DISSECTION

One of the lessons of the past week and the great Veuve Clicquot scandal was that it showed what an incredible force for communication and change that the social media has become.But you have to know h0w to use it as it is a pretty unruly and hungry beast with a very short attention span.

This is best exemplified by just who ended up carrying the story.

Take for instance this tweet

latest: JancisRobinson @bustedblonde Congratulations! Social media have the power to leech multiple kilos of Veuve C from tight fists. bit.ly Retweeted by you less than a minute ago

Thats gold in social media. Jancis Robinson has 40,000 followers on twitter. They are all people who have a serious interest in wine and food around the world. And she likes New Zealand and New Zealand wine.

So who were responsible for the story gaining a foothold in the social media. At the core were the bloggers. Whaleoil ( who started and led the whole campaign , his ability to get stories into the mainstream media is now well established), Kiwiblog, and Cactus and a host of other bloggers who quickly followed suit, were central to the story getting legs. They all have considerable weight in social media, while for the purposes of this campaign BustedBlonde just has the weight!

Many of them twitter and facebook as well. So its about using multiple channels and quickly.

You have to be bloody nimble and it helps if you have a core team as we did.

So did we have a plan? Nope not really. Just some ideas and some tactics. Its very organic and you need to have faith in your intuition.

Then came facebook. That cant be underestimated and its like an infection and of course there is Twitter. If you want to get your message out quick and it gets onto someone site who has 40,000 followers like Jancis then you have critical mass very quickly.

Take for instance this.

August 26 at 1:03pm

I see NBR finally responded!
I briefed a US mate of mine, Colin Clarke, who is commentator on social media strategies and he wrote this, I should let him know NBR has made a move. Well bloody done you. http://marketingsense.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/when-a-social-media-campaign-goes-bad/

When A Social Media Campaign Goes Bad « Marketing Sense

marketingsense.wordpress.com

An interesting case study has recently emerged in New Zealand that underscores the power of social media… and how it must be wielded CAREFULLY.

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So this happened two days ago and and already the analysis of the clicquot competition and the social media response and its impact are flying around the world at lightening speed.

And then there were the emails. And by all accounts there were a few direct to NBR ( we have seen some). And of course TV3.

It defies all the old rules of PR. Its not about planning its more about plotting. n.

So whats the damage to NBR? - bugger all we reckon. As soon as they made amends and publicly people were heaping on the praise for the putting right.

And Veuve? Well the damage might last a bit longer. They were involved in a competition that was supposed to be all class.

I havent seen the winning entry but I bet its all lovely and worthy and romantic . It will tick all the brand boxes for Clicquot.

However the competition was so badly designed and executed that it ended up being all about ass. It provoked crassness. Then when the judges got crassness and not just from our entry but dozens of others as well, things went pear shaped.

For us Champagne is all about fun. And for the last couple of weeks we have had lots of it.

And we have learnt quite a bit as well.

THE NOT THE VEUVE CLICQUOT SITE

Oh dear, Veuve Clicquot wont appreciate this fan page on Facebook.

go here to find the latest on the Great Veuve Clicquot NBR scandal.

BUSTEDBLONDE

Hello all,

I have had a few emails asking why Roarprawn has not been entered in the Air New Zealand Awards for bloggers ( real bloggers). Well as Busted is a little bit of bother which hopefully will be resolved soon, she decided that it would not be appropriate to enter.

However, it appears that Roarprawn could still be a wildcard in the awards which are here

As Busted can't do or say much for the moment, here are our links to some of her best work in the last year.

I like Bustedblondes impressions of Ngai Tahu politics such as this post here. I am Rangitane so I am always interested in what our neighbours in the south are up to.

And I definitely want to hear more about this issue. Scampi may be a tad historical but by Jove it has all the makings of a great yarn.

And who could forget this post about the downside of being a mistress. ( Busted seems to know an awful lot about being a consort) That post spawned an international threat of legal action because some woman claim to own the word Mistressology. The entire VRWC corner of the blogosphere came to her aid and slam dunked the Pommie blogger.

She has such an interesting family. He mother and father seem  to live every day like there will be no tomorrow. This post shows a real soft side to Bustedblonde.

And she has been a very strong supporter of Maori TV. That was apparently one of her most read columns.

She is fervently pro whaling, leaving no room for doubt. She scored a world exclusive piece of footage on the Ady Gil crashing into the Japanese whaling vessel. It was watched on You Tube over 45,000 times in less than 2 hours - before it was taken down - but not before the activists re edited it and put it up on you tube where it was viewed by millions. Busted then put it up again with reworked commentary and today it has been viewed 18,000 times.

So I am sad the Busted never got to enter the Real Bloggers awards and I hope that this list of posts will show that she would have been an admirable contestant.

Toodle Pip

UP IN SMOKE

For Gonzo......

BLOG BITS

This will make us think twice about buying " Fair Trade coffee" again - seems its designed to keep poor people poor. Eye2theLongrun often has some interesting blogs on economics..

Inquiring Mind who does some great fisks - fisks Fran O'Sullivan.. excellent it is.

