Joe blogs

Lost in translation

allaboutjoe — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:41:42 +0000

The road sign in Welsh

The English on this road sign reads ok, but the translation in Welsh reads: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”!

Where are all those Welsh-speaking proofreaders when you need them?!

Read the full story on the BBC. It’s genius.

Tuning out, listening in

allaboutjoe — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:51:50 +0000

Its not often you get an email that starts “This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.” Kind of grabs your attention.
In this case it was from Pandora, the music recommendation engine which closed its station to anyone outside the US a while ago, but kept it open in the UK in the hope of resolving rights issues with the music labels. It hasn’t.
That’s a shame, because I think recommendation engines are a brilliant way to get you to buy music – if you find a new track you like you don’t just want to log onto your PC and navigate to a web page each time you want to listen to it, even if it is free. Surely Pandora is great viral marketing? Maybe I’m missing something…but for the moment I’m missing Pandora.

However, the rights issue doesn’t seem to work the other way round – even our own private conversations are now considered fair game for advertisers. Scarily, there is a new service being developed that will listen in to your phone calls made over the internet or mobile and display adverts based on keywords that pop up in the conversation. Perhaps people will invent a new code to get round this, talking only in words that cannot possibly have any advertising connected to them. Or perhaps advertisers will come to their senses and remember that it’s rude to interrupt.

Did I miss Christmas?

allaboutjoe — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:13:18 +0000

It’s the eve of Christmas Eve and I’m just getting round to wrapping my presents, but I’ve started to wonder whether Christmas has been and gone without me noticing.
In the post this morning I got a mailshot from Eurocamp which started ‘With Christmas over it’s time to look forward to spending your summer holiday together as a family’.
And just a few minutes ago I got an email from Tesco that started, ‘It may be Christmas Eve, but here at Tesco.com we’re already thinking about great offers for the New Year!’
What are they thinking of? Don’t they know everyone will be too busy queueing for those undelivered chrimbo presents at the sorting office?!
Happy Christmas

Wannabe Wicked proves that niche is best

allaboutjoe — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:53:18 +0000

I must admit I hadn’t heard of the musical WICKED until All About Joe started working with Orange and IMP Media on ‘Wannabe WICKED‘.
(And now after watching all the video entries to the competition so many times I can’t get the damn tunes out of my head, but that’s another story!)
As you may or may not know, the musical is a kind of prequel to the Wizard of Oz and has attracted something of a cult following. Turns out there’s an army of fans out there that can’t get enough of anything WICKED-related. There’s even an annual WICKED day dedicated to them.
So they were delighted when Wannabe WICKED came along: an Orange-sponsored competition where fans could send in a video of themselves singing an extract from the musical for the chance to win a walk-on part in the London production. Orange customers voted on which vids they liked best and the final four went to a real-life audition in front of the WICKED production team in London. It was a great prize and a great project to work on.
Anyone who has attempted to attract user-generated content will know it’s something of a fickle art form but in this case we found a successful formula which worked a treat: passionate fans + a great incentive to send in their vids + effective, targeted marketing to the fan base + a great showcase for the submitted content = the key to UGC success.

Comic timing – all in the delivery

allaboutjoe — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 22:53:00 +0000

The shortlist for this year’s BIMA awards is out, with perfect comedy timing.
Nominated in the ‘Best integrated campaign’ category were Proximity London with their ‘Stop Lateness’ campaign for the Royal Mail.
Let’s hope the award’s not in the post!
Good luck to all the nominees

Happy Birthday to the :-) but not the ;-)

allaboutjoe — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:58:08 +0000

The smiley is 25 years old today. Happy Birthday

Not the pin badge smiley favoured by the rave generation which was invented by in 1961. I mean the digital smiley favoured by techies and texters worldwide which was supposedly invented by Scott E. Fahlman on this day 25 years ago when he wrote on a bulletin board: “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: . Read it sideways.” To which the appropriate response should have been ‘Dude, where’s your sense of humour! ;-s’

Whatever. All this talk of smileys made me wonder how exactly the smiley family evolved. Was the happy face smiley the first one? When did we get the
Did it come before the frown or after? And what about the ? Surely more widely used than the smiley?

Now that emoticons have taken over instant messenger conversations, I’d almost forgotten what the sideways-written ones looked like until I came across this site. My fave is the smiley with a toupee but I can’t ever imagine using it conversation.

