Crazy Australians…
You’ve probably seen those Outback TV ads which suggests Australians are more advanced because they are a day ahead… well, not these guys who decided to steal critters from the local zoo…
“The original plan was to steal a koala – that’s what they were going to use to swap [for] the drugs,” Mr Kemp said.
“[But] apparently [the koala] scratched the shit out of them.”
“The blokes have quite a lot of scratches and lacerations caused by the koala.”
The thieves then decided to take a crocodile instead.
“I don’t know what makes someone go, ‘Oh we tried to steal a koala and that didn’t work so lets go and steal a croc.’ ”
Police believe the crocodile was taken in the early hours of Saturday morning but Mr Kemp remembers seeing it on Sunday morning.
He thinks it must have been taken on Monday morning when another drama occurred at the zoo.
“One of the wombats got bitten by a snake. No one can officially remember seeing [the female] crocodile on Monday.”
Some stories are just too good…
MarketingProfs Daily Fix…
MarketingProfs has launched a blog – Daily Fix. Lead story falls into the current story trend of “why not to blog“. In this case, some of the reasons not to blog are the very reasons to blog:
10. You can’t control every message on a blog. (But message control has always been an illusion.) Right. So might as well blog. At least the loose creative act will result in more authentic messages with real-time feedback.
9. You’ll have to decide when to respond and when to ignore comments. Isn’t that the whole point? Don’t do it if you don’t want dialogue. And plenty of blogs simply turn-off comments all together, or, only turn them on for topics that they want feedback on.8. It’s hard to build an audience. It takes time, effort, and skillful promotion to build an audience for a blog. So get started now. Immediately. It’s just as hard using any other medium. If the point here is that it isn’t as simple as it might seem, I agree. But just because it is hard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a swing at it.
And… 3. Blogging is addictive. You might not be able to stop. It’s also lots of fun. I agree!
Countering Conventional Marketing
In the upcoming war for Soccer mindshare, Nike isn’t countering Adidas with conventional marketing. Adidas is set to spend upwards of $200m on ads – some of which sound very creative. Rather than match them dollar-for-dollar, Nike has launched a MySpace style network for Soccer nuts:
The site, which launched on Mar. 15, will roll out to 140 countries in 14 languages. Hoping to make Adidas wonder why it spent all that money on mere ads, Nike is making the site a replica of top social network site MySpace.com (NWS ) for soccer-mad fans to commune with each other over their favorite players and teams, download videos, create discussion groups, and the like. – BusinessWeek
Nice move. Both strategies are probably right. Where one zigs, the other zags.
Go Forth & Blog…
OK – that’s pretty close to the headline from this morning’s GMSV which reports:
The freewheeling days of political blogging will roll on thanks to a Federal Election Commission ruling that grants media exemptions to bloggers and other pundits, allowing them to politick online without fear of federal interference. In a 6-0 decision, the commission left unregulated almost all political activity on the Internet except for paid political advertisements.
Seven Blogging Rules…
… from Mr. Carr nonetheless. Some pretty sound advise. His first is a doozy:
- Don’t do it. If you have no compelling business reason to get involved in the blogosphere, then don’t.
I’m with him. And this is typically the hardest part of initiating any blogging effort – defining the compelling reason to blog. I’d love to hear from small to medium enterprise bloggers. The reason I ask this is that large companies are typically rich in talent and resources. In smaller enterprises blogging normally involves a trade-off. And where there are trade-offs involved, you’d better have a compelling reason for doing something.
Where I am not with Nick – and this directly relates to my experience of Sun – is that by encouraging and affording people the opportunity to blog they do bad things. My experience was they do great things and that a “sand pile for self expression” can be a good thing. I’ve seen the same in many companies now. They trick is to get the foundation right.
