Hill+Knowlton Strategies

If things have been a little quiet on here lately, there’s a
good(ish) reason. No, I haven’t fallen out of love with the blogosphere
- quite the reverse. It’s all down to Chocolate, you see.

For some weeks now my affections have been elsewhere as one of the Chocolate bloggers, a blog our Netcoms team set up to amplify a blogger relations programme we are running for the LG Chocolate phone.

While it can be considered poor form to post about client work (I
think this is my first), I have been itching to share some observations
into the programme so far. Observations which probably don’t have a
natural place on the Chocolate blog. So, here we are. Sorry.

My colleague Niall has already blogged about some of the more mainstream insights he has gained, so let me just make a few personal observations:

1. Bloggers don’t bite, as long as you ask nicely and do your homework.
2. It helps if you have an interesting product to talk about. A lot.
3. Prepare to learn something. Despite mugging up on the phone for a good
   week, almost every review has taught me something new.
4. Bloggers
   don’t follow the classic ‘press review’ formula. Reviews are personal,
   passionate and go in unexpected directions. Little things matter.
5. Take a deep breath. This kind of activity makes people nervous.
6. Be yourself and try to have fun. It shows.
7. The higher profile an activity, the weirder emails you get.

In the interests of full disclosure in case I haven’t made it clear, LG is a client of ours

Thanks to a particularly savage set of keys, my right hand pocket is officially out of action today. This leads to a storage issue for all of the gadgets I have been accumulating in recent weeks, now that it is jackets-off for the summer.

And it appears I am not alone in experiencing this increasingly common problem in modern society.

My poor overworked left pocket now has to cope with wallet, keys, MP3 player and phone, leaving it surely at breaking point. Just as well I’m not carrying a BlackBerry or digital camera. Fortunately, my independent-minded pedometer is at home on a belt.

Given the growing convergence of devices the solution may be to have one of the combined MP3 players and phone. The problem is that no single, affordable device acts as a panacea.

My digital camera takes better pictures than my mobile phone. My MP3 player is more intuitive and has better storage than my mobile phone. Those devices are out there, but will have to go through the early adopter pricing phase before they are viable for my pocket (in all senses of the word).

With the steady growth of m-commerce, mobile transactions will become more trusted and prevalent, allowing me to reduce wallet space, although again it will face the issues of trust and technology that e-commerce went through.

Indeed, even my pedometer’s days could be numbered through the likes of GPS. But not anytime soon.

Until then it’s time to get out the needle and thread and fix that pocket.