The Chameleon Net blog

The President of New Media

stephen@actualmarketing.co.uk (Steve Thorn) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 11:33:27 GMT

The President of New Media

Maybe it’s my age but for the first time ever I’ve found myself following the developments of the US Presidential Elections.

With just five days to go, the coverage on the BBC has been up to its usual standards, but I’ve been intrigued enough by the characters of the main players to have a look at their websites and see how they’re using the web to spread their message.

Arriving at the McCain site, www.johnmccain.com, I was greeted with a streamed video of the hopeful candidate that opens with the words (rather worryingly seeing as he’s also a Republican), “The last eight years haven’t worked very well have they?”

Unfortunately there isn’t a Sarah Palin gallery online (I did search for one, perhaps another indication of my advancing years) and I got quickly bored with the site and wandered off into the Web to see what else I could find. The most engaging item was the Republicans’ YouTube video satirising the ‘holiness’ of the Obama campaign (see more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/) being currently embroiled in a row over copyright.

Heading on over to the Democratic camp, I found www.barackobama.com much more new media savvy with lots of exciting, dynamic web content including BarrackTV, the RoadBlog, Obama Mobile, the choice of sixteen social network links and a button inviting me to ‘Donate Today and receive a free Obama car magnet’!

Obama has also used new media to target likely pockets of supporters including the Latino vote - www.vivaobama08.com features perhaps the only Mariachi song to include a mention of healthcare legislation.

All good multimedia stuff. Not only that, but whatever the outcome Barack will go down in history as the first President to use video game advertising to spread the message (‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Burnout Paradise’). This is aimed at a target audience of 18-34 year olds in 10 key States before the election.

And finally, a 10-second search on YouTube came up with the song “I’ve got a crush on Obama” which has so far received 10 million views. A truly terrible video, only lifted by the magnificent lyric halfway through: “You’re into border security, let’s break the border ‘tween you and me”. Enjoy. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

A little CASE of Reputation Management in Higher Education

surajs@chameleonnet.co.uk (Suraj Shah) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:42:11 GMT

In August, Vicky (our MD) and I spent an afternoon at the CASE Europe Annual Conference in Brighton. The conference was attended by Alumni, Communications, Development and Marketing professionals in the Higher Education sector across Europe, although mostly the UK.

CASE, which stands for Council for Advancement and Support of Education, is an international network of professionals leading the advancement of education. CASE runs a number of conferences, seminars and workshops, and the CASE Europe Annual Conference dealt with some of the big issues as well as the smaller, day-to-day matters that occupy those immersed in the Higher Education sector.

The first session I attended was titled Crisis vs. "No Comment", where a panel of speakers explored a number of situations where they talked about whether to consider the issue a crisis and do something about it, or simply state "No Comment" and let it slide. It was encouraging to see that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) generally respected other HEIs and would be more interested in supporting each other rather than make the others look bad. The sector as a whole seems to really appreciate the karmic philosophy of "what goes around comes around".

This first session allowed for a large amount of audience participation where representatives from various universities were able to either share their own experiences of how they handled situations, or ask questions to the panel. One situation I had read about before attending the conference was about a university student who created a video that slated the course she was studying on and posted it up on YouTube. This student was subsequently suspended from the course, and I was curious about how other universities may have treated this situation...

From the response given by the panel that I posed the question to, it appeared that most universities would rather sweep such a situation under the carpet and 'let it go away' rather than engage in an online conversation to resolve the friction created on the web. It turns out that although most universities have grievance procedures in place to handle complaints offline, many universities are simply not yet prepared to deal with issues that arise in the digital landscape. This tends to 'lettings things slide' which unfortunately snowballs into prospective students wanting to back out of courses that they are just about to start. More on online reputation management at the article "How To Manage Your Online Reputation".

The panellists of the Crisis vs. "No Comment" included Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at University of Brighton, Ann Mroz, Editor of the Times Higher Education magazine, Peter Slee, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Student and Staff Affairs) at Northumbria University, and the panel was chaired by Ian Rowley, Director of Communication and Strategy at University of Warwick.

The second and final session that both Vicky and I attended (remember, we were only there for the afternoon!) titled "Buzz, brand and budget" was presented by Helen Aspell, Head of Digital Marketing Communications, at the University of Southampton. As we are the official digital marketing partner of the University of Southampton, it was only right that we attended the session to support Helen, and I'm glad I was there as it was really very well presented. Helen talked about why social media technologies such as Facebook, Second Life and Twitter are crucial to your brand, how to choose what to get involved in, and how the effects can be measured.

