There is (sorry was) a viral ad on You Tube purportedly produced for JC Penney (a US dept store) by their agency Saatchis showing 2 teenagers practising quick undressing and dressing in their respective bedrooms apparently in preparation to "watch TV in the basement" whil the girls mother is upstairs - see article - that has caused uproar in the US as it apparently condones teenagers having sex. Last week the viral won a bronze at Cannes and JC Penney have absolutely denied any involvement in the ad and have pulled it from You Tube and ambitiously are trying to pull it from "the web". This follows a spate of similarly supposed "no Client involvement" virals including the VW suicide bomber viral and "sneaky" virals such as Gatorade and BMW's mockumentary as well as some great ideas such as Draft FCB's for Sporting Portugal
All it took for some campaigns to go wildly viral was great content that has been passed around beacuse it was funny, clever or sarcastic and the most successful are often risky (see JC Penney!). But being truly interesting requires risks and in order to reamin true to the channel Clients needs to take risks to achieve true virality.

Apparently no matter how weird, worthy, dull or deranged you are, there's a social network for you and the Crave part of the Cnet website have been good enough to pull togeter the 50 most bizarre social networks.
It makes fascinating reading what people get up to from the understandable but oddly named Sermo where over 65,000 doctors share their knowledge from the frontline of medicine, to the supportive divorce 360 for people contemplating, going through or recovering from divorce to the stalkers dream of Loopt - a friend-locator site that uses GPS to turn your mobile into a homing beacon or the dark (self explanatory) Goth passions. I personally found the my free implants the most extraordinary.
Social networking is booming with emarketer.com predicting Worldwide advertising spend on social networks forecast to reach £2bn by 2011 with roughly 11 million UK Internet users visting online social network sites regularly in 2007. And the market is booming—60% of respondents to an early-2008 survey said they had created a social network profile, up from 27% in 2007.
So if you have a brand that is interested in where they can reach recovering alcoholics (sobercircle if you are interested) or Hamster lovers (yes seriously - complete with a paw pointer - see hamsterster.com) then here is your answer !

After a nightmare I have had recently trying to sort out some issues with my TV, phone and broadband provider (guess who?!) I was intrgued by a piece I read in the Times Money section a few weeks ago about a site called Pebble - which was summed up as "the site will force companies into improving service by making customers' experiences visible to everyone." - it was music to my ears.
Plebble was set up with one main purpose in mind - to improve the level of service and value for money provided by every business and other organisation in the UK. It does this by giving consumers a voice on customer service issues and by using the power of the internet to join together consumer voices in a powerful, easy to use and easy-to-understand format for other consumers and businesses themselves to use.
It's about sharing information simply and quickly - but highly effectively. It's about empowering you, giving you choice and enabling you to make the right decisions about which businesses to use. And, in the end, it's about making businesses more aware of and accountable for levels of service.
I had a look this morning and interestingly (although maybe not surprisingly) the worst performers were well known companies such as Foxtons the Labour Party and British Gas whilst out of the top ten only 2 were mainstream companies (Waitrose and Ocado at 8th and 10th respectively). It will be fascinating to watch this site develop and hugely amusing the read the comments which for Foxton's the choice 2 were
"Arrogant. Appalling hair cuts. Ridiculous sense of unfounded importance. Funniest thing was seeing a Foxtons mini being clamped and towed away. I cried with happiness..." and the simple "prats in minis" - Virgin Media watch out !

Hugh Macleod of gapingvoid fame has just published his "10 things I hate about web 2.0" which (despite the americanisms) made me smile a lot especially number 6 (below) after a recent conference experience (more on that in a day or 2):

6. People at conference panels, pretending that the only reason they're attending is to offer valuable insight to their fellow man, as opposed to just pimping their wares and/or scouting for consulting gigs.

Definitely worth a read particularly the comments posted in response.

I remember more years ago than I am willing to disclose running a campaign for the launch of a new Fiat in association with The Children's Society where we "sold" balloons for a donation to the charity and the chance to win one of the new cars. One the launch day itself we released over 1m balloons from Fiat dealerships all over the country and I recall the nightmare of speaking to the Civil Aviation Authority about when and where exactly this could happen ...so I was intrigued by the new Orange activity to launch the animal themed contracts for PAYG customers billed as the "World's first internet balloon race" and it looks great - you can choose a balloon, call it what you want and add a tag, all the balloons are launched on a specific date and you have to control them as they cross the internet collecting internet miles along the way for daily, overall and bonus prizes. The site is simple, easy to navigate and upload and I am looking forward to having a go in a couple of weeks - I do however think they have missed one integral trick in that if this is really balloon race 2.0 where is the web 2.0 functionality ? - I tried to enter the Gravity site as a site for the race but it kept logging me out and there is no feedback form or even blog / forum to feedback on this glitches AND most importantly it would be great to know how many others have entered (maybe a clock counter)and the chance to read what other particpants think about the idea PLUS why can't I play this my mobile...................?

As we all know Social media has become an essential element of a marketers armoury - it not only offers a fascinating insight nto your customers point of view on your brand / sector but also provides a perfect opportunity to get involved and start talking to them and providingthem with what they want. So it was good to learn that, according to a new report from Jupiter Research, titled "When Good Social Marketing Goes Bad," marketers are using consumer-generated media in their marketing plans, but are failing to do the leg work on the back end to keep things going. According to the research, 35% of marketers have CGM on their on sites and 21% have an online social networking profile. However, only 29% of marketers who use social media tactics follow through and monitor online discussions on an ongoing basis -- and a whopping 17% of marketers who use social marketing tactics don't monitor online discussions at all.

This does not surprise me at all - in fact I would have thought that the figure would be far higher - too many brands think that by setting up a Facebook account and adding an ecrm stream to their site that is social media job done when anyone who is even vaguely involved in this new media opportunity knows this is just the tip of a very large iceberg. It seems we all have a long way to go to change this perception but it is a fight worth fighting with huge rewards to those who persevere - let's get going !