft's major products in 2008. Today is the big day for the UK launch up at the NEC in Birmingham. Ballmer should be just about through his keynote by now. As with the US launch, the Virtual... Read More

Its not every day at the office that you get a buzz from your job. However sitting here in London, watching Steve Ballmer delivering his live Launch Wave keynote in LA, through our Virtual Launch Experience solution - and knowing that all around... Read More

Steve Rubel recently commented that The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites. He's right but that's not the point of this post. His headline helped me draw together a couple of related thoughts. Namely, that The Future is Interactive, Not Online.... Read More

Up against it today. So, not much time to comment on these stories that caught my eye recently. Blogs can sometimes be just so much more lipstick on the proverbial pig. Jeff Jarvis rails against Wal-Mart. The lesson: companies are judged... Read More

Charlene Li, now the sole employee of Altimeter Group, has produced a new report - free to download - correlating leading brands' level of engagement in social media and their value. The report can be found here and explanatory post from... Read More

Last week I posted on the power of the niche in building community among professionals in vertical industries but at the time I missed this post from Richard Holway. It covers some of the same territory and also flags that the FT is planning to launch... Read More

It's not often that we post about what we do on a daily basis but sometimes there are things I just have to post about, they are also the things that normally that keep me from posting more regularly.Over the last few months we've been working hard to... Read More

Normally I'd shy away from ever claiming a 'world's first' - someone, somewhere must surely have got there first? But in this instance we think we are on solid ground. Working with the team at Mediacom we have been busy putting the finishing touches... Read More

bbb... Read More

Something else for marketers and especially designers to embrace - data driven design. James Governor has a great analysis of the drivers behind Adobe's Omniture acquisition - Adobe Omniture: Data meets design. Here comes Google! if you are a marketer... Read More

Our SEAT Exeo project has been written up as a Microsoft case study and put up onto microsoft.com, find it here. Many thanks to the SEAT team for agreeing to share the highlights. Tags: Seat, Exeo, Silverlight,Microsoft Advertising, Metia, PageLife... Read More

There have been some considered and thoughtful posts on the implications of social media recently (and some silliness too). I like these two viewpoints for inspiring intelligent discussion on some of the practical issues arising... Read More

Good post here by Gartner's Richard Fouts on using customer references across the breadth of an organization. It comes complete with this nifty little quote from Richard: "Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference... Read More

Following on the heels of Steve in his recent post, I want to talk briefly about PR firm Edelman's entry into the online world of Second Life. (Executive summary: I like it.)Fig, 1 - Edelman's strangely foreboding SL headquartersIn my mind, I have a rough... Read More

When is news too old to write about on your blog? Well, if AdJab can post about this amazing Diet Coke and Mentos video, I can mention Gizmodo's shaggy dog story of mid-December. The gadget blog posted on December 14th that the iPhone would be announced... Read More

Behold the new face of terror! These battery powered light displays were installed at public locations in 10 American cities two weeks ago as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Cartoon Network show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Yesterday Boston... Read More

In my last post about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force/Boston bomb scare, I declared the campaign a "win for the client". That, of course, was before the client's parent company paid $2 million in restitution and compensation to the affected cities and various... Read More

Adaptive Path cofounder Lane Becker is using Plazes to tell us where he is, or is very likely to be.Remember the old days when we used aliases on the Internet, and didn't share personal details with people online lest they track us down and murder us... Read More

Over at Information Week, Cory Doctorow points out that the Web is really, really good at humiliating companies that fail to perform as promised (computer techs falling asleep on customers' couches, rats in the kitchen at KFC, etc.). But how can companies... Read More

As many people did I watched the World Cup final last night.  One thing I noticed, other than the Zidane headbutt, were the adverts around the touchline.Most of them were the standard global brands using this for brand awareness but there were 2,... Read More

The Church of the Customer Blog has a post about putting Mentos into Diet Coke.  I read about this the other day but it's interesting the responses from the two companies. Mentos: "We are tickled pink by it," says Pete Healy, vice president of marketing... Read More

A couple of recent articles caught my eye: "Marketing is the new finance" according to Google's chief economist in this AdWeek article. Google has a chief economist? VC tells agencies to get some serious tech creds, article in AdWeek again - creativity... Read More

