Pirates

I went to a pirate party during R&G week and herd loads of fantastic jokes and was thinking to myself there really just aren’t enough opportunities to air pirate jokes .September 19^th is world talk like a pirate day  but that’s ages away and of course you can change your Facebook language setting to New English (pirate) but in general there just isn’t enough pirate talk .So I decided to dedicate this blog to pirate jokes .

Why did the pirate go to the apple store ?

To buy an iPatch….

What did the pirate say when his wooden leg got stuck in the freezer?

Shiver me timbers !

What Did the pirate get in his leaving cert ?

All high SEAS !

Pirate walks into a bar ,and asks for a Coras light and the barman says are did you know there’s a the ships wheel is down your pants?

Pirate responds ,Yeah It’s driving me nuts.

Why is the life of a pirate so addictive ?

Because when you loses one hand you get hooked?

Why are pirates so opposed to cannibalism  ?

Because they don’t swallow seaMEN .

Well guys their my favourite pirate jokes if you’ve got or think you’ve got any better one please post them there.

Love Machine

On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day I’ve decide to dedicate this blog to the business of love .I’m not talking ”MeLoveYouLongTimeTenDolla”.That’s what Asian prostitutes say . Incidentally, when I was younger I used to wear a jumper that said that, until someone’s mother old me what it meant.

 Internet dating is big business these days and apparently not the preserve of weirdoes and phsiopaths  .Really ? though I hear you ask. According to Hitwise a market research firm, online dating is extremely popular and here to stay. In fact online dating at times, can accounts for 1% of internet usage. Extremely popular are niche sites that focus on religion, ethnicity, or special interests. My favourite, that I came across this morning was doglover.biz which promises to ” help dog loving sole mates find each other”. Ok evidently there are some weirdoes out there.

Internet dating has been a massive financial success. There are thousands of new sites going live every day. With thousands signing over their cold hard cash in search of Mr/Mrs Right. There are many free online services out there .Apparently your better investing the cash ,to save time weeding out the college students with too much spare time making fake accounts ,purporting to be hopelessly romantic, millionaires, who like foreign travel, read the times and like cuddles. Online dating is relatively inexpensive with sign up charges at around 30 euro for the year. Most sites over a browse before you buy policy. This means you can peruse the quality of their stock before signing up. It’s all just so romantic.

 But we shop online, study online talk to our friends why not meet your future husband online. Are we being old fashioned to turn up our noses at the 4Billion dollar industry? I’ve already been to the wedding of a couple who meet on line. Ohhh, I can hear the sharp intake of breath from across the web as you realise I associate with cyber daters. Well do know what, take your nickers out of a bunch Granny, they are totally normally, not suffering from any form of social ineptitude and the wedding was a serious party. People thought social networking sites was the preserve of geeks and cyber freaks when they first hit the internetweb, and sure look were all on them now. I’m turning down an ever increasing number of friend requests from relatives and friends parents ever day. Thank fully I haven’t had to sit down my parents for that awkward chat where I have to explain that we just can’t be Facebook friends.

Ok well I leave you with some ideas for profile headers if any of you feel like giving the move machine that is cyber dating a whirl and making some dating profiles ….

1. You must be over 6″ to read my profile

2. Coffee, Chocolate and Men – some things are just better rich

4. Willing to lie about how we met!

5. I bathe Every Day !

Please let me know if any of you give it a go and report back.

Social Sports

Super Bowl 2011 retreats back to the recesses of our brains for another year and the last of the post-game analysis is pittering out. Yet the internet is still awash with analysis of the other big game that was big played on that faithful Sunday night “BrandBowl”.It’s got every ad agency in America glued to their screen. It started in 2010 and was a massive success organised by duo of Mullen &Radian6 teamed up again to bring us brand bowl .This year it was in the top 3  trending words on Twitter in the world on the big night !So I suppose you could say its catching on.

