Growing importance of Word Of Mouth Marketing

A recent study in the US by Millward Brown, the Keller Fay Group and Voodoovox shows the growing importance of Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM). As such this is not big news, the facts and figures are. For example 43% of US marketing executives will use WOM in the next six months (source: CMO Magazine, April 2005). Also 29% of WOM-conversations take place online (source: TalkTrack™, Keller Fay Group, 2006).

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Media Catalyst's 2nd Annual BBQ

On Saturday we had an office party to celebrate who we are and what we do.

Sunny day, happy people, cold beers (eventually), and only a few upset neighbours. Nice to see Wubbo Ockels joining us again!

If you weren't there you missed out on some wicked tasty food, and the debut performance by the MC band, who were AMAZING.

See you next year!

 

Blank Tape Spillage Fete

For the past few months I've been participating in a sound/ art project set up by Mat Fowler and Matt Hunt from playarea in collaboration with pointer footwear, called the Blank Tape Spillage Fete.

Click to biggify the image and read details of the exhibition.

Here's how they describe the idea behind the Blank Tape Spillage Fete:

"Sharing a passion for all things analogue and still (obsessively) making mix tapes for each other and friends, they decided upon the idea of sending out a blank audio cassette to people far and wide and in return asking them to fill the tape with their own music, recordings, warblings, noodlings, spills, fluff, shiny new stuff, anything as long as it was their own. And then to create artwork or packaging to accompany their tape, and finally to send it back. The idea being to hunt and gather contributions with a view to nurture and document a community-spririted sound/ art exhibition."

So, I'm excited to say that I got the book and T-shirt in the post yesterday. The next step is the exhibition in August in London. I'll be playing the launch gig on Sunday 27th August. If you'd like a preview of the noises I contributed, you can check em out here [mp3, 20MB] and here [mp3, 32MB].

Let's spill!

 

Fujifilm rolls out new corporate brand identity

Quote: With a sharp accent design in the center of the logo, Fujifilm aims to express its commitment to advanced technologies. The dash of red expresses its determination for continuous innovation. At the same time, Fujifilm will continue to use green as its corporate color, inheriting its established brand assets.

To read the whole press release and see the previous identities of Fujifilm, go to this page.
Rather funny how they are still using the old logo on the page and as a favicon.

 

Google analysis of attributes used

While looking around looking for statistics and analysis,
I came across this interesting page by my (and if you know what is good for you, your) favourite tech-company
:

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

They did an analysis of the types of tag in use, detecting trends (onmouseout is losing ground, for instance). It is a nice read if you're into that sort of thing.

 

Timi wins Golden Dot Award

Last night I tripped on down to the Westergasfabriek to catch the annual IAM Award show, where Interactive Media Students from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam presented their best work from the past year to a jury featuring members from Fabchannel and Qi Ideas, in the hope of winning a coveted Golden Dot Award.

The 11 first year project teams and 6 third year 'Content in Motion' students showed some impressive skills. Seems like the kids like Flash nowadays! Databases/ dynamic backends also seem to be par for the course, and there were a couple of pretty impressive examples of 3D work.

And then who should win the Graduation project award, but Timi Alcala, who has been doing her internship with us in the Media Catalyst office for the past few months. Her successful project is entitled Pinay Fiesta Table [PDF/ 10MB].

Pinay means Filipina. The fiesta table is envisioned to be an interactive artefact that will primarily be used to collect and chronicle stories of Filipina migrants in the Netherlands. How? Using food and the visual and social metaphor of sharing a meal round a table to facilitate storytelling.

Click and read, it's a fascinating approach to engaging a community which otherwise would have little use for the internet. It's also the only project I saw last night which convincingly dealt with the internet in a global/ social context.

Congratulations Timi!

 

Oldies but goodies - the Onion and David Siegel

This week, the Onion is celebrating 10 years online by running a series of "best of" compliations, which I unreservedly recommend... Amongst such gems as "Christ Returns to NBA", "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia" (curiously difficult to find on the Onion site itself, but all over the rest of the internets) and "Earth to be Made Child Safe", I'm also particularly pleased to see Herbert Kornfeld laying down the Accounts Receivable law again.

About the same time as I discovered the Onion, I also spent a lot of time reading David Siegel's website - notable for featuing a very blog-like journal waaay back in 1996. His old site is still out there, including all sorts of theories and predictions that proved to be quite accurate. It's worth paying attention to what he's picking up on his radar now.

And by the way, ladies - he's looking for lurve...

Keywords: the,Onion,David,Siegel