“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.”

Looks cool, what do you think?

Via Brand New.

I thought it would be sensible to grab a Facebook page for the island itself back in 2010. Since even the organisations which seek to represent the Island have their own brand names, (e.g. “Isle of Wight Tourism“), there was going to be a gap in the market for someone to just represent the Island.

This has given me an interesting perspective on the various organisations on and around the Island that seek to gain an audience on Facebook, and this made me think, who gets Facebook on the Island? Well, without further ado, let’s find out!

General Tourism

First lets look at the pages which intend to represent the Isle of Wight. This includes my page (The Isle of Wight), but also some others including Isle of Wight Tourism and Red Funnel’s ‘myisleofwight‘…

This shows that the brand of the island on its own easily attracts ‘likes’ from Facebook users, people will much more readily click ‘like’ for a generic Isle of Wight page than they would for one that says ‘Isle of Wight Tourism’ for instance. This doesn’t particularly take into account the effort put into the pages, and the full time & content rich nature of pages with big money behind them, which will no doubt grow over time.

I launched ‘The Isle of Wight’ page back in 2010, and its growth has been pretty much entirely viral since then, I am still working out what to do with it, but I do try and keep its content up to date, and use the page to promote my own photography, for instance.

Travel Operators

I happen to find this category quite interesting, the massive disparity between the market leading ferry operator Wightlink and Red Funnel is in my belief, down to the promotional efforts that Red Funnel has put into building their fan base. Whenever I have gone on a Red Jet to or from Southampton, there is quite often something promoting a competition to win Festival tickets or iPods or something or rather if you like the Red Funnel page. Maybe this is what Wightlink has been missing out on?

It’s certainly hard to believe that Red Funnel is 400% more popular than Wightlink as this chart suggests, but anything’s possible, right?  Alternatively it could be the SEO value achieved by Red Funnel, who’s page is named ‘Red Funnel Isle of Wight Ferries’; is there something missing from ‘Wightlink Ferries’ name?

It is interesting to see other smaller operators getting Facebook pages, like some taxi firms; however some haven’t posted regularly or at all, so is there even a point in them having such a page?

Tourist Attractions

Now I’m not really an expert on Isle of Wight tourist attractions, so I may have missed one or two here, but here’s the chart…

It is clear here that the Dabells (Robin Hill & Blackgang Chine) are well out in front, however Robin Hill have achieved this through the use of a personal account rather than an official company page. The Robin Hill personal page has over 3000 friends, but this could mean Robin Hill did the friend requesting.

Regardless of who did what, and whether having a personal account for a business is really sustainable, the fact is that Robin Hill is able to advertise to just under 4000 people, and Blackgang just under 2000 people through Facebook, which is impressive to say the least. Their efforts put others such as The Needles pleasure park (who pay so much for advertising on the back of buses) to shame…

Media & Government

This graph is particularly interesting, since media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian have been able to exploit social media so well on a national scale, how local media on the island performs on these kinds of platforms may well determine who stays and who goes in terms of media firms. So let’s see the graph…

I was immediately struck by how far down the chart the Island’s number 1 media provider is, The Isle of Wight County Press has invested an awful lot into its website, but their presence on Facebook is pretty much a robot app called ‘RSS Graffiti’, getting one or two likes and comments on an odd article, and the page is closed to wall posts. The newspaper could earn a lot more followers by opening up, asking more questions, and finding a better way to present its stories to Facebook users.

Which brings me to VentnorBlog and Isle of Wight Radio. Both have embraced interactivity, and post directly to Facebook, rather than relying on robots (most of the time), and it shows. VentnorBlog, who many people had not heard of a few years ago has over 3x as many ‘likes’ as the Island’s best known newspaper.

It’s also notable and possibly worrying that the Council’s update page, which was created to inform people of cold weather, and now serves to post press releases and travel updates, has more followers than the Isle of Wight’s local newspaper. Local government interacting more with social media than local media? Now that’s crazy.

Last but not least, it’s….

Major Events & Festivals

Now I haven’t found any major flaws in what these guys are doing with their Facebook pages, but I thought you might find it interesting to see the popularity of these differing events on Facebook. Again, different factors involved, so you can’t say definitively that one is more popular than the other, but it’s a good indication!

Yes, Bestival has 43,800+ fans, over 13,000 more than the Isle of Wight festival. I was going to include some other smaller music festivals in this chart, but it’s just so unfair to compare them! Cowes Week is an interesting comparison, as a far more niche event with a completely different audience, is that about the number of fans that Cowes Week is able to get, so should they be satisfied? or could they push social media more during the event?

So there you go, a little look into the weird and wonderful world of Island-related businesses and Facebook.

Do any of them really get it? Now that’s a question.

Information gathered on 3 and 4 February 2012, this is not definitive or expertly researched, just my own personal perspective, which might be wrong.

Updated 4/2/2012 to add ‘friends’ of VentnorBlog and show clearly the difference between ‘friends’ and ‘likes’ on graphs.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/11/shepard_fairey_designs_occupy.php

It was a few months ago that I blogged about Marlboro’s ‘subliminal’ advertising on the back of Ferrari’s 2010 Formula 1 car. The story became news about 2 months later, when doctors demanded an inquiry into the matter and it caught the media’s attention.

As a result of the media attack on the ‘barcode’ design on the back of Ferrari’s car, after denying that the design had anything to do with Marlboro, Ferrari caved in, first replacing the barcode with an empty white box, and then entirely getting rid of any such markings on the car.

