Results tagged “web” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

Whilst browsing the web the other day I happened across a fairly innocuous-looking story that, at first glance, seemed nothing more than one of those "strange but true" tales that you mentally file away to impress your mates with down the pub after work.

However, something about it set a few alarm bells ringing for me and, on further inspection, this throwaway story turned out to be a nugget of pure viral marketing gold.

It also prised open a family-sized can of worms in my hardened TV researcher's brain and set them wriggling in the part of my cranium that exists to remind me that the web can also be a truth-hunters worst nightmare.

The story concerned Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old kid in Texas who had been arrested after he swiped his dad's credit card and embarked on an epic $30,000 spending spree. This misadventure wound up with him and his mates holed up in a hotel room with a pile of junk food, a brand new Xbox and two nubile $1000-a-night prostitutes procured from the local whorehouse. It also landed Ralph in the arms of the law when the hotel room was raided by the local Texan constabulary after being tipped off by a delivery guy who'd supplied the boys with snacks.

Apparently our young hero claimed he was funding this escapade through the winnings of a World of Warcraft video games contest and, when the high-class call girls questioned his age, he convinced them that he and his friends were in fact "people of restricted growth" who worked for a travelling circus. Even better he went as far to inform them that, if they refused his custom, they would be in direct violation of the state's disability discrimination laws. Only when the boys seemed more interested in playing Halo than getting to grips with their "hired help" did the penny finally drop.

In a strange twist of narrative the poor, misinformed sex workers were released without charge whilst young Ralph was slapped with a three year community order for fraud, presumably ruing the day he figured out his dad's pin number.

Unsurprisingly the story turned out to be complete hogwash. It was later revealed to be the result of a viral marketing experiment by Cornish social media marketer Lyndon Antcliff (aka Lyndoman) who unleashed the story on popular finance site Money.co.uk.

Lyndoman deliberately laced his Munchaussen-esque tale with every conceivable narrative trigger point needed to ensure its viral success.

Sometimes the longer you spend in a creative job, the harder it becomes to actually keep on innovating. Over time, you find that your ideas are just becoming rehashed versions of things that have been done before or that you've become so entrenched in your day-to-day routines that you just can't remember how to think outside the box any more.

What's more, because everyone in your industry is most likely reading the same magazines as you, browsing the same Sunday papers, watching the same TV shows, and exploring the same websites, chances are that even when something does spark off an original idea, a dozen other people have just seen the same thing and are now beavering away on projects pretty damn near identical to yours.

So what the hell do you do about it? Jack it all in and work in a factory? Cryogenically freeze yourself until a time when your hackneyed ideas suddenly seem ironically retro? Bury your head in the sand and try to ignore the whimpered cries of your inner muse as it slowly shrivels up and dies?

No. Just get yourself lost.

A casual visitor to Chez Lockey tonight would be forgiven for thinking that I was in the middle of clearing up after a major break-in.

In fact I'm in the midst of an epic packing session in preparation for Friday morning when I'm due to hop in a taxi at sparrow's fart a.m. bound for BHX where a big shiny plane is scheduled to whisk me off to sunny Austin, Texas.

No, I'm not about to give up my new-found love of blogging to join the rodeo, I am in fact off to the South by Southwest interactive festival (or SXSWi for those of you with a vowel aversion), the biggest, geekiest tech-fest on the planet.

And in the true spirit of interactivity, you get to have a say in what I see and do at the conference as well as following the action via an ambitious experiment in collective reporting.

A few months ago, I attended a briefing for a broadcaster's new commissioning round. Representing a particularly progressive department in a notoriously forward-thinking channel, the commissioners were adamant that they were going to hammer the multiplatform message home and decided to invite an equal number of traditional TV indies and new media production companies to come along and explore how they could combine their efforts.

I think they were hoping to usher in a shining new era where telly luvvies and the new geek army would fall hopelessly in love with each other and skip off merrily into a brave new world of hybrid media together.

What they got instead was more akin to the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story.