IAB

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Joost Invitation

It has been a while since I posted something to my blog. Last year I was very busy webmastering all the websites of the StarParks/CDA group and TGV viral web campaign for my company Tagora. During this period I also followed the The Venice Project, the peer-to-peer tv technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). Since some time we know the official name: Joost (pronounced 'juiced').

Joost invited some beta testers and the reactions I've been reading over the last weeks were very positive. As a webmaster you try to keep up with the lastest technology so you can speak by experience during meetings, brainstorm sessions, ... in your company. And so some days ago I tried to Google for a Joost invitation and I landed on the weblog of Brent Roos. He has some Joost invitations but he doesn't want to give them away for free and that is his good right. So he announced a contest on this webpage saying if you want to be considered receiving an Joost invitation, you have to write an article about it. And so I did.

I will keep you updated if Brent Roos was so kind to send me one of his Joost invitations. Meanwhile don't hesitate to visit his blog. There are some really good articles to read about e.g. Global warming.

Wijfzonderlijf.be and CroQaudile.com

Yesterday I sent out some e-mails to my friends and I hope my collegues did the same or will do the same this week. I will check the statistics at the end of the week and I'll put them online.

But yesterday evening I had a brilliant idea! I created an account at this very popular Belgian blog Wijfzonderlijf.be: a blog where everybody can add its own video, picture, ... Different from the other sites I created a profile in my personal name so I did not use the Tagora.
I did the same for another famous and popular blog CroQaudile.com: here they immediately edited my subject line into: High speed train and deleted the word TGV out of the content.

The number of views on these 2 pages were great and on both sites I got a reaction.

How great were those views on these 2 pages you wonder?
Well I just checked the Dutch TGV movie at YouTube and in 1 day I managed to generate more than 530 views (yes in 1 day) So this plan worked!

Briefing internal email

I just got briefed on how to boost this campaign. So they want me to go and have a chat with my collegues and write them an e-mail. So this is what I can up with:

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>> Dutch version:
Subject: TGV wil in alles de snelste zijn. Of toch in bijna alles …

Hallo

TGV heeft enkele verleidelijke promoties online staan. Om de website extra kleur te geven, bedacht Tagora een originele reclamespot die je zeker eens moet gaan bekijken via onderstaande link:

http://www.tgv.com/be/nl/annexe/video/video.html?from=mail

Stuur deze e-mail door naar alle vrienden in je adresboek zodat ook zij kunnen genieten van deze promoties en de leuke online reclamespot.

Groetjes
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>> French version:
Sujet: TGV veut être le plus rapide en tout. Enfin, presque en tout…

TGV a mis online quelques promotions qui sortent des sentiers battus. Pour donner au site de nouvelles couleurs, Tagora a mis au point un spot publicitaire original que vous devez absolument aller voir via le lien ci-dessous:

http://www.tgv.com/be/fr/annexe/video/video.html?from=mail

Envoyez cet e-mail à tous vos contacts pour qu’ils puissent également profiter de ces promotions et de cet étonnant spot publicitaire en ligne.

Salutations
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I hope this will have some effect. I have also send some e-mails out to a couple of friends with the message to go and have a look at the funny videoclip and the promotions on the TGV site. I hope this will create a first viral wave.

Viral starts inside?

The views are still very poor and the brainstorm session gave no real solution.

So I got the message from my 2 COO's to start this viral campaign within our firm. They suggested to write an e-mail to our floor (the floor to their friends, their friends to ...) and ask them to go and have a look at this funny videoclip and the promotions on the TGV website. I will be briefed after the weekend. I'll keep you updated on this matter.

Copyright and other troubles

For the last week I tried to post the TGV videoclip on as much video sharing websites as possible. I will put the list with all the links here asap (to be continued)

After the upload on these sites I got some comments from administrators: problems with copyrights, no commercials allowed, ...

But the worst part is that we don't have a lot of views on those video sharing sites but neither on the TGV website. So I sat down with the Interactive departement for a little brainstorm session and they only think we can generate some traffic to the site with an extra bannering campaign. They don't think a little contest will help because it will be on the site itself without any exterior bannering campaign.

My first blog post ever ...

Ok I know: it's really a shame that a webmaster doesn't have his own blog. But hey, I didn't have the time to create one. Till now.

This is how it all started ...
A few weeks ago my collegue Geert Desager, Business Development Manager & Strategic Consultant at Tagora asked me to help with a new project for TGV. TGV had a small budget and they wanted to do a classic banner campaign since their objective was to create brand awareness for their site. Instead of the classic campaign we shot this funny/sexy video, created the html pages on TGV.com and ...

... My task: try do give this whole campaign a viral character:
- by posting this "TGV - In bed" video on all possible video sharing websites such as Youtube
- by getting in contact with influential bloggers in the different target countries to have a look at the video and if they like it to blog about it.