Virginia Miracle

I am in the belly of BlogHer Business and loving it.

Bandwidth permitting (200 women live twittering, blogging and vlogging at the same time is hell on a server), my team is live blogging coverage here.

And I am live twittering here.

We are looking to add to the digital strategy talent on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence team in our San Francisco, New York, and DC offices. I shared a long “Personal Ad” style post about this on the OgilvyPR blog today but I will boil it down here to a few words:

• If you enjoy evangelizing the power of social media to people who may not already get it,
• If you read what certain brands, causes, or (currently) campaigns are doing to try to connect with their audiences and your mind starts rattling through what their strategy should be and all of the myriad ways that they could make that come to life,
• If you use every opportunity of someone asking for bright shiny digital object du jour (viral video, Facebok, group, widget application, wiki etc) as an opportunity to back up and talk about communications goals and set the stage for how each of these tactics would be employed in a different scenario

…then I am dying to meet you.

Demand for thoughtful, hyper-creative digital strategy that is built on sound business fundamentals is high and we are excited to grow the team to ensure we can optimize on the new opportunities in our path. If you’d like more detail or to apply, please check out the careers section of the ogilvy website and drop me a line at Virginia( dot )Miracle( at )ogilvypr( dot )com if you’d like to hear more about the various experience levels we’re seeking for the various offices or want to recommend that I reach out to someone in your network. You can also message me through Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter.

Side note: I and other members of the 360 DI team are participating later this week in BlogHer Business and Blogger Social. Hope to see you there!!!

Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google founder Larry Page have decided that, having conquered the whole of the planet we call Earth, they need to identify more territory to conquer. What’s next for 2 such big thinkers? Why, Mars of course. Thus, they bring you “Virgle“: the open source planet that claims to be the adventure of many lifetimes.

The best part is that you can test your fitness to apply to be one of the first colonists on Mars as part of the Virgle project. Why wouldn’t you you want to go? As they say on the site “Earth has issues“.

(Larry & Richard – thank you for fooling my husband into think this was real for about 30 seconds this morning. It made by day. Happy April 1!)

OK, maybe that’s stretching it, but this interview with Rick Astley and the LA Times on the topic of “Rickrolling” may surprise you. If you’ve ever been reading a blog or message board conversation and been led to a link claiming to be something relevant that turned out to be a YouTube video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”, you’ve been Rickrolled. Cute, but even funnier when the pranks are taken offline and the song has been played live at Scientology protests then captured on video.

The interview reveals that Rick Astley is not living in the past, has a sense of humor, thinks Rickrolling is hilarious, and strongly believes that him taking part or trying to capitalize on it falls somewhere between killing the internet magic and being quite sad:

“If some DJ wants to remix Never Gonna Give You Up and put it out as a record, if he did a good job, I’d be flattered…I think the artist themselves trying to remix it is almost a bit sad, really…Either that or I’ll get myself a pseudonym and remix it.”

It’s hard to believe that BlogHer Business ’08 is just around the corner. BlogHer, the community for women who blog, is bringing together leading social media practitioners from across industries and Ogilvy 360 DI will be there. We are sponsoring the track on Successful Social Media Creation and, with trusty videographer in tow, we’ll be interviewing attendees throughout the 2 day event.

Per the Catch Up Lady’s post here, we’d like to get your input on what we ask of the attendees. In her words, like any good 80′s movie - we need a montage! So, what would you like to ask leading female social media creators? What do you want to ask the brands who want to connect with these powerful voices? We’ll be there and we want to bring you the most valuable output possible, so let us know what you’d like to hear.