Get out there and Get Fit

So the clocks have sprung forward, and ok we lost an hour, but so what spring is snapping at our heels and when we leave work tonight at 6 it will still be light. But the announcement of spring also means that summer is round the corner and that means dressing less and getting out those white bits that we have lovingly cultivated over the cold winter months.

If your New Year’s resolutions have run flat, your jeans are still on the snug side and the summer holiday, so tantalizing close, remains un-booked because you can’t face the prospect of a bikini (or trunks for you guys), fret not here are some credit crunch busting ways to get fit:

1. Get a decent pair of trainers and run run run yourself skinny. Check out www.mapmyrun.co.uk for inspiration, and to ensure your start-up runs aren’t too ambitious. Also head down to the London Marathon on 26^th April – you have to admire them…

2. Find a trainee practitioner – we have a lady that is training to be a yoga teacher and takes us for classes for just £1.50 a pop. We get some instruction and she gets to practice. You can’t argue!

3. Cut price lessons. You’ll be surprised at how many gyms and local classes are doing deals at the moment – they are feeling the burn too so call up to find out what’s going on near you… Also some personal trainers will take group bookings so you get to split the cost and get extra motivation from working out with friends.

4. Walk up the escalators lazy bones – Or are you one of those people who rushes and bumps past me off the train in the morning just to stand on the escalator and waste valuable butt exercise time, you know who you are…

5. Re-visit your childhood and get down to the local pool – I hate swimming (swimming costume = the most unflattering piece of awfulness ever made) but having dropped my nephew to his lessons the other day I was amazed at how hi-tech the local facilities now are. I’m still not going but if you’re brave enough give it a go.

6. Go for a stroll at lunchtime - http://www.londonforfree.net/walks/index.shtml. What more excuse do you need to actually get away from your computer at lunchtime.

Just think of the beach in July – Enjoy!

The best of the 'new Banksies'

Whether they're dropping impromptu pieces among the bins or launching full-on digital art happenings, London's street artists are moving fast. Below are some of the new street artists to watch out for!!

D*face
D*face creates classic street art. Like Banksy, his imagery is wry, graphic and accessible. He started out producing Disney-influenced pop characters, which he printed on stickers and posters. Now he makes more complex, playfully anti-establishment graphic pieces fusing gothic skulls with icons from Che Guevara to the Queen.

www.dface.co.uk




Eine
Hoxton man of letters
Eine is in love with typography. Over a few years he has transformed Hoxton into a giant sentence, covering many of the area’s metal shutters with colourful capital letters in a circus-style font.

Over the past two years, Eine has painted more than 60 of his letters in London, Newcastle, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris. ‘Every time I visit a crime-ridden city I try to paint some shutters. You only find shop shutters in places where there is a fear, real or not, of crime,’ he observes.
www.einesigns.co.uk



The artist known as Caliper Boy
If Tim Burton made street art, it might look something like Caliper Boy. Images of this disturbing Victorian character pop up on fly-posted prints in strange nooks of London, emblazoned with the words ‘Dirty Little Secret’ or ‘I Feel Damp’. The artist prefers to lurk behind his creation: a disabled boy in a full body brace with one hand down his pants. Caliper Boy has a whole backstory, loosely set in the 1850s.





Adam Neate
Cardboard is his medium, the streets are his sketchbook. Unlike many street artists, Adam Neate couldn’t really be called a vandal; a litterbug, maybe. For the past decade he’s scattered his paintings around London, dropping his work everywhere from Shoreditch to the unsuspecting galleries of the Tate. Notoriously, he once left 100 pieces among east London refuse piles for the bin men to deal with. Neate views his freely distributed pieces as the foundation for ideas he then develops in gallery work, a kind of giant urban sketchbook on found cardboard. For Neate, this alternative to canvas has the added attraction of scratches, scuff marks, dents and holes. ‘If the surface already has some feeling to it, it will help with the feel of the painting,’ he maintains.

New Stationary Arrives

Boxed Water is Better for the Earth

That is the view of Benjamin Edgar who has founded a company that endevours to make water packaging more sustainable. Boxed Water is Better uses recyclable carton packaging instead of the standard plastic bottle. According to the company's website they are "part sustainable water company, part art project, part philanthropic project, and completely curious."The packaging is made up of a very green 90% of recycled materials, and in terms of transportation, about 5% of a truckload of boxes would require about 5 truckloads of empty plastic or glass bottles!

To me it sounds like a brilliantly simple, genuinely sustainable idea and who knows, we could all be drinking water from boxes in the not too distant future.

Alliance & Leicester

On Thursday last week we went along to our first MCCA awards. We entered the PR category and the Best of the Best Planning category. I'm proud to say that we walked away with a Merit in the Best of the Best Planning category, up against some amazing agencies this was a real coup.