Metia's London Influence business just came out top of PR Week's Top 40 Technology Consultancies, which is great news. Basically we grew in the period in question, and since then our Influence business has also scooped up some new clients like LG... Read More

Thought provoking article by Alex Benady in Campaign (17.10.08 issue) on the death of dialogue in advertising. The assertion is that TV and cinema advertising has been taken over by the use of bold imagery and evocative music to connect... Read More

Geoff Ramsey the co-founder of eMarketer has published Seven Predictions for 2009. Geoff's most interesting comment, taken slightly out of context but it's just as applicable to all marketing and media participants as to the traditional media companies... Read More

In this Reuters article - Tech Firms Tune into Social Media to Reach Consumers - NetApps says it plans to spend 20 per cent of its PR budget on social media. If NetApps were really radical, they would be planning to spend 20 per cent of their advertising... Read More

There's more than one way to take advantage of the recent decision by the UK government to cut the standard sales tax (VAT) by 2.5 percent. So hats - and crew neck sweaters - off to West London's finest mail order clothing store Boden:   I'm... Read More

Just when you were expecting something socialmediawebigital, Todd Bishop has spotted that trucks, sorry outdoor media, has a role to play in the Bing launch. Pics from Bill Bledisoe on Flickr here. Perhaps spending the whole $100m budget on trucks would... Read More

Here are the World's Best Presentations as voted for by Guy Kawasaki, Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds and Bert Decker for Slideshare.The winner is this one about the shortage of water called Thirst THIRST View SlideShare presentation or Upload your... Read More

I hate to interrupt the grownups when they're talking about implementing customer reference programs, but I need to take a moment here to discuss soda pop.I recently wrote that a throwaway post about My Coke Rewards on my personal blog had gotten a surprising... Read More

That's the headline which the World Advertising Research Centre site when talking about a report published by the American Association of Nation Advertisers. This report includes the following quote "Marketing accountability is still often an activity... Read More

Following on from my previous post on PR Week's tech PR agency ranking. Inevitably publication of the tables stirs up the annual debate on their validity and relevance. Already ...the world's leading... has chipped in on the overall... Read More

Not sure if that's a geographically accurate statement - Metia on top of the world - but its fun to see our new logo up at the North Pole. Our London office has been helping three friends of the company in their bid to raise cash for a male cancer... Read More

The Friendly Ghost has published a list PowerPR Index of bloggers. We are way down (I assume it might be us down there at #65?). TFG's list owes its heritage to Todd Andrlik and his Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs. Again, we don't feature, even... Read More

The story so far. A small storm erupts on Friday night around a Microsoft ad campaign running across Federated Media's syndicated blogger sites (FM is kind of an ad sales clearing house that sells space for a group of independent... Read More

A clutch of interesting links on social networks from the weekend and Monday: Danah Boyd is academic about class-ism on Facebook and MySpace - summarized on BBC Online. Tom Murphy starts to hang with the kidz on Facebook. He has... Read More

Yesterday I got a piece of personally targetted direct mail with a proposition specific to my business. Nothing unusual there. But it was sent to me at my home address. In fact the whole creative angle was trading on how clever the sender was to... Read More

Listen. Hear that distant rumble of thunder? That's the sound of traditional ad agencies stampeding into the world of digital just as fast as their Hush Puppies will carry them. The data points below, just released by eMarketer and Forrester... Read More

Twitter and blogs are all a buzz about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (aka Kumo for project/product name genealogists). I'm no search engine expert, and haven't got any inside track until, like the rest of the public, we can get our hands on... Read More

Hat tip to Puffbox that 10 Downing Street is soon to be releasing a new website, looks like a big improvement.You can read their post here but in short Wordpress basedMore videoStreamlined navigationno go live date as of yet  Tags: 10 Downing... Read More

Some stories have come together heralding the death of the microsite - a staple of creatively led agencies in recent years. Coke drops campaign sites in favour of social media - NMA (sub required) Kellogg is latest brand to abandon campaign... Read More

A few sources have published data points highlighting the hiccup in the growth of online advertising. Mostly they are referring to 'traditional' online banner advertising, so whether that spend is now sneaking off to slightly newer 'online' channels and... Read More

As an agency we thrive on feedback. Whether from colleagues or clients it helps us tailor content to the exact needs of the target audience and ensures that we get it right first time round as often as possible. Having said that, there... Read More

