Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Holidays. Every now and then I need to unplug myself from the modern world for a few days.

This previous week afforded me that opportunity as I spent it literally in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the deep south of Burgundy. The house we stayed in had no TV, no local tabac to buy the papers, no internet access, no telephone and no mobile phone reception. Someone was trying to tell me something.

Life in the increasingly wired world has led me to expect the media at my fingertips and it took a couple of days cold turkey to stop wondering about what was happening around the world. Putting aside my revelations about life ‘on the other side’ for now, I usually spend the Sunday of any return poring through the papers to catch up with events while I have been away. It’s easy to miss important events, particularly where work is concerned.

However, this year, I decided to rely on my news aggregator which handily saved the week’s events for me in neat chronological order, all nicely organised by topic. A leisurely scan through the news, the sport (I shouldn’t have bothered) and then onto work matters quickly brought me back in touch with events. All it took was a couple of hours catching up on a Sunday afternoon and I was ready to tackle the traditional post-holiday email mountain on Monday morning.

My news, when I wanted it and how I wanted it. That kind of media consumption is hard to beat.

Cymfony’s Cindy Sullivan has posted a very thorough guide to taking advantage of Consumer Generated Media (CGM). However, one key difference between using blogs and other discussion to predict the buzz about forthcoming media products (movies, TV series, games etc.) and using them to detect early interest in consumer products, is that many of the latter (such as the recently unveiled iPod Nano) are kept under wraps until the day they go on sale. You have to wonder whether this will continue to be the case if marketers start to take full advantage of the customer research potential of online chatter.

With so many brands experimenting with viral marketing, it requires a combination of great idea and execution to stand out from the crowd. Saab have done this with the surprisingly detailed and addictive Race Against Time.

Race Against Time has been created to promote the Saab 9-3 SportWagon and involves good use of data capture and high standards of creative. The game itself is an absorbing journey in which by answering a series of questions you create your own narrative to find your way to Hazart Point in the fastest time possible. This involves a dangerous hitchhiker on the loose, police stops, even hidden games, all narrated through streaming video filmed from the driver’s view.

You have to admire their ambition as well as their budget. Sometimes the simplest virals can be among the best, like the addictive BBC paper throwing game, but this is a serious undertaking and the majority of the players will never get to see the full range of content that is contained within the game. It also carefully communicates key messages about the models available, driving pleasure and a spirit of adventure.

It will be interesting to see how many players and leads this generates for Saab. Will the office community be patient enough to follow it through when an amusing picture often provides the kind of coffee break moment they are looking for? Provided word of mouth and existing databases can drive enough players to the game, Saab have created one of the virals of the year.

Google has launched its new Blog Search tool and reaction has started to filter through.

Word Munger is concerned about the lack of plagiarism protection. This may be partly because the new search isn’t a true full-text search across all sources, as some publishers only syndicate first paras or excerpts of content via RSS.

You can limit searches by title, author and date or date range. You can also limit results to a specific language, or apply the Safe Search filter to results.

You can also save a blog search as an alert that will be updated any time new content is posted. Additionally you are able to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader.

Word Munger has also noted that you can do a link search for a main blog URL and this will uncover in-links that Technorati may have missed.

The tool comes in various language flavours already: Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, and Spanish, with more promised soon.

When I type “Google Search” into the exact phrase box this afternoon it returns a “Server Error“!