President Obama: got the www factor

Come Nov 4th the world will toast the appointment of Barack Obama as the new president of the USA. his victory will come not just as a result of his vision for change, youth, vigour, everyman appeal, love of plumbers and bob the builder catchphrase but because of his highly sophisticated and widespread online, mobile and social media campaign. there's a lesson here for dave & gord for sure...but also for anyone who wants to reach, engage and convince an audience online.

Understandably all roads lead to and from the obama website which is returned confidently on any search, swiftly followed by youtube, wikipedia, myspace, flickr and facebook ....so the lad certainly knows his way round SEO & social media although his $600m campaign budget probably helped nudge him up the google rankings he still managed to find time to tell me where the nearest polling station is and start a food fight.

Much to the delight of his fans he also manages his blog and microblog on twitter as well as all his pictures, videos and speeches which are streamed, linked or podcasted all over the world wide park.

Clearly the guy's a net generation dream...added to this is a plethora of apps and gizmos to download or just muck around with...lunchtime highlights include tax calculator, 'my obama' online tool box but best of all is obama mobile which has no less than 20 ringtones (all dreadful) an iphone app and downloadable album....In the face of all this new fangled interwebbing does the mccain campaign featuring my daddy books and commemorative plates really cut the mustard?

The World in 2010

A great film from Faris Yakob on the world in 2010, explaining how with mobile technology evolving so rapidly, the internet will soon infiltrate every aspect of how we communicate in the real and virtual worlds and how soon there will be no difference between online and offline.

It explores how content will become so vast that people will no longer search, but will rely on recommendations from others within their niche groups..suggesting how brands might react to ensure they get noticed.


2010: Entertainment and Communication from Faris Yakob on Vimeo.

The TEEN commandments for brands wanting to 'do digital'

An interesting and insightful post at Ruby Pseudo which quashes many assumptions about how youth use digital

“iPhone killer”

..the laziest headline of 2008?

Once more we have an exciting round of new mobile products that have taken the years of sweat and tears to develop and still the best that journalist can come up with is ‘brand x announces iphone killer’

By my reckoning there are at least 5 current handsets in the frame for the forthcoming murder of the iphone, after the last round of assassination attempts failed…the 3 prime suspects being:

NOKIA 5800


















SAMSUNG OMNIA




















..AND OF COURSE THE GOOGLE PHONE

The reality is that there will be no death, fatal wounding or hospitalisation of the iphone, just an incredible choice for us punters as to how our mobile media devices will look and feel. The only death, hopefully, will be that of a very tired headline.

Tom Thirlwall

Surfing the web makes ya brain live longer!

It's true. Says so here.