Vine isn’t even 24 hours old and already we’re seeing Brands experimenting with this new short form video format via their Twitter profiles.
Nothing earth-shatteringly ingenious or clever:
showing off their products and services,
offering a behind the scenes look at their employees, or
providing an interview snippet to entice fans into watching the whole thing.
But they’re showing willingness to try something new and most importantly, they’re having fun with it. Interesting also, that the brands values/identity clearly shine through in those little vignettes.
With their Track My Macca’s app, McDonalds really hit the nail on the head this week. The app tracks the ingredients in the food you just bought through some nifty use of augmented reality, geo-location and time information – basically allowing you to plug in directly to McDonald’s supply chain data. Social media integration allows you to share the burger you just ate and tracked on Facebook. You can download it from the app store here although I doubt it works outside of Oz (HT to @TaraSThompson).
Twitter released a report this week showcasing the tweeting habits of people while they watch television in the U.K. Why is Twitter important for TV? Well, if you’ve been reading my weekly bits and bytes, you’ll have read about ‘second screening’. Here are some stats to help you understand why the two go together like fish and chips: 60% percent of the U.K.’s 10 million active users tweet while watching a television program and 40% percent of all tweets mention TV in some form. Download TV Twitter Book ‘Tune in with Twitter’. It’s free.
It was all about Facebook this week: they launched their version of Skype/Face-Time but the big news was all about the launch of the ever so creepy ‘Graph Search’ to take on Google. At first, it will allow you to search people, places, photos and interests – before spreading to every bit of information on the network. So for example, rather than search for a Chinese restaurant in London, you could now search for a Chinese restaurant in London that your Chinese friends who live in London like. Mashable has used the Graph Search and learnt, for example, that Google employees like Pink Floyd, while – slightly more seriously, USA today looked at how businesses can use Graph Search to their advantage. Me personally? I think this is yet another reason to make sure you regularly spend time learning the new Facebook privacy settings, think twice about what information you share and remember that on any free platform such as Facebook, you are the product.
Oh yeah. MySpace finally relaunched. With a little help from Justin Timberlake and his new single. Which is horrible and why I don’t have more to say about the new MySpace.
Don’t call an iPad a mobile device. Stats from comScore show that 90% of iPad use happens in your own home, 40% in public locations (most likely café’s and on trains and around 30% at work. Or as Business Insider puts it: they’re home PCs that are a little easier to carry around.
A great spot from @a_little_wine: Helen McGinn, a former Tesco wine buyer quit London to live in the New Forest and turned a weekly email to friends on wine suggestions into an award-winning blog Knackered Mothers Wine Club. Red Online spoke to her about how it happened and Helen’s tips for blogging.
An impressive/mind-boggling look back at 2012 by Pingdom: How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? Find out on their blog.
Weather permitting, I will be in Philly next week. I might or might not pull together these here bits and bytes. I do however, plan to eat many Cheese Steaks.
An absolutely freezing night at the Emirates to watch the FA Cup third round replay between Arsenal and Swansea. Even though the stadium was only 3/4 full, the atmosphere was excellent. The fans were cheering on the Gunners, pushing them, willing them forward. When, after 86 minutes of frustratio (mainly at some profligate finishing from Walcott), Giroud finally managed to set up Wilshere for a cracking volley to win it and put us through to the next round.
Panorama taken with iPhone 5 and run through Snapseed for extra oomph.
Entirely by accident, I came across the 8 Bit Lane that Disney have set up at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane in London to promote their new flick “Wreck-it Ralph” via good old Twitter. And as I’d planned to head out on one of my favourite runs in London – Tower Bridge to home – I thought I’d combine the two.
So all layered up, I headed out to Brick Lane, enjoying some of the wonderful street art and the way to the Brewery.
Finally at the Truman Brewery I took in the great 8 bit art on show. It’s an interesting stunt and I throughly enjoyed it. I didn’t play the life-sized Wreck-it Ralph game via the Blippable building – and I didn’t see anyone else giving it a go either. Instead, everyone had their smartphones out and were taking photos. The explanation on the poster was straight forward – but to me it was just another example that while these augmented reality apps, nifty little gadgets that they are – just aren’t mainstream enough and perhaps require more effort in their implementation.
