Tag Archives: Sainsbury’s

GoPro understands social rewards, POTUS rocks and this week’s bits and bytes

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Sainsbury’s: Remember when you could slap Jamie Oliver via Youtube? Well, we’ve come up with our own version of that interactive Youtube clip to accompany our Kitchen Heroes campaign. Check it out to see what you can do with a carton of by Sainsbury’s chopped tomatoes (needs some work in the juggling department though…).

Also, make sure you watch the über-tasty food pornography that is the new by Sainsbury’s ads. Probably the greatest sausage sandwich you’ll ever see.

And yup, another month has passed which makes it time for a look back at our favourite tweets from April. Highlights were the new Gok for Tu collection, the Cake and Bake Show and of course the news that Sainsbury’s is sponsoring the British Athletics Summer Series.

Twitter safety: After high profile Twitter accounts from news organisations were compromised – most recently that of AP which caused a dip in the DOW – Twitter has sent a memo directly to the newsdesks with some tips on how to keep their accounts safe. Key points to remember are to use secure passwords and change them regularly, keep your email secure and keep an eye out for suspicious activity from any apps you may have authorised to have access to your account.

So far, so sensible. But then they go on to say that you should designate one computer to use for Twitter exclusively. So no email or browsing the Web. Bizarre. Here’s hoping this is all just a temporary stop gap before Twitter rolls out two-factor-authentication.

Reward & inspire: A customer that has bought your product and created something beautiful will most likely be a fan of your product. Should they chose to share this beautiful thing they’ve created, all you need to do is share that with your community. Your customer’s creation will serve to inspire other people to do the same or inspire their own ideas.

Much like Lego, the people at GoPro are brilliant at using the things their customers create and share them through their own social media channels. GoPro sells tiny HD cameras that can be mounted on pretty much anything, from tripods/helmets/skis/skateboards, to guitars, dogs and mouthpieces. The videos that they chose to share are some of the most incredible, inspiring, awesome clips you’ll see on the web. Sure, it helps if these videos feature a host of beautiful (often scantily clad) people doing awesome things, gratuitous use of slow motion and time-lapse photography as well as a pounding electro soundtrack, but you get what I mean.

Case in point – a video of a dude solving a Rubik cube. Not interested? How about if it’s three cubes at the same time. Still nothing? OK then. How about a video of a dude solving three Rubik cubes simultaneously WHILE JUGGLING THEM (are you listening @AlexCole71?). Thought so.

Facebook fatigue: There has been much talk about Facebook fatigue and the latest numbers from SocialBakers don’t show any turnaround in fortunes for the big blue social network, especially not in developed markets such as Europe, the US and Australia. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK. Why is this? The Guardian asked readers why: it’s superficial, boring, gimmicky and there’s too much fighting. An interesting point from a reader: It’s no longer a place where you can keep up with what’s going on with your friends and family – it’s a place where business can farm your information from.

Facebook’s demise seems somewhat exaggerated though. Its first quarter figures show that monthly and daily active users are up to 751 million and 665 million respectively. Even though net income was less than what analysts expected, mobile revenues is what seems to have saved Zuck for now: they’ve doubled this in six months. Still, as Nikhil Kumar notes in his excellent analysis for the Evening Standard notes, there is room for caution.

SMS is dead? Well, perhaps not dead, but definitely green around gills. Turns out that in 2012, more people sent messages using chat apps such as BBM, What’s App, Skype, iMessage than using good old fashioned SMS. A study by Informa found that almost 19 billion instant messages were sent using chat apps in 2012, compared to 17.6 billion SMS texts. All of that of course means a massive whole in revenues for mobile phone carriers. Suppose we can all expect data tariffs to become more expensive!

POTUS standup: President Obama spoke at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week. Not only was he funnier than Conan (not hard), his 20 minute routine just shows how charming the man really is and how important it is to count Steven Spielberg as one of your friends. For fans of the US version of House of Cards, please make sure you check out Kevin Spacey and a host of democrats and republicans come together for an excellent “Prom of the Nerds” spoof.

Still on POTUS – the White House this week joined Tumblr and in its first post, outlined exactly what people can expect from the blog with a nifty, hand-drawn pie chart. The administration will tumble quotes from Potus, videos, behind the scenes stuff and updates from Vpotus and Flotus. So far, so good. A sign that Obama’s social media bods are very much plugged into to the Internet Zetigeist comes in the form of a stand on how to pronounce the word “gif”. Rather than go with the soft G as in ‘gist’ (which, mind you, is the way that the inventors of the gif format intended it to be pronounced), the president has decided to go with the hard G as in gift. Let the battle of the geeks begin.