One area that Helen touched upon was the use of video to promote your university, which certainly peaked my attention. From the informal research I've been doing recently, there are many universities at the moment who are putting their promotional glossy 'corporate videos' up on YouTube, and clearly these videos are taking a lot of heat from the universities' own student - see comments to the following promotional video at University of Coventry's YouTube channel.

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This video attracted a mix of comments such as "Just graduated from there, that video makes it look so much better than it is." and "Cov Uni should be knocked down and replaced with a duck pond.", to "Im a student there and i love it. great place. quiet city. perfect for students." It also attracted comments from Coventry University's own reputation management team such as "just to let you know that a lot of the campus is being knocked down and rebuilt over the next few years, so expect things to look a lot better"

What Helen Aspell at the University of Southampton pointed out is that YouTube is NOT the place for 'corporate videos' of your university. YouTube is the place for 'authentic' videos that portray student life as it really is, ideally filmed by the students themselves. There was one incident that Helen mentioned during her talk, where one of their freshers posted a video about how hard she was finding her first week at the university, and that she really didn't like her halls where she was staying at, and was considering leaving her course and the university. The following week she posted a second video that shared about how actually the course isn't so bad, and she's making friends, and she now will stay on the course. This is the kind of video that is better to have on YouTube, as it gives a genuine account of university life. I wonder how other universities are using YouTube and other video social networks as part of their digital marketing strategy...?

Attending this conference in Brighton was certainly worth the trek from London down to Brighton, and I intend to be there next year. The next CASE Europe annual conference is 24-28 August 2009 in Liverpool (England) and you can register to attend at www.case.org. If you're attending, be sure to come over to our stall (yes, we intend to have a stall there) and say hi!

Also, if you are in a strategic role within Higher Education and want to know more of our thoughts on Online Reputation Management and other HE-related topics, you may want to take a look at a summary of our free seminar: Quick Web Wins for HEIs, which took place on Tuesday 25th November at London Chamber of Commerce, EC4.

The Day I decided to make a film

jeremyd@chameleonnet.com (Jeremy Davis) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:34:18 GMT

In the autumn of 2004 I was sitting on a train with a friend of mine, Karen Jepp, and we were discussing climate change. We’d both been reading about it (Bill Bryson started the whole thing as I recall) and had both, unbeknownst to each other, been going through a whole range of emotions about the subject: interest, fascination, amazement, incredulity, anger, disgust and fear. We were both clear about one thing: it was not the latest fad, it was not hysteria. We (by which I mean ALL of us) were sleep walking into the biggest disaster the human race had ever faced – Climate Change.

You see even re-reading that sentence somewhere I cringe. Talk of disasters, sleep walking, even “the human race” somehow sounds over dramatic, an exaggeration. Yeah, yeah, another global threat, another disaster. It’ll be fine. It always has. Except this time it is highly likely that it just won’t be fine at all.

The basic problem is this: how we live is not sustainable. How we consume and discard in ever greater amounts has caused us to draw ever increasing amounts of energy out of the ground and convert in order to sustain our amazing growth (the human population has increased 6 fold in around 200 years). And doing that has put A LOT of so-called Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere very quickly. So it’s getting warmer. And that’s probably the least of our problems. You see, we (yes, that’s ALL of us again) are just not aware of the cumulative effect of our consumption.

And so there we are, Karen and I on a train on a lovely autumnal day (weather looks fine to me) we decide that we want to DO something. We have to help make people aware because then THEY might want to do something. Karen says “Let’s make a film.”

“Excellent idea”, say I. “Do you know how to do that?”
“No”, says she. “You?”
“Not a clue”.
“Right”.

At which point, we both realise that whilst we don’t know the first thing about making a film, we both knew someone who did: Lily Murray. An experienced documentary film maker who was nuts enough to say yes to helping us.

And 3 months later we had a film, SOS Climate Change. You can view it online at I’m so proud of it. We interviewed activists, campaigners, industry leaders, designers (Katherine Hamnett was a coup) and even got an actor from Home and Away to front it for us (thank you, Mick). We worked day and night (mostly editing – how hard is THAT!) and at times we gave nearly gave up. But it’s done.

So, I hope you enjoy it. And I hope it makes you think. You see we didn’t make it for sentimental reasons. It’s not about saving the Whale or the Rhino or even the Rainforests, as beautiful as those things are. The truth is that Climate Change is not new to the Earth – it’s spent most of its 4 billion year history an awful lot hotter or an awful lot colder than it currently is. And species come and go – sometimes up to 95% get wiped out and the cycle starts again. What’s different this time is for the first time in the Earth’s history there is a species who can see it coming – and do something about it. And you never know, they might just save their own skins.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mUpVZwReoic