Birmingham Post - Business Blog

Birmingham Creatives - I can't hear you

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:58:28 +0000

Actually I can hear some of you, particularly those of you that are on the same social networks as me or that I happen upon as result of my work. I can hear you loud and clear and you've got lots to say about this city and how it values or doesn't value the arts and why what you do matters. What I can't hear is the voice of the organisation that's been set up to represent you collectively. Or to put it another way: what's the point of Creative Republic? If they're the voice of the creative sector aiming to make it "stronger, louder and more effective" then why does it all seem a bit quiet out there.

Indiana Jones and the Search Engine of Revelation

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:03:09 +0000

A whip cracks in the darkness of an ancient tomb. Flickering torchlight casts the shadow of our fedora-clad hero as he stoops in the gloom, his hand sweeping away ten thousand years of grime from a forgotten relic. As the dust falls away an ancient clue is gradually revealed and the secrets of a long-dead civilisation come slowly into focus.

Like practically every 20-something bloke I know, I've been swept up in Indiana Jones fever, eagerly anticipating last month's release of Indy 4 by reliving all of those backyard fantasies of fighting Nazis, dodging fiendish booby traps and snatching priceless relics from highly improbable places.

Whether watching an ageing Dr. Jones creak his way through two hours of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo was actually worth the 19 year wait is a matter for debate, but the recent tidal wave of Indy mania got me pondering our own place in the annals of recorded history.

And I came to the conclusion that we're a future anthropologist's dream come true.

Social Media's hidden legacy

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:00:57 +0000

Two things trouble me about social media. The first is that everyone I read or connect to via Twitter or Facebook or whatever, seems to be having a much more exciting life than me. It's a world of gallery openings, launches, great nights out or simply wonderful sunny, lazy days untroubled by personal dramas or upheavals.

Not that I'm jealous of course. Well actually of course it's because I'm jealous. I even get invited to some of the same events that my friends and colleagues go to I just never seem to get round to going to them - either through a lack of willing babysitters or, more likely, a general acceptance that I'm a long way from being renaissance man. A beer and night in front of the telly are usually all the cultural activity I can muster after a day at work.

Sex, Lies and Video Games

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:19:09 +0000

Whilst browsing the web the other day I happened across a fairly innocuous-looking story that, at first glance, seemed nothing more than one of those "strange but true" tales that you mentally file away to impress your mates with down the pub after work.

However, something about it set a few alarm bells ringing for me and, on further inspection, this throwaway story turned out to be a nugget of pure viral marketing gold.

It also prised open a family-sized can of worms in my hardened TV researcher's brain and set them wriggling in the part of my cranium that exists to remind me that the web can also be a truth-hunters worst nightmare.

The story concerned Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old kid in Texas who had been arrested after he swiped his dad's credit card and embarked on an epic $30,000 spending spree. This misadventure wound up with him and his mates holed up in a hotel room with a pile of junk food, a brand new Xbox and two nubile $1000-a-night prostitutes procured from the local whorehouse. It also landed Ralph in the arms of the law when the hotel room was raided by the local Texan constabulary after being tipped off by a delivery guy who'd supplied the boys with snacks.

Apparently our young hero claimed he was funding this escapade through the winnings of a World of Warcraft video games contest and, when the high-class call girls questioned his age, he convinced them that he and his friends were in fact "people of restricted growth" who worked for a travelling circus. Even better he went as far to inform them that, if they refused his custom, they would be in direct violation of the state's disability discrimination laws. Only when the boys seemed more interested in playing Halo than getting to grips with their "hired help" did the penny finally drop.

In a strange twist of narrative the poor, misinformed sex workers were released without charge whilst young Ralph was slapped with a three year community order for fraud, presumably ruing the day he figured out his dad's pin number.

Unsurprisingly the story turned out to be complete hogwash. It was later revealed to be the result of a viral marketing experiment by Cornish social media marketer Lyndon Antcliff (aka Lyndoman) who unleashed the story on popular finance site Money.co.uk.

Lyndoman deliberately laced his Munchaussen-esque tale with every conceivable narrative trigger point needed to ensure its viral success.

How multiplatform entertainment could save your life

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:14:06 +0000

Flying in the face of traditional notions of journalistic impartiality I'm going to do something a bit cheeky in this blog post and give a bit of a plug to a project that's been going on at Maverick Television, the company that kindly pays my wages in my day job as a new media developer.

Now before you chuck rotten fruit at me, I just want to point out that A) I wasn't personally involved in this one and B) I think it's pretty newsworthy, not only from a company achievement point of view, but because it really ticks all of the boxes that I usually bang on about in this blog in terms of exploring the crossover space between TV and the web.

It also represents something quite extraordinary: a controversial, sensationalist and eyebrow-raising piece of multiplatform entertainment that genuinely has the potential to save lives.