Source: White House

No. 10 Twitter first: Not wanting to be left out, Downing Street plans to use Twitter to give preferred journalists a heads up on announcements before they are made in parliament. I have a feeling we’ll be getting many more The Thick Of It moments as a result.

Can you tell a story in 6 words? Hemingway allegedly penned: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. But what about a story in 6 seconds of stop/start footage via Twitter’s Vine? Here are the award winning 6 second vines from the Tribeca film festival.

Anticipatory computing: Imagine you’re talking to a friend about planning your weekend, talking about potential restaurants, destinations and activities. You’re using an iPad app called MindMeld that listens to what the two of you have to say, conducts Internet searches on some of the keywords you use, and displays them in real time. As someone who has been in a long distance relationship and dependent on technology like Skype and FaceTime, I cannot imagine anything worse. But make up your own mind with this video

Videos of the week: every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera – a fact that Apple have gone and used as the idea for their new ad (and going by Flickr data, it’s actually true!).

Apple fan boys (why hello there!) and Samsung owners fight all the time on who has made the better tech choice. Have a look at this for a clever bit of advertising.

Budweiser’s ‘Buddy Cups‘ makes toasting friends instant friends on Facebook.

Ecotricity comes up with an excellent clip to promote alternative power sources.

And finally: Ed Balls breaks the Internet.

Twitter is for PR, giftastic Jennifer Lawrence and this week’s bits and bytes

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Sainsbury’s Twitter faves: Here are my favourite tweets about Sainsbury’s from February 2013. You’ll see some amazing Red Nose Day cookie creations, Goktastic reviews for collection 6 and lots of love for Lulu Guinness’ Red Nose Day totes. And, of course, a few customers declaring their undying love for our cookies. 

Twitter for PR, Facebook for branding: Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP Group chief executive, spoke to the Harvard Business Review about everything from where we are with the advertising business, to social media and emerging technology like Google Glass. He also said some interesting things about Twitter and why it’s a PR medium and Facebook and how that is a branding medium.

I get myself in deep doo-doo when I say this, but Facebook to my mind is not an advertising medium. It is a branding medium. So if I can get you to say something nice about WPP or me or one of our companies on Facebook to your wife, your friends, or whoever, that’s good. But it’s a long-term mechanism. Compare that with Google. Say you’re searching for a car: We know that up to 90% of car purchases in the U.S. are search-influenced. Depending on where you are in the purchase cycle, that number one ranking on Google seems more important than a Facebook “like.” This doesn’t deny the potency of Facebook. But it has to be seen in the context of a long continuum of brand building.

I’m going to get myself shot again. I think it’s a PR medium. Again, it’s very effective word of mouth. If you look at the Olympics in London, the big winner was Twitter. It wasn’t Facebook. It wasn’t even Google. We did analyses of the Twitter feeds every day, and it’s very, very potent. But—and this is the old fart speaking—I think because it’s limited in terms of number of characters, it reduces communication to superficialities and lacks depth.

The fail trail: This great infographic from social media monitoring firm SDL illustrates really well some recent case studies of how Nestle, Dominos and United dealt with their respective social media crises.

Social media magic: Two things you need to fulfil to have a chance at creating a successful social media campaign are the need to be loved and the need to be heard.

Oscars! The Internet fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence for being so darned down-to-earth and genuinely lovely – and heck, if you can recover from falling up the stairs of the stage to collect your award for best actress that gracefully, then you deserve all the adulation you can get. My theory though: Jennifer Lawrence is just animated-gif fodder.

Source: justnormalfangirl.tumblr.com

AAANYWAY. In terms of predicting winners, turns out that social media beat Google. Looking at the top categories (film, director, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress) Google got 4/6 and social media got 5/6 right.

Pope wiped: So the Pope finally said his goodbyes this week and the holy social media quickly changed the name on the Papal Twitter account to ‘Vacant Seat’, and wiped Benedict’s tweets. No chance for Ratzi to walk away and do the disgruntled former employee thing with the 1.6 million followers. But what about all those (well, 39) tweets Pope Benedict? Worry not digital Catholics, all of his have been archived on the Vatican’s news site and you can read all of them in nine different languages.

