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Britain’s Got Talent – The Masterful Use OR Abuse Of Social Media?

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Around comes February again and with it the latest dose of reality television – in this case it’s Britain’s Got Talent 2012. These shows have now become so regular that you can pretty much add them to your calendar at the beginning of the year. They are extraordinarily successful at bringing in the viewers and humanising the struggle that individual acts have to make it & become known in their respective industries (lets face it, it’s mostly the music industry!).

So this year the makers of Britain’s Got Tallent have decided to up their social media participation by giving one space on the live shows to youtube entrants. This involved a live stream on youtube last Monday evening to showcase 24 entries that were uploaded to youtube.

Get this – Over the following week each of the contestants have to get as many votes on their video as possible and the one with the most votes by the end gets a slot on the live shows – simple!

So is this a masterstroke by the BGT producers or is it exploiting 24 young & talented artists for the TV show’s gain? One could argue that the whole show does this! All of these 24 acts have to share the BGT youtube page all over their twitter & facebook pages & plead with their friends & family to do the same & get as many votes as possible so that they stand a chance of getting in front of Simon Cowell and the other judges. This means that before the show even airs that the website & youtube channel will have had tens of thousands of facebook shares, tweets and hits which creates a certain amount of buzz to get the viewers to turn on for the 1st show.

The reason this concept is so great is because the content for the show is organically created by the people themselves. Simon Cowell has truly mastered this to make the most watched TV shows consistently over the last decade. This is a step further to help the show dominate word of mouth on the social networks with the viral aspect being driven for free by the 24 acts themselves. If each act has say 200 facebook friends that are close enough to the act to share the link on facebook & each of those friends has an average of 200 friends……then in just 1 step the Britain’s Got Talent link has been exposed to 9.6 MILLION people. Remember that this show hasn’t even aired yet!

So what do you think? Masterful use of social media OR abuse of the willingness of acts to do whatever it takes to get onto the show?

I am most definitely in the “masterful use” camp. Remember that all of these acts are currently searching for their big break so they have been done a huge favor by BGT just by being selected to be in the final 24 youtube uploads. All of the buzz created within their personal networks will count for something and should benefit them for some time to come.

So why have I blogged about this? As it turns out my best friend is one of the aforementioned 24 acts!! His name is John D’ambrosio and he’s a great guy who deserves to be (at least as much as all of the others) on the show & take his chance with the viewing public. Please click here to go to the youtube channel and find his video called “John D’ambrosio – With Or Without You” and just login to youtube & click vote. You can vote up to 5 times per 24 hours so if your keen then please help further by coming back tomorrow & doing the same.

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on this type of leveraging competitions to create social buzz? Do you have any other examples of this working well or maybe not so well. Please share in the comments.

You May Hate The Weather But We Don’t!

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My Facebook & Twitter feeds are full of people moaning about the cold & snow.

People order more stuff online when the weather is rubbish, not only do they order stuff online more they also eat more! This makes ordering food online literally the perfect industry to be in at this time of the year.

So whilst everyone else is probably hoping for the cold snap to end or the sun to come out I’m sat in our office every day praying for the coldest winter since records began.

Sorry folks, I’m just not with you on this one :-D

Blogging – One Year On

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Its coming up towards 1 year since I started this blog mainly as a personal diary interspersed with my musings on various topics. Since the first post I’ve churned out 25 posts at irregular intervals with a mix of video blogging, advice, and diary format content.

Over the last 11 months the blog has received a fairly modest 4000 unique visits with the most popular page understandably being this one explaining the E-resistible story.

The next most popular post which sends a steady stream of google traffic is the one on how to combat credit card fraud; I’m glad that I started the blog just for writing this post. Clearly there are many other merchants  out there with small ecommerce websites suffering from fraudsters and I’d like to think that my post will have helped them to deal with the issue.

Aside from that this post seems to gain interest from people looking to find out how much Pizza Hut pays per hour!