The campaign has so far won a DMA, Finance Innovation, and PR Week award. Oh and now an MCCA.

I just wanted to say a big well done to all of the team who made this happen! Kate, Lisa, Belinda fantastic work guys. Thank you!

A Basic Guide to Twitter

Twitter is fast turning into the latest web phenomenon. It is essentially a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. With celebrities such as Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry spearheading a recent surge in popularity, we thought we would explain what all the fuss is about. Here is our guide of how to get started, as well as some recommended Twitter etiquette.

Firstly, get yourself registered.

Next, work out why you are using it - for work or pleasure. If it’s for your brand then outline what you would like to achieve through the platform. It is important to have clear objectives to maximise the potential of your twitter page. These can include:

• Making your brand more personable
• Active engagement with a certain target audience
• Driving traffic to your business
• Driving traffic to your website/blog

Next, ensure you build a successful business profile online, this can be done by using this checklist:

1. Claim your company, product, and appropriate brand names by registering your unique brand URL early.
2. Keep the profile honest.
3. Create a link between your Twitter profile page and website.
4. Be a helpful member of the community by answering other people’s questions.
5. Keep the tone true to your brand, whilst taking the opportunity to have fun and show some personality.

You can use Twitter to talk about your brand, but for it to really work you need something interesting to say. Ideally, if you have a ‘fan base’ of sorts, this will be a great tool for you to keep them hooked with tidbits.

An application called Mr. Tweet helps you to build relationships by looking through your network and your tweets. Mr. Tweet will regularly suggest good people and followers you are missing out on, recommend you to enthusiastic users who are relevant to you, and regularly update useful stats about your Twitter usage. It’s a valuable tool that will help you make the most out of Twitter.

Finally, and most importantly for marketers are the stats - Twitter Friends is a brilliant way of keeping abreast of Twitter friend numbers as well as how many followers your page has had over the past month.

All there is left to do is get twittering…

Harnessing the Power of Influencers

Harnessing the Power of Influencers

Every brand wants to create word-of-mouth and peer recommendation. We believe that influencers offer a credible way to drive this. The Lounge has been working with influencers for the past four years, involving them in our clients’ communication strategies to maximise both impact and reach. Here are a few of our tips on how to build an effective influencer programme.

Firstly, establish who influences your target audience. This is best done by talking to your audience. Those they look to for advice and leadership can vary from friends and family to avidly-followed bloggers, journalists, those at the top of their game within specific interest groups or major celebrities. At The Lounge, we identify exactly which influencers are likely to resonate best with the audience by talking to our Peer Network – an 8,000 strong panel of 11-35 year olds.

We divide influencers into four groups – peers, local heroes, major players and celebrities. We map out which levels are best to engage, and how, depending on the brand, their objectives and who the target audience is. Peer influencers are the early adopters and trend setters within grass roots social circles. Local heroes are those who are renowned and influential with your target audience in their geographical region, town or city. Major players are those who have risen to the top of their game within a specific industry, interest or lifestyle. And we all know who celebs are.

Secondly, ensure there is a real connection between your brand, your campaign and the influencer(s) with whom you’re working and that they have a genuine role in your campaign. To help with this, identify why influencers would want to work with you. This could be for several reasons:

i) Mutual benefit – We worked with Dirty Pretty Things (major players / celebrities) on the Samsung Band on Your Campus campaign. They were looking to promote their new album launch and saw the partnership as the key component in their marketing campaign. As such they immersed themselves in the campaign and spoke about it at great length in radio interviews on Radio One and XFM.

ii) Passionate about your brand or the campaign benefits – With ‘Big in the Game’ for Electronic Arts, we worked with 47 local heroes and 34 major players/celebs within the hip hop scene. They bought into and were passionate about the benefits of the hip hop training workshop programme we created to promote EA’s titles. They saw that EA was providing long-term support for the lifestyle and community, which was their lifeblood.

iii) Financial - If you have one of the first two motivations covered, it’s likely you won’t have to spend money to persuade your influencers to get involved, or if you do, it’ll be a lot less. If your influencer is only getting involved for financial reasons, it’s unlikely to gel.

Thirdly, be pragmatic about the appropriate level of involvement and commitment from different levels of influencer. Peers, local heroes and major players offer a focused approach if you’re looking to target specific locations or interest groups; major players and celebrities are more likely to generate national/international PR but will be a lot more restricted on time.

Fourthly, you’ll get a lot more out your influencers and wider coverage of their involvement if it forms part of a wider campaign. The influencers themselves are more likely to have a real role to play, which gives them something tangible to talk about through a variety of communication channels. If they are genuinely on board, they will also be happy to promote the campaign through their own media channels. For example, we recently worked with Sway to promote EA Need for Speed. Throughout the campaign, he posted updates on his popular MySpace and blogs.

If you’re interested in finding out more about working with influencers, from both an insight and activation perspective, drop us a line.