I can’t remember how I came across it yesterday. I did notice something ‘strange’ about the YouTube page but thought it was just because it would be a custom-built page. When the guy reached out of the video, I nearly freaked. And then, the pièce de résistance, the ability to type in your own choices and see the video response. Amazing.

I really like this for several reasons:

• It’s utterly viral. That is, it’s video – which often works because it’s a rich experience that people can easily share through just one link – it’s funny, it’s clever, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve written about viral before - what makes a good viral, and what is not viral. However, it also enables you to participate, which makes it almost totally viral in that you can change it, play with it, then pass it on. The closest I’ve seen to this is the Obama ‘What happens if you don’t vote’ video which I still love, but I wonder whether the Tippex viral tops it?
• It’s joined-up. I guess the insight behind it is that you can make small changes that have a big impact. This is good, much better than ‘You can erase things and change them with Tippex.’ And so they go from the insight to the execution. I mean, who’d have thought about bears? Creativity abounds.
• It has long legs. There’s huge scope for this to go on and on. Personally I’d like to see them invite people to create their own small videos for the terms that aren’t there. For example, I notice they don’t include ‘Tweets a bear’ which is probably quite a big miss. So, invite people to submit their own, and you get the audiences not just engaged, but activated.

I just wish I could have worked on this one. It must have been so exciting to come up with an idea you knew would work, then make it happen, and to take the client along with you. Whoever is behind this must be feeling pretty good about themselves today.

And I’ve noticed that it’s slow to load now. This is because it’s everywhere. How much more viral can you get? Let’s see how it pans out shall we? The chart below shows trends data for searches on the term ‘Tippex’. Let’s see if it starts to go up on the back of this.

Anyway, as the guy keeps saying to me: “Come on! Write something up there!” Top tip: give ‘tickles’ a go. It’s cute.

It took me about half a day to sort out the invoices alone, plus, given recent scares, chasing accounts departments for assurances that monies will be paid before the end of the month. As Yul Brinner would have said “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

So, imagine my surprise and delight when the end of the month comes and goes and no one pays me?

Thing is, it’s a tough old time for everyone but I have a strong feeling larger companies are more able to absorb non-payments than freelancers. For me, it’s fairly simple: I borrow money off a mortgage lender so that I can live in my house; I work for people who pay me; I pay the mortgage lender back so that I don’t get thrown out of said house.

You can probably spot the difficulty here. If the people I work for don’t pay me, I can’t pay the mortgage lender, and I get thrown out of my house. I think the same sort of thing happened to a lot of banks, albeit on a slightly larger scale and with less accountability.

So if you have a freelancer on your books, here’s some advice in nice, easily digested bullet points:

• If the freelancer asks for a commitment to a pay date, and you give that commitment, you need to keep it because the freelancer needs to as well. That’s why it’s called a commitment.
• If your accounts person ‘only comes in on a Tuesday’ or ‘just got back from holiday’ – or indeed, has ‘just gone on holiday’ – this is not an excuse, especially if you’ve been copied several times on correspondence.
• If you ‘forgot’ to forward invoices to the accounts department then you deserve to be the middle section of the Human Centipede. Talk about easily digested. Yuk.

Finally, if you think ‘it’s just us’, think again. I have just been let down by three clients and now I’m in a bit of a pickle. So I guess the fourth point should be:

• If you forget to pay a freelancer, it’s entirely possible other clients have too. OK so it’s not a conspiracy but the net effects are similar.

Part of me wants to get even and list the clients’ names publicly on this site, particularly the miscreant who has now let me down twice in a row. But that would be foolish in the extreme. Or would it? Comments and/or large sums of money here please.

Today I saw an interesting tweet from Mark Ragan of Ragan Communications. He pointed to a list of ’25 Essential PR Blogs’.

This piqued my interest for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I have a bit of form when it comes to lists of PR blogs. I used to curate the PR Friendly Index, in which I attempted an evolving, transparent methodology in which to rank the PR blogs that I read. I learned a lot from doing this and, incidentally and completely honestly, got a lot more attention for doing this than I ever anticipated.

Moreover, I was interested in two critical words: essential, and PR. Because what I learned through the PR Friendly Index was that, while my list tried to remove the subjectivity as much as possible – given that, accepted, it was my own reading list to begin with – I keep coming across other lists that have little or no objectivity at all. So ‘essential’ interested me.

PR was also an interesting term. I found out through the index that people who used to write about PR had largely turned to talking about social media.

So I retweeted and responded: RT @MarkRaganCEO: 25 essential PR blogs: http://bit.ly/bMEo1J << Essential in what sense? PR in what sense? Sorry, don’t buy it.

Mark responded, asking why. So I emailed him back, and we had a nice email chat about it.

This is the gist of my argument, which Mark has kindly given consent to be republished bearing in mind it was an email convo:

Regarding the ‘I don’t buy it’ comment, it’s just that I’ve seen a lot of lists, mainly in my PR Friendly Index travels (see http://brendancooper.com/the-pr-index/ for the backstory there).

I just have a problem with:

• Essential – without any metrics used to qualify this. About six months ago I popped up on Smarter Social Media’s list of 100 Smartest People in Social Media (see http://brendancooper.com/copywriting-blogging-social-media-strategy-services-… – although I just noticed the link is broken so I’ve asked them where that’s gone). I did point out to them at the time that there were no metrics accompanying this, so it really was just their take on it and it would have been nice to see a real, objective way of compiling such a list (I even had a chat about it with their CEO later that day). This is what I was trying to do with the PR Friendly Index. So, I don’t buy ‘essential’ without a way of saying what that means. Essential for what, to whom, why?
• PR – I noticed some blogs on the list that were about social media. Now, I know it’s all about communication, and social media and PR fit together hand-in-glove, but that was another issue that my PR Friendly Index brought up: namely, that everyone seems to be jumping on the social media bandwagon. I posted about it here: http://brendancooper.com/2009/05/11/the-pr-friendly-index-is-no-longer-about-…. So, as well as not really getting the ‘essential’, I don’t get the ‘PR’ here either. I guess this is just definitions, but they’re important.

And basically I was probably just trying to cause a stir with my tweet, but it got your attention!

At least I was open and transparent with the last point there…

So, very interesting. I like the way Mark asked me for more feedback, and how we were able to have a chat about it away from Twitter (I almost said ‘offline’ there but that’s almost how I view email these days).

We’re still all learning from each other and, on a day in which Facebook makes a move to dominate the location-based space and in the UK we find we’re spending half our time with online media, perhaps we need to start accelerating our understanding, now.