So blogging is fun, its nice to have somewhere to put your thoughts. I wouldn’t say I was particularly good at it but I know friends & colleagues like to read & catch up on what I/we’re up to.

So thanks for reading :-)

Why Warwick University IS An Amazing Place To Start A Business

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Following on from my moan about why Warwick SU aren’t interested in student start-ups I was a little worried that people may think that Warwick Uni itself isn’t a great place to start a business when in fact the complete opposite is true. I wanted to outline some of the reasons why Warwick IS an amazing place to start a business and why it’s reputation for entrepreneurial activity is justified and deserved.

1.) Warwick Business School has to be the first on the list. Whatever people say about the institution, it is one of the leading business schools in the country regularly featuring in the top 5 rankings. The facilities and teaching on the whole are first rate and their investment in technology to aid learning such as my.wbs.ac.uk is well ahead of all other departments and most other universities. The idea for E-resistible came out of a first year module called The Integrative Project which gets undergraduates actively participating in entrepreneurial activity right from the start of their degrees. It is safe to say that without this module we may not have a business now.

2.) Warwick Entrepreneurs is the society run by students specifically to help other students with their start-ups. This was set up a few years back by Demetri Koursaris founder of The Uni Express and has been run by some very capable presidents in recent years. They regularly run workshops to help students bring their ideas to fruition and organise a university wide competition to win £1000 called Be Your Own Boss which E-resistible entered and won last year.

3.) Warwick Internet Entrepreneurs is an offshoot of Warwick Entrepreneurs designed to specifically help students with ideas that involve the internet. Lead by Oo The Nigerian they are turning Warwick into an enterprise hub for the West Midlands and have a vision to create a UK silicon valley around Warwick rather than London.

4.) Warwick is a campus uni which lends itself to so much more entrepreneurial activity than a city one. Students are very easy to identify and market to, they also require more services than people living in a city who have them all right outside. This means that immediately there is a demand for a takeaway delivery service, The Uni Express provide student bus travel to off campus night clubs, I have even heard of students making homemade bread and selling it to others in their hall because Tesco’s is a 15 minute walk away.  A campus with 3000 people living in close proximity is a perfect place to start a business with a captive audience just waiting to try out your product or service.

5.) The university do help! Obviously Warwick is primarily an education establishment so its not their job to help students launch businesses, however once they knew about us the communications team in particular have helped E-resistible enormously. They have featured us in their 2010 prospectus for WBS, got us interviews with newspapers such as the Birmingham Post and basically use E-resistible as a good example where-ever appropriate. They do get the benefit from this too however it is very welcome exposure for us and shows that the department is switched on to what is happening across campus. Incidentally check out their advent calendar on the 16th, hint hint!

That’s just a few reasons why Warwick IS a fantastic place to start a business and the amount of entrepreneurial activity taking place all over campus is proof that it is an environment conducive to getting your idea off the ground. The main ingredients to a successful start-up are still the people involved and that will never change, but if you’re in an environment that is encouraging and supportive the chances of success are most definitely increased.

1st Post

Posted on by stevebarnesblog
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Hello All,

I’ve been inspired  to write a blog for a few different reasons.

1.) I have seen others doing a fantastic job of writing blogs which I enjoy reading & find interesting.

2.) I continually get asked hows the business going? and what am I up to? I never know the answer to these questions as I never know if they are just being polite or if they are genuinely interested. This will hopefully help those who are genuinely interested!

3.) I’m at a really exciting part of my life with new experiences & lessons being learned every day. I hope that this blog will serve as a history of my personal development working for E-resistible.co.uk so that I don’t forget everything that I do as life seems to be flying by.

I’ve added a box to the right so you can subscribe to have new posts delivered to your email if you want to keep right up to the minute with the updates! It may also make it less tedious than checking back for new updates.

Feel free to comment even if it’s just for banter, I’d love to know what you think of the posts or if you want me to write about anything specific.