Going offline: a guerrilla marketing campaign for my website

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Going offline: a guerrilla marketing campaign for my website

16 August 2007

A few days ago I wrote about how I had been trying out a little bit of guerrilla marketing, as mentioned at ProBlogger.

As Darren says, guerrilla marketing campaigns may not result in great floods of traffic, but it can be fun having a bit of a dabble nonetheless.

For my part mounting such a “campaign” required very little “real” work, just a redeployment of some existing resources, and taking advantage of my close proximity to UNSW, one of Australia’s largest universities.

Here’s what I did.

First up I created some A4 flyers. The “hardest” part was preparing the flyer to print specifications… that is using CMYK colours (instead of RGB colours), and a resolution of 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi, the usual resolution of images served to the web.

This meant I had to draw a new heart shape from scratch, since nothing else I had would scale properly. While the bigger version turned out just a slight tad wonky, I was otherwise very happy with the flyer.

As you can see the flyers have convenient “tear off” tabs, so the thousands of interested flyer viewers can look up disassociated.com as soon as they reach a computer.

The next step was to arrange some business cards. I needed these anyway, but realised they could also play a part in my guerrilla marketing.

There are a few shops that allow you to design your own cards and then send them the artwork as a “pre press” file in PDF format, all for a relatively modest outlay.

The shrewd (ha, if I say so myself) design of these cards allows me to cut off my contact details while leaving the logo and truncated URL intact, which then forms a handy calling card.

If you happen to visit UNSW you may have already noticed some of these babies around the place…

disassociated.com calling card seen in a lift

As well as of course the flyer, which I placed on a couple of boards around the campus. When I checked back a day later, a number of the tear tabs had been torn off, so there had been some interest.

disassociated.com flyer on noticeboard at UNSW

While it is difficult to gauge exactly what sort of response, in terms of traffic, this campaign had (I was checking my web stats for visitors from Sydney and/or UNSW servers arriving via “no referring link”), it was by no means overwhelming.

Still it was relatively simple to pull off, didn’t require huge resources of time or money, got me out of the house and away from the blog for awhile, plus gave me the chance to get back to UNSW and check out the campus again.

For some edgier examples of guerrilla marketing check out Web Urbanist, and if you’ve tried out any guerrilla, or off-line, marketing yourself please leave a comment and tell me what you did, and how it went.

Originally published Thursday 16 August 2007, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

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Spider-Man 3, a film by Sam Raimi, with Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst

28 May 2007

I’d heard a lot about the third Spider-Man movie before I saw it, and not all of it was good. Terms such as “spider cheese”, and the like.

But this is the third and final instalment of the franchise as directed by Raimi Smith, and given he needed to tie up a few loose threads that have run through the series, I suppose some cheesiness can be forgiven.

Some things seemed a little rushed though (such as Harry’s turnaround). I still liked it. I don’t really like to say a movie was crap, but Spider-Man 3 wasn’t quite as fun as the previous two.

Originally published Monday 28 May 2007.

The History Boys, a film by Nicholas Hytner, with Richard Griffiths

21 May 2007

While I enjoyed The History Boys, it wasn’t quite the hilt at the British class system, or epic struggle against the odds, sort of tale I had expected. It was more or less a fly-on-the-wall look at the lives of a group of gifted students who had the opportunity to gain places at two of England’s oldest, and most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

I actually thought the epilogue like ending was the best part, a scene which kind of melded onto the end of a teacher’s funeral. Given the story was set in 1983— just fourteen years ago — this is one of the best “where are they now” sequences I have seen in a movie so far.

Originally published Monday 21 May 2007.

Scoop, a film by Woody Allen, with Scarlett Johansen, Hugh Jackman

16 May 2007

Scoop is the latest Woody Allen production, and combines elements of his earlier work including Manhatten Murder Mystery, and the more recent Match Point, plus of course Scarlett Johansen. The result is a quirky, yet fun, murder whodunit set in London and the neighbouring Home Counties.

Allen plays a touring magician — who’s often surprised when a trick seems to work — who meets Sondra (Johansen), when she takes part in one of his shows. Together they find themselves trying to solve a murder, working only with scant clues supplied by a recently deceased journalist (Ian McShane), who has managed to return from the afterlife.

