Monthly Archives: December 2012

Running 125 miles in January – at least 1 mile a day

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For a while now, I’ve been playing with idea of going on a run streak. As it is the time of the year for New Year’s resolutions, I thought the time was right. So come January 1, I will attempt to run at least 1 mile a day, for 31 days. And who knows, I might keep going? After all, there are people out there who have gone for 50 days or 48 years(!).

Momo may need sunglasses with all the neon

At the same time, I have also joined the Strava Run Base Mile Blast. My goal is to hit the 125 mile mark and here’s how I’ll try to do it:

  • run home from work 2-3 times a week (5 miles)
  • do another 12-15 miles on each of the four weekends
  • complete at least 1 mile on the other days

That should be doable – providing of course I don’t get injured.

To complement all that running, I have finally signed up for my first session with British Military Fitness. I’ve heard nothing but good things from friends who do and swear by it and thought I should finally have a go at getting screamed at by ex-military personnel. We’ll see how I feel about that after the first free session on 5 January.

Best of all: as I’ll be spending a week in Philly in January, I’ll be able to run a few of those 125 miles with Georgie and Momo – clad in glorious neon, naturally.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Did you all have a good Christmas? Some of these victims of Christmas autocorrects didn’t (possibly NSFW).

At special request – a look at the best PR examples and campaigns from 2012 proved more difficult than I thought. Mainly because the Internet seems to like PR fails/disasters much more than PR wins. I did come across these lists from Maud Davis and My News Desk but it’d be interesting to hear from you lot what you thought were the best PR wins from 2012?

Looking ahead at what’s in store for PRs in 2013: a shift in outcomes and tactics. In a nutshell, the future will be about enhancing reputation, increasing share of mind and generating leads and website traffic through content PR and image led communication. Must read.

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A gift from the comedy gods this week that shows how little people understand about Facebook privacy settings. Randi Zuckerberg, ex-marketing director at Facebook and older sister of the sandaled CEO, this week posted a photo of the Zucks testing the new Poke app at Christmas. Unbeknownst to Randi, the photo was tweeted by a friend of a friend and went viral. Randi took offence, attacking the rogue tweeter for her lack of ‘human decency’. A delicious case of the pot calling the kettle black (which didn’t go down at all well on t’Interwebs) and spectacular proof that even the people who built Facebook don’t have a clue how the social network actually works.

The oxymoron that is ‘Facebook privacy’ is at the heart of this comical bit of ‘reporting’ of the Randi Zuckerberg story by The Today Show in the US. Not only don’t they have the slightest clue about what it is that happened, they seem to be proud of their total ignorance.

But that wasn’t the only story of social media incompetence from people who should know better. The Sale Sharks have sacked their social media bod who branded a section of the club’s supporters as “absolute f***wits” on her personal Facebook page. Ouch.

Moving on from this Facebook fail to some inspiring online ads – only that the best online ads in 2012 weren’t ads. “It’s the content that makes up the best native advertising, mostly on social channels; the non-ad, non-paid advertising that tells great stories, engages us and compels us to share these experiences with our networks.”

Slightly left field, but very interesting in terms of gaining insight on people’s behaviours through social media. A small start-up called Sickweather used data from Twitter and Facebook to declare an early start to this year’s U.S. flu season, six weeks before the Centers for Disease Control.

And finally, The Guardian has done a marvellous job in pulling together the viral videos of the year in a 5 minute clip. Warning: contains Gangnam Style.

Have a happy new year everyone – see you in 2013.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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We start with what for me was the biggest story of the week: Instagram’s terms of service über-fail. Hipsters, cappucino and selfie photographers the world over freaked out on Tuesday, when Instagram allegedly announced it was planning to sell the crappy, filtered, rectangular photos of people’s lunches to faceless corporations the world over.

I admit, I too had one foot on the InstaBashing bandwagon. But I wasn’t the only one. Users deleted their accounts, articles about how to remove all your photos from Instagram were popping up everywhere (mainly linking to the rather useful http://instaport.me) and the Guardian made the point that: “Instagram makes you the product” - but failed to realise that this is true of most other social network/platform/app out there).

