Monday 31 August 2009: Virgin Blue Airlines is celebrating turning nine years old with $9 seats on sale across a range of routes in the first of what the airline says will be regular ‘Twitter’ sales. The $9 ‘Tweet seats’, priced deliberately at less than a bottle of birthday champagne, will only be available on the Virgin Blue Twitter website – www.twitter.com/virginblue.

blah blah blah blah…

Virgin Blue Group Chief Executive Officer, Brett Godfrey, said, “This is a bit of fun and also a bit of an experiment trialling distribution through one of the latest forms of social media.

“Our marketing team has been closely watching worldwide consumer trends in markets where travellers are already social media savvy and we see Australians fast developing a following for Twitter as a source of the latest information regarding a wide range of products and services including airline news.

“With the current trend in real time news and information we expect the fares will be snapped up quickly,” Brett Godfrey finished.

To follow Virgin Blue on Twitter and take advantage of the “tweet seats”, check out www.twitter.com/virginblue.

This Twitter thing is really catching on…

1. People take Facebook very seriously. Read this story of how 4chan hacked accounts and then look at this (hilariously twisted) conversation string which was one of the outcomes (I’m not particularly offended, I think it’s amusing, but you might be).
2. Be careful how much personal information you leave lying around the Internet

About a year ago Seth Godin wrote that “maybe you can’t make money doing what you love“. I forwarded that post to every musician, artist and manager I know and they all smiled, nodded and agreed. If you’re an artist at heart I recommend you read that post, and re-read it every few months to remind you what you’re doing. To refresh your memory, here’s the gist of it:

A friend who loved music, who wanted to spend his life doing it, got a job doing PR for a record label. He hated doing PR, realized that just because he was in the record business didn’t mean he had anything at all to do with music. Instead of finding a job he could love, he ended up being in proximity to, but nowhere involved with, something he cared about. I wish he had become a committed school teacher instead, spending every minute of his spare time making music and sharing it online for free. Instead, he’s a frazzled publicity hound working twice as many hours for less money and doing no music at all. Maybe you can’t make money doing what you love (at least what you love right now). But I bet you can figure out how to love what you do to make money (if you choose wisely). Do your art. But don’t wreck your art if it doesn’t lend itself to paying the bills. That would be a tragedy.

That, for me, is the reason music is just a hobby. My ultimate life goal is still multinational rock and roll superstardom, but I’ve learned, over time, that you can’t really count on making it in the music business. No matter how hard you try, that one is up to fate. There’s nothing you can do to make it happen, the stars just need to align, and for most people they never will.

That’s not to say I sit on my arse and wait for superstardom to happen, I’ve got talent, I’ve written songs which have made it to the radio, I’ve toured around Australia numerous times and I’ve played the Big Day Out. A lot of work has gone into all of that, I’m just not counting on it leading any further than it already has. I don’t want my music to be something I mix in with my day-to-day life. That would suck all the joy out of it. That’s why I rarely write about it… Just in case you were wondering…

I’ve been on the receiving end of a few blogger outreach programs over the last year. The most notable of which was an admirable effort by Kirrihill Wines where I scored 13 bottles of their vino in exchange for, well, nothing. They got some free press out of me, I got some wine - it was cool.

I’m writing a report on blogger outreach at the moment, has anyone else had any experiences they’d like to share? Comment here or hit me up on Twitter @mattgranfield

Such a shame really. The agent was lovely and did an exemplary job throughout the whole process. When I went to pick up the keys yesterday afternoon I was kind of hoping for a bottle of agency-branded premium cleanskin sparkling wine to say thanks and remind me that when it’s time to sell the house they’d be keen to help out. Instead I got a lukewarm handshake, a smile and shitty little black box with a shitty little keyring inside it. They’d have been better off giving me nothing.

Corporate gifts aren’t much different to any other kind of gift:

1. It’s the thought that counts
2. A gift from the heart which truly means something to both giver and the reciever is better than something really expensive
3. Failing point 1 and point 2; the bigger the better

Sure, I have a house now, and yes, I need somewhere to put my new house keys, but I declare my crappy keyring to be an unequivocal CORPORATE GIFT FAIL.

