Belly flopping, Val Klimer and the world’s largest potato are just a few items posted at Becks.com today. This is all part of “The Daily Different,” a new blog created by the imported beer maker.
The brand interviewed more than 1,000 people to find the right personality. It picked British standup comedian Darius Davies from London to serve as the voice of the brand. The effort ties into Beck’s overall brand positioning of “Different by Choice” created by Euro RSCG 4D, Amsterdam.
Jorge Inda Meza, global marketing manager for Beck’s, said the goal of the blog is to create “relevant and entertaining content that’s not about beer in online places that are frequented by the target audience. We fully realize that, in order to make ‘The Daily Different’ truly engaging, we need to avoid corporate stories and let Darius’ control the content on ‘Different by Choice’ by providing posts that are relevant and of interest to our target audience directly on our main site, Becks.com.”
Beck’s is not the first beer brand to try such a tack. Miller launched its own Brewblog.com in 2006, but stuck more to the topic of beer rather than Top Gun. To promote the site, Beck’s has done some minor seeding to other blogs. One such blog, Adrants.com, welcomed the new site with this headline: ” Beck’s Launches Blog. Does Everything Wrong.” It took issue with the tone of the blogger and the fact that it used Flash. Angusgastle.com, meanwhile, outted Davies as being under the employ of an agency.
To promote the site, Davies also will create a “Daily Different Facebook” page as well as a channel on YouTube.
A survey released yesterday by Forrester Research noted that only 16 percent of people trust what they read on corporate blogs, ranking it below message posts and direct mail. Social networking from brands provided the second least trusted source of information.
Beck’s poured forth $8 million on U.S. media last year, per TNS Media Intelligence. Of that, $1.3 million was spent online. This year it spent $3.3 million and $400,000, respectively, for the first nine months of the year.
A day after his arrest and release without charges following an alleged altercation with a photographer in Newcastle, England, Kanye West went on the offense in his blog on Saturday. Before explaining the events that led to his arrest, West’s all-caps post goes after the paparazzi and declares that there ought to be a law preventing photographers from selling pictures of him without permission.
“I put my hand up to the camera in self-defense!” West said of what happened outside the Tup Tup Club. “Here’s what happened. … When I left the club, I was encountered by a thirsty paparazzi as usual. He felt he had more rights to my space than me, so I put my hand up to prevent him from taking my image. I didn’t assault him but merely putting my hand up to cover his lens. My security yelled, ‘Get the camera off him.’ I guess in all the commotion the camera scraped his nose.”
West said that three hours later, police came to his hotel and arrested him because of the photographer’s complaint.
“The cops were very cordial but told me they had to arrest me because a complaint was filed,” West went on. “They spoke about how this was obviously a publicity stunt by the photographer but they still had to go through the motions. … Even though I wasn’t charged, the damage was done. Sure enough, the next morning, plastered across every media outlet, ‘Kanye Gets Arrested.’ It didn’t matter that I wasn’t charged or the fact that I hadn’t assaulted anyone. All that mattered was that I was arrested.
“Sidebar, they quoted me as saying, ‘Get the camera off him!’ like I was talking in third person,” the Chicago music maven added. “He tried to make me sound like a crazy person, and people believed him. What merit does this guy have, that he can say something about me and people take it as law? The fact that he could get me arrested off a mere complaint but I can’t ask him to stop taking pictures of me is very lopsided.”
The Louis Vuitton Don, whose scuffle with a photographer and videographer in Los Angeles in September also resulted in his arrest, complained that he has no legal means to protect himself from the paparazzi.
“Let us not forget the paps killed Princess Diana,” he vented. “When will there be a law passed that simply enforces that someone has to ask to take a photograph of you? That would seem like common courtesy. Right now the paps are above the law and the people they shoot are below it. … The exploitation of my image is the problem. It produces a ‘by any means necessary’ behavior that cause the paps to drive recklessly on freeways, jump over fences and invade privacy all in an effort to get that ‘money shot.’
“You shouldn’t be able to sell a picture of me without my permission,” he continued, adding that photographers would still be allowed to take pictures in certain public places and red-carpet events. “The personal problem I have with the paps is when they try to catch you being a regular person. I am not a celebrity. I’m a normal person that’s just famous. I refuse to sneak in and out of back doors and kitchens of hotels, etc. I am protecting my personal space since there are no laws to protect that for me.”
Startups.com Network, Inc., a proprietary network of business sites focused on services and content for entrepreneurs and business executives, announces the launch of Twingr.com, a web application that lets people create their own micro-blogging communities.
