Next Friday sees the UK release of one of the most eagerly awaited movies of, er, well, the last few months, anyway. Cloverfield is already pretty much guaranteed a spot in my own personal top 10 of 2008. But the merits of the film itself are almost incidental to the amount of buzz that’s been generated surrounding it. That’s entirely due to the weird and wonderful way the film’s been marketed.

Obviously, having a name like JJ Abrams connected with the film doesn’t hurt, but who, other than the most obsessive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, has heard of Drew Goddard? Or Matt Reeves? There’s not a lot of star power attached to Cloverfield; the biggest name actor involved is Lizzy Caplan - and while you might recognise her face, you probably wouldn’t recognise her name.

Nope, the buzz around Cloverfield is entirely down to the online viral marketing. An alternate reality game has been built up around the movie, using various websites representing fictional companies, organisations, and characters - as well as MySpace profiles for fictional characters - to spread clues about what the movie might be about. The trailer was just intriguing enough to push people towards Google to find out what this mysterious 01-18-08 thing might be, and then the string of clues lead them around all the other connected sites - and crucially, none of the sites really gave much away. Only the merest hints were given, to the point where people wanted to see the movie in order to solve the clues.

A lot of the people who did follow all the Cloverfield clues were eventually disappointed by the movie. But considering they’d already paid for their tickets, how much did that matter? More importantly, the clues weren’t crucial enough to the plot of the movie that anyone not playing along would feel excluded, so even if you were only dimly aware of the marketing, you could still enjoy the movie.

Cloverfield’s record-breaking January box office figures confirmed that this was an incredibly successful campaign. But other attempts at viral marketing campaigns have failed miserably (see, once again, the deservedly much maligned All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP Sony website). So what makes the difference?

Well, firstly, the viral campaign has to be good - which is to say, it needs to be meticulously planned and thought through. It has to be interesting enough that people will want to talk about it; if the clues you’re dropping are too easy, people will see straight through them and move on. Ideally, you want people to have to work together to speculate on what the clues mean; the buzz will be self-perpetuating if you manage this. There needs to be an element of interactivity, or people will get bored; you can’t just hand your audience everything on a plate.

The next important thing is to keep updating - keep adding new things. If you don’t, your audience’s attention will wane, and by the time your product is available, they’ll have forgotten all about it. You want them to keep coming back for more.

Another thing to think about is that, if you do successfully attract a lot of people to your campaign, you need to keep a step or two ahead of them. Which can be difficult - never underestimate the intelligence of your audience. If there’s more stuff out there to be found, chances are they’ll find it, possibly before you’re ready.

And of course, ultimately, you’ll need to be able to monetise your campaign. To return to the Cloverfield example, obviously the marketing paid off because people went to see the movie, but there’s also a massive opportunity there to sell shedloads of merchandise related to the campaign - anything branded Slusho!, for example, would sell. Cloverfield’s campaign created characters and brands that were mostly irrelevant to the main product it was selling, which is a lot of work, but again… record-breaking January box office figures.

The popularity of Lost proves that JJ Abrams knows what he’s doing. The marketing for The Dark Knight could also be pointed to as an example of doing the viral thing well, but let’s face it, people were going to see that movie anyway; it’s a Batman movie. Using viral marketing to successfully sell a completely unknown quantity is much more impressive.

(And yes, I just wrote this blog because I wanted to talk about Cloverfield some more. I love that movie.)

Steve Jobs keynote speeches are always exciting. Even if I know there’s no way I’m ever possibly going to buy whatever it is he’s going to announce, I’ll still be a bit excited to watch the show. (You only have to look at previous entries in this blog to know I’m a bit of a Jobs fangirl, in spite of my best efforts to resist his charms.) I’m not entirely sure why, but there don’t appear to be scary brightly coloured spirals spinning round in his eyes while he’s on stage so I’ll assume it’s down to charisma rather than brainwashing. It’s safe, then, to say that whatever new product Steve flaunts tonight, it’ll be achingly cool and desirable as all hell.Those in the know are predicting that there’ll be some kind of new ultra-portable Mac announced. Ultra portable is, as they say, hot right now; solid state drives and touchscreens are everywhere, and Apple definitely knows its way around both of those. So there might be some new mini-laptop or tablet PC style thing on the way.

Another logical, sensible prediction is that there’ll be an upgraded iPod of some sort on the way - maybe a new Nano, with increased storage capabilities, probably 16GB. Slightly less likely-sounding rumours include the iPhone getting 3G capabilities, or possibly a bigger hard drive; or, that Apple is about to include WiMax on Apple notebooks.

