If you thought wearable technology was only designed for humans you might want to think again.
For the past eight months, Asger Christensen, a Danish farmer, has been involved in trialling GEA CowView, technology that lets him track the movement and the behaviour of every animal in his herd.
Each cow wears a special collar, fitted with a wireless RTLS (real time locating system) tag, which is read several times a second by sensors fitted in a grid in the roof of their barn.
From this, the system can tell the farmer via real time alerts delivered to his smartphone whether the cow is ill, or is ready to be inseminated.
Wearable technology is increasingly becoming an integrated part of every industry, including healthcare and, now, more traditional ones such as farming and agriculture.
The value of this new technology is still underestimated and its costs are often still too high for the masses, but it’s undeniable that they have the potential to revolutionise processes and in some cases the industry as a whole.
Keld Florczak, the man behind the CowView technology, believes so and estimates the technology should pay for itself in one to two years. Of course, assuming that cows will overcome their privacy concerns.
Facebook has been criticised for changing its look too often, automatically resetting privacy settings and sharing personal information with third-party apps.
It seems that just when we start getting our head around our “new” wall or page, Facebook unveils a new design and moves things around with the purpose of optimising the space and giving users a better experience.
Here is how Facebook Updates Would Look in Real Life.
Do you still think these changes are worth the frustration?
To celebrate Vine’s 100-day birthday, video technology company Unruly has released the results of its study of Twitter’s new video app.
Collecting data from over 10 million Vines during a one-month period, the research found that the young app is becoming increasingly popular, as five Vines are sent every second. Moreover, marketers will be interested to know that branded Vines are four times more likely to be shared than branded videos.
This data is important news for brands that are using Vine or planning to add it to their marketing portfolio, as it allows drawing a more effective marketing strategy for the six-second video app, according to Matt Cooke, CTO and co-founder at Unruly.
Unruly, has also developed aSocial Video Playerplug-in that allows brand to integrate Vine into their current social video campaigns, as well as a Guide For Brands On Vine, that helps users to get greater insights on the Twitter’s app.
YouTube has, at last, launched its much-rumoured paid channels, that can only be accessed after paying a subscription fee starting at $0.99 (around £0.64) per month.
For now the programming is quite small, around 50 channels, but YouTube will be rolling it out in the coming weeks for current qualifying partners.
So what do YouTube paid channels mean for brands? Viewers will not be willing to pay for something they can get elsewhere for free, so brands that are planning to get a paid channel will have to ask themselves whether their videos are producing additional value for their audience.
For this reason, YouTubers and brands that are trying to monetise their efforts on the platform will have to invest more time and resources in their content strategy.
Moreover, quality will override quantity. Of course the number of subscriber will always be important, but brands will have to focus more on retaining and engaging with current viewers, since these represent a constant source of income.
A full list of channels can be found onYouTube’s Channels page, including offerings from film distributors Magnet and comedy channel Laugh Factory.
What channels are you planning to subscribe to? Let us know in the comments below.
If emails are part of your marketing strategy, then you’ll probably be interested to know what times and days emails have the potential to deliver a better ROI.
As every business is different, the only way to find out exactly when emails work best for you company is through testing. However, according to the Econsultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2013 only half of businesses are currently testing the time and day of their email messages.
Want to get an idea of what times your testing should focus on? Here is an infographic showing best time and day of the week to send emails.
If you’ve seen any other bizare wearable technolgies around the web, don’t forget to share them with us on the Ruder Finn’s Facebook page and Twitter. Till next week… Gabs (@gabrielegenola)
AllFacebook has published recent news announcing the formation of Facebook’s new UK advisory board which is “aimed at strengthening the relationships between brands and agencies in the U.K. and the social network.” The board consists of the great and good of some of the UK’s largest companies and media buying agencies.
The Facebook Studio blog details the rationale for setting up the board which includes being “in constant contact with our industry partners, listening to their needs, and working together to help make their marketing efforts on Facebook more effective and efficient.”
The formation of the advisory board illustrates the importance Facebook places on maintaining good relationships with some of its most valued customers. However, one can’t help but think that it has given little-to-no consideration about the rest of us who use the Facebook platform for commercial reasons. Why is there no PR representation? Why is there no small business representation? NGOs? Charity? I could go on.
While undoubtedly a smart move for those involved and indeed it may stand to benefit the rest of us 99% eventually, the formation of the advisory group doesn’t align with Facebook’s democratic and non-hierarchical principals from which it was built on.
