Yesterday I passed a poster for the Labour Party which said ‘It’s time for a change. Are you with us?’.

The poster gave the web address makeachange.ie, and invited me to free text the word ‘change’ to 50100.

Leisurely walking along with nothing better to do, and being a curious soul, I texted.

Here’s what I got back:

It’s time for a change. Labour will bring a change for the better if elected to government. Pat has 5 Commitments for Change, check them out at makeachange.ie

What a banal taxt. The only possible advancement the Labour Party has made with me here is that I now have the web address on my phone, but the text was so unengaging I’d be unlikely to check it out if I wasn’t motivated by my interest in viral campaigns and the like.

If somebody is motivated enough to use the freetext then they are interested at some level - maintaining that interest is crucial. Off the top of my head I would send them something like this:

Pat Rabbitte: 5 commitments for change.
1. Beds in hospitals
2. Pre-school education
3. Gardai in the neghbourhood
4. Carer’s means tests
5. Buying a home
Reply with 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 for more!

In the text I received it refers to ‘Pat’. If this happens to be the only communication between us, and I’m not familiar with Pat Rabbitte already, I’m none the wiser now.

Text is an opportunity to engage with people, sending one bland text just doesn’t do it. As you can see from my above outline, I’d encourage people to request more info on the item (or items) that interest them. This could also provide some interesting data about which areas are foremost in people’s priorities.

You would now have, in one text message, got Pat Rabbitte’s name out there and got the five areas of Commitment out there. By following up and sending a further text, if requested, you are engaging on a level that interests the texter.

Here’s an example of what I would include in the second text, for commitment 1:

Not a vague promise. A clear goal of 2,300 more beds in clean hospitals.
Cost and delivery time set out on makeachange.ie.
For regular updates on Labour news reply with the word ‘updates’.

Obviously, the mechanism and cost for the whole text updates would have to be considered, but my point is that having engaged with someone, it’s important to build on that small relationship somehow. Perhaps not by text updates as I suggest above, but something.

Their blog doesn’t allow comments (which is a shame, but I can understand why) but I wonder do they note trackbacks?

Until Bif blogged about IPRED2 I hadn’t heard a PEEP about the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive.

The European Parliament are voting on the 24th of April, which is damn soon, and according to copycrime.eu there are some major issues with the directive.

Have a look at their site, and sign the petition to amend the directive.

Below are some excerpts from the site:

PRED2’s backers say these copycrimes are meant only for professional criminals selling fake merchandise. But Europe already has laws against these fraudsters. With many terms in IPRED2 left unclear or completeley undefined - including “commercial scale” and “incitement” - IPRED2 will expand police authority and make suspects out of legitimate consumers and businesses, slowing innovation and limiting your digital rights. [...]

IPRED2’s new crime of “aiding, abetting and inciting” infringement again takes aim at innovators, including open source coders, media-sharing sites like YouTube, and ISPs that refuse to block P2P services. [...]

Criminal law needs to be clear to be fair. While IPRED2 says that only “commercial scale” infringement will be punished, the directive doesn’t define “commercial scale” or “incitement.” Even IP lawyers can’t agree on what are “private” and “personal” uses of copyrighted works. One step over that fuzzy line, however, and anyone could be threatened with punishments intended for professional counterfeiters and organized criminals.

So the competition winners have been announced, but we all know it’s not the winning or the losing, it’s the taking part that matters.

So a HUGE thanks to everyone who entered our draw and caption competition, as I’ve said many times, the high quality of entries was incredible and made it very difficult to pick a winner.

Not veryone who entered left a link to their blogs or website, but here are those who did, it’s worth paying them a visit because judging by the entries to the competition they are all super-smart!

• James Corbett
• Mr T (Draw Winner)
• Branedy
• Joe
• Keith Clancy
• Jonathan Brazil
• Twenty Major
• Seamus Ryan
• Roosta
• Will
• Evert
• Liam G
• Deborah
• Green Ink
• John Prendergast
• Ger
• Adam
• Primal Sneeze
• Richard
• Declan
• Adam (Maguire) (Caption Comp Winner)
• Gerard Carthy
• cianginty
• bluepaintred
• gon
• Janie
• Tim
• Blogorrah

Phew, I’ve just been to all of them, and sure enough there are some great blogs and sites in there, some I was already aware of and some I hadn’t come accross before.

A big thank you also to those who didn’t leave a link:

Daniel, thelastangryman, Cormac, Fergal, Gary, Kev, conor, Martin, Ben Haugh, Glen Holmes, Jess, bleachontop, Lanod, Dosko, pmc, Sean B, bunster, gillygooley, Dave Winders, John, Brian Lanigan, David Charles Byrne, Joris, Rob Falconer, lowerbrau, Bryan, berg, Nuranis and Kev

As John Spillane would say ‘Well done everyone, well done.’

We had two brand spanking new iPod Shuffles to be won in our incredibly brilliant caption competition and we had over 80 entries and the quality of the captions was just fantastic.

If you missed it, you should go and read through the entries, there’s some really priceless ones.

I knew picking a winning caption was going to be tough, so I decided to do the draw first.

The winner of the first iPod shuffle is (drumroll…….)
Links for Everyone for this post.

Then it was on to the hard part - choosing the winning caption. I whittled it down and whittled it down but finally I settled on this one:

Congratulations to Adam Maguire for winning with his super smart entry.

Now, I timed this rather badly as I am away on holidays for a week as we speak. However, thanks to the power of the interweb I will arrange delivery of your beautiful new iPod Shuffles while I’m away if the winners would be so kind as to drop me a line with a delivery address at frankp at bifsniff.com.

Also, the fun doesn’t end here. a) I have one or two ideas related to this that I hope to follow up on upon my return and b) we have to do this again!

Stay tuned Batfriends!

The closing date has come and gone, so now all that is left is to choose the winner for the caption competition and draw the winner for the, er, draw.

The caption winner will not be an easy choice - the quality of the entries amazed me. Whenever I see caption competitions my mind goes blank, so everybody who entered would have my admiration regardless, but to see so many sharp entires blew me away.

Thank you so much to everybody who entered both the caption competition and the draw.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners, they will be posted before the end of the week.

And in case you missed it, it transpires the (telecoms) poodle is a very expensive pet. Who knew?