Hill+Knowlton Strategies

This blogger is a fan of Burger King’s viral marketing. It has proved itself consistently innovative and generally effective both in raw traffic and in changing perceptions of the brand among the yoof (and not so yoof) demographic.

As with all successful ventures you then face the difficult task of trying to surpass your previous efforts. Burger King’s viral marketing shot to fame with the Subservient Chicken, where visitors could type in commands to see him do just about anything from dancing to commenting on a competitors offering.

This was followed by the less successful Harry Enfield-endorsed Angus Diet and the weird and wonderful Sith Sense.

Burger King have now returned to their first love, chickens on the net, with a spoof rock band website, Coq Rock. As you’d expect, the site is awash with chicken puns and some suprisingly well produced rock tracks in praise of chicken fries. While the site lacks the addictive qualities of the Subservient Chicken and the Sith Sense, it shows Burger King further experimenting with the medium through the use of ringtones, merchandise and a messageboard (unavailable at the time of going to press, hmm).

Footnote: Burger King clearly knows the literacy levels of its core audience, buying both the ’subservient’ and ’subserviant’ versions of the domain name (note to self: spell check this article, ahem).

Net Rage, Catalyst’s new study of blogs and usability concludes that “consumer acceptance” of the medium may be delayed by a range of different issues affecting navigation, taxonomy and nomenclature. It’s a little odd that the study concentrates exclusively on blogging as a one to many platform, as many of the usability issues pinpointed here will also have tried the patience of bloggers themselves.

Clearly blogs have their own taxonomy requirements and the first generation of blogging platforms have yet to establish universal conventions that will survive the test of mainstream uptake. However, some of the RSS usability load may be absorbed by the next generation of browsers.

There’s a new site called Audioville that allows users to pay for and download speech-only MP3 files such as BBC comedies and documentaries. They can also use the site as a platform for selling their own audio content.

I also read today about Peerflix, a service that allows you to exchange the DVDs you rent from Netflix! Well, maybe not, but it makes you wonder how successful this model has to be before the number of purchased DVDs in play starts to stagnate. Last week the Marginal Revolution weblog listed amongst its five reasons that Hollywood analysts are starting to feel bearish that: “the demand for DVDs has fallen because movie lovers have completed their core collections .Forget the collectors, you buy DVDs to have a stock on hand so you don’t have to run out to the video store on short notice.  Now everyone has a stock.  Stocks must be replenished every now and then, but there is no longer a large new cohort simultaneously building up a stock from scratch.”

Jason Kottke ponders Google’s patented plans for ranking news articles by credibility: “I wonder if these systems will eventually let their users tweak the credibility algorithms to their liking. For instance, it won’t take long for conservatives to start complaining about the liberal bias of Google News.”

Not sure if this is a marketing stunt, but MindComet has today launched BloginSpace.com, “a free service for bloggers allowing them to submit their blog feeds for transmission into deep space” (isn’t that where most of them end up anyway?)

Their terms of use include this stellar (sorry!) gem:

“While Blog In Space supports Intergalactic Free Speech, Bloggers who use this site are urged to keep their blogs devoid of any overt language, comments or content designed to offend, taunt or provoke alien life forms in any way. Aliens may find your lifestyle, grammar or the picture of your girlfriend offensive, we just don’t know. Blog In Space does not warrant that any content transmitted into space will not be objectionable to alien life forms and will not be responsible for alien abductions, close encounters or intergalactic war.”

I have a better idea. How about BloggerinSpace.com, a service that allows you to submit the blogger you dislike most for transmission into deep space.

Who’d be first on your list?

eDirectory.co.uk has launched a new RSS service called Desktop Bargains that sends news of the latest online offers directly to your desktop, a feature that is likley to be imitated fairly widely.

Anil Dash has updated his advice to PR agencies that might consider pitching to bloggers. After reading them you may “feel free to market yourself to your clients or potential clients by saying you’re blogger-friendly”