In other words, if you aren’t a large brand or media buying agency you don’t get a say.
Doesn’t the digital world remind you of our crazy weather sometimes? No matter how much planning and forecasting you do, something that you didn’t foresee often happens and, just like the unexpected March snow covers the first spring flowers, it changes the rules of the game.
This week “All you need is…” brings to your screen the stormiest digital news of the past week, forecasts on the future of the blue bird of social media and much more.
Followers of the BBC Weather Twitter account got a rather unusual forecast the other day when hackers, claiming to be affiliated with the pro-Syrian government Electronic Army, hijacked the account.
The hacking started with a message of support for embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and continued with a mixture of threats and insults towards Israel, as well as countries and governments supporting the Syrian opposition, including the UK.
It wasn’t long before the Social Media Editor for BBC News, Chris Hamilton, realised that the account had been compromised and just moments before the BBC regained control of its Twitter handle the SEA tweeted goodbye with a polite “thanks for hanging out with us” to the 57,00 + followers.
The recent series of Twitter hacks are a reminder of how important it is to protect your accounts by using good online security, especially if you are responsible for corporate social media accounts, which are higher profile and, hence, more vulnerable to potential attacks.
At the beginning of last week a new Google app made a brief appearance on the Internet before disappearing just as quickly. But a few days later Google officially announced Google Keep, its Android-only note-taking app, which resurfaced in Google Play.
Google describes the Evernote competitor as “a central place to save what’s on your mind.” You can use the app to create notes and lists, by either typing or using voice memos or photos, which will sync across all your devices through Google Drive.
It’s not clear yet whether the app will come to iOS, but the competition between Google Keep and Evernote to gain the title of best note-taking app seem to have already started.
Twitter is seven years old, but in some ways programmers have only begun to explore its utility.
Twitter is a truly broadcast medium. Anyone can follow any other stream of tweets, and programmers can build software that interacts with Twitter itself, through its machine-to-machine API.
This means Twitter is useful as a kind of universal platform for getting machines to broadcast their status.
Despite the hype, there still aren’t that many sensors in our world that are broadcasting anything of interest.
Right now toasters that tweet are useless. But a tide gauge that tweets turns out to be very useful, and anyone can access its human-readable output via Twitter.
As programmers build and connect more “things” to the Internet, the status of Twitter as a “universal API” will mean more traffic and utility for the service than ever.
Do you think Twitter will become a hub for machine-to-machine interaction? Let us know your ideas.
With great surprise, last week, Facebook updated its policy regarding cover photos. Several of the limitations that were introduced with the Timeline last year have been removed from the guidelines and this brings a series of benefits for brands.
Marketers can now include a call to actions such as “get it now” or “tell your friends”, as well as price or purchase information such as “40% off” or “Download it here”.
Moreover the cover photo can now contain contact information, such as your website address, email or telephone number.
The greatest advantage, however, is that fans and visitors to the page are now allowed to like and share the cover photo (and the promotions and information contained in it), which means brands will have greater chance to reach consumer and use Facebook to drive sales.
However, before your run off to your Facebook page and start editing your cover, you might like to know that there is still one rule to limit your creativity: text can’t take more than20% of the space on a cover photo.
A part from this, have fun and let us know what changes you’ve made.
Twitter has recently turned seven and decided to celebrate its birthday with a thank-you video, dedicated to its users, showing the milestones that have turned it into this global town square with over 200 million active users send more than 400 million Tweets every day.
Happy birthday twitter!
Just like the March snow, uncertainty has its negative sides. But have you ever thought how life would be if everything was straight and predictable?
Don’t forget to let us know your thoughts and leave a comment below. Till next week… Gabs (@gabrielegenola)
Ever thought about how many times a day you say the words love, food or work?
Now think about how many times you say the word Facebook.
Facebook seems to have become an intrinsic part of our lives and now that is reaching market saturation in many countries it needs to start reinventing itself to make sure its users won’t start hanging out elsewhere.
This week, all you need is… a whole bunch of juicy news about the king of social.
As you might know there are two ways to upload videos on Facebook. You can either share a link from You Tube or upload it on your timeline from your computer.
Have you ever wondered how these two methods affect engagement rate and reach of your videos?
A study by Social Bakers shows that Facebook videos tend to have a higher Engagement Rate than YouTube links (0.22% on average compared to 0.10%). But what’s really interesting is that the reach of Facebook videos is ten times higher than the reach than YouTube links.
