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Doritos has been everywhere lately, all over the radio, a few other ads here and there. Basically they have been punting their Facebook page.

I eventually saw that one of my friends on FB had joined the group as well as ±1500 people.

My immediate reaction is that this is a flop of a campaign. Advertising on radio is no cheap affair but an affair it is. You face the risk of being caught out by your better half - the listeners or target market. And to me it seems as though this has happened to Doritos.

Why I think this is campaign was a flop?

Coming off the back of a great advertising campaign with their “Moment of boldness” A few years ago I can’t believe that Doritos could have done so badly with this one. That campaign was a viral campaign before there were viral campaigns. To this day I know many people who still joke about their moments of boldness.

At the time of writing this post there were 777 122 people from South Africa above the age of 18 on Facebook. That works out to about 0.2% of the users on FB, from SA actually bothered to become a fan of the brand. In my mind, that’s a bit of a flop.

Why this could be perceived to be a successful campaign

Theoretically what we could be looking at here is quality over quantity. Involvement and activity over masses of inactive users/fans.

But let’s look at this for a moment before we get ahead of ourselves. The available features on the FB page of Doritos are: Notes, Photos, Video, Wall Comments, Events and Discussion Board.

To analyse these in a bit more detail:

Wall
313 posts

Discussion Board
Topic 1: 120 posts by 95 people
Topic 2: 29 posts by 25 people

Videos
12 fan videos

Photos
44 photos
5 albums

Events
Event 1 - 6 confirmed guests, 4 wall posts
Event 2 - 28 confirmed guests, 6 wall posts

Notes
7 notes
144 comments

Looking at the above breakdowns I honestly cannot say that all the money Doritos must have spent on their mainstream ad campaigns was worth it. 44 photographs and 12 videos is really not a good response in my opinion. Especially considering that there are ±1500 people in the group and over 750 000 people in SA on FB. That means that less than 1% of the fans on the page posted a video and almost 3% of the fans posted a photograph.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve posted, viewed and commented on hundreds of photos on FB, that should’ve been the saving grace but alas, it wasn’t.

What Doritos could have done differently

Expanded their “moment of boldness” campaign to an online network of viral campaigns. Blogs, videos, podcasts and “fake events” that could have boosted the reputation of the brand for the young and socially in touch.

I can picture the blog and videos now; South Africans all over filming their moment of boldness, recording fake jumps, dares and ironic, satirical parodies of the “bold” factor.

Doritos could have done more with their Facebook group. Updates, invites, ads, coupons, giveaways, freebies. Sometimes it just takes a bit of gritty interaction to spread the word for a fan page, not an entire radio ad campaign. Other than giveaways the Doritos fan page gave nothing to its members. No community offering. I know a lot of people who feel an affinity to Doritos, it’s their choice chip, but they were not enticed to join this group. People like Apple Students has it right on their page. They have a community, not a product.

Below the line marketing would have worked better. Get bloggers involved, send them a box of crisps and ask them to eat them, rally a party around the chips, get other bloggers in on it and spread the word slowly to all their readers via the subsequent posts.

Print would even have worked better than radio. More people will sit near a computer while reading a newspaper/magazine than will be listening to the radio, so why put it on the radio? You are probably driving in your car when you hear about the Doritos fan page, not sitting by a pc with internet access. Bad move.

I did try to contact Doritos, the admin of the group or anyone but no one responded. I gave them a few working days. I’d love to know if they consider this campaign to be successful or if they are looking in to recovering from the flop that I see?

In fact, it’s been a long year so far and it’s only February. I hate this feeling.

But things are coming right, work doesn’t suck, people are settling down and becoming easier to work with at the moment, which is great. People are gathering focus. Blogging is going well (not on here) in general although if I thought that running two blogs was tough work, three is incomprehensible. I work late, really late, blog every night and on weekends and am constantly looking for now content on three different levels.

But however you look at it, I have little to bitch about, so I wont bitch.

