Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

May The Blog Be With You

The Star Wars fan club - Hyperspace - has launched a blogging service for its members to create their own community.  The blog home page is here.  It's a great example of a brand offering a service to its fans and then getting out of the way...

Sega's Fake Blogger

Today's FT has a good article (subscription) about the upheavals in the advertising industry.  It makes great play about Beta-7, the fake character that Sega created (through Wieden & Kennedy) in 2003 to publicise its ESPN NFL Football video game....

Wnek is a T-Rex

It's actually quite shocking how oblivious the ad industry continues to be.

The advertising community has had a wonderful time over the last 50 years making 30 sec ad slots for clients keen to tap into the world's huge media networks.  However, brands are increasingly finding that those networks no longer offer the value they once did.  Simply because there aren't the same...

Managed Blogs

Managed Blogs is one strand of Collaborate Marketing.  I have been talking about the service to PR & Marketing consultancies in London for a few months now.  They've given me some great feedback, which I have used to tweak the offering.  One issue that often comes up is control...

Manifesto Feedback

The feedback to my manifesto What is Open Source Marketing? continues which is great.  Sorebrek thinks it's a helpful way of approaching the Long Tail.  Ernie Schenk ties in the manifesto with a few other open observations and decides that,"something is definitely going on". Tim In San Francisco says that, "persuasion is out, collaboration is in". Kevin Briody (aka the SeattleDuck) feels Open Source Marketing...

Off To Reboot Camp

Johnnie and I are taking Open Sauce Live to Reboot in Copenhagen in mid-June. It sounds like a pretty saucy event that will go beyond the normal formats.

"This year’s theme is the new ways ahead. After more than 10 years of old ways of creation, old values, and old models for communicating and organizing ourselves, new ways are emerging. That is what reboot7 is about."

So we are planning something in the spirit...

Collaboration Is Scary

Everyone talks about collaboration these days, in fact it has become a bit of a buzzword.  However, when people are asked to actually act collaboratively on projects they often struggle and resort to a 'command and control' mindset.  This is a common reaction for companies considering closer collaboration with customers, as outlined in What is Open Source Marketing?...

WildFire Fox

Firefox is a phenomenon.  For the non-technically minded/interested, Firefox is a web browser that people can download and use (probably instead of Internet Explorer).  What's interesting is that firstly,  it's really good, secondly, it's free and thirdly, it's been created by an open source community.  But most startlingly, is the pace of its commercial progress....

Lessig on Marketing

"I hate most marketing; I hate the models of most marketing; I think we should be encouraging experiments in spreading a message, and learning what's heard."

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford. Which makes him clever.  He is also the force behind Creative Commons, the new model for IP management favoured by the BBC, Beastie Boys, Chuck D and Gilberto Gil.  Which makes him super-smart. So when Lessig talks Modern Marketing listens.  Thanks to Chris R at WarmCo. for this one.

UK's First Blog Election

This was the first UK election featuring blogs. The BBC's blog is here and alerts us to Paxman's brilliantly hostile interview with George Galloway, the new MP for Bethnal Green, (just down the road from me)....