30 July 2007

I recently came to the realization that the tension I feel over blogging is due to the fact that I'm often unable to blog about the stuff I'm the most passionate about.

Allow me to explain: Being a web director, I'm often working on projects that are under wraps, not yet live and therefore not "bloggable." The stuff I'm researching and working on are often "confidential" until they are made public, so my blogging about them would simply ruin the surprise.

The workaround: I do get to describe the project the minute it goes live. I get to talk about the work/rationale behind the project and answer questions that people are asking. So even though there is tension - I'm trying to make the most of it.

The Office Series Project

For the past week or so I have "gone dark" (to use a Jack Bauer term) in order to finish up the website for this upcoming series before I go on vacation early next month.

The plan: Think outside the box (again) in order to create buzz surrounding a felt need series targeting peoples unfulfilling work lives.

The Execution: In order to create this buzz we initiated the following:

• Billboards: obtain eight billboards in the community and advertise the series with witty sayings and display web address of site below.
• Website: created a separate site for this series (purchased domain name and forwarded it to www.gccwired.com/office and masked as www.myofficesecrets.com/ for those interested).
• Office Secrets: created a place where people could (anonymously) tell their secret office stories.
• Wallpapers: created desktop wallpapers from billboards.
• More Fun: Offer ways for people to interact. Page created so people can email pictures of their messy desks and have them displayed on the page. Page created so people can upload videos of their "crazy office games" to YouTube and have their link added to the page on our site.
• MyOfficeSecrets.com linked back to the series page on GCCwired.com.

Sidenote: Twice in the past month we have made an intentional decision to use YouTube rather than having people send in videos on DVD and encoding them for use in house. The quality is poor but this is the tradeoff: social acceptance is high, there is high potential for buzz and there are helpful features like YouTube providing the link to the video and the code for embedding the video into your site/blog.

Another fun project completed.

Go document your office secret now >>