Alf Grumble does a great piss take of Winnie the Poo.

And Gonzo has a funny cartoon about House Tv series..

and we only have 5 days of work left before we are on Holiday! And only 3 days before the olds cross the ditch in Bugsy's Burrow

US HOUSE BUILT ON SAND?

Gonzo leaves the drugs debate alone for a while and looks at some interesting business info about America.

GM sells the Hummer brand for a quarter of the asking price.
Gonzo rightly questions just while the US talks assets up their real value appears to be substantially less.

HAERE RA

Well folks its good bye from us. We were going to do all sorts of weird shit tonight to keep people guessing about why Roarprawn ceased operating at midnight tonight.

The simple fact of the matter is that we are going to work for a Ministry full time. Yip a public servant gig. As my mum says - a real job...We start tomorrow.

And the State Services Act is a bit of a bitch if you want to be a political commentator. Now we are fairly well positioned as a National Govt cheer leader but from time to time we have to put down our pom poms and give them a piece of our mind and , well you cant do that when you are a public servant. And we are not all that anonymous. After all we have been on telly.

We have had a ball blogging , its fun, outrageous and has ignited the old journo within. We were starting to get some decent numbers again too - up around the 1000 a day.

Now, who knows what will happen in the future - so we wont delete the prawn - but we will locked it away for a while. If someone wants to buy it - well email me on bustedblonde@gmail.com

To all my fellow bloggers, keep up the bastards honest.


Love you all...... BB

SOME PREDICTIONS

• Christine Rankin will not take up the job of Family Commissioner

• David Farrar will get engaged in the next year.

• Two high profile press secretaries will resign in the next 3 months.
• 
  
• Richard Worth wont last the year out as Minster
  

• Shane Jones will feel the full heat of an inquiry into Bill Liu

• The Securities Commission will be given greater powers

• We will find out who stole the Brash Emails and why the police covered it up but it will take another six months.

• Beaujolais will order more champagne next time we have a party.

• Winston will marry Jan Trotman

• Deborah Coddington will separate from her legal squeeze

• Whale Oil will get his own TV show -a mix of Rove and Jackass

• GonZo will write a novel and get famous

• Swine Flu will mutate

• Cactus will fall in love

• Rodney will get engaged

• Jim Anderton will leave parliament

• Melissa Lee will go close to taking Mt Albert

• Fairfax will scrap a Sunday paper by Xmas

• A new online newspaper to rival them all will become a " must read " by this time next year

• The world economy will go into freefall again - we are just seeing the deat cat bounce.

BEST OF THE BLOGS.

Ethical Martini has a very humourous take on some of the hysterical American style media coverage of the Napier shooting here and here

He rightly points out the breathless reporting of rumour as fact in the race to be first with the latest breaking events.

Whale Oil sticks it to David Shearer, the Labour candidate for Mt Albert who thinks that crime isn't a big issue in Mt Albert.

Home Paddock has a roundup on two big philanthropic gifts - one by Eion Edgar for the Olympic committee and the other from New Zealandiophiles Julian and Josie Robertson who have donated a stunning art collection to the Auckland Gallery and finally and most importantly for farmers, some largesse from Ravensdown offering drought ridden farmers some relief.

And Alf Grumble obviously learnt more than stock ratios, wool classing and optimum rates of hop consumption when he was a young tigger at Lincoln University doing his Dip Ag. He does a lovely, almost scholarly dissection of some wankers PHD on the effectiveness of blogging.

And GoNZo does a nice takedown of some crap subbing at the Herald.

And Hat Tip to Cactus for this one - some executive eye candy for all us executive sweet tooths.


And then Adam over at Inquiring Mind has a lovely poem called the Gords prayer. Nice find.

We had the day off - getting hair done, bit of shopping to help support the economy and a wee bit of non blog writing..

COHEN HAS FUN WITH O'ROURKE

The sometimes testy and always ascerbic scribe from NBR David Cohen had an audience with one of the great Gonzo journalists and commentators P J O'Rourke.

Lucky bastard..
We particularly like this bit.

In terms of his own social commentary, O’Rourke said the economic crisis was proving to be a fabulous time. “I’ve been having a ball with the Obama administration,” he said cheerfully, “although in fairness to Obama, any new administration is by its nature terribly awkward. But if one happens to be in ideological opposition to an administration, then one is going to have a field day.”

But Obama had already proved to be “a smarter man” than many of his predecessors, left or right, including the one who recently vacated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Bush had some people around him who one wouldn’t care to have to dinner, but then again, so does Obama. But one thing I would add here in Obama’s favour is that it is the responsibility of the leader of a democratic nation to speak to the people by whom he was hired and to whom he is responsible. You have to explain yourself. Obama does seem perfectly willing to do that, but Bush was perfectly unwilling to do that.”

It is well worth a read.

We are off to Auckland later this week to hear him in person. Can't wait.

MONDAY MORNING BEST BLOG

Willie de Cleene from GoNZo..

He takes a good look at the Law Commissions nanny state ideas around alcohol

And why we owe more than our freedom to the soldiers of the First World War.


Raise your glasses everyone.