However, Social Bakers does not give an explanation for these figures.
Do you think it’s because users believe videos uploaded from the computer are more personal and therefore more interesting?
Facebook has recently unveiled its re-designed news feed. This is not just more pleasant to the eye but is actually bringing some advantages for its users too.
With the redesign, Facebook has condensed its two feeds into one and the chat frame has been incorporated into the left sidebar, which is now just a strip of icons. Facebook has reduced the clutter and made it easier to find the type of information you’re looking for.
The re-designed news feed also features filters.
The “News Feed” filter is the regular assortment of updates, sorted by algorithm in order of importance, while the “Most Recent” filter shows everything in reverse chronological order. There are also filters for Photos, Music, Games, Groups and more.
As Mark Zuckerberg said, the new filters will make Facebook “the best personalised newspaper.”
Lastly, Photos will be a lot larger and this will make it easier to just scroll through, without having to click on every individual image in order to see what’s going on.
But individuals are not the only ones benefitting from the new changes. The news feed redesign brings a whole lot of changes for brands too.
Econsultancy posted a really interesting article on how social data could be used for a more accurate credit rating.
Many would argue that the process by which the main UK credit reference agencies apply their judgement should be more tailored to each individual.
What do you think about connecting with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and allow the bank to analyse your lifestyle as well as your credit rate when applying for a mortgage?
That data could be cross-referenced with established credit history, third party data and freely available ethnographic segmentation and could then be re-interrogated as a whole picture in order to make application process simpler, fairer and representative of someone’s wider existence.
Credit files are not the only way of understanding consumers. So why are they the only product used to assess financial worthiness? We have access to more data now than we ever have. Let’s use it to transform some of the areas that frustrate so many people and make better some of the things that simply don’t work well enough.
This would represent a significant step up not only for a fairer credit rating but also in in terms of enhancement of social media content.
Wouldn’t it be a better online world if we all thought twice before posting?
While conducting an engineering audit, Facebook has discovered bugs in Facebook Insights affecting data of impression and reach. According to Facebook, Ad Insights weren’t affected by the bugs and the issues were encountered only in reporting and not in delivery.
Fixes to sort the problem have already been rolled out and Facebook Pages saw a median Total Reach gain of 31 percent per fan, Organic Reach median gain of 41 percent and a median gain in Viral Reach of 275 percent.
Would you like to find out the impact these bugs had on you page?
First parents were against Facebook due to their privacy concerns. But when they realised that the lack of privacy could play on their favour and allow them to keep an eye on their children, many decided to embrace it.
So what’s going to happen when teenagers will start labeling Facebook as uncool and dropping it?
Ah, wait, is that already happening?
Have I missed anything? If you think some other Facebook related news should be part of this week’s RF| digital round up, then feel free to add them in the comments below.
Remember that ‘sharing is caring’ so don’t forget to let your friends know what’s hot and what’s not. Until next week… Gabs (@gabrielegenola)
Facebook’s new soon-to-be-rolled-out news feed was unveiled yesterday and it looked more than a little familiar. In fact, users of Google Plus might have been forgiven for thinking their network had turned blue, given the closeness in look and feel of the social network’s redesign.
Of course, Facebook weren’t mentioning the G-word, but making the design cleaner and fresher is no bad thing. Facebook’s news feed hasn’t had much love since Timelines was launched and the new redesign certainly is a lot smoother on the eye.
The redesign is also mobile-led, leading to a more coherent look and feel across all devices. Again this makes perfect sense given the rise of mobile traffic for Facebook and means that anybody who is still putting web and mobile into different silos needs to change their thinking, and quickly.
But cosmetic changes are all well and good. For brands the key question is how does this affect my Facebook page? And the answer to this is there’s good news and too-early-to-say news.
The good news: getting visual
The good news comes in the form of images and videos. These will be more prominent in the user’s news feed. If you’re posting a lot of visual content, there’s a great opportunity to make it even more engaging and really tell stories with photos. It also gives a huge boost to video content.
Facebook also acknowledge that people regularly use other social networks and apps outside of the site and have looked to incorporate them more into the news feed.
The Facebook-owned Instagram is a big winner in this (unsurprisingly), with users’ pictures pulled through into the photo feed. Facebook also used Pinterest as an example – pins shared to Facebook now look and feel more like they would on Pinterest.
This is all encouraging for brands who have strongly visual campaigns, and especially those who have a strong strategy across multiple social media channels.
The too-early-to-say news: multiple news feeds
Mashable probably summed up the changes to the newsfeed best when they described the new newsfeed as “Facebook gets simpler, more complicated.”
Facebook have attempted to declutter the feed with the new design – and early impressions are this has worked. However, in doing so, they’ve created a host of different feeds in the right-hand menu that means you can drill down a little further.
As well as the main news feed, there’s a Most Recent feed (self-explanatory) and an All Friends feed, which shows you everything your friends are sharing. There’s also a photo-specific feed, which is just made up of pictures shared by friends and pages. It also includes the afore-mentioned Instagram.
There’s also a separate music feed featuring posts about music being listened to – great if you’re a fan of sharing your Spotify activity – along with a games tab, which you can file away all your Candy Crush Saga updates.
Finally, there’s also a Following feed, which is solely for updates from Facebook pages and users you’ve subscribed to. This is the key part for brands.
Mark Zuckerberg said his aim was to “give everyone the best personalised newspaper we can”.
Theoretically, it means users can click on the Following feed and never miss an update from pages they’ve liked. Practically, it depends on users wanting to click on this feed. Is this something the average Facebook user will want to do?
There’s also options to further customise your content – which includes the option to filter your feed to see just updates from friends.
Before you start panicking that your page is being filed away in a feed that potentially won’t be clicked on, Facebook haven’t immediately indicated that posts from pages won’t appear on news feeds.
Indeed, it appears the current thinking is to allow users to set their own filters. The big question here is how many users will take up that option. Will users actively remove branded content from their feeds or will they passively continue to consume?
Adios EdgeRank?
One really interesting development about the news feed is how little the EdgeRank algorithm, which determines which updates get featured in your feed, was mentioned in this Facebook redesign.
Potentially this downgrading of EdgeRank could see updates being delivered to more fans. But it also could mean that your updates will drop off the main news feed a lot quicker as the feed gets more chronological.
The implication is here clear. Pages need to be a lot smarter about the timings of their posts. If you’re not using Facebook insights carefully and testing what times get the best reaction from your audience, you could be punting a post into the ether. It also means global pages have to think more carefully about their audience.
Secondly, it suggests the best way to get traction on the news feed is to create content that people want to share and can share quickly and easily. It will no longer be enough to post any old image – you’ll have to think harder about your content strategy (although it’s still unlikely to stop some pages posting non-relevant images just to get shares).
Ultimately, given Facebook’s current prominence of sponsored stories on mobile devices, and the smaller window for getting a fan’s attention, you’ll still have to invest in advertising if you want to reach and grow your Facebook audience, especially if you want to circumnavigate those who’ve actively deselected brand updates from their news feed.
You didn’t think the social behemoth was going to give you all this for free, did you?
Welcome Ruder Finn’s weekly roundup of all things digital. It’s been quite a start to 2013 already, with online being blamed for the demise of the high street, among other things, but also bringing snow lovers together as the UK shivers during the big freeze.
Facebook have made the long-awaited move into the search market, but it’s not quite a replica of Google.
Graph Search, which is powered by Microsoft’s Bing, is their effort to utilise the power of your friends – and friends of friends and beyond – within the Facebook engine.
So, you can search for TV shows your friends recommend, the restaurants they’re eating at, what coffee shop most of them are checking into in your area, or even searching for nearby singles with a similar taste in film, all within Facebook.
The power of Social Graph is to make greater use of recommendations from your social sphere – something Google have already been aiming for, as they aim to connect your search queries with that of your network.
There are, of course, questions about the effectiveness of Social Graph, which depends on the amount of information Facebook users are willing to share - and users of Facebook and Google have started to become a lot more privacy-savvy recently. Nonetheless, if Facebook succeeds in linking our social experiences and recommendations together, Social Graph could be a very powerful tool.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Social Graph, Wired have an excellent behind-the-scenes story of how it was built.
Fire up Twitter on any given evening and chances are a high proportion of Tweets in your feed or trending topics will be related to primetime TV. Whether it’s X Factor, Homeland, Africa or the Champions League, our viewing habits play a large part in firing Twitter conversation.
Now Twitter has released stats showing just how much the UK is Tweeting during TV – and also the behaviour patterns around selected genres of shows. According to Twitter 60% of all users access the social network while watching TV, while 40% of all peak-time traffic on Twitter concerns the small screen.
Twitter has also produced case studies around selected programmes. For example, Homeland sees spikes in Twitter activity before and after the drama, while The X Factor peaks at notable points during the show. Current affairs programmes, such as Panorama, have a much longer lifespan as people debate the contents after transmission.
On-air hashtags and celebrities Tweeting along to the show help, but the stats indicate that event TV is still very much alive and engaging viewing content still drives plenty of discussion on this online watercooler.
Troubled retailer HMV fell into administration last week after months of uncertainty over its ability to operate as a going concern. One day later, DVD rental chain Blockbusters announced it too was calling in the administrators
As news of HMV’s demise filtered through, Twitter users shared their memories of buying their first CD (or record) at the retailer, as well as bemoaning the potential loss of mainstream music shops from the high street completely.
But while Twitter indulged in nostalgia, analysts and bloggers were quick to point out that a major failing for HMV – and indeed Blockbuster – was its inability to get to grips with online retailing, streaming and the threat of the likes of Amazon.
As T3.com noted, HMV never really prioritised online and Amazon and Play filled the gap, while the stores have barely changed in the past 10 years and don’t stay open at convenient hours for many customers. To quote Which, Online shoppingis cheaper, faster and easier – and that’s hard to compete with when you’re chasing consumer spend.
It’s perhaps a little simplistic to completely blame the internet for the woes of HMV, Blockbusters and camera shop Jessops, but online was a common thread linking all three insolvencies – both in terms of products offered and the experience (or lack of) with the collapsed retailers’ own online sites.
Photo-sharing app Instagram moved assure fears of an exodus from the app when it released its latest user figures. The popular smartphone app, which was snapped up by Facebook last year, had caused a backlash when it announced changes to its Terms of Service, which initially suggested that Instagram would sell photos on the site to advertisers.
Instagram rolled back on this and despite many users vowing to boycott the service, the photo-sharing site’s users have continue to rise, with 90 million active users, 40m photos uploaded per day, and 8,500 likes on Instagram per second.
The updated ToS went live on Saturday and so far there doesn’t appear to have been any adverse reaction, although competitors have taken advantage over the privacy row, with Techcrunch highlighting Berlin-based social photo and filter app EyeEm rising to second position in the US iPhone charts for photo and video, and doubling their Twitter following.
Any competitor still has quite a way to go to usurp Instagram in the photo-sharing market though. Although Instagram pictures no longer display direct into Twitter, it still has a growing community – led by the adoption of celebrities such as Rihanna – and has the might of Facebook behind it.
Snow joke for wintery conversation
A flurry of the white stuff is always guaranteed to drive online conversation, whether it’s rating snowfall in the local area with the #uksnow hashtag, sharing pictures on social media, or liveblogs on the weather from every news organisation.
One of our favourites came from Ruder Finn’s very own Joanna Hirst, as featured in the Evening Standard’s liveblog. It looks like the Queen joined in the rest of the nation by underestimating just how cold it was outside…
Remember, “sharing is caring”, so leave a comment below and get involved with the conversation. Until next week…. Gary (@garyandrews).
If you’re in the gambling industry, excitement is mounting right now over social media usage, specifically Facebook for real betting in addition to driving revenue and engagement as social marketing channels. Whilst Facebook is apparently talking to many gambling organisations about future plans, the first project that saw the social network allow users to bet real money was launched with Gamesys this week. You can bet your life it won’t be the last. Under pressure to deliver to shareholders, Facebook is continually looking for ways to monetise its platform and this is a natural next step.
But how social are these gambling companies anyway and who is best placed to win in the social space when Facebook does eventually open its doors wider? A report today from Qubit (via Econsultancy) suggests that Betfair has the best odds with wide ranging engagement, reach and revenue driven through the five sources it evaluated (Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Pinterest).
The report evaluates the UK’s top ten betting sites based on monthly page view statistics from Doubleclick Adplanner. These also include 888, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes, Bet365, Skybet, Betfred, Stan James and Coral.
The QuBit social scores are calculated based on each company’s reach on social networks, which is then weighted based on the average time spent on the website and revenue driven through each source.
Betfair was the only site to have engaged across all five key social networks, with a notable presence on the rapidly growing site Pinterest, which has been found to proportionally drive far more revenue than Facebook. However at the moment Betfair’s account has just 12 followers, despite creating 10 boards with a total of 129 pins. So while it should be commended for being an early adopter and experimenting with Pinterest, it’s unlikely that the social network’s predominantly female user base will be flocking to view the boards in high numbers.
