Day: December 3, 2004

A Case Study: Successful grassroots marketing….

Thomas Mucha has written an interesting article on the collaborative marketing efforts around the Firefox browser.

“Here’s a neat marketing idea: Lock 40,000 people in a room. Combine their brainpower, divergent backgrounds, various skills, and colorfully disparate ideas. Then sit back and let this passionate collective spread your product across planet Earth.”

Oh and if you haven’t already downloaded Firefox, I recommend you do so right now.

Footnote:

An interesting place to work…

Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day” e-mail is always a welcome distraction.  Today’s entry is particularly interesting (for me):

donnybrook DAH-nee-brook noun

*1 : free-for-all, brawl

2 : a usually public quarrel or dispute

Did you know?

The Donnybrook Fair was an annual event held in Donnybrook – then a suburb of Dublin, Ireland — from the 13th to the 19th centuries. The fair was legendary for the vast quantities of liquor consumed there, for the number of hasty marriages performed during the week following it, and, most of all, for the frequent brawls that erupted throughout it. Eventually, the fair’s reputation for tumult was its undoing. From the 1790s on there were campaigns against the drunken brawl the fair had become. The event was abolished in 1855, but not before its name had become a generic term for a free-for-all.

Why is this interesting? Well Donnybrook is where I work and spend a lot of time.  Unfortunately it isn’t anywhere as interesting as it was in the past….

Fleishman-Hillard tackles Los Angeles issue…

For the past while Fleishman-Hillard has been fighting allegations over their dealings with the city of Los Angeles, mostly behind closed doors.

On Wednesday, Richard S. Kline, regional president of Fleishman-Hillard wrote a formal response to these allegations in the Los Angeles Daily News.

“In the 58-year history of Fleishman-Hillard, we have never experienced allegations remotely like those facing us today in Los Angeles…….Fleishman-Hillard is a firm of high ethical standards. We would never knowingly tolerate improper behavior and we will not attempt to avoid our responsibilities in this case. But the DWP had good reasons to seek experienced outside counsel and our firm provided a great deal of value in the six years we worked for the department.”

Share your views on how communication is changing…

 Elizabeth Albrycht is looking for people join her to share their thoughts on how communication is changing for a blog-based event taking place in January.

“I have written a lot about how I think communications is changing, and others have as well.  But this information is currently fragmented, anecdotal and spread all over the place.  What I decided I wanted to do was to synthesize this information with theories from communications studies, media ecology, philosophy and science and technology studies, and come up with a new model that people can use, test, improve, etc.”

 Also Kevin Dugan has an interesting post on how companies are using blog for market intelligence.

Some useful E-mail advice….

Although RSS will probably play a larger role in the future in how we discover and share information, E-mail remains a vital part of our communications toolbox.

I found a couple of interesting e-mail posts over the past couple of days:

 Andy Lark shares some of his e-mail rules.

“Or, like it has for many, email has become like an arcade game in which we win by shooting the bastards down as they flood our inbox.”

 Amy Gahran shares some advice on how to be smart about communicating with the media via e-mail and also makes some recommendations on good e-mail list software.

“The plague of spam is having disastrous effects on legitimate e-mail distribution lists. Most people � especially journalists � receive such a high volume of spam that they routinely overlook, delete, or filter out many legitimate messages, including mail from opt-in lists.”

Some more e-mail related content: