This week Gorkana invited us to their brilliant breakfast briefing to discuss what we do at MSN UK and how PRs can make their stories a success on the portal. It was a great opportunity to share some insights and hear feedback. Thanks to everyone that came along.
Gorkana took notes from the session along with videos which you can view here.
So on the eve of this year’s Oscar nominations I finally got round to watching The King’s Speech at my local cinema. Had to really, Colin Firth is bound to get an Oscar for an outstanding performance as the stammering King. Safe to say, everyone from ol’ blighty is gunning for him. He’s come a long way since his Jane Austin days and 2009′s A Single Man was outstanding.
It will be good to see some of those Oscar nominations finally turn into awards for our Colin.
That said, the The King’s Speech is not without criticism. Although the story of the relationship between King George VI and speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) is compelling enough – the characters are shadowed by the stammering antics of the King to the point that they lack any psychological depth.
The Logue character could have been so much more. He’s a brilliant ‘outsider’ and the audience connects immediately with his mocking of the institutionalised values of his day. But his character is never allowed to develop so he remains this sort of Shakespearean clown-like figure, great in contrast to the King but never believable in his own right.
The same could be said for the rest of the supporting cast – they are all very two dimensional and blinded a little by Firth’s leading light.
That said, when the film finished I did wonder if they would make a sequel. Perhaps, this would be the chance for Logue to really shine.
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Check out our latest interview with Adele as part of our MSN Xclusives coverage. We’re really pleased with this one. She’s a great singer and we already think her new album Rolling In The Deep is going to be one of the best releases of the year. In the interview there’s a great story about how she got the inspiration for the music on the album from her tour bus driver.
Well, as they say, it’s not what you know.
A funny, warm and honest account of making an album. This girl is just going to get better and better.
This week I presented at the Content Strategy event in Richmond – discussing how we approach ‘Search’ in our editorial workflow at MSN. My main point was that search is now so much more than ‘just’ SEO, especially now that search engines are taking more account of our social media activity when ranking pages.
And if you add to the mix the way that trending topic tools (Tweet Deck for instance) can shape the type of stories you choose to publish that day – then the lines between search and editorial begin to blend.
That’s why good ‘Search’ in the wider sense reinforces good editorial practise and promotion. You don’t have to compromise, they can all work together in harmony to hit your online objectives.
Great to see so many questions raised and thanks to everyone for their input. My edited presentation below.
I’m pretty impressed by this – got tweets back from Jeff Brazier and Fearne Cotton both in the same day. Soon my plan for world celebrity domination will be complete. MWAA HA HA HA HA HA!
PS: Best of luck to Jeff who’s currently battling it out on Dancing On Ice. We think he’s the best and that’s not just because he writes a regular Jeff Brazier column for MSN Entertainment!
Christmas TV for 2010 was a mixed festive bag. When I look at what I actually recorded on my PVR over the Xmas break, it looks like the only programmes on offer were random ‘comedy classics’ and a collection of films that no one else would bother watching (Groundhog Day anyone?) at any other time of year. Why do we still put up with this kind of shambolic scheduling on terrestrial TV in the UK?
Anyway, one programme that did hook me in was the Take That documentary Look Back Don’t Stare. You couldn’t have missed it, they repeated it across the various ITV channels about four times which must have made it the most heavily marketed album (Progress) across TV over Xmas. The record label scored a real coup getting the album this amount of exposure and its not hard to see why. The reunion of the band is a great story and the band, along with the label and media, are milking it for everything it’s got.
So, as a promotional tool, you’d expect the documentary to be nothing more than a marketing platform for the said album and, to some extent, it mostly is. There’s a lot of familiar archive clips thrown in as the band answer familiar questions. We get taken through each of the new tracks and the reasons why they were written, cue the classic depictions of rehab and eventual resurrection. To make matters worse, a lot of the band banter is staged creating more than a few cringing moments as the band pretend scenes haven’t been discussed or rehearsed beforehand.
Take the scene below when Robbie meets the guys in the New York Studio for the ‘first time’ to discuss their thoughts on getting together. As Robbie starts to sing lines from ‘The Flood’ I’m left wondering if the programme producers think we’re all idiots. Maybe I am, I’ve been watching it for over ten minutes now.
However, as I kept watching, I found myself becoming gripped. I should have been reaching for the remote but it slowly began to dawn on me that the tracks on this album were actually very good. Although I was trying to resist it, this documentary was giving me every reason to buy the album. I love stories around music, all that drama and intrigue and as I began to listen to the songs I began to realise this was a very honest account of an album being created.
So I have to forgive the documentary makers for pandering to the mainstream by creating these false scenes mentioned above – how else could you simply explain how a group of people start working on an album? The truth is probably a lot less interesting and complicated than a hour long programme can handle. And, let’s admit it, there’s nothing more boring than musicians talking about music.
Oh, and I also thought I saw Stuart Price in the studio with them, although I don’t think anyone would recognise him anyway.
Utterly brilliant.
What would the ultimate SEO checklist for your team look like? It would probably include a bit of detail, as well as the a bit of strategy, taking account of how your own editorial team is structured and the resources available to you. Oh, and it would be easy to understand and execute. Every team is different so here’s my own suggestions:
No doubt about it. Every time I watch this 1972 BBC recording of Chuck Berry it cracks me up. The guy is such an effortless player and frontman, he’s got the audience eating out the palm of his hand. The funny thing is when it comes to Johnny B.Goode, Chuck Berry starts to a go a bit wild and you can clearly see the rest of the band struggling to keep up with him. Not sure if this was his regular backing band or just a load of musos they wheeled on at the last moment to support him.
Great to watch Chuck pushing the band as much as he can and having loads of fun in the meantime. Great tune as well.
Needless to say, this post has nothing to do with Content Strategy at all, although, thinking about it, Chuck’s performance strategy is quite interesting. Namely, ‘take no survivors’.
Random thoughts and observations from an MSN Content Manager. Mostly about entertainment, mostly good fun!
I last listened to:Copyright © Steven Wilson-Beales
Content strategy, music, thoughts
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