Posted by Victoire on Feb 26, 2007 in Fun, General
Paul and I announced chilibean media’s launch on the 14th February with a special launch video - what you saw was “chilibean on the rocks”, but behind the scenes it was more like a cloud of dust, as we scrambled with the technicalities of recording and editing in a medium we’ve not had much experience in! However, when all the dust settled the video was miraculously edited, the chilibean flash banner converted into video, and we were ready to rock! All of this is thanks to an awesome team of outsourced talent:
- Office For Design’s Paula and Lize for their outstanding design work and excellent service delivered with a smile,
- Nico from Aquila Online for being our swish cinematographer, and then burning the midnight oil getting the video just right - cuts and all.
After all the editing was done, Nico surprised us with a montage - the chilibean bloopers - revealing the candid and un-edited face of the chilibean team. Keep an eye out for the chili dance, which I referred to in my del.icio.us chililuvin post last week!
chilibean is all about passion, and lots and lots of luvin… Indeed, everytime we hear people talking about us our hearts do a little chili dance (watch this space - I’ll be publishing evidence of this soon)!
Our chilibean passion came to fruition when we launched chilibean media on Valentines day - the international day of luvin - and now we’ve caught wind of a growing chilibean fan base. You must know what that does to us - infact, I’m still trying to locate Paul in the stratosphere!
However, we don’t really know who you, our chili fans, are.
It’s with this in mind that we’ve devised a strategy through which we’d be able to get to know you better, and the best part of all is that it’s really easy to do. Bookmark your site with the tag “chililuvin” on del.icio.us. We’ve already set up the feed so that the moment you add the chililuvin tag to your site we’ll know who you are.
These are the steps to follow:
Set up a del.icio.us account if you don’t already have one - Mike Stopforth has quite a comprehensive blog post about del.icio.us which describes how to do this
Install the tools for saving del.icio.us bookmarks - The links to these are at http://del.icio.us/help/
Click on the “Tag” button on your new browser toolbar and enter chililuvin in the “Tags” field, then click on “Save”
Voila! You are our newest fan, and by association, we are yours. So tag your site with “chililuvin” and join our fan club… you know you wanna!
Oh, and if you haven’t quite had enough of all the chililuvin going around, why not spread the love and add our funky flash banner widget to your site?
Forrester has released a paper researching the “why” and “how” of what they call “external blogging accountability”.
Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.
The paper investigates the need for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of organisational blogs and the limitations to these calculations. In addition to the actual calculation Li et al have identified three factors to determine the return:
Quantify and value the key benefits of blogging
Estimate the costs of blogging
Incorporate the risk calculations in the ROI model
The measurement of ROI of technology within the organisation has always been a key factor in the motivation for its cost of ownership. As blogs, and new media in general, are more intensively marketed to, and adopted by, organisations the measurement of the total cost of ownership and their return on investment will be critical. Whilst the “cost of ownership” of the research paper itself is inhibiting at US $379.00, it will be interesting to observe the various permutations of the blogging ROI model as organisations gain experience with this technology.
Another article of relevance published by Forrester is one which explores a case study on the calculation of the ROI of blogging. The case study takes a look at General Motors‘
implementation of corporate blogs. What I found most interesting though, was the ROI model used by GM. Instead of making use of a traditional monetary-value measure, or the popular “page hits” used by most bloggers, GM measure their value of return by “the number of press mentions” metric.
Forrester used the process outlined in the associated Best Practices document, “The ROI Of Blogging,” to calculate the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane blog; but, this is not merely an exercise to generate a number. Using scenarios, General Motors can understand the risk and impact of increases and decreases of a key metric the number of press mentions on the value of the blog. With this knowledge in hand, General Motors can make critical businesses decisions, such as whether to invest heavily in innovations that will rekindle press attention.
I just received an email from Apple. The message: “Go beyond Vista. It’s time to get a Mac.” Apple is known for it’s innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, so this instance is no real exception, however I still love the way they have taken the opportunity provided by Vista’s launch, as blogged by Paul earlier this week, to promote themselves. [1]