No, wait, I lie, I can’t not bitch. I’m tired. Was at work today before 7am. That is really early for me. Maybe not for everyone, but for me it. I feel like it’s early for me because I am always working lately.

Initially I really loved blogging - I still do - but now it has become work, a job, a mechanism to express opinion, earn revenue and generate hype. This is work in a nutshell. So I work a full-time job (roughly 10 hours a day) and then go home and work more. Managing three blogs is tough work, but at least I love it!

Take it from me, if you are thinking about filling your empty plate, think twice before you over fill it.

I am somewhat confuzzled and bemused.

Let me start by saying congratulations to ShaunOakes.com for his nomination in the 2008 bloggies. As well as Tertia and Gladtobeagirl. Great work for SA and the SA bloggers!! I have asked all my SA Rocks readers to get over to the bloggies page and vote!!

Now I have read shaunoakes.com before. Once or twice. Nothing more. Maybe I am stuck in a little SA blogosphere bubble but I tend to think of myself as well read and on the pulse of the sphere. In this case I missed out.

Can someone explain to me how shaunoakes.com has been nominated as best African weblog of the year for the bloggies 2008? The key here is AFRICAN. I could maybe just understand or grasp the nomination if it were purely South African. But are you telling me that his blog is the best of what Africa has to offer? If so, let me know why and I’ll change my mind, but I’m lost.

I am not saying any of this to imply that I am any better, cause I’m not. At all in fact. I just want to understand the situation. Were the nominations not well received in general? Were the numbers low? Did Shaun’s readers pull through and are they deceivingly high? That can’t be the case because his blog is ranked below mine on Amatomu.com and I know that I am not doing particularly well in the whole participatory readership category. Or in the general readership for that matter!!

I am also not saying that readership defines blog quality or how deserved a blog is for an award at all. It just interests me to know how Shaun managed to get nominated, what was the process, who voted, who said, who, who, who?

Have a look:

Below you see Tertia whipping my butt and shaun’s butt. She has the readers to get the nominations.

Then you can see Tertia whipping everyone’s ass:

Shaun’s blog is friendly and arrogant to a degree (which I like). He strings together posts that are mixed, mismatched and a motley combination of funny, serious, satirical and other things. But I honestly cannot believe that this blog is up there with the best in Africa?

Tertia I can understand. A long standing successful blog with proven potential and achievement. Great readership, participation and a focus throughout the entire blog, she is merciless with her blogging and rigorously sticks to a schedule. Understandable nomination.

Shaun - if you have a tip for me, please let me know, cause I am interested to know how to get my readers to participate more in what I ask!

Either way, whether I am blind, dumb or just plain biased I think it’s great that there are a three SA blogs up for awards and I will be the very first person to email Shaun personally and congratulate him if he wins in the category.

http://2008.bloggies.com/

I have been thinking about this for a while now. Whether it’s better to focus on one blog or two share your attention between two.

I run this blog and SA Rocks. I think that the two are mutually beneficial but conflict one another on occasion. It’s a difficult balance but one that I think has been extremely beneficial for me.

What you need to maintain two (or more) blogs

You need a clear definition of each blog

Discipline is essential

Creativity is a must

Focus

Goals

A plan - this is the most important on that I think I missed out on. You need to have a plan for each blog and each post that you write. If you don’t have a plan the blogs can begin to cancel one another out and overrun one another.

The pros

Cross population

Cross referencing

Association links

Post ideas

Cross-blog debates

Associated traffic (gaining traffic from SA Rocks as the author)

Cross-promotion

The cons

Cross population - try to keep your blog posts separate unless there is a clear and present need for them to link.

Time constraints

Mental drain

Contradiction - I’ve struggled with SA Rocks to keep my positive outlook on SA Rocks and maintain it on my personal blog. This could be seen as a pro and a con as blogging on SA Rocks has allowed me to stay away from negative topics on my personal blog.

I would love to find out how many other bloggers run more than one blog and if you do, what problems are you finding?

