Anyway, I’m back now with a simplified category structure and a few new things that I want to write about – Book Reviews for one. I am a business & industry book junkie and constantly telling people to read stuff. I thought I’d start collating my thoughts here to save you time & money finding out which ones are best.

My old site was on wordpress with a redirect from www.grapevine-consulting.com. Hopefully everyone has found me again here and updated their RSS readers with the new feed.

Alpacas. The new LOL cats?

Kerry has started a meme to share resolutions for social media and digital blah in 2009. Ordinarily I probably just wouldn’t do it but then that’s already…

…My 1st Resolution: Enjoy doing more of the fun stuff on the web and less o’ the work side

My 2nd Resolution: Give up explaining why I use Twitter to non-users. Like with everything else just try it yourself and decide

My 3rd Resolution: Bother to show my friends more of the cool/useful stuff on the web. This will help with my 1st Resolution

My 4th Resolution: Express my opinion more even if it’s *shock horror* a tad negative. As a PR you can get a little paranoid that a) you are creating a problem for another PR b) will never work in this town again

My 5th Resolution: Trim out people in my communities who are unpleasant about PRs. Yes, we make mistakes but there should still be space for people to mess up without all this stoopid ‘naming and shaming’. Personal attacks on, quite often, junior people just starting out in their careers and following instructions, are rubbish. This includes PRs who are quick to cannibalise each other.

Could I suggest we spend 2009 victimising call centre support staff instead? Let’s face it everyone gets fed up with customer service, we’ll never find out their real names and we might  get some vouchers from ranting.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

In line with 1st Resolution going to tag some non-marketers to see what they’re planning. Over to you Jess, Stuart, Steve, Leila and Ferdy

Last week I attended the inaugural FRUKT Sessions. I promised to drop a few notes down so here goes.

Dan Southern: Xtreme Insight

Dan kicked off with some interesting vox pops showing that if you ask people what they get for free they can’t recall exactly. Of course we’re accessing a huge range of free services & content everyday (particularly on the internet) but this has become so normal, especially for the young folk, we’re seeing ’Generation Free’

Dominic Hodge: FRUKT

Dominic listed some of the trends which have been driving the culture of free in music:

1. Technology:fast internet speeds & storage ability. P2P networks the obvious example, I love the case study that even though Radiohead gave their album away for free 100s of people within minutes were putting it on P2P site; the behaviour on those communities is entrenched
2. Ethos of creative freedom: internet is disruptive at a philosophical level, some people feel content should be free and they should also be able to take, reuse, repurpose
3. Competition from other industries: Gaming industry, film industry much bigger media providers for consumer than in the past
4. Bad music industry PR: calling customers “thieves” made music companies unpopular and made people more reluctant to buy from them
5. More brands = more promotions

The session wrapped up with a panel featuring: Steve Purdham (We7), Geoff Morley (Blyk), Greg Miall (Sport) and moderated by Ruth Mortimer (Brand Strategy).

I normally gripe a bit about panels being dull but the guests were really well selected but I’m sorry to say I stopped taking notes at this point and just listened. I saw FRUKT taking video so I’m hoping they may put some highlights online. We’ll see.

I’d recommend getting in touch to see if you can get on the list for these events and you can also sign-up for their free fortnightly newsletter Brands, Bands and Fans (which I defy you to say 5 times in a row really fast).

On a final note, thanks to Dan for showing Chris Anderson’s 4 models of ‘free’. Really insightful and something I hadn’t seen before.

The four frees - Chris Anderson

Yesterday I was lamenting on Twitter the geo-blocking on TVNZ’s OD service. Back home I’m missing the [re]debut of my sister, Narelle Ahrens, as Nurse Bernadette Hamblyn on Shortland Sreet :-(

Social PRobiotic, reminded of my kiwiness, then told me to watch the new Air New Zealand advert currently on YouTube.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bh44yOZdPZo]

I liked it, but it doesn’t touch my fave NZ ad from a few years ago. This from L&P showcases how funny we can be when do that thing where we just laugh at ourselves (while secretly getting very very upset if you say one mean thing about our beloved country).

