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.

Let the Android party begin

If you’d have asked me my opinion about the mobile phone industry pre the iPhone, I’d have told you that it needs a good kick up the ass because we’re all sick of hearing about wap and video calling. Then the iPhone came along and set the bar (a far bit) higher and challenged the rest of the market to follow. And followed they have, every other manufacture has produced a so called “iPhone killer” to take on the boys at Apple. The problem is though, it’s not just about the hardware, is it?

Enter Google and their Android. The guys at Google know a killer app when they see one, so you’d probably be fairly safe in saying that Android is going to be the next installment in an already glittering portfolio. The news today is that T-Mobile in the US is going to be the first to show off a handset (HTC) featuring the software at a conference in New York on 23 September.  It’s going to be interesting to see how the media and analysts react to it as this is Google’s play to widen their advertising model.   

MyTake – This is really the best front to attack Apple on. It really doesn’t matter how cool that handset is, if the user-experience is poor, then so is the handset. Google have gone down the same road as Apple by opening up the software to third party developers, which in my opinion was Apple's master stroke. I predict a real clash of the titans type battle between these boys.