Blog

‘Tis the season to be jolly. Has been for a while if you count how many times you’ve heard Slade since October.

So let’s mock the world of social media similes, but in a festive way.

We can call it ‘Jingle Bell Jargon’.

There’s nothing wrong with a good simile, plenty of people use them very effectively in tweets, blogs, presentations and meetings. It’s just that the world of social media does seem to spawn some hilarious ones. You’ll have seen them promoted by people with 45,000 Twitter followers and user names such as @SocialMediaGuruSEOPRspecialist.

“Social media is like a slot machine” is a new favourite – unearthed when trawling Google recently. But, this isn’t going to be a list of the funniest similes already in existence, that’s way too subjective.

Instead, via the mini-crowdsourcing mechanic of texting a few Manchester PR colleagues, here is the Citypress Top 10 Totally Made Up Christmas Social Media Similes 2010:

1. Social media is like Santa’s sack. You have to be good to get the best presence (see what we did there?)

2. Twitter is like a massive turkey waiting to be carved. If you serve up too much on one plate, no-one will be interested when you offer any more.

3. A Facebook friend is like an eager child, waiting to check the tags on all the presents under its tree of followers.

4. YouTube is like an advent calendar. Every day you open a new moving window of fresh knowledge.

5. Bringing social media knowledge to the meeting table is like being the Wise Man who carried the myrrh. No-one quite knows what it is but it’s the talk of the stable.

6. Managing a good LinkedIn profile is like carol singing. Hit all the right notes and people will open the door to you.

7. Talking about social media is like hanging decorations – you have to get the right balance or your tree will fall over.

8. Twitter is like Quality Street – not everyone likes every tweet in the tin.

9. Google is like Father Christmas. It knows what you want and whether you’ve been bad or good.

10. Getting social media wrong is like smashing a snow globe. All the parts are there but you’ve ruined its charm.

Are you groaning yet? I hope so. The alternative is nodding sagely and cutting and pasting one of those into a presentation or Twitter update.

If you feel the need to add your own please use the hashtag #jinglebelljargon.

Season’s Greetings.

I’m loath to second guess Rupert Murdoch.

It’s easy to dismiss his recent strop over Google and YouTube as the ramblings of a 78-year-old media mogul woefully out of touch with the digital age.

But this is a man worth billions, one who successfully monetised pay per view football when many doubted it would work and, despite the apparent failure of his $580 MySpace acquisition, he must have a genius long term strategy.

Surely?

He says he is in favour of the micro payments route – online pence removed from your digital purse for reading articles from The Times, The Sun, The News of the World and hundreds of other titles in his empire.

But micro-payments is the model publishers should have introduced 10 years ago, before they gave away all their content for free and began price wars and DVD cover offers which further eroded our loyalty to one print newspaper yet ensured that we had a copy of Where Eagles Dare to stick on while we sleep off our Sunday roast.

Although the music industry was slow and litigious in its response to online file sharing, there are now pay models, such as iTunes, which work to a degree. There will always be piracy.

And that is what Murdoch claims he is dealing with….

Piracy – outright theft of News Corp content.

Except Google isn’t stealing his content, it is aggregating it, sharing it. To read the NOTW’s latest revelation that there is an X Factor crisis I still have to land on a News Corp site, where the publisher can then ask for my payment.

So did we just ‘steal’ that content or direct you to it?

Murdoch may as well ask WH Smith to tell customers not to glance at a print edition of The Sun if they aren’t going to buy it. Google, like the newsagents’ shelf, is the shop window for his product.

Bloggers and Twitter users are potential street sellers, shouting out headlines to an online audience.

Yet Murdoch is still talking about removing News Corp titles from Google AFTER any pay walls are in place.

There seems to be absolutely no logic to that.

Unless being anti-Google as well as anti-BBC is Murdoch having fun and generating global PR to further his long term aim of using new best mate David Cameron (if elected) to slash BBC budgets and push for fresh online regulation to protect his content.

Because for micro-payments to really work, all Murdoch’s rivals need to follow suit, and his online ‘competition’ is hard to define and counteract with new legislation. Google is the key. If he can force it to the table to account for unproven crimes then he can get the biggest online player in a defensive position over regulation.

For instance, Murdoch openly hates the BBC for its ability to launch new digital ventures such as iPlayer and give away its content without the commercial pressures faced by publishers who rely on advertising.

But remove the BBC from the equation and you still have millions of online consumers who will happily take similar free news and gossip to that found in a News Corp title from any number of other sites or blogs. Even proposed ‘paid for’ content from a columnist such as Jeremy Clarkson or a chequebook exclusive will hit someone’s blog soon enough.

And Murdoch knows this. He needs to create a villain in the all powerful Google because the BBC, whatever faults it may have, is still much loved in the UK – kicking it too hard is like repeatedly punching Bruce Forsyth in the face.

David Cameron should be nervous. Murdoch’s sharks are tearing their last pounds of flesh from Gordon Brown and heading his way.

They’ll expect to be fed.

You may be familiar with the concept of the ‘so bad it’s good’ movie.

I don’t want to cast aspersions on what, for many, may be favourite films, but Keanu Reeves and the late Patrick Swayze are two of the genre’s key actors, making Point Break the benchmark film. This is fact.

But I’m not sure it works as a marketing ploy, even when the explosion in sharing digital content allows both good and bad campaigns to make an impact.

Whereas many truly awful campaigns once died on the daytime TV circuit, today’s worst examples are emailed, Tweeted or have Facebook groups dedicated to mocking them.

One recent example is so bad that it’s tempting to dismiss it as a spoof. Unfortunately it’s not. The Windows 7 ‘launch parties’ video on YouTube is over six minutes of marketing so knuckle-bitingly cringeworthy that I challenge you to get to the end.

The official version has had nearly one million views but adding comments has wisely been disabled. Remarks below this unofficial version reveal why.

While Apple continues to redefine cool with its products and marketing, Microsoft has chosen to promote one of its core launches with a cheap looking campaign seemingly devised by a team of Apprentice hopefuls. I can hear Alan Sugar now.

As a contrast, look what this group of French Canadian students produced to promote their university in Montreal. Cheap, effective, over a million views.

It isn’t even an original idea. Just a good one, well executed.