To my eternal shame I’ve worked within minutes of world famous West End theatres and hardly been to any of them. But two nights ago I added one more to my paltry list, not for a performance of its regular show The Lion King, but for a performance from the king of cultural commentators Malcolm Gladwell. read full post »

There’s a few very good digital tech blogs out there including Cybernetnews, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, each of them regularly post about the latest apps on the block; here’s one from ReadWriteWeb about a bunch of apps that have stood the test of time and another from Mashable about top sites for web savvy families. The developer community churn out thousands of apps a week, each one claiming to revolutionise our lives for the better, unfortunately the majority of these apps are likely to fail. Having said that a good deal of them will emerge from the market-place victorious, with a few healthy rounds of funding and a few million users to boot.

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As a Leeds United fan I’ve met my share of super-fans, those displaying such a quixotic level of support for their club that it consumes every part of their life - including their moods and general disposition. But, Leeds United is also well known for its intensely loyal and active wider support base (those who love the club but understand it is just a game) evidenced by the weekly gate receipts of 30,000+ and leedsunited.com having the 5th highest traffic in all the land; this is made all the more remarkable when you consider they now reside in the old 3rd division. I think one of the main reasons for this strong support base is actually the existence of a strong super-fan core, which acts as a powerful and firey centre generating a kind of gravitational pull on the wider fan base. 

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We at Made by Many launched an experimental blog 10 days ago. Normally we create blogs, blogging platforms and blog-based communities for clients (other than our company blog), but this time an opportunity arose to do one for ourselves and to use it like a laboratory.

The opportunity was provided by my little brother Jonny Malbon, who set sail in a non-stop, round-the-world, solo race called The Vendee Globe. It’s the one that Ellen MacArthur almost won eight years ago. Only 68 people have ever completed it. Sometimes people don’t come back. It’s mad: the premise being “last one round the South Pole’s a sissy” and the race involves these 60 foot super-high-tech lightweight surfboards with too much sail area. It’s a formula one drag race round the planet that takes around 90 days and involves a long and lonely stint in the outer space of The Southern Ocean. The video below provides a good overview.

The ultimate Vendée Globe 2008 from Artemis Ocean Racing on Vimeo.

So what are these experiments?

Well, Jonny is at the head of a very long tail of content being produced, distributed, picked over and reassembled by citizen journos (blogeurs) and old media alike. It’s a feeding frenzy for a global community of die-hard yachties. Most of them are in France, it has to be said, but there’s a huge online buzz about this race: these are big floating gadgets after all, and practically the only way you can follow the race (bearing in mind that most of it happens way offshore) is through digital media created onboard the boats by the skippers, and consumed online in a thousand places. Most of the boats have big, expensive sites and some are very good, but we’re interested to see what you can do with a simple blog and by using all the free tools we can get our hands on.

One of the most exciting of these tools is Twitter.com, and in less than a week Jonny has gathered 78 followers at his TwitterStream. This, and the fact that we have linked various Twitter accounts with with Netvibes and various Facebook accounts has led to 35% of our referrals in the first week coming from these services.

Screenshot of Twitter. Yes, it’s been up and down. No, it actually isn’t cool and this is an annoying error screen.

Jonny is Tweeting live from the boat, which is a far as we know a world first - and, quite frankly, a much better use of Twitter than informing the world that your bus is late! We’re piping these updates from Twitter into the sidebar of the blog - but we’re also experimenting with how you can design this sort of content to encourage portability - see the image below that shows how a style we designed to display tweets at JonnyMalbon.com below is now finding its way into niche sailing sites, partly because it simply looks good:

We’re also thinking carefully about the needs of the super-engaged fans around the world who are trying to piece together what’s happening from many sources in (mainly) two languages. We’re providing summaries - we call them ‘info-bursts’ and ’round-ups’. They’ve been really successful.

Another thing we’re experimenting with is guest blogging and blog-swaps. We found this guy Michael Kingdom-Hockings, who writes a blog called New Freebooters about the Vendee, was commenting a lot at JonnyMalbon.com - so we co-opted him into our content team, and we’ve blogged at his site. I’ve never met this guy, we just found him by doing the blog and he’s written some good stuff.

And we’re collecting together multimedia (audio and video clips) from all over the place and re-posting it all in one place.

So, is it working? Well it seems to be. From a standing start with no marketing (aside from link-love and commenting) we’re up to 196 visits/430 page views a day as of yesterday and climbing. The weekend didn’t slow it down. Come and have a look and let us know what you think.

On Nov 1st Jim Stengel (ex P&G Global Marketing Officer) launched a new kind of marketing consultancy with an extremely lofty ambition:

 “to accelerate a movement to deeply rethink and transform the roles and meaning of marketing and branding.”

When Mr. Stengel starts to talk about branding needing a rethink people sit up and take notice, but when Mr. Stengel quits his job and sets up a consultancy with the sole aim of accelerating said rethink, everyone in the industry should probably pay very close attention. His central tenet is that marketing should be more about defining what a company does - beyond making money - and how it can make customers’ lives better, he calls it ‘purpose-driven marketing.’  But this isn’t the first time someone has called for a radical rethink of the marketing processes and structures. 

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