Minor internet trend of the week

These have been around for a while, but I'm still amused by 'literal video’ versions of music videos.

In other words re-singing a music video so that the words fit the images.

The current major hit is a reversioning of Total Eclipse of the Heart:


My favourite so far is Take on Me

TFL's great use of text

Very simple this.

TFL allow you to sign up for travel updates by text.

I've just got one alerting me of a tube strike tomorrow night.

Timely.
Relevant.
And directs me to the website for more information.


Extremely simple but in its own way perfect.

The elections online

The different strengths and weaknesses of different media channels were very obvious watching the election results over the last few days.

The traditional media did a good job of comprehensive analysis both online and offline, but hours after the events, so was usually my last port of call.

The legal constraints and lack of imagination of councils mean that while they run the whole process they are very poor at communicating the results quickly or interestingly.

Immediacy

Twitter wins hands down for being the fastest way to find new information about counts around the country. For instance a Twitter search on ‘Bristol’ directed me to a good source of results on Bristol council’s count on Thursday night.

For the really targeted stuff, like who won the local council by election in my backyard, text messages were faster than anything the councils did, or indeed any other medium succeeded in doing.

Relevance

Facebook’s status updates worked well at telling me results relevant to my Facebook friends. So I found out, for instance, about the Conservative to Lib Dem swing in Sutton courtesy of Tom Brake’s Facebook update.

Comprehensiveness

The BBC worked well at giving me answers to questions like ‘What percentage of the vote did the Liberal Democrats get compared to 2004?’

However the BBC didn’t bother with sub regional results online, even though nobody really cares about regional results until they are finally announced. So for questions like ‘Who has done best in the European results in Burnley?’ discussion forums were a far better source of results.

Gossip

Discussion forums such as Vote2007 and the comments threads on ConservativeHome, LabourHome, Lib Dem Voice and Political Betting were excellent for gathering together softer gossip and the feel of counts as they went on.

This is exactly the sort of thing that CNN’s panellists gather up superbly during American elections. But British forecasters seem to be comfortable with pundits who have never run an election campaign, so have very few links into the grassroots campaigns.

The brilliance of Boris Johnson

His emails break every email marketing rule around.

But unlike virtually every other marketing email I get they are well written, funny and engaging.

So despite my political opposition to him I can't help but smile and marvel at the quality of the writing.

And of course by doing so he effectively reduces his risk of being attacked on the big issues.

Here's a great example from recently.

Why don't organisations really care about communicating with their staff?

I'm continually astounded about how few organisations really care about communicating with their staff.

When communications campaigns are put up for marketing awards it's almost as if internal communications doesn't exist as an objective for anyone.

For most organisations their staff are potentially thousands of people (or in the case of the NHS over a million) who, every day, have the opportunity to market their organisation - not just to customers but to their friends, neighbours and acquaintances.

Within major organisations there's usually a communications hierarchy where the press office is closest to the board, marketing is somewhere in the middle and internal communications is often left to the human resources department.

All the exceptions I've come across either result from an organisation that genuinely believes that staff are the future of it (e.g. the John Lewis partnership) or where the Chief Executive realises the value of it (e.g. Allan Leighton's internal Ask Allan blog at Royal Mail).

Anyway this is a convoluted way of saying that there's a great blog post on this at Hill & Knowlton's Collective Conversation blog here.

The incredible rise of free council newspapers

My local free newspaper from Lambeth council has an audited ABC of 115,000 copies per issue (one copy every two weeks).

The Independent, across the whole of the UK, has an audited ABC of 200,000 copies per issue (daily).

Add together free newspaper circulations across the UK and they must be in the millions.

Tam's pregnancy - part II

What happens if you announce some interesting (to friends & family) news via various online channels?

1. Twitter - nothing at all - reflecting the fact that I only have one follower.

2. Blog - roughly 25 visitors found the news out that way, and a few said congratulations in the comments. This seems to be a combination of my regular visitors plus a few people who noticed it on LibDemBlogs.

3. Facebook - at least 25 people noticed, with lots of wall comments and messages. This included quite a few people at my work - and gradually they've told other people at work. Cumulatively I reckon half my company (ie 50 people) now know indirectly this way.

I'll sweep up by email at some point in a few days - but it's an interesting reminder of quite how un-viral even interesting news can be.