 Brandbowl is a real time social tracking app, It scores the leading ad campaigns during the  Super Bowl. It works by measuring positive, negative and neutral sentiment from Tweets about brands during the big game, along with total tweets for a brand and total tweet for all brands. It then breaks down the scores to level the playing field so regardless of whether you had 10 ad or just one or still in with a chance. Brand bowl then reveals the most talked about and most liked ad. Brand bowl attracted 60,000 people to tweet the ” #BrandBow”  hash tag .They analysed over 30,000 tweets that they could discern were talking about super Bowl ads.

This year Crysler was the overall “winner”, Volswagen was the most liked and Doritos was the most Tweeted about in terms of volume.

But stepping away from all the buzz ,fun and the extremely complex statistical programs that are used to turn out the results, account managers are left asking the question they always ask. What’s the pay back where,  the ROI where to you put positive tweet sentiment in the Profit and Loss accounts.

The wall street journal’s Driver seat Blog posted this early the week after the Brand Bowl Winner was announced.

“Moments after the spot ran during the third quarter of the Super Bowl, online searches for information about Chrysler and the Chrysler 200 spiked on auto-shopping web sites. Edmunds.com reports that research on Chrysler models on its web site jumped 328% after the ad appeared.

Autometrics Inc., a company that tracks activity on more than 100 auto-related web sites, reported that 131 people actually sought price quotes from dealers within 10 minutes of the ad’s airing. By midnight it was up to 839. By comparison, Audi’s commercial for the A8 generated 380 requests for quotes, Autometrics Chief Executive Stephen Shaw said”

Although this seems like more concrete results than just % sentiment ,I still feel that the financial benefits of social media need to be made more accurately accountable. It is very hard for companies to hand over huge sums of money to social media marketers without being able to see the ROI .

Does anyone know if there are any more accurate measure out there, at the moment or if there are any in the pipe line ????

Politics 2.0

Today I came across an article about a young candidate running as an Independent in Dublin south east ,now when I say “young” I mean young .This guy, Dylan Haskins is 23 and as one of the comments on his YouTube video astutely pointed out he looks like Jedward’s younger, yet significantly less mentally challenged  brother. From my brief research into Dylan and his politics he seems like a nice fellow, up for greater transparency and accountability in our political and financial systems, who isn’t I here you say .He hasn’t gone to great pains to explain how he would achieve this, but I’m sure he has some sort of a plan. I say best of luck to him. We need more young people in politics, especially ones who haven’t got half the country’s pensions on their conscience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdHZ5LNIhs

Dylan has something in common with one of the great political figures of this century, Mr Ohhh-bama. Now don’t get overly excited I have a few things in common with Gisele Bundchen, were both female, white, above average high but it doesn’t necessarily mean were the same .Mores the pity. So what do the two politicos have in common, they both understand the web 2.0 and more specifically social media .It’s been well documented that Obama used social media to spread his message of hope and to amass bucket loads of cash for the campaign trail. Team Obama included social media guru Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook .He didn’t make the film, but still a very important part of The FB landscape. This man knows to handle social media like Kate moss know how to handle a drugs scandal (her endorsement rose by appx 300,000 in the year subsequent to pictures of Cocaine Kate breaking).

 During the race for presidency Obama had 3 million online donations. He sought lots of small donations .The standard practice is huge, more morally questionable donations from big businessmen. Further, he used sites like Flickr and YouTube to distribute his "message of hope." and had a presence on no fewer than 16 social media sites. He encouraged supporters to create their own content and that idea, and those images and videos, went viral. Two million people created profiles on my.barackobama.com. This was the jewel in his campaign.

Obama went to where his customer base was. He couldn’t go to everyone’s kitchen, he could friend them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. He could connect with specific ethnic groups through MiGente (Latinos), BlackPlanet (African-Americans), Glee ("gay, lesbian and everyone else") and others.

They say Nixon got radio, Kennedy got T.V and I’d say when people look back they will say Obama got social media. We are entering a new age of politics where votes aren’t won in the hearts and minds of men they are won on the social media battle field. Dylan Haskins competition may be able to grow beards, but he seems understand social media so perhaps he has a chance.