May 3, 2008

Twitter offers Get out of Jail Free with its Service

An employee sent me an email with this link - fascinating!

Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt

"As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch...send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!

UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.

What the Egyptian authorities didn't probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: "ARRESTED," the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.

The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man."

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 2:34 PM | Permalink

April 9, 2008

eMarketing Summit @ InnoTech is Next week: 4/16-17

eMarketing Summit @ InnoTech
April 16-17, Oregon Convention Center

www.emarketingsummit.com for information and registration
Use Discount Code EROI8EMS for the $129 price. Prices includes two day summit, both luncheons topics and Don Tapscott Featured Speaker breakfast on April 17.

The 4th annual eMarketing Summit meets in Portland, Oregon this year, and brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals.
This two day Summit focuses on social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and web 2.0 tools, including widgets and more. Guest speakers include Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics; Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP, Digital Strategy, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Kent Lewis, Anvil Media; with additional speakers from Northwest Airlines, Razorfish/Avenue A, Hill & Knowlton Digital, Jive Software, Kick Apps and many others.

4/16: 10:30am - 11:30am
What the Heck is a Widget?
Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales and Strategy, eROI, Inc.
Matt Bijur, Vice President, Business Development, KickApps
David White, VP of Business Development, FlightStats
Mike Berkley, CEO, SplashCast Media
Widgets are building blocks for social aggregators. Widgets can also quickly help your web site reach new audiences in web 2.0 including social media, blog, web site and more. This expert panel will discuss the roadmap to planning, designing, creating and distributing this innovative gadget.

4/17: 10:30am - 11:30pm
Bringing Sexy Back into Email Marketing
Ryan Buchanan, President, eROI, Inc.
Has your email marketing program gotten tired, neglected, and stuck in a rut? eROI CEO, Ryan Buchanan, will use several case studies from some sexy and unsexy businesses to show how marketers can breath life back into their email marketing program. More...

Comments (1) | Posted by ryan at 9:40 PM | Permalink

March 19, 2008

Chuck Porter, Crispin Porter Bogusky, Inspires: The Power of a Story

At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.

Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King's Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).

Also, it's not always about a new medium. Porter's agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80's style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000's of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.

In Porter's last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product - The Whopper - with a campaign called the "BK Whopper Freakout." The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.

Takeaway for MediaPost - get more creatives as speakers and show the work - Porter rocked!

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 2:49 AM | Permalink