New Zealand Online Marketing

This is a follow-up on my post about the Creative Freedom Foundation’s Campaign against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws in New Zealand. To try and fill you in quickly, the Creative Freedom Foundation are protesting against Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment Act that is due to come into law in New Zealand on February 28th. This ammendment to the law would mean that ISPs would be able to cut off internet access and web sites of anyone who is repeatedly accused of copyright infringment, based purely on accusation alone, without evidence or proof of guilt. It will be a three strikes and you’re out system. On the third copyright infringement the ISP will automatically cut off your internet connection, without being proven guilty in a court of law. Completely outrageous indeed. The same kind of legislation has been rejected in other countries such as Germany and the UK.

The campaign started out with the Creative Freedom Foundation asking people to protest by signing an online petition called Not In My Name. They also wanted people to spread the word about the campaign by either joining them on Facebook and MySpace, writing to a member of parliament or displaying an animated banner on your site.

Now the campaign has taken on a new phase calling for people to join the INTERNET BLACKOUT N.Z PROTEST from the 16th - 23rd February. They want people to BLACK OUT their Facebook, MySpace and Bebo avatars, your Twitter account and web sites.  It is proving to be a very powerful addition to the campaign as the protest has turned into a global viral, due mostly in part to celebrity actor, comedian and author Stephen Fry.

Day 1 of Campaign

• According to Mohawk Media, Juha Saarinen asks Stephen Fry to tweet about #blackout

• Stephen Fry shows support for the campaign by turning his avatar black, changing his Bio to: I’m blacked out: Stand up against “Guilt Upon Accusation” for New Zealand http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html and talks about the internet blackout campaign on Twitter. This helps push the campaign global.
• He also tells people to Digg this

By doing this Stephen Fry gains 15,000+ friends overnight and he comes in as No.3 on Twitterholic with just over 200,000 people following him. Twitterholic tells you who the most popular - Top 100 Twitter users are based on followers.

Day 2 of Campaign

• #blackout becomes the #1 search trend on Twitter, beating Heroes, 24 and Dollhouse
• The Internet Blackout campaign makes it into Wikipedia as a definition for Blackout
  
• People start blogging about the Internet Blackout protest including Richard McManus at ReadWriteWeb and Cory Dotorow at Boing Boing.
• A Guilt Upon Accusation anthem called the Copywrong Song is realeased under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License. A Copywrong Remix Challenge is issued calling for people to make the ultimate remix of the Copywrong song.

Day 3 of Campaign

• Chelfyn Baxter at Mohawk Media releases his ‘Kangaroo Court’ animation, a protest video for the campaign against Section 92 of the New Zealand Copyright Ammendment Act.

Day 4 of Campaign

• On Thursday 19th February, a public demonstration took place on the grounds of the New Zealand Parliament in Wellington with the ‘Not in my Name’ petition handed over. People were asked to come along in bright clothes and black placards.
• Stuff’s Blackout news story ‘Stephen Fry rails against NZ internet law‘ hits the front page of Digg.com

Day 5 of Campaign

• More web celebrities & supporters join the Blackout campaign including author Neil Gaimen, and Xeni from Boing Boing.

Day 6 of Campaign

• Cartoons start appearing about The Guilt Upon Accusation Law including Dylan Horrock’s and Mike Moreu’s.

Day 7 of Campaign

• Preparation and instructions go out on how to modify your web site for the final day of Internet Blackout protest.

Day 8 of Campaign

• New Zealand Political blogs and other web sites Blackout their sites including Public Address, Scoop, Kiwiblog, The Standard, No Right Turn, Frog Blog, Whale Oil, Not PC, No Minister, Just Left, The Hand Mirror, Roar Prawn, Policy Net, Kiwi Politico.
• Prime Minister John Key announces that Section 92A will be delayed until March 27th

Posted in Facebook, MySpace, Political, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Viral Tagged: Internet Blackout, NZ Copyright Law, Protest

Tourism New Zealand have recently launched a second phase of an online marketing iniative here in New Zealand. The Pure New Zealand ‘Have your Say’ studio is the second phase of the ‘What Do You Say UK?’ campaign that was launched in London. They want people to use social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook to spread the word about New Zealand as a holiday destination.

