For many companies, a silent blog means either that they don’t really understand online media, or that they are just focused on the core business which is mostly offline, or that they are about to go bust.
None of those things are true for Small Pictures. Most of our business *is online and what is more, it’s thriving. Considering that writing about things, aka blogging in olden parlance, is one of the things we do best, this company blog has been shamefully neglected. It’s just we’ve all been terribly busy, so bear with us while we play catch up.
We devised and launched quite a few successful additions for our illustrious client John Cleese, as he attempted to rake in as much money as possible to assist with his alimony payments. Here’s what we did, in brief.
World of Cheese – John Cleese Merchandise. We designed a lot of nice new t-shirts and other apparel, including custom tour shirts. Some designs are based on the old man’s Twitterings.
For example, this tweet: http://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/5387626328 gave rise to this shirt within minutes:
The shirt promptly started to sell and has continued to sell ever since. This is real time web meets real time retail – you read it here first.
We’re so contemporary it hurts.*
John Cleese’s Nigerian Lottery – aka the email newsletter – was a great success. We took over the old list, cleaned it up, gained 5,000 new addresses from the 270,000+ Twitter followers and continued banging out fun monthly missives.
It was a blatant, opt-in third party marketing ploy, and though we’ve been gentle so far and sold official t-shirts and advertised John’s tour dates, obviously we included ads for other people for a reasonably high price, as long as they were sufficiently amusing.
So, contact us by leaving a comment here if you have a product or service you’d like us to shill to John Cleese’s most fawning fans, or anyone’s fans who we like, we’ll consider anything legal.
Facebook finally changed its Terms and Conditions so that they didn’t lay claim to your first born child and your pension, which meant we could begin to use that sprawling social network. We picked up the unofficial fan page from a kind and generous fan, authenticated it, and we added 20,000 new members in a little over a month and it now runs with 1.8M users. We also run a private Facebook JC fan group of many thousands.
We’ve always had cunning plans in the pipeline, including mobile activity (iPhone, Android) which is now called TikTok. If you really want to keep up to date with our Cleese and other superb activities, you’re better off following John’s Substack, even though given the huge investment of time and energy we put into our day to day work will only occasionally get a look in. The only reason I’m writing this now is because the weather is so dreadful, and I’m stuck in on a Saturday night.
TTFN.
* these asterisks donate the existence of Mark Crook who with Dean Whitbread was very effectively running Small Pictures. His musicality, gift for animation and quirky appeal gave our punchy two-person business a lot of success right up to and even beyond the great crash of 2008.
** This double asterisk explains what the The Great Crash of 2008 was for those who don’t know what happened when and how. It refers to the global financial crisis that erupted following the collapse of the U.S. housing market bubble, marked by the Lehman Brothers failure on September 15, 2008.