Something I spotted on South African marketing site 10and5 is this story of a pair of Cape Town parking attendants who were given a 1.4 million rand – or according to iol.co.za 1.9 million (£161k / $262k) – Audi R8 by a mystery benefactor.

Apparently the businessman asked them to use it to perform good deeds, “because of a dream he had.” The two parking guards have since cut a slit in the hood of the Audi for people to drop donations and suggestions.

An extreme and heart warming case of pay it forward, or as iol.co.za suggests money that could have been used to generate extra interest to feed the homeless? Or, maybe a PR stunt, though the car carries no branding whatsoever (other than the hand made ‘future for all sign’).

Whichever version you believe, it really is, as 10and5 says, a fairy tale come true.

Check out the short clip of the new owners of the car above.

I rarely put posts up where I talk about myself, but this will be the exception.

That’s because from today I’ve got a new job.  The former digital division of Cow has been hived off into a separate agency, Rabbit, which I now head.

So, nine years after being one of the team that started Cow, I’m back in start-up mode!

Cow (where we remain part of the group) has done some incredible things, going from a £10,000 loan in 2001 to agency of the year in 2008, while remaining completely independent.   That’s thanks to the amazing group of people working there.

The awesome Louise Doherty has come over from Cow Digital to help me make Rabbit happen and we’re drawing on five more Cows in Cape Town and London – really we can be as big as clients need us to be.  But, if with Rabbit we achieve just a fraction of the success that Cow has had, I’ll be happy!

Why a separate agency rather than a division?   Three reasons really, two commercial and one personal.

I know there’s been chatter that this year could see the end of division between digital and traditional agencies, but from experience, we’ve lost out on business due to some brands still preferring to give online business to someone they saw as a specialist.

Having said that, we have backgrounds in traditional comms and marketing and don’t believe in working in silos.   Whatever we develop will be designed to have traditional media legs as well as online ones.   In fact, ideally we want to become the lead creative agency in campaigns.

Then there are certain advantages in being able to build up our own client base.   Some clients we’ll of course share with Cow.   Others will be our own.

And from a personal point of view? I just fancied trying this all over again and concentrating on something that’s become a specialism of mine.

We like carrots, not sticks

Finally why Rabbit:

Because of the Cow link we wanted to choose an animal, but we took one that was as likely to be undomesticated as live on a farm.   Then there are the obvious Internet connotations with ‘rabbit, rabbit’ and ‘breed like.’

Want to find out more? Check us out online, follow us on Twitter, or send us a mail – hello at therabbitagency.com….and, oh,  did I mention exactly how excited we are about all this?!

Image – Svadilfari

Steyn and Aziz, two of the Cows in Cape Town, posed an interesting question this afternoon. Who owns your tweets? Clearly re-tweeting is a big part of Twitter culture, but do you have any sort of intellectual property claim over what’s your content?

There are several answers to this question.  One of them from analyst Jeremiah Owyang, is that quite possibly your boss might be the owner and not you…in addition to owning any Facebook photos, You Tube videos etc developed and posted at work. The reason? “Employees sign employment contracts that may indicate that all intellectual property created during employment may be owned by the company.”

It’s obviously not that straight forward. A Twitter feed that has a lot of followers and appears on a lot of lists is clearly useful to a company, but would it have value if the person left, and would you really want to enforce it? However, solicitor Lisa J Borodkin, who comments on Jeremiah’s blog says that:

“It’s important in the age of the blog and Twitter that people understand that a clause claiming all ‘intellectual property’ created during the term of employment would be property of the company, would cover tweets and blog posts. This provision would also cover anything else creative the person did on the side, such as writing a screenplay, or creating a comic strip, even purely for fun.”

As a result, the solution here would be two fold. First of all, to have employment contracts read that only work related content belongs to the boss. And secondly to develop clear social media guidelines for staff (we’re doing so currently at Cow, as much to protect the people we work with as ourselves).

Finally, looking at the question of ‘who owns your tweets?’ on a wider scale, the answer is you do. But there is an important caveat as this Mr Tweet blog post states. Twitter says you own what you post, yet it can also refuse service and close accounts.

And when it comes to source attribution and re-using content for gain, there would be a grey area where, say Twitter is used to break a news story. “That tweet becomes the source, who does it belong to?” The Mr Tweet post says we’ll never know definitively until there’s a court case about it, which I imagine shouldn’t be too far off.
Image – Kumar Appaiah

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