Source: @Pontifex

I want to be a cop: When looking for inspiration for clever web design that puts people and their stories at the foreground I immediately think of Coca Cola and their new(ish) site. Seriously. Google ‘corporate website story telling’ and whole first page is nothing but links to articles about Coke’s page. So when @davidjstocks emailed me a link to the Milwaukee Police’s website, I was a bit surprised. But within about 5 minutes I was looking for how to become a US citizen and sign up to join the men and women in blue. The site uses some of the slickest combination of parallax scrolling and floating navigation I have ever seen alongside gripping photography and a fantastic arrangement of infographic type visuals to convey the PDs story. Well worth a visit.

Source: Milwaukee Police

On Twitter? Don’t break the law: An overview of some court cases that suggest that ordinary social media users need to have a grasp of media law to make sure they stay out of trouble (HT @a_little_wine)

Videos of the week: Samsung are working with Tim Burton on a new flick about the ‘Unicorn Apocalypse’;

Nike combined GPS data, maps and Facebook to drive their ‘Run Like Me’ campaign (it’s from Nike Japan, so it’s especially mental);

and Heineken conduct probably the best intern interview process I have ever seen!

And finally: Ever been to Starbucks and they totally mess up your name when they write it on your cup? You’ll love this (HT @stangreenan).

Hacking Burger King, social content and this week’s bits and bytes

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It’s finally happened. The awesome colleagues in Sainsbury’s Washington have pulled off a great version of the current Harlem Shake craze. Even better: it’s for Red Nose Day so watch it and donate!

The advertising campaign is dead – A must read article in the Harvard Business Review about how the campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction. The Oreo moment at this year’s Superbowl is seen as just another reason why advertisers should act more like newsrooms, reacting to current events not only in real-time but with useful and appealing content. What to do? Create just the right piece of content at the right moment by bringing the day’s zeitgeist together with your brand ethos and your audience’s expectations.

Memories and brands – A fantastic and inspiring report by Franck Sarrazit, Global Director of TNS’s Brand & Communications practice about how we make memories and what that means for brands.

Bang with Friends – Remember the scene in ‘The Social Network’ where Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg hot-flipflops it back to his dorm to add the ‘Relationship status’ field to Facebook profile pages after realising that in real life, there’s no easy way to see if someone is available or not? Well, I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but there’s a new Facebook app called ‘Bang with Friends’ that takes things one step further. Boasting to have already generated 100,000 ‘hook ups’, the app allows you go through your friends and mark the ones you’d like to, well, bang. Unlike other Facebook apps, this one works in private, matching friends that have expressed a mutual interest in, you know, banging each other. Once matched, the two prospective friends with benefits are notified by email and go about their business…

Source: Bang with Friends

Meanwhile, people on Facebook are hiring fake girlfriends so that they can change their relationship status to ‘In a relationship’ and make their lives seem romantically complete – even if it’s just virtual. WTF.

Social content that works – An excellent presentation by @JeremyWaite from Adobe about the social media purpose pyramid – or why social media does six things really well: emotional messages (entertain, challenge, inspire) and rational messages (inform, solve, educate). Jeremy notes that understanding what motivates people to share is at the heart of every successful social marketing campaign.

You could argue though that there should be one more element to the social media purpose pyramid, one that LinkedIn capitalised on these last few weeks. Social media provide you the perfect platform to brag about how great you are. A simple enough email then from LinkedIn to their users congratulating them that they are one of the most viewed profiles on the network. That ego boost was gratefully accepted and shared by many LinkedIn users, resulting in over 80,000 tweets mentioning individual greatness. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the LinkedIn email campaign (HT @tomparker81).

The King is hacked – Another week, another Twitter disaster. This week it was Burger King’s account that got hacked (apparently their password was ‘Whopper123’) and while it did get them 30,000 new followers in one day, it probably wasn’t worth the hassle/brand damage. Of all the many articles, Gizmodo probably has the best summary, including the wonderfully smug tweet from McDonald’s saying they had nothing to do with the hack. The lesson is clear: use a strong password, change it regularly and don’t use the same password for all your accounts.

How to create a strong password? XKCD has the answer.

Source: xkcd

A quick side note on hacking – this interview on the BBC with Jeff Jarvis was supposed to feed into the usual media panic of ‘oh my God, we’re all getting hacked’. It doesn’t quite go to plan. You can almost hear the Facebook PR team cheering in the background…

Also: is the Beeb really that precious that it feels it needs to cut an interview short because the interviewee has used such vitriolic insults as “crap” and “BS”?

Creative CVs – Could you get your whole CV across in 6 seconds? Aspiring journalist Dawn Siff has published her CV on Vine. Other recent advances in CV formatting have brought us Philippe Dubost’s Amazon page and Sonya William’s eBay page. Meanwhile, Enterasys – a wireless network provider – is considering applicants for a six-figure senior social media position, but no paper résumés will be accepted. Instead, the company has decided to recruit solely via Twitter.

And finally: You had one job.

The Harlem Shake and this week’s bits and bytes

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Sainsbury's Giraffe Bread

Source: Sainsbury’s

What does Sainsbury’s have in common with Apple, Zappos, Trader Joe’s, the Ritz-Carlton and Lexus? According to Business Insider, they’ve all shown examples of big businesses actually getting it right. Some really wonderful stories, all showing that going above and beyond customer expectations will generate a lot of positive sentiment towards a business.

I’ve talked about the growing trend of second screening. 80% of Twitter users in the UK us the service via their mobile – or to put that differently, they tweet from the sofa and while they’re on the move. Twitter recognised this and even published a book on the link between TV and Twitter – how people talk about what is happening on telly while it’s happening. Not a big surprise then that Twitter acquired a social analytics start-up that measures just those two things what’s happening on TV, and what’s happening on Twitter.

The Harlem Shake is the newest Internet meme to take the world by storm. The 1-minute videos have already amassed over 44 million views on YouTube in two weeks. The meme is a combination of a track by Brooklyn-based DJ Baauer that was released in 2012 and the popular dance move from the ‘80s, both called ‘Harlem Shake’. It all seems to have started with a video by DizastaMusic where a group of people wearing bizarre outfits dance to the an extract of the track. Since then, the meme has mutated slightly, with videos now following the pattern of one person dancing while the rest are either going about their business or there’s no one else in shot. Then, once the lyrics kick in, everyone goes into a frenzied dance off. Completely mental but obviously brilliant fun for those taking part – and YouTube. There have been versions from Westpoint Cadet’s, the Norwegian Army, Western Uni students and the British Army. My favourite has to be this one from two DJs who incorporate their entire audience.

Cheeky Valentine’s Day advertising from Ikea in Australia: a free baby cot (some assembly required, I’m sure) for babies born on 14 November 2013. All you need to do is show them the coupon and a birth corticated.

Source: Coloribus.com

A great stunt from Nivea in Germany for the launch of their new ‘Stress Protect Deodorant’. Titled ‘The Stress test’, the stunt plays out in real time as an unsuspecting passerby is photographed and their image used to create newspaper splashes and breaking news reports showing that same person as the main target in a nationwide manhunt . It’s an idea that’s been done before in different guises but I think this execution in a German airport, bringing together a host of extras is excellent. You can really see the panic in their eyes increase, especially when the PA system announces in minute detail what they are wearing. And they say Germans don’t have a sense of humour…

Econsultancy provides a good overview of some of the common pitfalls for brands and their social media initiatives. In summary, stay away from campaigns that are only geared to gaining followers, promoting a purchase, offer a lame prize, or only serve to make something simple more difficult.

And finally: Love reading the Guardian but can’t quite come up with an appropriate comment? Try the random Guardian comment generator.

HMV’s Twitter meltdown, a masterclass in multimedia storytelling and this week’s bits and bytes

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Pinch, punch, first day of the month – it can only mean our monthly look back at @SainsburysPR’s favourite tweets from January 2013.

And while we’re on the topic – Sainsbury’s has landed on rank 6 in the FTSE 100 social media index (up from 27th last year!). The report highlighted Sainsbury’s strong presence across all six channels in the index, especially the YouTube channel with its variety of content from recipe tutorials to playlists on its involvement in the Paralympics and with Fairtrade. Sainsbury’s use of Twitter and how we engage our corporate and consumer audiences through dedicated accounts @SainsburysPR and @Sainsburys was also seen as a reason for the strong performance.

