Five interesting posts from the last week

The Apprentice Australia – where was the PR?

September 30, 2009 By Matthew Gain 1 Comment

Monday night marked the launch of The Apprentice Australia, which I watched and enjoyed thoroughly. Though according to Mumbrella, disappointingly for Nine, only 691,999 other people joined me.

One Tim’s post there was a lot of discussion about why this failed. Some people thought the show was on too late, others that The Apprentice concept was tired and more than a few who thought that Mark Bouris was simply not up to the task. None of this was an issue for me. The late-ish slot works for me, I like The Apprentice series (having been a big fan in the UK) and I thought Mark was fine. Though what I thought was lacking was the PR!

I am a fairly big consumer of media, being a PR guy, but the show hardly touched me. This was completely the opposite in the UK at series launch. The Apprentice was absolutely everywhere! Profiles of the contestants appeared in the papers, the radio stations talked about it, the morning current affairs programs cut to scenes of it, celebs were asked their opinion, last year’s contestants gave their insights. There appeared to be little of that here, which is disappointing.

Of course in the UK the show was on BBC, so benefited from the power of its news and influence network. However, Nine, its affiliated online partner ninemsn and magazine stable ACP for all the poor decisions they have made over the last decade are still a media powerhouse.

Maybe I am getting this wrong, I was moving last weekend so didn’t consume the same amount of weekend media that I normally do, but a quick straw poll of some of my friends suggests the same. The PR simply didn’t register.

As momentum around the show heats up perhaps it will all change? I hope so, I really enjoy The Apprentice series and want others to talk with about it.

Filed Under: Entertainment, PR, Professional Posts Tagged With: ACP, Mark Bouris, Mumbrella, Nine, ninemsn, The Apprentice

If you printed the web…

September 29, 2009 By Matthew Gain Leave a Comment

hat tip Kris Hoet, my ex colleague from Microsoft in Europe.

Filed Under: Professional Posts, Web stuff Tagged With: Cross the Breeze, internet, internet stats, Kris Hoet

Sydney dust storm images

September 24, 2009 By Matthew Gain 4 Comments

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhide/

Waking up and seeing the sky a burnt orange colour is a rather scary prospect.

Due to work being stupid busy this week, and needing to be in at the crack of dawn I didn’t take the time to grab my camera and take some shots, but thankfully plenty of others did. Some are below.

3945957994 daae01cc5c Sydney dust storm images

Luna Park by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhide/

3945166833 8745dfa280 Sydney dust storm images

Beach dust storm by http://www.flickr.com/photos/africadunc/

3946091734 542f71767f Sydney dust storm images

Looking out by http://www.flickr.com/photos/sketchesbymez/

Lots more Sydney dust storm images can be found in this Flickr Gallery.

As my colleague Ian Rumsby put it on his post about the storm:

10,000 miles away, at the very moment Sydney was waking up, the world’s leaders were waving fond farewells in New York at the close of a relatively fruitless effort by the UN to get the climate change agenda back on track. It was difficult to miss the poignancy of the news from New York whilst eating cornflakes in the middle of an orange mist.

And to think there are still global warning deniers.

Filed Under: Personal Posts, Sydney Tagged With: #duststorm, Australia, Blogsherpa, environment, Global warning, NSW, Sydney, Sydney Dust Strom

Five interesting posts from the last week

September 21, 2009 By Matthew Gain 1 Comment

I have been super slack updating this of late, but rest assured there are a few posts in draft format that will be up soon.

But in the absence of a proper post I thought I would share some of the interesting things I have been reading over the last week.

HabitatUK return to Twitter on Digital Tip

It was in June that HabitatUK learnt the power of social media when they jumped on Twitter and used trending topic hashtags (the most tasteless was the Iran Election) to push signups to their marketing database and furniture discounts . As the blogger who broke the news, and then watched it break all records on Social Media Today, I am very relieved to see them back on Twitter. The case has been used as a benchmark of the cynical use of hashtag spam, been written up on countless posts, news stories and talked about on Twitter. Even though HabitatUK apologised through me via another blog post, and then promptly blamed their intern as the cause of the hashtag spam, they didn’t respond back on Twitter. Until now.

Where Gen Y Leads, Others Follow on Millennial Marketing

A new book, featured yesterday in USA Today, says Millennials have significantly impacted retailer practices in technology and merchandising. Titled ’Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail’, they call Gen Y “the taste-makers, influencers, and most enthusiastic buyers of today,” who will become “the mature, high-income purchasers of the future.” The authors conducted surveys and focus groups, interviewed hundreds of Gen Yers, spoke with retail executives and spent lots of time in malls.

Building Rome in less than a day with Photosynth on Geek in Disguise

The University of Washington has built a Photosynth of Rome using 150,000 photos from Flickr and it’s mighty impressive. It took them 21 hours for Rome using Flickr and Photosynth and they’ve also been busy with Dubrovnik and Venice. Check out Dubrovnik below and you’ll see that the resulting synth really is quite amazing. They’re literally reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web.

Wispa Gold Gives Advertising Space To Its Fans on PSFK

To celebrate the return of Wispa Gold and say thank you to fans of the chocolate bar, Cadbury is offering up £2 million worth of advertising space for fans to potentially have their personal messages displayed on the brand’s billboards throughout the UK and Ireland. Fans need to log in to Wispa Gold Messages and submit their message along with an explanation of why it is special to them. A panel of Wispa Gold fans will select certain ‘gold’ messages which deserve the limelight, and those messages will be displayed on the billboards. If participants need help in designing their message, a panel of Wispa helpers is on hand.

Malaysia: Social Media and Facebook numbers on Laurel Papworth

Malaysian Internet users like Facebook, Myspace, and Friendster. They’re also connecting via Twitter, LindedIn and Plaxo, and eBlogger. They use resources such as Slideshare, iTunes, Flickr, and YouTube. Nine of the Top 20 websites in Malaysia are social networking sites, and the top 6 sites are Yahoo!, Facebook, Google.com.my, YouTube, Google.com, and Blogger.