1. Cyanide and Happiness - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Explosm

2. The Dilbert Blog - http://dilbert.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/atom.xml

3. 9 to 5 Mac - http://www.9to5mac.com/feedburner.xml

4. Deputy Dog - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Deputydog

5. Sarah Britten - http://feeds.feedburner.com/thetimes/britten

And a few extra special mentions:

David Airey - http://feeds.feedburner.com/CreativeDesign

Publicity Generation - feed://http//www.publicitygeneration.co.za/?feed=rss2

Freakonomics - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/rss2.xml

December (the month we are in) marks three years of blogging for me. More specifically, three years of blogging on this blog. Now the name might have changed a few times which definitely hasn’t helped my rankings at all.

This is not going to be on of those posts where I explicitly explain what I’ve done in three years and how its felt deep down. To be honest I don’t think you care and I don’t think I do either.

But this blog has been an interesting experiment for me. It has become part of my “real” life. People I’m out with begin sentences and stories with “don’t blog this but…” and that’s when you know.

I have made friends, lost friends (I have enough friends anyways) and built incredible relationships in business and my private life all thanks to this very blog.

SA Rocks is a result of this blog and to be fair, this blog is a result of the influence of the Groogle and Shnitz. So thanks to them too I reckon!

I have also been thinking about my “linkbaiting” as some may call it. It’s not. All that I do is speak my mind and take a different angle to the norm. Most of the time I piss people off, most of the time I don’t really care but sometimes I do and sometimes I listen.

My recent silence has been thanks to my end-of-year-brain-drain. I will be back on my game soon. Here’s to another three or more years of blogging!

We have all heard the “blogging elite” in the world talk about niche blogs and their effectiveness. I have rarely found a blog that sparks my interest in the “niche” category but this one has.

Deputy Dog has no “about” section so I am going to make one up. The site focuses on phenomenal things. Let me be more specific. The author actively seeks incredible photos, stories and videos of amazing phenomena such as double story winding bridges, planes almost crashing in to one another and many posts such as “The world first…”.

It’s kind of a “World first, biggest, oldest, largest etc etc etc” blog. Which I find fascinating. You can’t take everything (or anything) on the blog as gospel but I can read this sort of stuff for hours. Much like that old show Ripley’s believe it or not on TV, this blog really makes me want to click back in to the archives.

Do yourself a favour and read the blog now.

I really struggle to MyDigitalLife (MyDL) blogs. It’s not the blogs themselves or the bloggers, it’s the fact that on Amatomu all MyDL blogs appear with a single author, MyDigitalLife. Immediately that puts me off.

I have glanced over and ignored countless posts by MyDL bloggers for this reason. In stark contrast, I enjoy reading Iblogs, Amagama and other who have individual authors listed on Amatomu.

The reason? I think that it is due to the fact that in my mind it appears as if MyDL is trying to own the content of all their blogs and thus alter editorial content.

I was asked to post SA Rocks posts on MyDL a while ago. I started using the service and received little to no feedback. I then noticed my current issue with them on Amatomu and have yet to post another SA Rocks post on MyDL.

Simply put, bloggers on MyDL need to take back their blogs.

Vottle has pumped some serious moola in to their advertising campaign recently. I think we have all heard them on 5fm or whichever other radio station it was.

Yet I am left a bit baffled and bemused at their approach to blogging. They clearly believe they have a massive product if they are willing to pump money in to their campaign. They clearly have the money to do this, but they have a BLOGGER blog?

Not only is the website a .com url, which means they have a hosting package attache to that .com, but they most probably have a great big hosting package to cope with the traffic they built up over the ad campaigns. So I ask you, where is the .com/blog blog? What are you thinking?

Blogger might have been cool a couple of ages ago, but now blogger blogs are filled with porn, spam and clutter. .com blogs are the way forward, .co.za blogs are a very suitable substitute, but a blogger.com blog is not acceptable. They might have redirected the blog to “blog.vottle.com” But they have chosen to keep the Blogger template. This really makes no sense to me.

