Matt Harding, of Where the Hell is Matt? fame, is one of the most enduring internet memes but how much success has he brought to his sponsor, Stride Gum?

Matt first came to the world’s attention in 2005 with a short video of him doing a very distinctive dance in iconic locations around the globe.  This was before the days YouTube went mainstream so ignore the fairly paltry viewing figure of around 878,000.  When the video was initially doing the viral rounds, Matt’s server was receiving 20,000 plus hits a day.

Matt was then approached by Stride Gum, a new entrant to the US market who apparently said:

“We like what you’re doing. We want to help you. We don’t want to mess with you.”

FAQ, Wherethehellismatt.com

The second video, filmed in 05/06 took six months and 76 flights, it currently has about 10 million views on YouTube.

Understandably Matt receives a lot of emails from people wanting to dance with him.  So he approached Stride and suggested a third video where he danced with others.  This trip took 14 months, 42 countries and in the ten days since it was posted on YouTube has received 3,456,451 views.

All of which is pretty awesome, but what about the value for Stride?

Except in the end credits there is no reference to Stride in the two videos, which shows that it kept to its’ word about not interfering. Matt does reference them a few times on his home page and was undertaking a media tour in the states before he became the victim of suspected bedbugs, but coverage, via google news, seems pretty minimal.

A quick look at Google trends, shows that while search has spiked for Stride with each video release, more people are searching for Matt more than the gum.

But that all said, I never would have heard about Stride if it wasn’t for Matt, and next time I’m in the States, if I see a pack I’ll probably buy it. If I’m ever asked to recommend a company that has done cool stuff in social media, I might reference them too, though as ever it would be great to be able to provide some hard stats, either in terms of ROI in sales or increased awareness and sentiment for this fairly new brand.

Full disclosure: At about 1.29, the furthermost arm on the left, belongs to me.

David asked:
Can we have a section of our blog where we can post links to stories on popular green sites?

Answer

There are several ways we can do this, but we’re going to cover just two, the “blindingly simple”, the “slightly more interesting”, and the “link blogging” approach.

The blindingly simple (RSS) approach

RSS feeds (standing for “Really Simple Syndication”) are a feature of nearly all blogs and most news sites these days.
What this means is that sites publish a feed of headlines, content and links.
This feed can be included in lots of other places. One of these places could be your blog: it’s straightforward to include a feed in (say) the right-hand column of your site.

Read more

Duke Nukem Forever aside, has there ever been a more eagerly anticipated PC game than Spore?

In development since 2000, Spore is genre defying and offers unique game play to users as they guide the evolution of a creature, all the way from being a single cell to becoming a race of intergalactic space travellers.

Since it was first publicly demonstrated at E3 in 2005, buzz has been gradually building, augmented nicely by such stuff as Robin Williams doing a demo at E3 2006 and further demos by creator Will Wright at TED 2007.

The buzz hit critical mass last week with the release of the Creature Creator Editor on June 17th. Available to buy or as a free trial version, a deal struck with YouTube allows users of either version to upload videos of their creations straight to the Official Spore Channel.  Four days later there are over forty-two thousand creature videos uploaded.

EA also issued a few preview copies to 50 celebs, including Kevin Rose, Stan Lee, Adam West and MC Hammer asking them to go head-to-head in designing a creature.  Their efforts can be viewed and voted on at www.sporevote.com, with the winning designer netting $15,000 for charity.

All of which has led to a very nice spike in search, forum and blog post trends and really upped the anticipate levels for the full release in September.