Microsoft have launched a site called the Mojave Experience and the views on it have been quite wide ranging.From comparing it to the Milgram experiments in the 60's.To being critical of people who aren't tech savvy enough to use VistaTo what if Apple... Read More

Catching up on a couple of interesting reports which appeared recently and need to be considered by marketers: The CMO Council Forrester's Josh Bernoff declares Social Media Playtime is Over supported by some datapoints and assertions that now... Read More

Time was, advertising stole many of its best creative ideas from the film industry. Now there is the Internet and user generated content. 3M is feeling the negative backlash of picking up on an office prank that went viral (some time ago) and replicating... Read More

Germaine Greer, the old devil, wades into the Robert Hughes/Damien Hirst feud in today's Guardian. For fear of oversimplifying, this particular spat trades on the fact that Hughes's artistic sensibilities have been roughed up by an upstart who doesn't... Read More

I wrote about the notion of Marketing Attacks last week. It got me thinking about marketing techniques the world could do without - which is slightly different to just plain bad marketing (doubtless a far more extensive list). I had to spend a couple... Read More

Want to see a whole microsite experience squeezed into a teeny tiny banner ad? The Mass Effect 2 launch campaign is now live at MSN UK Gaming. What's all this about? See the previous post. World's first interactive and expandable banner ad (we reckon)... Read More

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes and German-manufactured white goods from John Lewis." Add to that hallowed list ad after great ad from Nike and its agencies. The latest spot fuses The... Read More

The first ad got pretty widely slated for not slaying the I'm a Mac campaign in a single stroke (which was never going to happen). Here's ad number two. Still no product connection but some definite clues about where it might be heading. Bill is... Read More

Word is that Gartner has now cancelled it's flagship Vegas and Barcelona Symposiums (Symposia?). Similarly, Salesforce.com has cancelled it's Dreamforce event. Not surprisingly big ticket events which incur substantial risk for hosts (venue,... Read More

In this post Ben McConnell finds the good news in the bad news about marketing budgets. We agree with Ben. Certainly the areas of our business that are very relevant to the problems faced by our customers: virtual events to get around travel freezes;... Read More

A few months back we announced the PageLife platform for producing e-Magazines - or digital magazines - built using Microsoft Silverlight technology. So it is interesting to note a couple of pieces around the topic of e-Magazines. ReadWriteWeb has penned... Read More

Piece here on Mashable about the use of Twitter for marketing. Nothing remarkable in that, there's lots of marketing taking place on Twitter, a little by companies promoting themselves or looking for leads or insight, but far more by Twitterers selling... Read More

A new Microsoft ad campaign aired in the US yesterday. This is the one from Crispin Porter + Bogusky I mentioned back in June. The first ad is oblique in the extreme and seems to have left commentators from the tech / blog universe cold - here's... Read More

The ads are out there. Opinions, links and comments on the ads from Joe Wilcox, TechCrunch and Steve Clayton. Not seen themself. So I have no opinion, yet. UPDATE: TechCrunch praise them, almost like them, Mashable are neutral, VentureBeat... Read More

Back in London this weekend I was persuaded to visit the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a good show, but with a bizarre and slightly sinister follow up. About 24 hours later I acquired another Twitter follower, this time a Mr Mark Rothko.... Read More

Coming back through the airport at the weekend I picked up a copy of The Google Story. It was one of the few business books that didn't need to be mulched and re-written following the financial crisis of the past few weeks. Now, I'm up to... Read More

Joe Wilcox reckons the I'm a PC campaign is a fail. How shall I put this? I'm sure it's not a runaway success either - but it's a lot better than what has gone before. Was a single campaign ever going to turn around perceptions overnight?... Read More

The designers and developers who work buried deep below ground in the Silverlight mines here at Metia have unearthed a rich vein in PageLife. Responding to some of our customers' requirement to explain their products or services via a structured, narrative... Read More

Some time round about now in San Francisco and London, Microsoft is formally taking the wrappers off IE9. Which means our NDA and embargoes time out and we can shout about the Rough Guide to the World. I suspect the launch will grab a bunch of coverage,... Read More

              A story from Ad Age in the US highlights an area where the UK is moving ahead of America. From May 26th it will become illegal for marketers and their agencies to seed positive references... Read More