I suppose that any online presence in the form of a blog is better than no online presence. But surely an ONLINE company knows better and knows about better services?

Lock it up and throw away the key. Get a Wordpress blog.

I have started to do it recently as have many more bloggers in SA. I have seen people become bloggers and bloggers become products. The latest of which is Tyler. Tyler has apparently not only branded himself, but is currently RE-branding himself.

Now I have no real problem with this in essence from a person like Tyler because I understand what he is saying. People are brands, companies don’t buy in to a product any more, companies and clients all buy in to people. That means that you are up for sale, you are on the pricing boards every time you open your mouth. This is undeniably true.

My question is this: What have we become when we are selling ourselves openly, blatantly and shamelessly? People have always sold themselves as part of the package but had the tact to hide it. Now I openly say that I am worthy of x or y amount and my time is worth R350, R450 or more per hour. In days gone by you were the product up for sale but the client was not aware of this.

Blogs have, in recent times, played a great part in creating this forwardness if you will. People feel obligated to talk to their community and tell them what is going on, even if that is a trade secret (The secret being YOU). I personally like to keep my trade secrets to myself.

I am interested to see how the bloggers, new media evangelists and entrepreneurs feel about this topic.

The subject of Blogs has been covered intensively by the world press over the past decade. Advancments in Blogs can be linked to many areas. Until recently considered taboo amongst polite society, its influence on western cinema has not been given proper recognition. It is an unfortunate consequence of our civilizations history that Blogs is rarely given rational consideration by so called ‘babies’, many of whom blame the influence of television. At the heart of the subject are a number of key factors. I plan to examine each of these factors in detail and and asses their importance.

Social Factors

Interweaving social trends form a strong net in which we are all trapped. When Thucictholous said ‘people only know one thing’ [1] he must have been referning to Blogs. A society without Blogs is like a society without knowledge, in that it is quite good.

Our post-literate society, more than ever before, relies upon Blogs. It grows stonger every day.

Economic Factors

Economics has been defined as ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.’ To my learned ear that sounds like two people with itchy backs. We shall examine the Inter-Spam model. For those of you unfamiliar with this model it is derived from the Three-Amigos model but with greater emphasis on the outlying gross national product.

What a splendid graph. Obviously housing prices sings a very different tune. The financial press seems unable to make up its mind on these issues which unsettles investors.

Political Factors

Politics was once a game featuring competitors from elite classes. Comparing Blogs and much of what has been written of it can be like comparing Blogsism and post-Blogsism.

To quote the uncompromising Kuuipo Rock ‘A man must have his cake and eat it in order to justify his actions.’ [2] What a fantastic quote. It would be wise to approach the subject with the thought that ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’. However this can lead to missing out important facts.
One thing’s certain. The Human species liberally desires Blogs, and what’s more human than politics?

Conclusion

To conclude, Blogs has played a large part in the development of man in the 20th Century and its influence remains strong. It sings a new song, ensures financial stability and never hides.

Here with the final word is Hollywood’s Keanu Jackson: ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without Blogs.’ [3]

End.

I wish that I had written this essay, wait, I am not sure about that. Anyways, this essay was produced by Essay Generator. Give it a go, type in a word and it pops out an essay! I wish that I had this sort of site when I was a student.

I am considering a change in name and url for Shutterview. I am tired of Googling my blog and finding another site. I am tired of hiding behind my blog with my opinions. I think I am perfectly happy for people to know who I am by the name of my blog. I have never hidden behind my blog url but also never promote who I am.

I am just a bit stuck about hosting, url purchase, design etc etc etc. So, if you have any suggestions, thoughts or comments, feel free to send them through.

I am considering an obvious but easy http://nicharalambous.com as the new url.

Is it worth the admin of resubmitting, reclaiming, technorati ranking, google ranking, alexia, RSS feeds, subscription losses etc etc etc? I’m not sure, but I am sure that I am fed up with blogger in a big way.