Also, unless you recognised the angry looking character from the Wreck-it Ralph game (I didn’t) or knew that this was about the soon to be released Disney flick (I didn’t), there was no messaging I could see explaining the exhibition to passers-by. Only through googling once home was I able to pull it all together.
How can you not love that wee ‘pixel pup’ (HT @surfpunkian) with his little bit of digital doodoo?
All pixeled out, I stripped off my trousers, vest and jumper – garnering some rather alarmed glances that quickly turned to relief as people realised I was wearing running gear underneath – and headed off home.
2°C and scattered clouds. 9.1 miles, 1h19m18s, 8m40s/mile – via Strava
No points for guessing why this is one of my favourite runs in London: it goes right past some of the most inspiring sights in London, all the while being dwarfed by the newest addition to the London Skyline, the Shard. Of course you do have to contend with the all the tourists, especially around the Tower of London, along Embankment and especially by the Houses of Parliament.
The beautifully restored Albert Bridge signals that there’s just under 2.5 miles left to go bringing my total for the Strava Run Base Mile Blast 57 miles in 13 days. Chuffed to have kept my January runstreak going so far!
All images from the day are also on my Flickr and edited using Snapseed for iPad for some added oomph (loving the ‘Drama’ filter).
While we’re on the topic, here’s an excellent 8 point guide to blogging that not only sums it up perfectly, but also shows how it’s different from writing a press release or an article. From the importance of tweetable and descriptive headlines, writing upside down to inviting comments with questions and opinion – if you blog for work or privately, this is a must read, print, laminate and stick to the wall kind of document.
Ideas of Year are looking for just that – creative ideas from the Great British PR industry – to showcase some of the best stunts, social campaigns, quick and simple media stories. At the end of the process, around 100 of the finest examples will be compiled in a coffee table book that’ll be published with PR Moment in March 2013. So if you have a campaign to enter, complete this form and submit it by January 20.
Lego have been on a roll in regards to customer service recently and this week has been no exception: A boy lost his new Lego toys in Sainsbury’s. He wrote a letter to Lego asking them if they’d replace the toys. Lego’s response is pure customer service gold. The original Tweet has been shared thousands of times, ITV and other media outlets have picked it up, and I don’t have to tell you the importance of quick, empathetic, helpful, human customer service in a viral world.
The guys at Oddbins are back and running yet another marvellous promotional campaign. After their cheeky anti-Olympics campaign in the summer, they’ve now turned their attention to four groups of people who, in 2012, did not always receive the love that they probably deserved. Throughout the four January weekends mothers, bankers & journalists, Germans (YES!) and gingers will take turns to receive 10% discount. I am getting ready for the German weekend.
We all know that the place for breaking news is Twitter. Something happens and people instantly come to Twitter to search for a keyword – often without getting much context. Looks like Twitter are looking to wrest that role of context provider from media outlets using a combination of clever algorithms and dedicated people: they are working to improve the search function with a real-time human computation engine that helps identify search queries as soon as they’re trending, sends these queries to real humans to be judged, and then incorporates the human annotations back into Twitter search results.
Still on Twitter, those crazy cats at @SolihullPolice are at it again, providing their followers with the best comedy crime fighting you could possibly squeeze into 140 characters.
Not a scam: If you’ve committed a burglary in the Solihull area within the last week – come to our police station & claim a FREE iPad.
No surprise given murky privacy settings, tax affairs, Instafail, and the new Poke App, but Ad Age doesn’t like Facebook very much: Think of Facebook as a self-absorbed, petulant brat, one that doesn’t understand how to play well with others — users, investors, partners, competitors. Perhaps they should send that to Mark directly – it’ll only cost them a $100. That’s one way to monetise your social network… (HT @stangreenan)
7°C and foggy drizzle. 9 miles, 1h18m24s, 8m42s/mile – via Strava
After my first British Military Fitness session yesterday this was never going to be a fast run, but I am super chuffed with getting to the 9 mile mark, racking up 25 miles on the Strava Run Base Mile Blast and for keeping the Janathon runstreak going for six days now.