Recently I've met with two people who are responsible for their corporate website marketing. One was from a pure play online financial brokerage company the other from a car rental company where most of their sales come through their website.They had... Read More

Dale at Freeform Dynamics has shared some data on the use of social media based on an online study of 1,456 IT professionals undertaken in September 2007. Six months is probably a long time in social media, so it would be great if Freeform... Read More

This week we have had a team over at the Beach Break Live student festival in Wales. Our role was to build and sustain a virtual experience that gave a flavour for the live events happening at the festival. Live streaming wasn't an option, so instead... Read More

Here's something to occupy the barren hours before kick off. The creative team tell me there are a magnificent eight moments of iconic World Cup history recreated in the video we knocked up for our Mobile Keepy Uppy game. Can you find them? BTW -... Read More

Not everything goes to plan. My World Cup journey ended in a bar in Washington DC, rather than Johannesburg. While neither England or the USA exactly set the competition alight. Metia came away with more than a few extra fans. Metia's Mobile Keepy... Read More

Here's the formal release: Metia creates a ‘Rough Guide to the World’ web site for leading travel publisher ·         Interactive site uses Windows Internet Explorer 9, HTML5 and Flickr to allow travellers to... Read More

I saw an ad recently for New Balance's Love/Hate advertising campagin and rather than me wanting to go and buy a pair, it normally doesn't take too much encoragement for me to buy a new pair of shoes, all I could think of was Marmite.There's a slight... Read More

Not Google, who launched Google Health Beta on Monday this week. Check it out here. eHealth Insider has a report. Mashable has a review too.  Would I trust Google with my records? Sorry, no. Probably not Microsoft either, who have their... Read More

Selene Bowlby has written a post titled "15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have" which lists things every web site should have.Good Visual DesignThoughtful User InterfacePrimary Navigation Above The FoldRepeat Navigation In The FooterMeaningful... Read More

Personally I'm not a big Twitter user and don't need to write lines like Hugh's cartoon. I see the benefit of Twitter, my lack of usage is mainly due to the amount of time I have available rather than anything else. From a company point of view a lot... Read More

McKinsey Quarterly published Industry Trends in the Downturn: a Snapshot. This graph caught my eye. It seems in recessions we stay at home and spend money on things that are 'good' for us, in a Puritan sense at least. Namely, education, reading,... Read More

Interesting article in Fast Company on US advertising luminary Alex Bogusky. Much of the article hinges around his agency's recent acquisition of the Microsoft (consumer) advertising account. The tenor of the article is: Can Bogusky, who apparently... Read More

Steve Clayton offers a nice plug for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Digital WPC site. It is the second virtual launch experience we have delivered for client Microsoft, who are really beginning to understand how to execute... Read More

Courtesy of an AOL video sharing site, here is a Microsoft UK promotional video - Stay Ahead in Your Own Way - used to promote their recent Virtual Launch Experience (VLE). It's good to see how different parts of Microsoft are promoting... Read More

                    Another virtual launch event held for Microsoft, here for OCS R2 - that's Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2.0. Joe Wilcox at eWeek's Microsoft... Read More

Picking up on a contributed post at e-Consultancy's blog: The problem with conversational marketing The quick summary of the post is, that opening up conversations (dialogue via social media) with your customers isn't going to be enough, if... Read More

Most people who work in the marketing arena are aware of how technology is changing what they do.  No longer is it acceptable for the marketing department of an organisation to act as a black box they must be able to demonstrate specific return -... Read More

Here is a new site Metia has built for Microsoft Dynamics which has just gone live. It's a great looking site, the team and - most importantly - the clients are all very happy. It's also - we believe - the first Microsoft website to be built and... Read More

The Forrester posse is full of their new report on B2B buyers use of social media. Josh Bernoff says: "If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, this report means you're late." "This is your chance to stand... Read More

Analyst reports and market data are all well and good but its personal experience that tells you something has really reached an inflection point. It was Open Day at my girls next school yesterday. On one wall was a project where the pupils had been... Read More

Deloitte's research is picked up here in a piece by Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick, who refers to an earlier WSJ article. Blanket condemnation is good for headlines but is not 100 per cent true. It would be more accurate to say dumb ideas... Read More

