Archive for April, 2009

#LRNY – some further “unpleasantness”

As a further addendum to the #LRNY issue it is interesting to see another example of the aggressive opposition to the idea that anyone should examine and critique the initiative.

Chris Baccus, who actually works for Wunderman in their Detroit office, wrote a post largely based around my initial analysis and the Twitter tiff – Twiff he called it – it generated.  It was a good post and invited people to add their own opinion on his blog – which I did, drawing his attention to the more detailed summary post that sought to draw some lessons from the exercise.  Then a Mr Anonymous (ah the great Mr Anonymous) weighed in with this.  Continue reading ‘#LRNY – some further “unpleasantness”’

Three lessons from #LRNY

As you can see from the previous two posts (and also if you check-out the #LRNY tag) the recent Land Rover hashtag campaign has caught my attention.  Initially I thought it was a very good idea – I have been supporting the concept of what I call TagSpaces for a while – but on closer investigation the campaign turns out to be a bit of a disappointment.

I don’t want to beat-up on Wunderman, the agency responsible, or especially Land Rover because I think they deserve congratulation for having the courage to experiment with this sort of thing.  However, I think there are some very valuable lessons that can be learnt – and it is this I would like to focus on. Continue reading ‘Three lessons from #LRNY’

More thoughts on #LRNY – it didn’t work

Having now had a closer look at the #LRNY tag, its clear that the thing hasn’t really worked.  The reason is that Land Rover have failed to notice that a successful conversation has two mandatories – an ability to listen and an ability to speak.  Land Rover is doing neither – and its paid tweeters are doing nothing more than say “wow- aren’t Land Rovers really nice, please look at this website”. Continue reading ‘More thoughts on #LRNY – it didn’t work’

#LRNY – Land Rover creating a TagSpace

Some time back I wrote a piece about the concept of TagSpace and its importance as a new dimension is social media. Well here is the practice in action.  Land Rover in the US created a TagSpace – #LRNY – to talk about their new model as well as then paying Tweeters with big followings to promote this.  The TagSpace concept is good – although they haven’t really used it to drive real two-way conversation.  Paying Tweeters is less clever – but given this idea comes from a traditional agency its hardly surprising.

Expect more of the same.

Book burying – the new book burning?

Whatever your take on the recent #amazonfail controversy – it does suggest, as this article implies in its concluding paragraph that book burying (or in fact any form of content supression) could be the new book burning. Given that tagging in it various forms is becoming the principal method of information retrieval, this episode shows the importance of being alive to ways in which this process can be manipulated – wittingly or otherwise. Continue reading ‘Book burying – the new book burning?’