Oh, and if decides to go out for a few birthday drinks don’t be if he comes back all :#)

Facebook and other social minefields

allaboutjoe — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:51:01 +0000

Since when did social networks become social minefields? There used to be a saying ‘You can choose your friends but not your family’…now even choosing your friends is complicated. Thanks to social networking sites like Facebook, social etiquette just got harder.
When to poke and not poke? How often to update your status? And, most importantly, just who are your friends?
The nation is divided into facebookers who accept anyone who asks as their new bezzy mates, and facebookers who actively refuse friend requests. It’s a true test of character. I mean, how many people have you accepted that you’re now secretly regretting? And how do you drop them politely without them noticing? It can’t be done! And just how many exes do you have on there before your partner gets into the whole Facebook thing and starts asking awkward questions?
As I say, it’s a social minefield. And it’s not just Facebook. I know of one person who is refusing to update his LinkedIn because he doesn’t want people at his last company to know where he went next.
According to a new report we generally have 5 close friends no matter how many ‘friends’ we claim on Facebook, and almost all our close friends are ones we’ve made face to face, which begs the question why don’t we just meet them down the pub?
A friend of mine has been on facebook for ages and his wife recently joined. She wrote on his wall: “I’ve learnt more about you on your facebook profile in the last ten minutes than I have in the last eight years of marriage AND this is more fun than actually having a conversation with you.” And then she threw a turd at his Superwall. I guess that means they’re pretty close friends.

Things I noticed on my hols

allaboutjoe — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:55:29 +0000

Yes, lots of chateaux (it being the Loire Valley and all), and an unhealthy interest in pains au chocolat (resulting in a few too many pains au stomach), but I also picked up a few musings about multimedia along the way:
1. When the chips are down and you only have 5 minutes at the campsite internet cafe, what do you browse? I checked my email and my husband checked the news and sport headlines and the weather. Apparently we were behaving true to our gender – females use the internet to communicate and males use it for information and fact-finding. Obviously this is a huge sweeping generalisation, but it does seem to be true from segmentation research we did last year with Orange customers. And I was reminded of it when I read a newspaper article on the ferry about the explosion of pink gadgets on the market (phones, ipods, power screwdrivers, taser guns – you name it, there’s a pink one for girls). Handset manufacturers for one would do better to look at differences in online behaviour rather than re-setting the colours on their production line for geeky early adopters. More on this at a later date.
2. Why do mobile operators find it so difficult to make email work on your phone. Yes, there are hundreds of different email clients, yes, there’s POP3 access and webmail and hotmail isn’t joining in with everyone else and yes there are lots of different handsets, but come on guys – sort it out! (And then explain it to everyone in customer services too, so there’s just a chance they might be able to help or have a clue what you’re talking about.) Phew, rant over!
3. Radio phone-ins. Late-night shows for nutters and insomniacs or the great grandaddy of user-generated content depending on your viewpoint. We flicked between two phone-ins on the drive home in the wee small hours (5Live and Radio 2) and were educated on subjects such as Paris Hilton and George Michael – should they be given special treatment by the courts; Big Brother – what’s with the race row and why’s everyone talking about it (including us) and finally religion – what’s all that about?! All mildly entertaining and mildly irritating at the same time, but the thing that struck me was how old-fashioned the DJs were. Both said independently that they weren’t allowed to have their own opinions and that struck me as the problem. How can you have a proper conversation with someone if you can’t speak your mind. Maybe that’s why so many of them sound so insincere.
4. Back to work stress now starts before you get back to work. Some social researcher will invent a name for it soon (if there’s any of them left in Big Brother season!), but these days it’s not just your inbox you have to worry about catching up on – it’s all your social networks too. There’s so many things to check: LinkedIn invites and updates, Facebook postings, Flickr comments and contacts photos, blog stats, RSS feeds, subscription newsletters, Ebay bids, Youtube views…and that’s before you get to SkyPlus. There’s only one answer – book another holiday!

We have a winner!

allaboutjoe — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:09:23 +0000

The winner of our last caption competition was Jenny from Holmfirth with ‘Well you’d jump too if people kept firing arrows at you!’. Congratulations, Jenny: she wins a photomug, decorated with her own photo design. (Yes, it’s a user-generated prize for a user-generated competition, aka you can’t expect us to do all the work around here!)

Runner-up was Simon Ashberry from Orange with his caption: ‘Joe realised it wasn’t the best T-shirt to wear while spectating at the Stone Bridge Archery championships’.

Thanks to all. Look out for another All About Joe competition coming soon.

Clunk click for a nostalgia trip

allaboutjoe — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:55:50 +0000

We’re working on a set of low-budget instructional help videos at the moment and during the course of our extensive research we stumbled across a national treasure trove: all the public information films from 1945 onwards. In case you missed them first time around, they were made to warn us of life’s dangers such as discarding old fridges, crossing the road and taking part in general elections. Of all the films I think my favourite is the clunk-click campaign with Jimmy Saville about the perils of not wearing seatbelts. How dated does this look now! (and remember those seatbelts?!) You’ll be shocked to hear that most accidents happened to ‘you ladies’ travelling at less than 6 miles from home whilst out shopping or visiting the laundrette. At least I was shocked – you’d be hard-pressed to find a laundrette within a 60-mile radius now, let alone have time to visit one! Makes you wonder what dangers they’d warn us about now, doesn’t it? Anyone else got any ideas?