Not wanting to be outdone by the success of our colleagues in Metia New York, the London team and client Logica have been nominated for an Institute of Sales Promotion Award here in the UK. The work was our Logica Does it Better campaign. We are particularly... Read More

Great to see Microsoft's UK operation making the most of the company's virtual events platform (mentioned a few times by me, including first of all here). Why go virtual? My view is here. Or in the words of TechNet UK:... Read More

Last night – suited and booted – Metia London took our lovely client, Logica to the Institute of Sales Promotion awards, at the Park Lane Hilton. We were up for the Best B2B Campaign award, with our nifty, Logica Does it Better campaign. Across the... Read More

In his post Covering an Apple press event, Robert Scoble offers sage advice on how to get your coverage noticed. The bad news is that it requires a team of four to five people: "TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re... Read More

Could the genetically modified, armoured game character take the cuddly big green ogre? And where does Harry Potter stand in the line up? Well perhaps not in the lovability stakes (see above), but in terms of launch day revenues? Earlier this... Read More

Tech PR copywriter The Friendly Ghost has created a "relentlessly functional" tool using free Zoho Creator online database software. The Friendly Ghost Social Media Resource tracks PR social media knowledge, both theory and proof, and the Friendly... Read More

Dell has hired Andy Lark as its new VP Global Marketing & Communications. My headline is a bit of an overstatement, I'm certain Andy wasn't hired just because he is a blogger, but given Dell's experiences in recent years it can't have been a disadvantage.... Read More

The potential of Facebook to be far, far more than a social network site for students is becoming more tangible every day. Forrester's Charlene Li has a great post here about Faceforce a third party application on AppExchange that enables integration... Read More

Yesterday I was invited along to an e-consultancy roundtable on the future of B2B marketing. Other attendees included a few marketing service providers like ourselves and a variety of online marketers from blue chip organanizations like Sony, Canon, PwC... Read More

The Wall Street Journal (here) and the FT (here) speculate that Microsoft is angling for an equity stake in Facebook. Charlene Li gives context. Steve Clayton poo poos the story. Obviously its all speculation. Curiously, the WSJ story is dated... Read More

Simon Pegg recently diverted from promoting Run, Fat Boy, Run to explain to Jonathan Ross why he was happy to be a geek (and why he definitely wasn't a nerd). Steve Rubel recently commented on the rise of the geek marketer. Now BusinessWeek reports... Read More

Today David Bradshaw commented in Ovum's Hotnews (its a great service, but needs a subscription, so no link) that the exuberant valuations being touted for Facebook are a good indicator that a 2.0 bubble could be about to burst. Unlike every other... Read More

Hugh posts about Dinosaurspeak today. The cartoon I don't quite get, but the term - Dinosaurspeak - nails it 100%. It's something I'll sign up for (ie killing it off). And I'm certain I'd be followed quickly by our thirty strong content... Read More

Right now, visualization techniques and tools are areas where we are investing time. I was planning to post on this, and then everyone else beat me to it... Charles Arthur has taken a look at this subject in his Guardian techblog Charles also... Read More

Nielsen completed a global survey - 26,000+ consumers in 47 markets - which has confirmed that consumers place the greatest trust in... recommendations from other consumers. Well, we all knew that, but its good to have some more confirmation. More interesting... Read More

From the Life of Leo (Laporte) blog, a link to Virgin America's new online ads featuring cartoon versions of well-known bloggers.  Pictured: Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Pete Rojas, Alex Albrecht, and Kevin... Read More

Something a bit strange about following the wise words of Forrester's marketing team blog over many months, and then finding someone from a PR agency - Chris Thilk of MWW - suddenly joining the conversation on the site. All completely transparent... Read More

A naive question I know, but interesting to read that Richard Holway - formerly of Ovum and the eponymously named Richard Holway Ltd - now regards himself as an influencer not an analyst. And that he aspires to be a trusted influencer. I've paid... Read More

According to Dave Hatch, a Research Director at Aberdeen Group, three of the top four marketers' priorities are to do with justifying their existence inside their own business, not whipping the competition outside in the marketplace. Even those... Read More

Um, hi guys. I'm on deadline, and I probably shouldn't even be blogging right now; but I wanted to tell you about a couple of things. First, you might be wondering how you're going to talk about Open Social to your agency's execs without sounding like... Read More