Interesting times lie ahead to see how our behaviour on social networks will change when we can gamble real cash but also whether the context will be right for this activity. My money is on an explosive and expensive new pastime for many of us, how about yours?
The full report can be downloaded from Cubit here.
The mighty blue whale of social announced the provision of greater analytics for social ad campaigns this week. The changes are to the analytics that marketers can see when measuring campaigns. Previously, insights showed who had clicked on an ad / liked a page etc. New functionality will show expanded metrics that help comms professionals track how the campaign performed against wider marketing initiatives e.g. Clicked ad, liked page, completed survey, bought product, shared on wall.
This is good news for PR and social media professionals using Facebook advertising to support their campaigns as previously the insights fell short of what clients were used to in terms of delivering a result against a specific call to action. It also lets us see what has been achieved as a result of a paid campaign versus what was happening anyway as a result of ongoing Facebook activity.
From Inside Facebook:
Previously, it had been difficult for marketers to understand what sort of effect their ads had beyond building a fan base since Facebook did not provide information about what users did after they clicked on an ad. This change seems to be part of a continued push to de-emphasize Likes as a campaign goal, and instead encourage marketers to focus on engagement within the platform. Today’s announcement does not affect Facebook’s pricing model. Ads are still sold on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis….
Under the old system advertisers could only get data about the number of people who liked the page as a result of the ad. They could visit a separate page insights dashboard to see the total likes, comments and shares for a post, but there was no way to distinguish which actions came organically versus through paid media.
I was reading an interesting article from Charlotte McEleny this afternoon about the next steps for social commerce and it got me thinking about my general attitude to shopping online. With the proliferation of retailers embracing social commerce it seems more of a norm than a rarity when you go onto an online store and can interact with others, read reviews and share experiences etc. I would be interested to know however how many of us feel that social commerce really does make a difference to our shopping habits? At the end of the day, yes I read reviews for products online but I will still send an email round the girls at work or to my mum to get a final opinion before I buy. In fact I’m not sure I find the reviews online massively helpful at all - just confusing – as they all tend to contradict each other and I know far too little about these people to know if their intent in buying matches mine and therefore if our opinion on the product will be the same. Do you trust the views of a complete stranger when making a decision to buy or not to buy?
As Charlotte points out, what is missing in social commerce of today ‘is a human element’ – ‘If we can now watch The X Factor or The Only Way Is Essex together online and comment and discuss what’s going on live, why can’t I take my friends shopping?’. We need more than just a static review on a site – we need proper interaction. Recognising this, Dell’s global VP of online Manish Mehta told new media agelast year that the company wanted to take the social aspects of high street shopping and recreate them online by letting people interact and have discussions in real time when buying products from Dell’s website.
Perhaps this is also where the new Facebook shops will prove their worth? One of the first companies to announce a fully transactional Facebook shop was Asos in January. With its new application users will be able to buy directly from a brand without leaving the ultimate online social destination that is Facebook.
So what do you all think? Have you been taken in by social commerce or are you waiting for other retailers like Dell to push the technology even further? Do reviews help or hinder your purchase decision? Any and all thoughts appreciated…..
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks you will all be aware that the (wrong, in my opinion) winner of X Factor was crowned on Sunday. Geordie lad Joe McElderry beat Olly Murs with over 60% of the vote, securing a record contract and almost certainly a place on Dancing on Ice in a couple of years.
But, in a strange twist of events, it seems that poor old Joe may be deprived of the 15 minutes of fame pretty much guaranteed to all X Factor winners - the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot. A campaign which was started on Facebook encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s track ‘killing in the name of’ has seen the song start to outsell the X Factor winner by an estimated 10% , making it the favourite to be number one this weekend.
Simon Cowell has spoken out against the campaign, calling it ’stupid’ and it’s participants ’scrooges’. Poor Simon, as if becoming TV’s first billionaire wasn’t bad enough, he now has to face the prospect of one of his many, many acts not doing as well as he had hoped. I, for one, think it’s an excellent campaign, not just because I think Olly should have won, but because it is an excellent example of the power of social media and how it can mobilise society. Ok, so it might not be over something as important as global warming, but if people can hold a strong enough opinion about this and feel compelled to do something about it, then maybe this model can work for important campaigns in the future. As organiser Jon Morter said, ‘Even if we didn’t quite succeed it will still be a great achievement in bringing people together and actually trying to do something’. (NME.com)
What do you think? Can something as simple as a Facebook group re-write music history, and possibly change the way we campaign in future?
