As some of you might have read in the blogosphere (sideburns, boondoggle, ibert), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide the fact that we created www.coalitionisland.be.

What started as a wild idea in the slip stream of an internal interactive workshop a few days before the elections, ended up in an online adventure which generated in 2 weeks over 20.000 site visits and 500 conversations.

Call it viral, word-of-mouth, buzz or whatever marketing, we didn’t speak about it but others did the job. And why did they do so? Because they liked it? Because it was just a good idea? Because it was a hot topic? Probably all of the above. And why didn’t we claim it earlier?

Because we didn’t want the effect to be biased by the Saatchi brand. We even managed to hide ourselves for a while, but as the blog fallout illustrates: it’s hard to hide on the internet. And because we didn’t find the time to make it better (with a rating system for example, eliminating a lot of the crap that can be found among the discussions).

Anyway, the stats show us that short after the elections, most conversations were built with Yves Leterme, Freya Vandenbossche, Guy Verhofstadt en Jean-Marie Dedecker. Curious if Coalition Island will relive again (and who will be the online main players) as the political climate is in our favor.

Finally, we do want to stress this is a ‘Saatchi only’ initiative. CD&V, who we worked for, was not involved.

Posted by Erik Meylemans