So why the InstaRage?

The BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, put his finger on the main issue: “Real story on Instagram is incompetence (again) of Facebook in framing its privacy policies. Don’t think they’ve any plans to sell photos but they should have made that clear in the t&cs.”

But I think that the second element is one that Paul Ford started writing about waaay back in 2007, when he talked about the web being a powerful platform for people to voice their discontent for then they had not been informed of changes relating to their lives. “Why Wasn’t I Consulted, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.”

Facebook changes settings, removes features, even redesigns their website without consulting their users. And you can understand them – they simply wouldn’t get anything done. Instagram though are a lot smaller than Facebook. They haven’t reached that point of total domination where – if you’re not on Facebook you basically do not have a social life.

So I think the combination of incomprehensible and confusing legalese and not even making it seem like they care about their users privacy led to Instagram losing even more of that loveable upstart karma they started to lose when they were acquired by Facebook.

In other news this week, The Mail Online cracked the 7 million daily unique browsers mark. Guardian.co.uk comes in at just under 4 million and Telegraph.co.uk at just under 3 million. Meanwhile, CIPR looked at the top newspaper Twitter accounts and found that the FT had the most followers, The Telegraph tweeted the most, The Sun received by far the most retweets and The Guardian receives the most replies.

In what Marketing Week called “a shift in social strategy”, Tesco this week launched their first Twitter campaign that encouraged users to pull virtual crackers by tweeting the hashtag #pullacracker. Followers who reply using the hashtag will be sent a unique link to an animation showing a cracker being pulled and revealing their prize. http://www.tescopullacracker.com

Jamaican beer Red Stripe teamed up with director Greg Brunkalla and Hirsch & Mann) to transform Best Supermarket on Kingsland High Street into an interactive music box, where products were rigged to create a plethora of instruments – a food can xylophone, jumping box drums and clinking bottle bells to name just a few. The finished clip has been viewed over 350,000 times (make sure you also check out the making of clip).

Buzzfeed have again done a great job of pulling together 5 of the best PR/advertising stunts of the year. The entirely epic Red Bull Stratos features, of course, but the other 4 aren’t to be sniffed at.

In a series of short webisodes (Fresh Meat fans will be amused) the cheeky buggers at Google look at what what bad web practices look like in real life - using the example of supermarkets. The point being: if it is annoying in real life, you can be sure that it is also annoying when shopping online.

The London Fire Brigade might actually want you to tweet about a fire before leaving the building, after it announced that it is looking to set up the world’s first 999 emergency Twitter feed. Given the amount false positives I see every week about fires at Sainsbury’s, I suspect (hope!) that it’ll be a while before this is implemented.

Starbucks are still having a rubbish time: not only was their #SpreadtheCheer Twitter campaign hijacked, the tweets were displayed on a big screen at the Natural History Museum. Ouch.

A different look back at the year: Spotifiy’s Review of the Year, with the top 100 tracks by country. Gotye’s Somebody that I used to know at no.1 in the UK. For shame.

And finally: the entirely NSFW ‘Epic Chef’, a new online cooking show from the deranged geniuses behind Epic Meal Time. This is totally and utterly mental. One of the secret challenge ingredients is a “mother-expletive-deleted case of bacon”. One of the contestants opens a jar of mayo with a chainsaw. Just watch it.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Poynter has pulled together the best and worst media errors, corrections and apologies of 2013. From CNN’s and Fox News’ epic failure to correctly interpret the US Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision (guess who actually corrected the mistake and who just went with it) to some cracking examples from closer to home, including the apology of the year from The Sun and their coverage of the Hillsborough disaster – this is an absolute must read.

Ever since Google published their first Zeitgeist summary, there is no better way to have a quick look back at the year and see how we searched in 2012 (especially as this year’s clip is put to the wonderful track “All I Want” by Kodaline).

Not to be outdone, Twitter have pulled together their own little look back at the year 2012 in Tweets. They’ve even partnered with Vizify to allow you to create your own personalised look back at your year on Twitter. Turns out I swear about Arsenal. A lot.