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GSFCvG6curE]

Listening to the ad again, the voice sounds suspiciously like Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords. Then I had a thought – now wouldn’t that be the perfect brand partnership for Air NZ!! NZ comedians + international audience + name related to flying =  Advertising dream, no?

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zs_rXxi0zhM] 

To try and round off this whole ramble, I discovered this old video of Jemaine AND my sis from cult hit Tongan Ninja. Now I don’t mean to perpetuate the myth that all NZers know each other it’s just, as Air New Zealand says, a kiwi thing.

[And she is gonna freakin' kill me].

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FtDtCqoDet0]

Today’s event brings together thought leaders who’ve played a part in shaping ‘Generation Free’ and how it impacts on business. Anthony Ackenhoff (FRUKT) will be kicking things off and my former client at Shiny Red Steve Purdham (We7) will be joining in on a panel later.

The most important question they’ll be trying to answer today is:

How do you connect with an audience whose most precious commodity is their own attention?

I’ll take some notes and post back here.

I’ve been a bit of a dweeb this year reading books about Lifestyle (like Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Work Week), Business (like The Beermat Entrepreneur), and Design (like John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity).

Now I’ve found a concept which plays to my need to obsess on theories *AND* teaches me about my inability to be even remotely cool – The Cool Curve.

The Cool Curve is a presentation honed at Tuttle, introduced to me by one of my favourite web people (sizemore), and created by Creative Coffee Club guru Toby Moore AKA sleepydog.

Enjoy.

This was long before I was doing stuff with the internet of course. But now I can experience the 2001 internet all over again because ruggerblogger sent me the link to Google’s oldest available index which they’ve brought back in honour of their 10th Birthday.

See what my 2001 Darika namesakes were up to on the world wide web: 

• Search result 1: The Kabalarians were predicting that my name made me predisposed to trying to further my interest “through pursuing the association of people with influence.” Was this an insight into my future work ‘identifying influential bloggers’ for brand engagement?
• Result 2: The Darika School, where “All teachers …. graduated from the famous universities” was, er, running strong and to this day will still “take care your children the best we can“
• Result 3: Pete from Arkworld.com was contemplating “airbrushing Darika out of the picture” (Why Pete? What did she ever do to you?)

 What were you doing in 2001?

Half-an-hour day for Growing Ambitions

A little while back I wrote about some of the interesting companies I’d met via Media Trust. One of the organisations I met was Growing Ambitions who are currently organising ”half-an-hour” day on the 14th October.

On this day individuals and businesses are being encouraged to sign up to give one half hour of their time in the next 12 months to help young people near them make more informed career choices.

Go on, it’s only half an hour out of your life to do something nice for today’s ‘yoof’.

I never knew YouTube did a guest editors slot until I spied Seth MacFarlane’s featured picks this week which led me to his YouTube channel SethComedy.

SethComedy on YouTube is sponsored by Burger King who also host the videos on their BK channel. I followed the trail further to the separate SethComedy website and then found out about Seth’s plans to take over the internet and monetise his own content via a clever distribution deal with Google AdSense.

I love disruptive broadcast models like this which put a greater share of the profits in the hands of the creators. Really hope this is a success for all parties.

A new online agency is born

Welcome to Stephen Davies’ new consultancy 3WPR. To me Davies will always be the original PRBlogger so I have no doubt his own agency will pan out very nicely indeed -  if he just stays on his end of the Island that is (kidding).

There’s all together too much good will towards this new upstart of an agency so I thought I would uptake the challenge within his first quote as MD:

I don’t think anyone who works in the PR industry , or indeed the wider media industries, would disagree with me when I say that the momentum is moving online.

Stephen, this online nonsense is just a blip. We have only 30 years till the internet stops working. Good luck out there :-p