If you haven't twigged already, I'm talking about Maverick's Embarrassing Illnesses spin-off, Embarrassing Bodies which hit the airwaves of Channel 4 last week amid the usual furore surrounding it's graphic, no-holds barred depiction of unfortunate body issues.

This time round, hidden behind the usual headline- grabbing cavalcade of warty appendages, crusty crevices, weeping orifices and unsightly growths was another newsworthy addition to the format which, in its own quiet way, was a spearheading a minor online revolution behind all of the attention grabbing TV.

The Scrabble for supremacy

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:00:10 +0000

If you'd have mentioned 'Scrabulous' to someone last year you'd have probably forgiven them for thinking you were talking about some kind of nefarious skin complaint rather than the Facebook-based unauthorized version of the traditional boardgame, Scrabble.

With more than 600,000 players using the Scrabulous application daily, game company Mattel has launched an official Scrabble application to rival the unauthorised version. Unfortunately for Mattel, early signs are that people are sticking with what they know with the official version only attracting 2000 daily views.

Have Mattel missed the boat or can they tempt users over to the official version? More importantly, should they be trying to best their rival or instead take advantage somehow of the renewed interest it seems to have generated in their product?

Let's get lost - harnessing creativity through experimental web exploration

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:27:21 +0000

Sometimes the longer you spend in a creative job, the harder it becomes to actually keep on innovating. Over time, you find that your ideas are just becoming rehashed versions of things that have been done before or that you've become so entrenched in your day-to-day routines that you just can't remember how to think outside the box any more.

What's more, because everyone in your industry is most likely reading the same magazines as you, browsing the same Sunday papers, watching the same TV shows, and exploring the same websites, chances are that even when something does spark off an original idea, a dozen other people have just seen the same thing and are now beavering away on projects pretty damn near identical to yours.

So what the hell do you do about it? Jack it all in and work in a factory? Cryogenically freeze yourself until a time when your hackneyed ideas suddenly seem ironically retro? Bury your head in the sand and try to ignore the whimpered cries of your inner muse as it slowly shrivels up and dies?

No. Just get yourself lost.

Life in the long tail

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:03:32 +0000

There are 120,700 businesses in the UK's Creative Industries and the largest 200 of them account for half the total turnover. In Television and Radio the largest four firms make up a whopping 64% of the turnover and there's a similar figure for the publishing industry (four firms contributing 58% turnover). Should these figures worry us? How many of these big hitters have we got in Birmingham and should we be pumping our resources into getting more of them?

Of course the key point is that like much of the rest of the country our Creative Economy sits in the long tail. If the top 200 are making 50% of the turnover that doesn't mean the remaining 120,500 are unimportant; in fact they're crucial. In some sectors the balance is such that the 'tail' makes up the bulk of the growth. Take the music industry. There you have the top four firms contributing just 4% to turnover and as a whole small firms contributed 69% to the sector. The figures are similar in Film and Photography.

Why today's Daily Star is a PR text book classic

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:04:50 +0000

A teachers' union this week has been discussing how the cult of celebrity is damaging children's education and there are not enough 'ordinary' positive role models.

Is it really any worse than it has ever been? Or is it simply that with the opportunities for publicity offered my a multitude of global media we now turn our ordinary heroes or villains into celebrities much quicker?

When I was first being schooled in journalism I was told about the 'five Ps' to help decide on news values: princes, people, pay, power, policies. When I was being interviewed for a job in the museum many years ago I once added a sixth: princes, people, pay, power, policies, paintings.

Our job in PR is often to take stories clients give us that clearly fit in the fourth, fifth (or sixth) category and try to win news coverage by moving them up the interest ladder. That's why we look for a human-interest angle or sometimes even pay for a celebrity to cut the ribbon.

So to today's newspaper front pages.

While the world's financial markets are see-sawing between Armageddon and "Asian bounce back" and a couple of papers use the fifth anniversary to try and revive interest in the Iraq war, the popular press devote their front pages to celebrity stories.

They are dominated by Heather Mills, now the target for popular hatred, with the McCanns and Shannon Matthews' family also featuring strongly.

The comparison between the parents of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews is an interesting one.

The Independent notes how the rewards offered at the same time in the hunt were £20,000 for Shannon compared to a celebrity-endorsed £2.6m for Maddie.

"Has class influenced the rewards offered and publicity given to two campaigns to find missing children?", it asks. It certainly took a lot longer before the media started to turn against the McCann family.

So the front of today's Daily Star is worth filing away for study by future PR and media students.

Top right is an amazing apology: "Kate and Gerry McCann: Sorry"

Middle banner: "Amazing fantasy world of warped Mucca - pages 4,5 & 6"

Main picture: Someone from Coronation Street

Splash headline: "Shannon mum is quizzed again"

The Lacy/ Zuckerberg SXSW Keynote: A Post of Two Halves

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:37:25 +0000

Firstly, I want to point out that a proper digest of this year's SXWX interative festival is in the pipeline and secondly I want to apologise for this rather epic blog post.

