MessageSpace’s latest viral seeding initiative (on behalf of ActionAid) saw us scope out the web in South Africa, as ActionAid asked us to help promote the video and help send its message viral, during the period of the Durban Climate Conference.

We leveraged our network’s readership in South Africa, and augmented our efforts with a media buy on South African online publications to get traction for the video. As can be seen, it was quickly the most viewed video in the YouTube non-profit channel and the second most viewed video in South Africa. Be sure to check the video out – it’s a simple message: The UN Climate Conference in Durban needs to support women farmers in order to tackle the growing global food crisis, and agriculture is being increasingly threatened by climate change.

We leveraged the MessageSpace network’s readership in South Africa plus an online media buy in South Africa to push the video out. It became the most watched video on YouTube in South Africa on the non-profit channel and the second most viewed video in South Africa during the period of the conference.

If you are producing a campaign video, we can give it that extra push beyond what can be achieved by PR.

Call us to help your video go viral.

Mark Wallace, wit and leading Elvis revivalist, joins the MessageSpace blog network with his take on politics from an insider’s point of view. His Crash Bang Wallace blog has only been going for just over a year yet his blog was voted #18 in the Total Politics magazine blog awards. Well worth reading.

Douglas Carswell, the blogging MP for Clacton has joined the MessageSpace network of political, current affairs blogs and news sites.

Charles Crawford, the former British ambassador to Poland turned blogger has joined the expanding MessageSpace network of news and current affairs sites. He describes his website as a “Blogoir“.

MessageSpace is pleased to welcome the renowned politico-religious blogger known as Archbishop Cranmer to the network. Consistently ranked as one of Britain’s top blogs it is the first blog on the network with a religious flavour. We are truly blessed.

After completing the testing of a substantial upgrade to our finance and administration systems we are now ready to expand the MessageSpace network from the current thirty news and current affairs websites towards a target of three hundred sites on the network.  To achieve this “long-tail” expansion we have reduced the minimum daily traffic threshold before which we will consider a website from 10,000 page views a day to 1,000 page views a day.

For your website to be considered as a candidate to join the MessageSpace advertising sales network it needs to meet the following criteria:

• Attain an average of 1,000 daily page views or 200,000 page views annually.
• Focus must be on politics, current affairs, news and opinion.
• Have been established for at least 3 months.
• Be regularly updated, preferably daily.

We use various software tools to create our products; we create Flash-video animations using Adobe software, we also use Photoshop and Premiere video editing software for video content produced by our two Sony broadcast standard video cameras.

The apprentice would be trained in using these tools with the aim of being eventually competent enough to produce online advertising.

As part of our work for clients we produce websites, usually based on content management systems like WordPress which we integrate with email list functionality and applications like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We would want the apprentice to get a grounding with these applications and HTML in general.

A large part of the apprenticeship will also involve becoming familiar with the broader aspects of the business. The apprentice will be expected to gain basic competence in all aspects of the business and have an all round knowledge of the business. We will train the apprentice how to use our financial management systems, they will administer our ad serving technology, uploading media and setting advertising campaign parameters. We use cloud based applications for everything from
ad serving to accounting and invoice generation. We are a digital business with very little paper-based administration.

The apprentice will report to our Chief Technology Officer and learn “on the job” from him. It is not a cliché to say we are looking for a self-starter, someone who will learn on the job by doing as much as from asking.

Any candidate with relevant skills, however rudimentary, will be looked on favourably. So evidence of use of web applications and software or similar mentioned above will be taken into account.

Anything the candidate has already produced that demonstrates design savvy or artistic skills within the digital sphere will be viewed favourably.

The apprenticeship includes training towards a nationally recognised qualification. Pay is in accordance with the National Apprenticeship Service’s guidelines for London. We hope to eventually give the successful apprentice a contract once they are trained. Apply via the National Apprenticeship Service.

The campaign video incorporates a donation function which raised a five-figure sum within hours of the campaign launching. MessageSpace also did the media buy online across political websites ranging from the Spectator to LabourHome. We think this once again demonstrates the immediate ROI potential of integrated video / fundraising campaigns.