According To Professor Frink's Calculations, Occy Should Win The Clash Of The Icons
Internet forums, websites and Twitter have been alight the past week as one of surfing’s greatest rivalries go toe to toe at one of surfing’s greatest locations, Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. With both Occy and Curren at 8 wins each, it’s harder to pick than a broken nose as to who would come out on top. At time of wirting, Tom Curren has taken 1st blood in the 2 heat series, but with swell on the increase, the ball is back in Occy’s court for the second match up.
Since announcing the rematch, tongues have been wagging left right and centre as to further rematches between some of the sports’ greatest – it’s all starting to remind me of the latest Rocky movie.
Over the past few months, I’ve been testing a number of social media monitoring tools that analyse conversations online, identify key tastemakers and influencers, and generally act as an eye in the sky across multiple platforms. Brisbane agency Dialogix have been leading the charge in this field in Australia, I quite enjoyed testing their system. Shout out to @mattgranfield
Viral Heat is another good tool, and for this experiment, I’ve been using their system for the past few weeks to monitor the online activity of Occy and Tom Curren. Who is the favourite when it comes to most mentions in social media? Computer Says… Occy.
Rumble In the Jungle, Surfing Style
According to Viral Heat, Tom Curren has had 323 mentions, whilst Occy manages to edge him out with 342 mentions this week. Pretty damn close. Now I have to say, these results are not 100% accurate. The spiders that track these results are tracking individual characters, so for example, with Tom Curren, you also get words like ‘currency’, etc… This is my biggest ‘beef’ with social monitoring tools; unless you have an extremely unique key word, you are likely to also get alot of unwanted junk in your results. But having said that, they are an extremely valuable tool for any brand; as not knowing what consumers are saying about you, is like sticking your head in the sand.
But for the fun of it, here are the results of the tracking of Occy Vs Tom Curren, Clash Of The Icons, social media style.
Social media mentions of the term 'Occy'. Source: Viral Heat.
Social media mentions of the term 'Tom Curren'. Source: Viral Heat.
Conversation monitoring of the term 'Occy', just after the Clash Of The Icons heat. Source: Viral Heat
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Without attempting to drown in a pool irony, I thought it only appropriate to kick of this blog, with a post about blogs. I have to admit; this is about the 4th blog I’ve started, most of which went nowhere fast. Why?
Time and content.
Finding time to blog when you’ve got a number of commitments such as work, family, and not to mention surfing as much as possible often makes it hard for me to pull my finger out and start posting. Not to mention developing a niche content plan.
I’m not a photographer. I don’t shoot video. Though I wish I did both. So the chances of creating exclusive, quality content are slim and nil. My previous efforts saw me heading down the same 10 Questions road as every other blog and website out there. Whilst that was fun, it wasn’t unique or compelling.
So I went back to the drawing board to try and carve out a niche gap in the increasingly competitive world of digital surf media. And that’s exactly where I found the gap.
Is it just me, or has the number of surfing websites and blogs seemed to have doubled since the start of 2009 compared to years past? More so, it seems traditional print media have finally pulled their fingers out and realised they need to be just as competitive online as they are in print. But we’ll come back to that in the next few posts.
I’m a regular reader of all the industry press I can get my hands on, including Boardsport Source, Australian Surf Business and Transworld Business. But being a digital media enthusiast / junkie / tosser, I’m yet to find anywhere dedicated to the online environment of surf media in the digital space.
Surfing is leading the way in global sports with live web casting, and the endless amount of content that makes the sport so rich. So hence, this blog will be dedicated to digital surf media.
10 Blogs You Should Check Out (In Alphabetical Order)
5Ones Very ‘cali action sports’ (surf / skate / snow), which is all the more noticeable if you’re not from California, but this blog seems to be getting better all the time with the quality and frequency of their content.
Billabong I have to say, I’m on here almost every day because they’re constantly hooking me in with links via Twitter. Some brands don’t get how to differentiate between their website, and a blog, but they seem to have adapted a great strategy to creating content for the blog.
Board Of Marketing You guessed it, a marketing blog checking out some of the hottest marketing campaigns in surfing. Still early days for this blog, but definitely one to keep an eye on.
Caught Inside This is a cool blog because they’ve carved themselves a niche. Surfing movie news, reviews and insider tips. Not the most comprehensive blog by any means, and it’s very California (not there’s anything wrong with that), but if you’re after some surf clips to watch, and can’t be arsed with youtube, it’s worth a look.
.tv/dion Dion seems to have THE best job in the world. Surf. Party. Blog. BIG kudos to Globe for being one of the 1st on the case with letting free surfers run wild with the blog.
The Goods Life The social media stars of the ASP world tour. I say that because CJ and Damo are totally on it with their blog, posting pretty much every day on their adventures around the globe. Pun intended.
The Mountain And The Wave For a global brand, Quiksilver’s blog feels very pro-USA (which is not a bad thing), but I’d like to see them utilise their worldwide network with producing content from some other regions. But there is sh*t loads of content here which you could spend hours / days digesting. Digg in.
Modern Collective Incase you haven’t heard, Modern Collective is the brand spanking new project from Taylor Steele protégé Kai Neville. After kicking round for a while making awsomse DVDs for the Australian surf rags, and most recently having a major hand in the Poor Specimen production Stranger Than Fiction, Modern Collective channels the current psychedelic-electro-triangle-rave scene, with big crazy airs and busting of fins at every opportunity with the likes of Jordy, Julian, Dane and the newest of nu-skool.
RVCA This is one of those ones where the brand website adopts the blog format. And with the very strong artistic focus of RVCA, it works perfect for them. Cool as f**k. Please send me some clothes.
The Rock Rip Curl have adapted the calendar format blog, which is hardly revolutionary, but works really well for The Rock project. Daily blog entries over 20 days in Hawaii. Keeps me clicking on everyday. Hours of fun here.
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