Fans of Allen’s trademark neurotic banter will not be disappointed.

Originally published Wednesday 16 May 2007.

Bobby, a film by Emilio Estevez, with Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore

14 May 2007

Bobby is a “what if” movie. What if Robert (Bobby) Kennedy had been elected president of the United States in 1968, as he seemed destined to be? What if he managed to stay in office for eight years, thus by-passing the Nixon era? What might the United States, and the world, be like today as a result of his influence? While the big picture is enthralling, the smaller one is no less so.

Bobby is a dramatization exploring the stories of some of staff and guests working, and staying, at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, on 5 June 1968, the day Kennedy was killed. We also are left pondering “what ifs” of their lives. Kennedy is only seen in the movie by way of archival footage, but nonetheless makes the strongest screen impression.

Originally published Monday 14 May 2007.

Progress? Coming soon, the disassociated WordPress blog

13 May 2007

The wordpressing (my new favourite word) of disassociated is well under way. It’ll be a while before anything happens though, as I’m trying to convert four years of static HTML file blog entries into a format I can upload to a WordPress database.

It’s not all cut and paste work. There’s quite a bit of formatting still to do. Redundant CSS styles and HTML tags need to be removed (to say nothing of dead links, but later for those), and there’s still the risk it won’t work. It should though.

As part of the redesign I have created (and uploaded) photos to a new-ish Flickr page, so go check it out. More photos will be added as I go. Bye for now…

Originally published Sunday 13 May 2007.

The Last King of Scotland, a film by Kevin Macdonald, with Forest Whitaker, James McAvoy

23 March 2007

I’m not sure how exactly to classify The Last King of Scotland since it’s not actually a true story in itself, though the portrayal of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), and his reign of terror, is certainly accurate.

The Last King of Scotland tells the story of Amin’s rise to power through the eyes of Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a graduate doctor from Scotland, who through various turns of events becomes Amin’s personal physician.

Garrigan’s euphoria at being newly arrived in Uganda matches that of the Ugandan people, and their belief that the then new leader Amin would turn the fortunes of the country around. Garrigan’s subsequent lapse into depression and despair also parallels that of Uganda, as the previously charismatic and apparently affable Amin becomes increasingly tyrannical and oppressive.

Whitaker’s fits-like-a-glove portrayal of Amin surely matches that of Helen Mirren in The Queen.

Originally published Friday 23 March 2007.

The Queen, a film by Stephen Frears, with Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen

9 February 2007

Constitutional politics has always fascinated me. And The Queen offers — for me at least — an intriguing insight into the British governing hierarchy.

Set in 1997, newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) nervously sets off to meet the Queen (Helen Mirren), to be invited to form a Government. While the Prime Minister holds the real, executive power, the Queen has an authority of her own. But this standing is threatened, following the death of Princess Diana, in the weeks following Blair’s election.

Originally published Friday 9 February 2007.

The Pursuit of Happyness, a film by Gabriele Muccino, with Will Smith

20 January 2007

The Pursuit of Happyness: based on a true story. I loved the central character’s lateral thinking abilities. Often with little warning, he manages to devise excuse upon excuse, while lurching from one crisis to the next. And if losing your home and going bankrupt isn’t bad enough, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is also trying to land an internship at a prestigious stockbroking firm.

Originally published Saturday 20 January 2007.

The Prestige, a film by Christopher Nolan, with Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale

30 November 2006

First an aside, I wonder if The Prestige was the team behind 2005’s Batman Begins deciding to apply their collective acting and producing talents to a completely different story? We have Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and director Christopher Nolan, all from Batman Begins, present here.

The Prestige traces the unhealthy obsession (is any obsession healthy though?) friends turned rivals, Alfred Borden (Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), have with each other’s magic acts, and the ends one will go to, so as to out do the other.

Caught up in this rivalry is Scarlett Johansson as stage assistant, Olivia, who becomes romantically involved with both men during the course of proceedings. And though I knew David Bowie was also in the movie, I didn’t recognise him as Tesla, an American inventor competing with Thomas Edison.

Originally published Thursday 30 November 2006.

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