This blog has nothing to do with food and I’ve made it a personal policy to never use it as a soapbox for complaint. I’ve had some crap customer service experiences lately and it was tempting to have a whinge here under the guise of how they’re bad examples of ‘marketing’, but that would be silly.

Grill’d, on the other hand, deserve digital kudos (there’s a good domain name). They are brilliant. They took my order over the phone last night and didn’t even ask for a phone number. Even though I sounded tired and possibly a little tipsy after moving house, they just presumed I’d turn up. The burger was delicious, as they always are. It was well-priced. The staff were lovely. The website is cool. Nice work Grill’d. If you’re hungry, and you live near a Grill’d, go there.

There’s a few ways to get people to blog about you. Making them hate you is one. Doing things right is another. It’s no wonder there are more than 200 photos about them on Flickr too.

How many advertising messages is the average consumer really exposed to each day? There are figures ranging from a few hundred upwards, but the consensus seems to be about 3,000. I’m interested in finding out an accurate statistic because it’s a figure I like to quote when I’m arguing the relevance of word of mouth marketing in a world of advertising saturation.

One day this summer I’m going to count. I suspect I wouldn’t usually get near 3,000 because I don’t watch much TV or listen to any commercial radio, but in the interests of research I will find out exactly how much commercial TV and radio the average consumer does listen to each day and expose myself to precisely that amount.

I’m not going to go to work as I normally would, but I will make the normal commute across The Valley and back and try and behave in the same way as I would on an average day. The result wont be qualitative of course, but it will be a good indication.

I will also need some rules. They will be as follows:

• Visible logos count. The logo on my watch, the logo on my phone, the logo on my fridge, the logo on my knife and fork. They are there to advertise.
• Hidden logos (inside the tag on a shirt for example) don’t count. They aren’t there to advertise.
• Product placements on TV and radio shows count.
• I will use a click-button counting system like those traffic-watching people use, to ensure accuracy.
• I will not attempt to go out of my way to remember or write down any ads I saw, unless I would ordinarily do so because I needed to.
• Banner ads count.
• Spam counts.
• I won’t go out of my way to look at ads. On my bookshelf for example, there is a logo for each publisher on the spine. I could look at my bookshelf and be ‘exposed’ to hundreds of logos at once, but that would count because I’m not really taking them in.
• The day after I do my count, I will then write a blog post listing all the ads I can actually remember and in what detail.

Any other ideas for rules?

Anyone want to bet how many advertising messages I’ll end up being exposed to? I’m guessing 1,000.

Do you remember the first time you ’surfed’ the Internet? Do you remember what you stumbled across?

I was in my high school library doing research for a grade 11 modern history assignment on the Vietnam War. It was 1996. I wanted to know if any Vietnam vets had published photos of the conflict to the world wide web. I had to get special permission from the librarian and my history teacher to access the Internet because it was expensive. I can remember searching Yahoo! and finding a pic of some soldiers in a jungle. It took about five minutes to load about a third of the graphic and then I gave up and went back to the usual history books on the shelves.

Can you remember the last time you went to the library? Do you remember feeling instantly out of date, at least until you got near a computer?

It’s amazing how much the world has changed in 12 years since I first surfed the web. Back in 1996 my first impression of the Internet was that it was going to change the world because suddenly the people had the power and I figured it wouldn’t be long before media corporations were sidelined. At university two years later I can remember one of my left-leaning media lecturers getting so exctied about the prospect of ‘citizen journalism’ he managed to spill a full glass of water all over the nearest Noam Chomsky book.

I’ve been doing a lot of social media marketing presentations lately and one of the quotes we used to explain how the Internet has changed the way people communicate comes from my old boss, Rupert Murdoch:

“Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control…”

A good friend of mine has a fairly powerful job at a News Corp publication and she had dinner with Rupey the other day when he was in town. The topic of discussion centred around the theory that it won’t be long before people stop wanting to read the news on dead trees. Credit to Mr Murdoch for seeing the light and buying MySpace (I don’t like MySpace, but at least he’s getting his head around the situation and making some dough), but I get the feeling no-one in traditional media circles has any clue as to just exactly what is about to hit them.

My job is to tout social media as the saviour of the world and I obviously carry some vocational bias, but when masked terrorists started shooting innocent hostages in Mumbai last week, it wasn’t Fox News, The New York Post or News.com.au that people turned to for information, it was a little site called Twitter, a photo sharing tool called Flickr and a blog run by a community of concerned individuals from around the world.

Citizen journalism came of age last week. So did social media.