Flashers and flashmobs at Liverpool street

Flicking through a popular free London paper yesterday I came across a story about a flashmob organised via Facebook, mimicking a popular TV for a mobile telco. My first thought was one of amazement at the continued popularity of flashmobs, but then I started thinking about the actual PR idea behind the flashmob.

Flashmobs have been around for a while now and there have been some very successful ones and some not so successful. Most of the successful ones have not been organised by brands or on behalf of brand, they have been for individual causes, or more often than not for no reason whatsoever - think about the Rickrolling event at Charing Cross last year. Now I've yet to make my mind up on how involved the actual brand was in this, as it attracted up to 13,000 people (including some guy that stripped off) and that's a hell of a lot of "willing" volunteers!



As mentioned, it was organised through Facebook and it generated a hell of a result that will surely have some traction for the brand - whether or not they were involved or not. It begs the question, are the social networks opening up to the world of marketing to a greater extent?

MyTake - Brilliant brand awareness and if it was a managed and delivered campaign, then a big pat on the back to all involved. From a marketing perspective, the social networks have always been a bit of a sacred place and the likes of Facebook is littered with cock-ups by a whole host of different companies, but perhaps this is good news for marketers.....build it and they will come.

Have you been RickRolled?

I think my sister was a big Rick Astley fan, but I don’t think even she would take it this far. To give you a bit of background, a trend has emerged known as “RickRolling”, where blogs and forums trick innocent readers into clicking on a link. This link then takes them to videos of Rick Astley’s song, Never Gonna Give you up (and sometimes their own lip-synced versions of the dubious 80s hit) before finally putting them out of their misery by informing them, "You've been RickRolled".

The trend recently hit a crazy high when a group of 500 people turned up at London’s Liverpool Street Station for a one of “RickRolling” type flash mob (see movie below) after the event was publicised on Facebook. As you can imagine, the regular commuters at the station were a bit baffled by the whole thing, but still entertained – after all, it is a Rick Astley number.

The most interesting part of the story is Rick’s response to the whole thing: "If this had happened around some kind of rock song, with a lyric that really meant something ... I could kind of understand that, but it's a pop song; do you know what I mean? It doesn't have any weight behind it….. But maybe that's the irony behind it." – You reckon Rick?




MyTake – Things like this pop up all the time on the web, but this is so bizarre that it’s funny. What it does demonstrate is the power of a really good web-based idea, it can go on and off the web and become ownable by so many different people and communities. In this case, it started on the web, went around the blogs and forums, then went offline with the Liverpool Street stunt, and is now back online being talked about by a bunch more bloggers – including me!