I learn things at our offsites too. In London last week, our quietly understated content and editorial team took the stage. In the past 12 months this 40 strong team, spread across London, Seattle and Singapore, have: Produced no fewer than 1,353... Read More

More top metrics. Our interactive team has pitched in with a new project* they have just won. It has a target of one million users in its first twenty four hours after launch. That's a great target. But come back to me after it has been delivered. It... Read More

Wal-Mart is venturing into the blogosphere again. Previous forays gave the US retail giant (and its PR agency) a bloody nose. Not being an American, I don't quite understand the degree of antipathy toward Wal-Mart. It certainly seems that if they slip... Read More

One Twitter, one blog post, and one good idea equals instant community. Jeremiah Owyang (there ought to be a limit on how many times I can refer to him on one day) urged social media/marketing enthusiasts with Twitter accounts to leave... Read More

Marketer David Berkowitz was surprised (and none too pleased) to discover that Blockbuster was using his name and likeness in advertisements that appeared on his friends' Facebook profiles. Berkowitz later found himself unintentionally endorsing an application... Read More

Okay, that was dorky. But I was just looking at the Web site for a musician who performs under the name A Fine Frenzy and was intrigued by how it ties together various types of social media. A lot of the site's content consists... Read More

This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program. One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees... Read More

It is my daughter's eighth birthday soon, I could run it by her... but I reckon she'll stick with a Hamster. Gizmodo unearthed the story.... Read More

Now will you just look at this campaign poster? It's a thing of beauty. The candidate is turning away from the shadows and looking directly toward the light and warmth of the sun. He's dressed all in white, but not in a way that makes it look like... Read More

Strangely, one of our most popular posts ever was this story from Wade on Sun taking a swipe at Microsoft on their home turf by advertising OpenOffice on the local Seattle bus routes (see the number of angry comments the... Read More

This is how it's done. At 7:30 AM Cory Doctorow writes a post on BoingBoing about a reader's difficulty with Amazon's MP3 downloads, and the bewildering response from customer service. At 3:17 PM, an Amazon employee on the MP3 development team leaves... Read More

At last night's BIMA dinner I met Jamie Galloway, Head of Digital Media at the Central Office of Information (COI). For anyone, like me, who isn't immersed in the public sector, in simple terms the COI acts as a procurement clearing house and trusted... Read More

Next up: pressure-sensitive toilet seats and LCD screens in the stall doors! Mark my words!(Photo by avlxyz, via Engadget) Tags: advertising, hand dryers... Read More

The New York Times reported that a new organization called the September Fund is unleashing "a barrage of late advertising and on-the-ground action to secure Democratic victories" in the 2006 midterm elections. One ad that's making the Intertube rounds... Read More

Photo courtesy of Daniel Boud CBGBs - the birthplace of the New York punk scene - has shut its doors. The place went from dive in a bad neighbourhood to become a tourist attraction in a bad neighbourhood. After a lengthy and well-publicized... Read More

I'm about to board a bus for our annual company offsite (held this year at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, a development that seems designed to make me explode with sheer delight) , but I wanted to take a second to wave energetically at you... Read More

As a former network administrator and current marketing guy, I'm savvy to which e-mail messages deserve my attention and which can be cast into the trash bin with a snort of derision. Spammers cannot trick me into opening their missives - I'm wise to... Read More

I'm just back from presenting at Customer Reference Forum Europe. This was the first gathering of customer reference professionals in Europe and was brought together by the illustrious Bill Lee who, as always, did a great job as host and facilitator.... Read More

Ben Edwards of IBM is delivering his presentation on corporate branding in the age of YouTube, and brought the house down with this video ad for mainframes.I'm not used to "hilarious" being an adjective you can apply to IBM. This was a very skillful way... Read More

I've posted my notes from the Blog Business Summit on this site as articles, because as posts they were just too long.I've cleaned them up a bit but they're still a little rough. But they're notes, right? Not transcripts. However, if you attended the... Read More

UK Resistance dissects a Nintendo advertorial in Prima magazine touting the fitness and weight loss benefits of the upcoming Wii game console.Okay, sure - if you jump up and down, or run in place, or swing your arms wildly while using the controller,... Read More