The thing is I really want to convey what struck me as one of the biggest revelations at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Technology accelerates gossip so fast it's out of date before you even get to blog it.

My epiphany came during the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote event where the Facebook CEO became the subject of probably one of the worst-received interviews in recent history at the hands of Newsweek journalist Sarah Lacy.

Many of you who follow tech news on the web would have seen the video clips of the disasterous keynote on Youtube and many of you may be wondering what all of the fuss was about. We'll nothing I have seen online conveys the sheer hostility of the crowd that day and this was something I really wanted to convey in my blog.

Unfortunately I was hamstrung by two factors. Firstly, I was caught up in a wave of mob hysteria that amplified this barely remarkable event into something approaching a war-crimes trial. Secondly, my decision to delay writing my post until the next morning meant that the legion of Twitterers, live bloggers and industry gossip-mongers present at the interview had practically burnt the hype out before Lacy had even left the stage.

So much so that I decided it wasn't worth publishing the post after all.

In hindsight, however I thought it would be pretty interesting to revisit it now the storm has blown over just as an example of the wacky zeitgeist that swept the blogosphere over one 24 hour period in March 2008.

Is it wrong for ordinary hard-working people to line the pockets of expensive consultants?

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:44:07 +0000

What's so despicable about spending money on PR?

If you take any large organisation and analyse its spending you can almost guarantee finding something to single out for criticism. Find someone to complain and you've got yourself a news story.

It works particularly well with public sector targets, where the spending in question has come from our taxes.

In days gone by there used to be a period (nicely scheduled for the 'silly season') where Birmingham City Council's accounts were opened for public scrutiny and a few individuals did a good job of digging. Nowadays of course we have the Freedom of Information Act.

You can bet that with any organisation the size of Birmingham City Council - it claims to be the largest local authority in Europe - you can always find a huge figure to provide suitable ammunition. The statistics will generally have enough zeros after the pound sign to make all sorts of things sound extravagant enough to feed a juicy news story. "They spent how much on bottled water?"

South by Southwest Day 1- Engaging Your Online Audience

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:09:09 +0000

Well, that's day one of the South by Southwest interactive festival under my belt and what a day it was. I sat in on some great sessions, met one of my digital heroes , interviewed an absolute new media legend (video to follow) and partied with a load of robots in a field at the Make Magazine party.

In fact I did so much stuff that I can't even begin to blog it all, but two sessions in particular struck a chord with the thing's I've been working on recently in broadcast new media.

Big names get friendly with Social Networking

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:04:09 +0000

So, another week's gone by and inevitably every other sentence I hear is still carrying the words 'social networking'. Working in digital media it's pretty easy to guage when a bubbling web trend has gone mainstream - it's the point at which clients start asking us if there could be a commercial application for it. The inevitable question being, 'we've heard about this and would like to use it somehow?'. Now, this isn't a criticism of companies looking to be innovative, after all that's what keeps us in business. It is however a pretty good signpost that often the approach with tapping in to these services is born more from a 'lets have a presence' approach, rather than a 'do we have anything relevant to say that would justify a presence' approach. It's on this point then that I watched a few key 'link ups' unfold this week which paired some pretty well known names with some equally well known social media networks. The thing that made these stand out for me though was the fact that rather than being cynical attempts to create revenue streams, boost a brand or generally exploit an existing service, they all represented pretty neat ideas...

Taking the credits

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:43:02 +0000

This post is tinged with a health and safety caveat. My drive to work in the morning is often a time for me to mull over the tasks for the day before I get stuck in, which means I have a lot of different thoughts competing for limted attention. Add to this the concentration required to negotiate the M42 bottleneck safely and I confess I can't remember the name of the woman who appeared on Radio 4's Today programme on Monday talking about television credits. Sorry.

Whoever she was, she was arguing against the trend for TV credits to be squished into split screens, talked over and sped up. She claimed that the viewers were being denied the opportunity to fully experience the credits, although she did grudgingly admit that credits were as much, if not more, for the benefit of the people involved in production of the TV programme as they were for the viewer.

Once upon a time in the West (well South by Southwest actually)

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:49:10 +0000

A casual visitor to Chez Lockey tonight would be forgiven for thinking that I was in the middle of clearing up after a major break-in.

In fact I'm in the midst of an epic packing session in preparation for Friday morning when I'm due to hop in a taxi at sparrow's fart a.m. bound for BHX where a big shiny plane is scheduled to whisk me off to sunny Austin, Texas.

No, I'm not about to give up my new-found love of blogging to join the rodeo, I am in fact off to the South by Southwest interactive festival (or SXSWi for those of you with a vowel aversion), the biggest, geekiest tech-fest on the planet.

And in the true spirit of interactivity, you get to have a say in what I see and do at the conference as well as following the action via an ambitious experiment in collective reporting.