How this will work is a mobile recording studio will be touring around the country collecting tourist stories of their time in New Zealand, in the form of a video diary. They will be able to edit it with their own photos and video footage, then post it on to social networking sites.

YouTube Channel - PureNZ  ‘Have Your Say’

The videos are being published into unpaid media channels, including a YouTube PureNZ ‘Have Your Say’ channel which will be fed on to Tourism New Zealand’s consumer web site. Their goal is to record about 3,500 video diary clips during the tour around New Zealand.

In their press release they say “If every clip is viewed by 10 friends and family back home, and if 3000 clips are filmed that’s thirty thousand messages about New Zealand sent to our key markets – a very cost-effective form of marketing.”

John Key’s video message removed?

To help promote this New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism, John Key recorded his own video message. Unfortunately John Key’s video (which had over 3000 views when I last saw it) came across as kinda cheesy and the 20 text comments in response to his message hadn’t exactly been very nice either.

And low and behold, I was just about to embed John Key’s video into this blog post, when suddenly the video isn’t available anymore. The video has been removed? My guess is that they may have removed it due to the unflattering text comments people have left. If you want an example of the type of comments people have been posting in response to John Key’s message, then check out the responses at the Spare Room.  You’ll be able to relate to it more if you actually saw the video, but the comments are spot on, wet your pants funny, with people taking the piss out of John Key.

Is it a case of  ‘Have Your Say’, but no actually you can’t have your say if you ain’t got anything nice to say about John Key or New Zealand for that matter?  I’m sure everyone would love to hear from Tourism New Zealand as to why they decided to take down John Key’s message!

Tourism New Zealand have also launched a 100% Pure New Zealand Facebook page and a 100% Pure New Zealand group on Flickr around the same time as this campaign.  But after corresponding with Tourism New Zealand, they confirmed that actually neither of these were part of the ‘Have Your Say’ Campaign.

On the 12th November, I received an email newsletter update from Greenpeace. In this email they were urging people to record a message to John Key about climate change via web camera, video camera or mobile phone. Then upload the video as a response to John Keys victory speech on YouTube and add the tag ‘dearjohnkey’. The last step was to send the Greenpeace email message to friends and family.

Follow-up email
Two days later, I received a follow-up email from Greenpeace letting me know that there had been some video contributions uploaded to YouTube already. This email also said that if you can’t manage sending a video, then send an email to John Key: john.key@parliament.govt.nz.

YouTube video responses
Searching on YouTube for the ‘John Key victory speech’ turns up 2 listings under those keywords. The correct John Key victory speech listing to add your video response to has had 672 views. So far there have been 7 video responses uploaded and 17 text comments (at the time of writing).

So it’s been 2.5 weeks since I received that first email and only 7 videos have been uploaded. It’s not a huge response, but it’s good that they are trying to get people involved and participate through web 2.0 intiatives. A video response is getting people to commit to being responsive in real time. Plus you get to see the real people behind the messages, a private conversation being made public. And this is what social media is all about trying to engage people meaningfully through the use of social media.

The New Zealand vodka, 42Below have decided to create a web based movement to celebrate people who live by their own rules and those who follow their own dreams. They wanted a platform to unite the free thinkers, the independent spirits, the creators and the artists of the world, so have set up the site Because We Can.

To capture the spirit they asked like minded people to create an endeavour that had the potential to delight and surprise, but most of all create something that meant something to them. To unify the contributors, they got them to use white coverall suits in their creation. The reasoning behind the wearing of the suits is to have viewers focus on their endeavour rather than on the people behind it. To be anonymous, universal and generic. Here’s one of the videos called: The cycle of power.

Monthly video competition
To get you involved and get your creativity flowing, there is a monthly competition where they want you to create and submit your own videos to show the ‘Because We Can’ spirit. Entries for this month have to be in by 12.00GMT time on 30 November, and for your effort you could win $USD4200.