Marlboro remains in Ferrari’s name (Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro),  and as a barcode on uniforms and helmets. In this case the company no doubt predicted correctly that, having removed the mark from the car, the media would be silenced – any complaints about the barcode remaining elsewhere easily dismissed as pedantic mumbling about old news.

This whole story tells the tale of one of the last remaining tobacco advertising tales in F1. One that started years ago, with only a few nations censoring the ads, teams replacing brand names with allusions, barcodes, and tongue in cheek slogans, like Benson & Hedges’ “Be on Edge”. This was a phrase I noted on some B&H packs just a few weeks ago, showing that link between F1 and tobacco still persists, long after its (theoretical) abolition.

Now with tobacco largely absent from F1, other areas of controversy are beginning to become visible. The finale of the 2010 F1 season was last Sunday, and crowned surprise victor Sebastian Vettel. Vettel is unique in this season as he only led the Drivers championship for one race, that was on Sunday; and he was also the only F1 driver to be stopped from getting into Silverstone by my friend Stephen, who refused him entry into the British Grand Prix because he didn’t have a pass.

But back to last Sunday’s Grand Prix, held in Abu Dhabi. This city is in the UAE, an arabic country, with understandably Arabic laws. I first noticed it on the Uniform of McLaren’s Jenson Button, below BOSS and other sponsors. It was ‘DIAGEO’. This name may not be familiar to you, I doubt it’s familiar to a lot of people. It’s the company that owns Smirnoff, Strongbow, Guinness, and McLaren regular sponsor ‘Johnny Walker’ whisky.

The company had replaced all the mentions of its Whisky brand, on the competitors uniforms and helmets, to say DIAGEO. Similarly on the Force India cars, the usual ‘Kingfisher’ sponsor was different. Instead of plugging Kingfisher beer, instead the cars said ‘Fly Kingfisher’. Going from alcoholic beverage to little known airline in little more than 3 letters. Fly Kingfisher does exist, I have no idea where it flies, but it’s owned by the same person who owns the beer. One hopes they aren’t trashed while flying the aeroplanes.

As Arabic countries become more and more important in F1, and business, and the mainstream world – we’re only going to see more controversy where Alcohol is involved… and I can’t help wondering if it offers a foretaste of what lies ahead for alcohol advertising in the West, given the experience with tobacco.

Maybe it’s old news now, but perhaps it’s worth a bit of introspection a week after the dramatic scenes which became the defining image of the Student protests in London.

Now much could, and has, been said about the media, and how its at fault for highlighting a negative minority in a protest. This problem is not new, and was best highlighted by Charlie Brooker in his deconstruction of news coverage of the G20 protests. This protest was also defined by a violent few, resulting in legitimate peaceful protesters having their voices drowned out by the sounds of shattered glass and crackling flames.

Whether the emphasis on a violent minority by the media is right or wrong, it’s worth examining the other aspects of the protest to see whether they could, at least partially, explain the violence.

Now I’m not planning to go very in depth here, as I’m sure others will, but here are my thoughts on the issue. Organisers at the National Union of Students (NUS) were fast to denounce the violence after it happened, but one probable cause could be the language used by the organisation when it went about promoting the protests.

On the left is a poster for the Student Demonstration, based on the graphics issued by the NUS. It clearly says ‘Demolition”, a clever play on words on the one hand, after all, The ‘Demo’ was against the supposed ‘demolition’ of the education system. At least in the view of the NUS.

However, in hindsight, this slogan may have been a mistake. Demolition was a name given to the protest, and reinforced by a lot of the poster messaging given out by the NUS, and thus distributed around England’s Universities. This name was seized on by at least some groups, including those Anarchist ones later blamed for the incidents at the Millbank Tower as a definition for the event.

The sites were shown on the news, clearly titled their plans for the event under the same ‘Demolition 2010′ name which the NUS had suggested, with these posters, for their protests. This name could have led to an interpretation of the event very different from the “peaceful protest” that the NUS stressed that it intended after the event.

I don’t think anyone can say clearly whether things would be any different without the use of the aggressive language (and indeed military style graphics), and its hard to know whether the NUS will relent, since they now state they want to conduct “Decapitation Strategies” against any Lib Dems who break their pledge.

Will someone have to lose their head before the NUS uses theirs? Only time will tell.

Welcome one and all! I have finally got around to redesigning my website, after almost a year or so. The last website was very much focused on photography, and while that is something that I do, and still enjoy, it’s much better expressed on my Flickr page than on a website which can be difficult to update.

This new site, not only has a new colour scheme, but also places an emphasis on the design work I have been doing over the past few years, and am now able to do for paying clients. The site is based on the excellent Tesigner wordpress package and matches my Print Portfolio perfectly.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the site, I’ve spent quite a while on it!

The group was primarily Facebook based, and designed to counter the group called ThWART (The Wight Against Rural Turbines).

Since its formation ITAG has gained 1,751 members on Facebook, and been featured in the local media when Turbine issues have been raised.

I designed the logo for the group, which was selected from a number of designs by Kerri, I also produced a website for the organisation, and finally I produced placards protesting the Vestas wind turbine factory closure in summer 2009.

Each of these elements has been reproduced in local and national media, the placards being seen on the front page of The Morning Star, in the pages of The Socialist Worker, and in the background of national bulletins.

Locally the website was shown in a report by BBC South Today, and logos and photographs of the placards could be found in the Isle of Wight County Press and news site VentnorBlog.

As part of the project I designed not only the logo, but also packaging for the product, as you can see below.

I was asked back to design both the website ecoEmblem.com, and the packaging for the product which I endeavoured to make professional class.