Obviously there’s no way to know for sure. After all, this time last year the announcement of an Apple iPhone seemed pretty unlikely, so there’s always the possibility that Jobs could throw us a complete curveball. I’m not going to make any promises to eat various items of clothing live on telly or anything, but here are some things that almost certainly won’t be announced tonight (but would undoubtedly be cool even if they were):

- An Apple games console. Because if you think about it, the kind of thing Apple would be likely to create in the gaming arena pretty much already exists in the form of the Nintendo Wii.

- A toaster. Because that’d be daft.

- A Polaroid camera. Ditto.

- A new range of home furnishings - in a range of metallic colours, and also available in classic Apple gleaming white.

- A helicopter.

Time for a cup of coffee, now, I think. Apple probably won’t be announcing that, either.

“Oh dear” pretty much sums up what I want to say about this. Oh dear, oh dear. This week, Mozilla launched a new viral marketing campaign, Fight Against Boredom - and promptly had to reel it back in again as the Internet erupted in outrage. So, in case you blinked and missed it, I’ll recap.

The Firefox Users Fight Against Boredom website contained a YouTube video, fake talk show footage, a Facebook link, blogs, MP3s of the Fight Boredom song, and links to download Firefox. All good, fairly standard viral marketing fare, except that on the blog were some statistics that … well, were a bit offensive, or hurtful, or just not very funny. Here are some of the stats that were included:

Compared to Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are -

* 15% more likely to have watched cartoons
* 21% less likely to have gone fishing
* 14% less likely to have sleeping disorders
* 67% more likely to go mountain biking
* 40% less likely to be widowed
* 53% more likely to go hiking
* 60% more likely to drink microbrew beer
* 51% less likely to be an accountant
* 26% more likely to have gone to a live concert
* 6% more likely to practice yoga
* 113% more likely to be a student
* 17% more likely to be self-employed
* 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business
* 45% more likely to have gone on vacation in San Francisco within the last 2 years
* 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol
* 23% less likely to have cancer
* 20% less likely to live with others suffering from cancer
* 25% less likely to have breast cancer
* 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.
* 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
* 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 days.

See the problem? Yeah. Not the most sensitive campaign, or even the most logical. The site was pulled, and Mozilla’s VP of Marketing, Paul Kim, apologised on his blog for the whole debacle, saying:

“The site was not meant to be publicly available and contained several stats, taken from a recent Nielsen study, that were offensive and in poor taste, as pointed out both by readers of TechCrunch and many people here at Mozilla. I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn’t reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately.”

It’s not really the best excuse ever - even if those stats were only circulated amongst Mozilla’s employees, it’s still really poor taste. And completely irrelevant; how does knowing any of those snippets of info about instances of cancer in IE and Firefox users help Mozilla’s marketing department in any way?

This has to rank alongside Sony’s All I Want For Christmas Is A PSP viral marketing campaign in terms of Things That Were Very Bad Ideas And Shouldn’t Have Happened, surely? In both instances, someone somewhere needed to think just a little bit harder about what they were doing. It might be common practice now to imply that use of your competitors’ products makes people into boring disciplinarians, but the whole Internet-Explorer-causes-cancer thing is more than a step too far.

Then again, the whole point of a viral marketing campaign is to make people aware of your product, and in terms of getting people talking, Fight Against Boredom has been a resounding success.

So, that was Christmas - we’re now officially back at work, the holidays seem like a distant memory, and next Christmas is too far off to even contemplate. Did you have fun? I did. I ate lots, drank moderately, read lots of books, played lots of games, watched some truly dire telly, completely forgot all about the Doctor Who Christmas special, and sang various Christmas songs. Loudly, and not particularly well. It was fun.

One of the more notable aspects of the fun was the introduction into my life of an Xbox 360. I had been lagging sadly behind in the games console stakes, still playing PlayStation 2 games (I even got my very own copy of Fahrenheit for the PS2 as a present this Christmas, which is awesome!) but over the Christmas holidays, a whole new world of gaming opened up to me.