Must be getting crowded over in Second Life. No sooner had Sam Palmisano and IBM taken up residence, as described in BusinessWeek Online, than Silicon.com reports Michael Dell is joining them with his own Dell island (not sure if Michael has... Read More

Read Michael Castellon's blog on a new initiative to defuse the alien threat to Nevada. Teaser pic below. But remember, back in June you read it here first. Tags: KFC, Aliens, Junk food... Read More

Some boffins at Nike have realised there's something almost meditative and relaxing about driving a golf ball through a birthday cake. This is a great little viral to support its new Juice golf ball range, with slow motion footage of the ball’s impact... Read More

Fast Company has a great article about Campfire - headed by Mike Monello and Gregg Hale (otherwise known as makers of The Blair Witch Project) - a production agency "branded entertainment company" specialising in viral marketing. At a... Read More

If you are a large corporate, then don't enter Second Life in an obvious way. Make a statement. There's a challenge to Marketing. Tags: Second Life... Read More

from OK/Cancel a cartoon titled "A conversation with marketing" ... Read More

I'm back from Thanksgiving vacation, ready to pick up my cudgel and head out into the wild in pursuit of my Goals and Objectives for next year. My mission for 2007 is to turn TNM theory into practice here at the Seattle office. I'm forming a brain trust/strike... Read More

Jason Calacanis thinks so. He is on a crusade to out PR/marketing agencies who he suspects are paying top Digg-ers to recommend clients products. He has called for support in outing these companies and even put up a nominal $100 reward for information... Read More

Al Gore may have invented the Internet and Howard Dean may have discovered how to use it to organize supporters and raise campaign funds; but I think we're seeing Web 2.0's maturity as a political tool at the Web site of Tom Vilsack, Iowa governor and... Read More

Hugh MacLeod drew this last year for Steve Clayton at Microsoft. At the time Clayton said, "I like it a lot and plan to paste it around the building as liberally as I can and to see what Mr Ballmer thinks of it :)" He took the concept a lot further... Read More

In my last post I talked about the Blue Monster of Microsoft, created by cartoonist Hugh MacLeod and, reportedly, adopted by a growing number of employees as a mascot.This morning I learned about the weird phenomenon of the OS-tans - various computer... Read More

Behold the new face of terror! These battery powered light displays were installed at public locations in 10 American cities two weeks ago as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Cartoon Network show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Yesterday Boston... Read More

In my last post about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force/Boston bomb scare, I declared the campaign a "win for the client". That, of course, was before the client's parent company paid $2 million in restitution and compensation to the affected cities and various... Read More

Big rats too. And lots of them. Click on the image to reach the video. I doubt the KFC/Taco Bell PR team now trying to deal with this crisis will be heartened to know, but they are probably starring in the latest case... Read More

Not literally obviously, that's a whole different topic - but The Sydney Morning Herald has a good summary of the implications for privacy in an online world. For a flavour here's the end game list of how one can build a picture of 'you' from public domain... Read More

Every day we get datapoints confirming the rise of online advertising. So many they tend to blur into a low level hum. But I couldn't let this item pass without a comment. The UK's Daily Telegraph has carried a news report analysing Google's... Read More

Anti-marketing activist Pete Roberts (my description, not his), spotted what appears to be a viral campaign gone wrong. He spills the beans here on a purportedly 'grassroots' campaign to undermine Google's position as the Internet's leading search... Read More

Branded search gets seriously weird. Dancer/singer/model/wrestler and, as Britney Spears' husband, tabloid fodder Kevin Federline has his own search engine. The hook: users win prizes.Figure 1. K-Fed dares you to search for PopozaoSays the site, "Every... Read More

Sadly, I wasn't able to post to this blog from South by Southwest Interactive 2007. However, I did update Twitter frequently using my mobile phone. So if you were watching Twitter you knew, for example, that I was at one point tossed into the back of... Read More

SF author Will Shetterly sparked a passionate discussion about how Web technology is changing the business of writing when he posted a rant by Dr. Howard V. Hendrix on a LiveJournal discussion board. Dr. Hendrix, the vice president of the Science Fiction... Read More

Fresh from two weeks vacation (its a European thing), I find myself at Bill Lee's Spring Customer Reference Forum in Berkeley, California. Having reached the West Coast via Switzerland and then London, I'm catching up on email, blogging and sleep (there's... Read More

