Its been quite a week for me and music. I was delighted to learn that Diane Birch was to be playing at Hard Rock Calling this year in Hyde Park, and quickly went about getting my tickets to see her in action after missing her earlier this year! Then last night I randomly ended up in a VIP box at the O2 arena watching the Black Eyed Peas on their Tour – admittedly I am not their biggest fan, I much prefer their old stuff but the production was just incredible – and Tom Cruise popped up on stage at the end to join with the chorus of “I gotta feeling”, an enjoyable night around I think.
Lastly, whilst watching the Final of the Jack Wills unsigned on YouTube I discovered a Mr Jamie Abbott, I don’t know a great deal about him, except he is from London and is working under the same production house as Jason Mraz, which may explain why I hinted at the similarities. Anyways, I have been listening to the guy all morning and can’t get enough of his music. So, without further ado Ill let you enjoy Jamie’s acoustic version of New York, and if you wish to check out more of his stuff you can visit his website or view more of his videos on YouTube. Enjoy
As quickly as my day was going from bad to worse after locking myself out the house, the metro made my Friday with yet another weird & wonderful story. This week its the story of a bear that came back to earth with a bump after it got stuck up a pine tree while foraging for food.
Police used a tranquiliser gun to stun the two-year-old California black bear, which tumbled more than 15ft into the front garden of a house outside Los Angeles.
But the fall was softened by a tarpaulin that caught the bewildered 100lb cub – nicknamed ‘Yogi’ by onlookers – and it was bundled back into the wild before the effects of the knockout drug wore off.
Yogi the Flying Bear
The sedated bear, his urban adventure over, was returned to a more natural habitat in the surrounding mountains and released about 30 minutes later on Wednesday lunchtime. We are happy to report that no bears were injured in the process.. isn’t he cute?
May I start by saying that some of you are not going to like this post and some of you will no doubt sit behind your computer screen and stress your dismay to my opinions only to then share your comments with all your tweeters and facebook “friends” and so on and so forth. I am just having a Wednesday morning rant after my nightmare tube journey and pouring orange juice on my Jordan’s Country Crisp!
A quick note to all those love sick puppies out there, I am afraid this will not work on human females, so please put your slugs away! Moving on, the rather er.. beautiful creature below is in fact a yellow-green ibycus rachelae, otherwise known as a slug! Not just any slug though, oh noooo quite the opposite infact. This little love beast seems to be a bit of a ninja, with the ability to fire ‘love darts’ to potential mates. Sounds like Rohypnol to me, but hey I am not one to judge. He is one of dozens of new species recently discovered in a stretch of ‘irreplaceable’ rain forest in Borneo. Yes, you have heard all of this right, this is a post about a slug, who date rapes other slugs, in a rain-forest, in Borneo…. I’ll get my coat.
Its Friday afternoon, its been a 4 day week and I am very much looking forward to the weekend, my new website is now live and before I sign off I would like to share this video that @Laura_Scott posted on twitter a moment ago. Its a short film by Patrick Jean…. pure genius!
Its goes without saying that social media is a great tool no matter what industry your in, admittedly some are more social media friendly than others but nether the less there is a little piece of social media to suit every kind of company.
However, if your a new company that is still establishing itself, how are you going to build any kind of following & build awareness for the brand? No one is going to search for you so how are you going to get people to “Fan” you?
Here is a quick example of how I used Facebook to build awareness for a new brand in a niche market at ZERO cost, zilch, nada. Enjoy
Music has always been a love of mine, even though I never seem to talk about it you can always find me on iTunes and other music website looking for new talent to listen to. My recent “daydream to work” play-lists have consisted of Ingrid Michaelson, Tristan Prettyman, Brooke Fraser & Amy Macdonald to name but a few. So I was delighted to find a tweet on Twitter this morning by Katy Beale linking to an article listing 10 New women in music worth checking out in which a found the delightful voice of Diane Burch. I am yet to listen to the rest of the album but this happy-go-lucky song called Valentino has got me hooked. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did
//EDIT – And here is another recommendation (thanks again @katybeale) check out the wonderful Alela Diane
This video had me in hysterics this morning on the tube to work, much to the dismay of the other commuters. It needs no introduction, its just pure genius! Here is the one and only, Piano Chat Improv guy:
With thanks to clicky media, Here’s your latest round up of Social Media stats for February 2010!
Social Networking websites continue to grow on a huge scale with Facebook recently announcing that they have now reached over 400 million worldwide users and Twitter soon to be reaching the benchmark of 50 million tweets per day. Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online.
Its to no surprise that with the growth of Facebook, brands in their hundreds are flocking to Facebook to build or cement their brand presence and digital footprint. For the bigger brands, they can hire the special agency with a plethora of knowledge to get the hard work done for them and go leaps and bounds, but what about the smaller companies that have to do in house? Well, here are some tips collated from around the web to help people to setup their fan page, how the get those fans and how to use Facebook effectively.
A question I am often asked is why a fan page? why not just a group? Good question, one that Mashable has answered on its thread titled: difference between Facebook pages and groups. But for those lazy bones out there he is a summary:
For personal or smaller scale interaction then a group is great for this but Pages are better for brands, businesses, celebrities, bands all of whom want to interact with their “fans” without having them connected to a person account. Remember, there is a 5000 friend cap on Facebook, so you are limiting yourself with a personal account. The great thing about Pages is that you can grow as big as you want whilst keeping the focus on the organisation and sending messages, notifications and updates to large numbers of people, unlimited infact.