Of the games which came bundled with the console, I quickly learned that Forza Motorsports 2 is not for me. I can’t drive and I know sod all about cars; my favourite racing game is Burnout, because it rewards you for driving like a maniac, forcing other people off the road and exploding your car, so a game that required me to tinker about and then drive impressively was never going to win my affections. I’m sure it’s very good, if you like that sort of thing. Viva Piñata, on the other hand… oh dear. I love it. I know I shouldn’t, because I’m a grown woman and it’s patently a children’s game, but I’m addicted. It’s one of those sim things where you’re given a chunk of land and some creatures and have to look after them - previously, I’d been obsessed with Dungeon Keeper, obsessed with harvesting as much treasure as humanly possible, but where Dungeon Keeper gave you evil minions to take care of, Viva Piñata gives you ridiculously cute, brightly coloured pinatas that, when their requirements are met, fall in love and do a “romance dance” before the stork shows up with a new baby piñata. It’s. So. Cute.

Of course, it’s not all sunshine and puppies, because occasionally your piñatas fight, or evil pinatas show up to kill them. At which point, you start hitting them with your shovel. You can also hit trees with your shovel, in order to make the fruit fall off. In fact, the game begins by presenting you with a plot of hard ground you need to hit until it turns into fertile soil, strewn with litter you need to smash up. After spending the initial 5 minutes spent smacking things with a spade, I was hopelessly addicted. I really feel like I shouldn’t be, but I am.

The only other game I’ve ventured into thus far has also involved hitting things with sticks: Dead Rising. This game is the whole reason I ever wanted an Xbox 360, and, um, well, actually, it’s a massive disappointment. I was sold on the concept of running around a zombie-infested mall, using anything and everything from each of the shops to slaughter the undead. And on that front, the game delivers: I used a lawnmower to grind them up, I used a baseball bat to smack them over the head, I threw giant teddy bears at them, and I experimented with a toy lightsaber before realising it was rubbish. I found ways to dress up my character to make him look ridiculous, I made disgusting-sounding smoothies for him to drink, and I zoomed around the mall on a skateboard, taunting zombies as I went, until I crashed into a fountain and they ate me.

All that was great. But the game is just unnecessarily difficult. There are a million timed missions, which overlap and drive you insane. A guy back at the HQ insists on radioing you and telling you inane crap constantly, even if you’re in the middle of killing hundreds of zombies, and if you dare hang up on him to, like, maybe fight off a zombie which is trying to eat your tasty brains, he whinges about how it’s rude to cut him off. The missions, as well as being confusing and overwhelming, are way too hard. Maybe I’m just rubbish (actually, scratch the ‘maybe’) but I like games that advance as you improve; I like it when your completing one action triggers something else. I like to be able to explore a game in a slightly non-linear way, but there has to be purpose, too. Dead Rising doesn’t give you much of a chance: it tells you what to do, where, and when. Except it’s too hard, and I always die.

While the box says you can choose to live out your allotted 72 hours however you want, you actually can’t, because if you mess up too badly, you can’t solve the mystery. Save points are few and far between, and there’s only one save slot per profile, so if you fuck up and save, you’ll have to start again from scratch. It’s so annoying! It just feels rude, like it’s being difficult for the sake of it, which just isn’t fun.

So I’m done with Dead Rising. Until Burnout Paradise is released, I’m playing Fahrenheit through again and tending to my piñatas. Hmph.

Confession time: I intended to write at least one blog entry over the Christmas holidays. But I couldn’t, because I left the e-mail containing my password in a work account, and since I was at home, er, that wasn’t particularly useful.

What I was going to write about, though, was the exciting news that Facebook has removed the word “is” from its status update box. (Which is now hopelessly out of date, but I’ll plough on regardless.) For the whole two people remaining in the world who don’t use Facebook, I should explain: Facebook allows you to enter a sentence about what you’re doing, thinking or feeling at any gi ven time, so all your friends can read it - kind of like Twitter, on a slightly smaller scale. And until very recently, that update box provided you with the beginning of a sentence - [Your name] is…

Now, though, the ‘is’ has been made optional, rather than compulsory. Now, your status update can incorporate whatever verb you like, without you having to come up with some grammatically torturous way of doing so. I can make my status read “Sarah Dobbs likes Christmas”, rather than, er, “Sarah Dobbs is liking Christmas”, or whatever nonsense I might have come up with, were I feeling particularly incapable of sentencing properly.*

If you’re a Facebook user, there were two appropriate reactions, upon hearing this news. One was “cool!” The other, “meh, whatever.” Bafflingly, though, some contrary types immediately set up a Facebook group demanding the return of the ‘is.’

I know Facebook groups are largely pointless and don’t serve any function other than to kill time, but - seriously? Does not compute.

* No-one reading this will get that reference. It’s obscure, but worth it.