I'll follow up with a more considered post - day two starts shortly... In terms of highlights, keynote yesterday was Ben McConnell. Ben manfully overcame the worst that the evil god of AV snafus can do to a man in front of a big audience. Luckily thanks... Read More

Following on from Siobhan's post on PR 101 tools and lazy journalism colluding to serve up ropy stories to consumers. I'd ask the question, so will bloggers be able to keep vendors and traditional media honest? Maybe, if the experience of a recent... Read More

I seem to recall that recently Gartner - to many people's surprise - scooped an award for its forays into blogging. Unfortunately, some corners of the Gartner empire seem to have been bypassed on the road to web enabled enlightment. Read here from competitive... Read More

PR agency Ricochet Public Relations has named and shamed its client as being the source of incorrect information passed on to the media. In a rare outbreak of responsibility in the PR world, Ricochet didn't fall on its sword for the client. Nor did it fudge... Read More

USA Today has a good wrap up on current legal cases around libel and blogging. It serves as a salutary reminder that while you may think you blog in a virtual world, your home and other assets exist in the real world. The one with all those lawyers.... Read More

The story so far. A small storm erupts on Friday night around a Microsoft ad campaign running across Federated Media's syndicated blogger sites (FM is kind of an ad sales clearing house that sells space for a group of independent... Read More

I haven't noticed much discussion on this post from OUT-LAW.com (which is run by law firm Pinsent Masons). The assertion is that - in some very precise circumstances - employers could own their employees' profiles or other data created on social networking... Read More

TV and film directors don't very often get the tech industry right, but last night I stumbled upon Riot On! on BBC4. Riot On! nailed it for me. It may strictly speaking have been about a mobile entertainment company - its the 'story' of Riot... Read More

Is there something a little bit too direct about this Datamonitor email pitch to clients and prospects? What would the company accountants say? Then again the discounts are good, sign up for yours here.... Read More

Every now and again stir up PR agencies (preferably on a Friday afternoon). Then sit back and watch the response. Tags: Tom Foremski, PR is dead (again)... Read More

Something a bit strange about following the wise words of Forrester's marketing team blog over many months, and then finding someone from a PR agency - Chris Thilk of MWW - suddenly joining the conversation on the site. All completely transparent... Read More

A naive question I know, but interesting to read that Richard Holway - formerly of Ovum and the eponymously named Richard Holway Ltd - now regards himself as an influencer not an analyst. And that he aspires to be a trusted influencer. I've paid... Read More

I don't why I find this snippet interesting. The Raw Story runs a story on the cost a wiretap, or telephone tap to us Brits. Comcast will fix a wiretap for you at $1,000 to install, then its $750 a month to keep on eavesdropping. Not a bad margin... Read More

Pinsent Mason's legal newswire, OUT-LAW News has a story on upcoming Italian legislation covering "editorial products", that may require bloggers to register with the government simply to publish a private blog. I suspect the keyword is *may*. One has... Read More

Wal-Mart is venturing into the blogosphere again. Previous forays gave the US retail giant (and its PR agency) a bloody nose. Not being an American, I don't quite understand the degree of antipathy toward Wal-Mart. It certainly seems that if they slip... Read More

When MP Derek Conway was outed yesterday by the Conservative party for apparently very nominally 'employing' his sons at the public's expense, journalists were faced with the question of where to look for 'colour' to illustrate the story?... Read More

Is it possible for a company to be evil and also play cricket? I thought I knew a lot about Microsoft but this Reuters story put a new spin on it (sorry). Disclosure: Microsoft are both a partner and customer, so if anyone wants to read anything... Read More

Last week Forrester published a new Big Idea on the Connected Agency. Their exec overview of the Big Idea is: Today's agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of... Read More

Teresa Valdez Klein of Parnassus Group will be giving a free Webinar entitled "Locating and Participating in the Online Conversations that Matter" at 10:00 a.m. PST on February 19th, with an encore presentation the following day at the same time. The... Read More

My friend Eric once described Facebook as a platform for serving up Scrabulous games. Beyond that, it offers nothing of interest to him. I have to wonder how many Erics there are out there, and how many of them would wander away from Facebook if Scrabulous were... Read More