Over on Escherman’s blog, @andismit takes a look at which journalists you should follow on Twitter. He uses data from Twitonomy to look at how The Guardian’s tech editor Charles Arthur uses Twitter (does he RT? Does he @? When is he most active?). This leads to a number of suggestions for how PRs should engage with journos on Twitter. It starts to get interesting though when Charles responds in the comments to the post and provides his own view on how to use Twitter – very useful to read his point of view and also goes to show that while using and understanding data is increasingly important for PRs, it should not be trusted in blindly.

In what ‏@marcusleroux from The Times called the most entertaining parting shot since Stephen Pollard left the Express, HMV’s official account @HMVtweets gained 10,000 followers in the space of a few hours yesterday as a an employee live tweeted the firing of over 100 employees. Apparently, HMV HR had started internal redundancy meetings with the marketing teams, including the person responsible for their social media account. The tweets were quickly deleted, but not before they’d been screengrabbed and retweeted all over the world. The social media manager behind it all later posted her motivations from her personal account. I’ve pulled together a summary of it all together in a Storify about the #hmvXFactorFiring.

You should always read things carefully. Especially when you retweet them, as Capital Hotel learnt when they shared what they thought was a positive review by Jay Rayner with their followers. Oops (HT @tomparker81).

Everywhere there is talk about the old media world dying. Interesting then that it is old media institutions like Forbes and the New York Times that are blazing a trail for the rest of the publishing world. Forbes offer a great insight into the changing of the guard that is evident in both the technology used by the journalists as it is in the their mindset in a great piece titled Inside Forbes: A New Wave of Digital Journalist Is Showing a Profession the Way Forward.

But what really blew my mind is this brilliant project by the New York Times about an avalanche at Tunnel Creek. Titled ‘Snow Fall’, it is already being seen as a seminal piece of work in terms of online storytelling techniques. It combines videos, animation and audio around one specific event and pulls it all together through some beautifully written and exceptionally harrowing narrative to deliver what is an entirely engrossing online experience. Truly magical in its implementation as it keeps perfectly the balance between tech and storytelling. Bottom line: PLEASE LOOK AT THIS. IT IS ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT. I can also highly recommend the Q&A with the author of the piece, John Branch (HT @davidjstocks).

Vine, Twitter’s new 6 second video app launched last week. Imagine Instagram without filters and instead of a photo you record a short video. I played around with the new Vine app myself and also had a look at how brands are starting to use it.

Image credit: Vine

Remember Foursquare? That app where you check in and get to be mayor of a location if you check in most often? Well as someone who was once the mayor of my local pub, my local coffee shot, my local Sainsbury’s, Sainsbury’s Head Office and a number of other places – I never really saw the point. Why? Businesses just weren’t rewarding check ins or mayorships. Launched in 2009, it’s taken them four years to finally come up with an app that allows business owners manage specials and view analytics. We’ll see if that will make checking in worthwhile…

Videos of the week

“Push to add drama by TNT – the sequel”

and “The Replacer”

Awesome. And you gotta love the Fargo reference in the second one.

Image source: Failposters

And finally: anybody who has ever spoken to me about QR codes knows I hate them and, given the chance, will go on a rant full of colourful language. Mainly because of the half-arsed and poor executed implementation. Generally I point people to the brilliant Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes but our very own @SimonLP has started curating these wonderfully painful examples of QR Code fails on Pinterest so I shall from now on point people who mention them there.

Blogging, improving breaking news at Twitter and this week’s bits and bytes

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@SainsburysPR

Starting off with exciting news from the Sainsbury’s digital corporate affairs world, I am super excited to say that we have finally been granted official ‘blue tick of awesomeness’ status by Twitter for our @SainsburysPR account (thank you @simonlp). Equally exciting is the launch of the lifestyle PR team’s blog, where Kathryn and her team will be bringing you all the news from the world of fashion, home and entertainment. The first post provides a sneak peek at the Spring/Summer 2013 home & lifestyle show.

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.

Twelve Thirty Eight have produced their annual review of PR jargon and practices that piss off journalists. Not too many surprises there I don’t think, but a good read with quite a few car-crash examples of what not to do in PR. Condensed here in The Guardian’s Greenslade Blog if you don’t want to go through the whole PDF.

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.

Hasbro came out with a clever PR campaign this week, asking fans of Monopoly to vote on which of the classic tokens will never pass go again. The Guardian and The Mirror have covered the story and Paddy Power made the wheelbarrow odds on to be axed, with the cat tipped to replace it. Head over to the official Monopoly Facebook page to save your favourite token!