That said, I don’t think I’ll be able to move my arms anytime soon…
The must read article of the week comes from Management Today and their look at the increasing power and influence of PRs. There’s a perception in some quarters that PR is just about transmitting a message. It’s not. It’s first and foremost about interpreting reality, reading the Zeitgeist. […] That requires some distance from the status quo. A good PR has to be a bit of an outsider and be prepared to tell people hard truths. I could just quote the whole thing.Trust me. You need to read this.
Last week I mentioned that I was looking for the top PR stunts of 2012 – well, here are some that caught my eye:
The BBC put together a look back at the top memes and viral videos of 2012, and of course we were chuffed to see that Giraffe Bread made it onto the list. Interesting to see the imbalance of planned vs. reactive – clear indication that you don’t make something go viral, it just happens.
One of France’s leading marketing bloggers Gregory Pouy pulled together a great slideshare deck of the best digital campaigns of 2012. It’s 82 slides long and includes videos as well as a key take away for each campaign so make sure you have a cup of tea ready before you tackle this bad boy.
@AndrewGirdwood pulls together 9 observations of where digital is headed in 2013. Point 9 sums it up nicely for me: In this increasingly complex digital landscape – a landscape that is evermore intertwined with offline – people, especially the crowds, are inherently unpredictable. Good marketers will recognise and adapt.
Meanwhile, The HuffPo looks at predictions for retail and mobile – note the schizophrenic nature of our relationship to our smartphone. It allows loyalty programmes access to people’s pockets but at the same time gives customers the ability to ‘showroom’.
Vice magazine looks at the age-old journalistic practice of using event anniversaries as story hooks. Prepare to read the 2013 headlines today.
And as ever, for every positive summary, there seems to be twice as many ‘top fails’ compilation. Adweek put together the 20 biggest brand fails of 2012 and you have to admit – from Amazon spoiling a key plot point in a book, the Bic ladypen to Nestlé using a bear that looked suspiciously like ‘paedobear’ – there are some crackers. I wouldn’t have put the AMC theatres/Oreos cookies in myself though, that was just a bit of a banter between two branded Twitter accounts. Still, this is very much a top 20 things not to do in communications.
Through sheer luck, I came across a video by Minute MBA about the top three HR mistakes companies make (no handbook, withholding criticism or praise from employees and ignoring the competition) which led me on to another of their videos about what you can learn from Valve’s Employee Handbook. If you don’t know, Valve are the people that developed probably one of the greatest and genre defining games of all time: ‘Half-Life’. They went on to develop the gaming platform Steam and another mindbendingly brilliant game ‘Portal’. In 2012, Valve’s employee handbook was leaked and caused quite a stir in the gaming and HR world. So I found myself sitting at home, on a Saturday morning, totally enthralled by a employee handbook for a company that I wasn’t working for. Not only does the handbook do a great job at outlining what their company culture is like, it is really very funny! They promote a total lack of structure to promote creativity and to empower their employees to follow and create what they believe has value. A brilliant bit of work, well worth the read and I’m sure that handbook and company ethos is a big reason why they attract some of the best game designers and engineers in the world (the handbook has a prominent place on their homepage, in high and low res pdf).
Always a relief to see when your principles of dealing with negative customer comments online is mirrored by third parties. Social Media Today provide this great 12 point checklist on how it’s done.
Do you know what the world’s most active Twitter city is? Nope. Not that one. It’s Jakarta.
6°C and sunny. 6.2 miles, 52m36s, 8m32s/mile – via Strava
A beautiful, sunny day in London today, perfect conditions to get this runstreak (or Janathon if you prefer) started. An easy 6 miles along the Thames, one of my favourite loops between Hammersmith and Barnes bridges (although more on a slight twist to an old favourite below). Great to see so many other runners out and about at 11am – and why not – it’s been a while since we had a sunny day in London.
Usually I run along the towpath or Lonsdale Road to get back to Hammersmith Bridge. Knowing that the towpath was going to be ridiculously muddy after all the rain we’ve had, I kept right and on a slightly higher and less muddy trail between the towpath and the road. Before I knew it, I had entered Leg o’Mutton Nature Reserve.
Annoyingly, I did not bring my camera, but I will definitely bring it the next time I come this way. A wonderful little oasis complete with a wide range of wild birds (at least according to the signs and Thames Wilderness page about Leg o’Mutton Reserve).
7°C and foggy drizzle. 9 miles, 1h18m24s, 8m42s/mile – via 