“Twingr.com is a very easy-to-use web application that will let anyone create a micro blogging group, community, or network,” said Pepe Amorin, VP Marketing of Startups.com Network, “We felt there was a ready demand for such an application, yet no one was covering it. There was likewise a growing need within our company. Using the most popular micro blogging networks out there, we thought it would be great to have one of our own. Over time, the idea developed and we thought about letting anyone create their own micro blogging platform.”
With Twingr.com, you can create your own micro blogging community and invite your friends and colleagues to it. You can follow your friends and be followed by them. Twingr.com is a free service for its users.
1. Update your blog regularly but at a similar frequency. This makes sense for those who are following your writing so that they know when to check back. Some blogs now email your readers automatically when you have made an update. I update mine at least once per month.
2. Have a theme for each article. The first year I wrote my blog I created a one year curriculum with a theme for each month. That at least helped me with the thought process for the next month. Now my blog has turned into a product of moments of inspiration. You can see what I mean: http://www.powernetworking.blogspot.com
3. Tag your blog everywhere. At the very least your blog should be in your sig tag of your emails.
4. Encourage people to learn more about you. Whenever I email someone for the first time I always try to remember to point out my blog so that they can learn more about me.
5. Provide both useful and interesting content. If your content is interesting but not useful it won’t have shelf life. If your blog is useful but not interesting it may not be read the first time.
Cute Overload! offers image after image of teeny-weeny furry animals means you’ll never be sad again.
Tags: Feature Blog
Barak Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States.
Some worthy sites to watch on Election Day.
iDashboards has a live dashboard that will run next week, showing you the current results from the election. It’s really cool because you can hover your mouse over states to see the voting results.
Talking Points Memo Talking Points Memo will be livestreaming from Obama’s headquarters and posting results with a map created with its partner Google.
The New York Times has all the news that’s fit to print, or post, with videos updated every half hour and analysis.
If you can’t get enough C-Span on TV, then make sure you visit their election site. One feature I like is that you can view any of the campaign ads and watch the previous debates.
Topix will organize all the News on 2008 Presidential Election continually updated from thousands of sources around the net.
Current TV Current Diggs the Election: Your Election Night Party with Digg, Twitter, and Diplo.
Five Thirty-eight “Electoral projections done right”. A number-crunching polling site that digests all the numbers flying around.
Swing State Project is running probably the best of the election maps, showing poll closing times as well as cumulative counts.
Political Base is one of the best blogs around that tracks news coverage, election predictions, and opinions. It will likely start reporting on the results next Tuesday.
Social Median is a news aggregator with an election page that includes blogs, Twitter posts, Flickr and YouTube videos, and a lot of other rich content that you can filter easily.
TechPresident.com is a great daily digest of Web content with charts that graph out supporters and what they are saying at popular social nets.
Photograph Your Polling Place The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election.
Politico Politico has all the standard election coverage paraphernalia – swing state map, live blogging of the results but adds in some irreverent video commentary taking in Vanilla Ice, Mary Poppins and vehemently anti-Obama cardinals.
Slate is running an online tipsheet with an hourly digest of all the significant developments
ABC News Livestreams of its newscast, the scene at both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ headquarters, roving reporters and searchable exit polling data, liveblogging and results via SMS.
Election Geek: Obsessively blogging every detail of the 2008 presidential contest
We will continue to update the list throughout the day.
Tags: Live Blogging
We get dozens of blogs submitted to our directory and probably 95% of them are crap. Sorry to say these blogs won’t make it into the directory. We are trying to build a quality directory with worthy blogs.
We also understand that it’s tough to have your blog noticed by search engines but that’s no reason to try and cheat the system. We received this submission to our directory that tries to hide it’s key words to get noticed.
This may work for a short while but once noticed you will be penalized by the search engines.
Want to follow all the breaking Election Night coverage but only have one set of eyes? Let the MLive.com Elections staff help.
As part of our live Election Night coverage, we’ll be watching six television channels, browsing the Web and monitoring twitter conversations. And we’ll be blogging it all right here.
Join the conversation of just follow along as we break in with all the breaking news. The blog starts Tuesday when polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m.
Tags: Blogging Event
BlogFinds.com will be featuring a blog we enjoy and read from time to time. I’m not going to commit to a schedule because frankly that never works out for me.
This blog was launched when staff of Lucas Online was reporting live from Celebration IV. It provided readers with the latest news as it happened.
Welcome to the Official Star Wars Blog at Wordpress, crafted by the folks from Lucas Online.
Tags: Feature Blog