A little geekiness lurks within all of us, some more than others (like the dude who can recite 100 decimal places of pi or this guy), so we’ve been working with Market United and iiNet on a competition to separate the geeks from the nerds and find the country’s Top Geek.

How it works

Casting [now - 14 Jan]

It’s an open call for geeks and people can submit themselves or nominate a friend. Participants then need to rally support for their entry by getting people to vouch for their geekiness by seconding their nomination.

Selection [15 Jan - 30 Jan]

The 5 entries that rallied the most support automatically advance to the finals and iiNet selects the remaining finalists (they know a good geek when they see one!).

Finals [31 Jan - 28 Feb]

It’s a geek showdown where the finalists complete challenges, upload videos and rally support in a points race to become Top Geek.

The lucky[ish?] guy or gal named Top Geek wins an all expenses paid trip to the geek conference of his or her choice [SxSW, Comic-con, PAX or CES] – as well as some serious bragging rights.

Enter here.

My presentation on the business application of location-based service Foursquare from last week’s AMI FutureComms workshop:

Location-Based Marketing: Foursquare + Businesses

My Kitchen Sucks!, an IKEA campaign we’ve been working on with Market United launched earlier this week:

Shoddy, dated or just not functional — tell us why your kitchen sucks and you could win an IKEA kitchen to the value of $10,000.

With my partiality duly noted, I’m still gonna say that this campaign is pretty damn awesome.

South Australians and West Australians simply own up to their avocado green appliances, stained and kettle-burned laminate countertops and harvest gold linoleum tiles for the chance to win a brand new $10,000 IKEA kitchen (one to be awarded in each state). Voting is open to the public, and entrants can earn extra points by uploading evidence (photos and floor plans) and by publicly shaming themselves (sharing their entry on Facebook, Twitter and email).

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OK so this is a tad self promotional but there’s something in it for you so don’t be too quick to judge. I will be presenting at this year’s Sydney ad:tech and if, despite this announcement, you were still thinking of attending (16th and 17th March) then drop me a line (marc@thinqdigital.com.au) as I can send you a code that scores 20% off your ticket(s). Here endeth the promotion.

Today we launched Bring It Back!, a social media campaign we devised for Ashley and Martin.

The campaign concept is simple - losing things sucks. Your favourite food gets discontinued, a great television show get canceled, bands break up… but you’re in luck, Ashley and Martin wants to help bring it back.

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Okay, let me start by saying that I wanted to post this for a couple of reasons

1. Disclaimer: I worked on it. Bluefly was one of my very dearest clients while at Attention and I was heavily involved in this campaign from ideation right up to launch; I’m incredibly proud of how it has turned out.
2. In my post about the Toyota Yaris agency campaigns, I suggested an approach of identifying influencers (ugh, can we get rid of that word already?) and then activating and empowering them to act as brand ambassadors. The proof is in the pudding, right? So here ya go…

Overview: America’s Most Stylish Blogger (affectionately referred to as AMSB) is a collaborative effort between designer fashion e-tailer Bluefly and Stylelist (AOL’s fashion and style blog) to find the country’s most style savvy blogger. The campaign commenced with an open call for submissions from which 8 bloggers were selected. The contestants are from all over the country, range in age and life stage and each possess a unique personal style.

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Oh noes, another cyberstoning!

Toyota’s Australian marketing folks are copping it for their unconventional RFP process, which has agencies competing their best Toyota Yaris campaigns against one another to take home the glory, the honour, the respect of their peers… and a retainer relationship with the car company! You can just see the agencies frothing at the mouth over this.

If you’re not familiar with Toyota’s social media ‘experiment’ here’s a quick overview (mUmBRELLA goes a bit more in-depth):

• 8 of the big digital/viral/guerrilla/social media/PR/advertising/[insert marketing buzzword here]  agencies were asked to devise a social media campaign for the Yaris
• they were given 2 weeks dev time and a budget of 15k
• the top 5 were allowed to take their campaigns live and face the public
• the top 2 win projects with the company in the coming year

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