So as of 4.30pm this afternoon I cease to be a homeless vagabond and become a home-owner. I thought I’d try and get to grips with the concept by having a picnic in New Farm Park last weekend because it’s my new local spot of grass. I’d been to the park many times before of course, but it wasn’t until last weekend I realised it had a website, and these cool signs.

I’m sure other parks have a website, and I’m sure other parks in the world have cool sign art, but I can’t imagine too many parks have both. If they do, they certainly don’t have The Powerhouse as well. That’s why I love Brisbane. It’s a city of the sun, but it has the arts at its heart, and since it can’t rely on a harbour to get by, it does a brilliant job of marketing itself.

…Even if they ripped off NY

Typical FMCG brand: Three month chart showing level of news articles, dialogue and sentiment.

This question came up with a client this morning. The short answer is that you own them and by uploading them you just give them permission to display them according to the terms you specify in your privacy settings. The Consumerist ran a story a little while ago titled “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”“, which caused a bit of furore (read about it in a state of the social mediasphere I wrote in March). But in reality, it was a storm in a teacup.

Facebook’s terms of service actually state that “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings.” user content and applications are exempt from its claims on content ownership and Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt is on the record as saying:

“We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend).

Facebook’s license only permits it to use user content “in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” And second, if that Facebook content was not public, the site will respect the member’s chosen privacy settings. In other words, if the photos you have uploaded to it are only accessible to people on your friends list, Facebook says it does not have the right to show those photos to anyone outside your friends list.

MySpace has quite a clear policy too. Their terms are at http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms.

The part that deals with photos says: “MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.”

The internet is a bit like a class photo. You get everyone’s picture of course, but there’s obviously more to being cool than how you look. In high school it’s where you hang out after school that counts. Who you date, how many people came to your birthday party, what sport you play and whether you’re captain of the football team, or captain of the chess club. Funnily enough, that’s exactly the sort of information people store in their online profiles. They may be out of high school, but the information they display next to their avatar can tell you enough about a person to know how likely they are to spread positive word of mouth about your brand.

Most companies tend to focus on calculating people’s social reach (ie. how many friends they have, where they’re ranked in Google, that sort of thing). I believe it’s the reason people like Julian Cole enjoy publishing (handy but self-serving) lists of ‘top’ bloggers. I also believe this approach is flawed (although Jules’s latest ranking of the top 35 bloggers who may, or may not be under 27 years old does at least include only reaction-based metrics).

I’ve just written an article for Marketing Mag on how we find a brand’s key online influencers which is available here. For the benefit of those who *heart* this blog instead, a distillation of the process is as follows.

I believe the fifth step; figuring out how much influence the people actually wield; is the one that gets results and leads to increased positive word of mouth for your brand. Influence is more than reactions or votes for a blog post, it’s about getting people to take action. This could be as simple as inviting people to a party and having most of the people you invite turn up, or as complicated as being at the start of a long chain of events that change the world. These steps are only a guide of course, but you’ll get the idea. This post is only a summary so refer to the original article if you want more info.

Step one: Find the people already talking about your brand

Step two: Find the people talking about your competitors

Step three: Find the people talking about your industry

Step four: Figure out their social reach

Step five: Find out who is actually listening to them

Ashton Kutcher has over a million Twitter followers but most of them are probably voyeurs. Just because he says jump doesn’t mean anyone asks ‘how high’? The best way to determine someone’s true influence over their peers depends on the social networks they are active in, how old they are and what you want to get out of them, but here’s a few tips:

• Use a tool like RetweetRank to figure out how often what they say is quoted by other people
• If you can see their Facebook profile, look at events they’ve created and see what percentage of their friends accepted invitations
• Check out their MySpace wall and see how often friends get in touch with them
• See how many recommendations they have on LinkedIn
• See how many posts they’ve made in forums, and
• See how many comments they get on their blog and how sources like Technorati and Google Reader’s voting system rank them

A few good social media monitoring tools can do this for you, but they’ll set you back around $1,500 a month. If that’s out of your price range, get in there and start copying and pasting yourself.

Step six: Analyse the numbers and crunch the data