My initial thoughts on this movement is, where is this movement heading, where is it taking you in the long run? What happens after you’ve created a few videos and it’s six months down the line, then what? It’s a big call though, trying to create a movement. My thoughts are, if you’re creating a movement then I would tend to expect big things. We’ll just have to wait and see what eventuates.

Pretty average web design
The other thing I’m going to comment about is the web design. It’s a pretty basic site - design wise. One thing I don’t like is the spaced out U P P E R C A S E type that is used for the intro paragraph on the main page (as seen below) and the headings. The Reason being is simple, it’s because I find it visually hard to read.

You are able to follow them on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Delicious.

This is Pete Fountain’s video release for the song ‘Caroline’ off his debut album ‘Will’. According to his MySpace blog it should be airing on TV now.  And guess what?….my brother and sister-in-law are in the video!

Hell Pizza in New Zealand have hit the headlines again with more controversial advertising. The latest is a Halloween pizza promotion that was on the microsite www.backfromthedead.co.nz. The animation depicts Sir Edmund Hillary, Heath Ledger and the Queen Mother emerging from graves and dancing to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller. People have found it offensive and in bad taste. The site has been taken down.

According to the BBC News, they say the firm’s marketing director Rachael Allison told New Zealand media that the latest animation was part of an e-mail campaign targeting existing customers and that around 5,000 people saw the advert before it fell into the hands of the media.

Mash-up on YouTube
A search for the animation on YouTube comes up with only one video posted. I’m not even going to bother to insert a link to view this video because the video clip doesn’t actually show anything of the animation and it doesn’t deserve anymore views.

When I begun my research on this latest Hell Pizza controversy, this YouTube video had been viewed 15,371 times. Looking at it the following day it had received 17,177 views. So, around 1800 views in one day. For a crappy, dud mashup that doesn’t show the animation, thats not bad in terms of views for that amount of time. And of course the only reason why it has had so many views is because it is the only thing you can find relating to the advert.

I am amazed that no-one managed to get the actual animation onto YouTube, as this is where a lot of banned advertisements end up. Okay, so now you’re curious and probably want to go and check out the mashup video anyway. Honestly, I wouldn’t bother.

The New Zealand Bakery of the Year 2008 competition run by the Baking Industry Association of New Zealand (BIANZ) ended in August. Last year I wrote about the 2007 New Zealand Bakery of the Year campaign on onlinemarketer.co.nz. The viral video for last years campaign was of the animated Gingerbread men Haka. This video proved to be controversial, so enhanced the viral marketing aspect of the campaign. This year they have done another Gingerbread man video, but in a scene from The Godfather film.

YouTube reach
A search on YouTube using the keywords: gingerbread men gangsters turns up 2 listings of the video. It is now a couple of months since the competition finished and these 2 listings together have only had 534 views. At the time I was writing about the 2007 campaign, around a 100 people had uploaded the Gingerbread Haka on YouTube, with them getting an excess of 300,000 views. Okay, so the Gingerbread Gangster video is not as controversial as the Gingerbread Haka, so it was bound to not get as much attention as last years campaign.

The campaign was run in similar fashion to last year. Get the bakeries to register online, assign them a unique number to identify them for judging and voting purposes. Then get people to vote by texting, online voting or instore voting. Once again people were encouraged to send the Gingerbread viral video to their friends on the web site. I am not sure as to whether they did any TV advertising this year. I don’t watch much TV, so I don’t know.

Even though this years Gingerbread Gangsters Viral video does not appear as successful in terms of reach on YouTube compared to the Gingerbread Haka, I still think the concept of the Gingerbread Gangsters is just as good as the Gingerbread Haka.

Last month we were invited to the Ponsonby Primary School Fair. Touted as a huge fair for the whole family. Live music, farm animals, amusement rides, vintage clothing, mechanical bull riding, food, crafts, plants, face painting, body art and loads more.

Our 2 year old son got to touch farm animals, especially the sheep and lambs for the first time. It was a fun afternoon in the Spring sun after such a wet winter!

A great little video for the Ponsonby Primary School Fair was created too.