Twitter however did not include my favourite tweet of 2012 (and quite possibly of all time). Robbed.

The guys at Buzzfeed have done a great job of pulling together the best print ads of 2012 and the best commercials of 2012.

A quick pitstop in the present with an entirely marvellous clip featuring a somewhat angry German dude (Martin Oetting, MD of Word of Mouth agency trnd) in conversation with a rude French Fox. Bear with me on this one: the point that word-of-mouth marketing is all about putting the customer on stage, rather than your brand of product is an interesting one and worth thinking about. Tune in from around the 9 minute mark if you want to skip the build up.

But what about next year?

David Armano, Managing Director at Edelman Digital, has again compiled his traditional look into the future at the top 6 social/digital trends for 2013. Most interesting personally, I find the co-dependency of social and mobile (Armano calls it ‘Smobile’): A smobile Web means your customers, co-workers and colleagues expect their digital experiences will be optimized for mobile/social sharing and as a result spend less time tethered to a PC or television.

And finally: it’s time to break up with the native iOS6 maps app (you won’t able to delete it, but you can now install the free Google Maps app).

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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I see a lot of happy, hilarious and downright heart-warming tweets about Sainsbury’s. So I thought I’d keep track of them and produce a monthly review. Here’s a Storify of my favourite Sainsbury’s related tweets from November and October.

A month ago we were contacted by social media consultancy Sociagility, telling us about a review they were conducting about how the FTSE100 use social media for their corporate communication, looking in particular factors including brands’ willingness to listen and engage, the level of interaction from users, reach and levels of trust. They looked at our use of Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube and found that Sainsbury’s ranked 3rd overall and 1st in the retail sector. Obviously super-chuffed and it just shows what we can achieve by working across corporate affairs, marketing and customer service teams.

You can now get The Mirror for free on your iPad – it’ll be interesting to see if more people will read the paper now that they don’t have to pay 45p during the week.

A great infographic about how Facebook is growing as a marketing tool for businesses: despite Facebook essentially being a platform for personal exchanges, brands are finding it to be a top resource for finding and engaging consumers.

A massive slideshare presentation that’s been picked up by Forbes about how the world is going mobile (it’s very US focused, but still good). 

Two takes on popular Christmas ads this week. First off we have Everton FC revisiting the John Lewis ad from last Christmas (the kid that can’t wait for Christmas so that he can give his parents their presents) and a rather brilliant clip from Greenpeace who have taken this year’s ‘holier than though’ Waitrose Christmas ad (we’ve not shot a swish ad and have donated the money saved to charity – but we’re still paying top dollar to Heston & Delia and to have it air during X-Factor) and are using it to put pressure on the upmarket grocer to quit their partnership with Shell. It’s titled “Waitrose: partnering with arctic destruction” and has resulted in over 12,000 customer letters sent to Waitrose’s MD, plus over 90,000 Facebook likes and thousands of views on YouTube.

After running an open API for a long time (“application program interface”, essentially a digital toolbox for building software applications), Twitter has started shutting down access to its API, cutting off such brilliant services such as IFTTT  and making it impossible, for example, to find your Twitter friends with the Instagram app to see if they use every Hipsters favourite photo filtering and sharing platform. Now, Facebook-owned Instagram has revoked access to Twitter, no longer allowing the micro-blogging platform to display photos within streams. To put that in a less geeky way: the connected web of apps, platforms and services that we have come to love are reverting back to being siloed tools, not talking to each other. Sounds rather like the good old days of the AOL ‘walled garden’ approach, where they did everything to keep people on their service.

Oh, and while we’re on Instagram: here’s a great little clip by College Humor poking fun at people that Instagram food, signs at abandoned grocery stores and old doors. Added bonus for making fun of Nickelback.

And finally: this video about how Lego reacted to one of their customers. Another example of how good customer service + Internet = the kind of story money can’t buy. Fast forward to the 1-minute-mark if you want to get straight to Total And Utter Happiness.