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.

Must watch video of the week: The totally epic, OTT, 3 minute clip for The Guardian and Observer Weekend™ featuring none other than Hugh Grant (really). Turn up the volume, sit back and enjoy (HT @TomParker81 and @tarasthompson).

Check out this excellent print campaign from Expedia using airport codes and luggage tags. Makes me want to book my next flight and check in – although LHR PHL LHR doesn’t really spell anything.

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.

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)

And finally: a ridiculously well done Brad Pitt Chanel N°5 commercial parody featuring Johnny Depp (again, HT @stangreenan).

The increasing power of PR and this week’s bits and bytes

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A round-up of my favourite tweets mentioning Sainsbury’s in December kicks of this week’s update. You can check out November andOctober if you missed them.

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.
  • Rich Leigh over at @GoodandBadPR did a brilliant job at pulling together his top 20 PR stunts and campaigns of 2012

What’s going to happen in 2013?

  • @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’.
  • 7 social media trends from Luke Abbot’s excellent blog
  • 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.

And finally: feeling the January blues? Then head over to the nicest place on the Internet and get a hug: http://thenicestplaceontheinter.net/

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.

Digital Corporate Affairs – weekly bits and bytes

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Last week I alluded to a re-launch of the Sainsbury’s corporate website to celebrate our 20×20 sustainability plan update. Well, on Tuesday afternoon we went live with the new Responsibility section. Eagle-eyed readers will also notice that the ‘Sainsbury’s views’ has made way for our new Blog – much simpler nomenclature. Do let me know what you think. 

Moving swiftly with the news that Rafa Benitez has taken the reins at Chelsea, Premier Inn Kensington has renamed a top floor suite “The Rafa Benitez Suite’ – perfect for short stays”. Manager Stephen Luck: “We’re perfectly located for a short stay. If he’s nervous of buying a house in the area, Rafa’s welcome to check in anytime and we will give him a great night’s sleep.”

It’s been an interesting week for people and companies messing up on Twitter. British Airways started us off on Saturday when they retweeted a rather horrible, vulgar and racist tweet to their 200,000+ followers. The tweet was up for an hour before it was removed and an apology was posted. Many people were up in arms, ridiculing BA for their incompetence. And sure. The RT was obviously a mistake. And a simple one to make at that: a poor chap in their customer service team will have clicked the wrong button. That said, BA’s response was almost 100% right. It deleted the tweet asap and apologised to its followers and said that it was investigating what may have happened. But they have yet to post a follow up about what actually went wrong.

Another Twitter mistake from the category ‘could have happened to anyone’ came from talk show legend Oprah when she announced gleefully that she loved Microsoft’s new ‘Surface’ tablet device, having already purchased 12 of them. The only problem? She tweeted from her iPad. 

And finally, moving on to actual incompetence… Rule no.1 for a creating a Twitter campaign hashtag – read it out load. Then read it again. Susan Boyle’s PR people obviously didn’t do this and caused great joy on t’interwebs when they used the rather brilliant hashtag #susanalbumparty to promote the singer’s new album event. Even though the hashtag was quickly changed to #SusanBoylesAlbumParty the damage had been done. The Guardian looks at some previous Twitter #PRfails.  

So, quite clearly, the mantra should be: think before you publish anything on social. Which leads us nicely into what is increasingly happening when you get nasty on social. Cases in point: The chap who threatened to blow up Robin Hood Airport landed in court; a teenager who posted a string of tasteless jokes about a recent child murder on Facebook was arrested and jailed; and this week Lord McAlpine kicked off The Biggest Libel Case Ever tracking down the thousands of Twitter users who wrongly named him as a child abuser in the wake of BBC’s disastrous Newsnight film. Charlie Brooker – of all people – has posted three suggestions for an online highway code:

  1. don’t form a mob on the basis of anything you read less than a minute ago
  2. accusations of child abuse don’t go down very well, even if you try to “lighten the mood” midway through them by typing LOL
  3. don’t be a dick

Sound advice if you ask me.

Interesting piece in the NYT about how Google’s autocomplete feature reveals broader patterns, including indications that the questions people ask of search engines often veer into the sensitive and politically incorrect. Google confirmed: “The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all Web users” and that the search engine tries to accurately reflect the diversity of what is on the Internet, whether good or bad.

And finally: the best underwear ad, ever.