blog till you drop!
A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology
A year since Londoners danced; T-Mobile’s new advert
Jan 15th
2010 is already proving to be an interesting year in terms of Social Media; I clicked for the first time on a Facebook ad the other day, and I am now responding to a mass mail out from T-Mobile’s YouTube channel, which I subscribe to.
It’s exactly a year since Londoners danced at Liverpool Street station for T-Mobile. To celebrate this anniversary, T-Mobile have a special 3-minute commercial going on TV tonight on Channel 4 at 9.30pm, during Celebrity Big Brother.
The commercial features 1107 people from around the UK who joined Josh’s Band and recorded a song together.The song can be purchased from iTunes, Amazon and Play.
T-Mobile making an interesting use of the social media space, as Josh’s Band is both on Myspace (a really awesome Myspace page too!), Twitter and a (personal?) Facebook Group to help Josh’s Band hit the Top 40.
This is an excellent example of digital outreach with minimum effort and maximu impact.
I am very impressed indeed!
Adding value to Foursquare badges
Jan 10th
I was one of the lucky few Foursquare users who recently received an invite to download their Beta Blackberry app. The Foursquare mobile site seriously sucks, and the app makes it easy and fun to ‘check in’, find out where my friends are but also get recommendations from fellow Foursquare users.
The really clever thing about Foursquare is that it reaches a segment of Internet users (such as myself) who wouldn’t traditionally leave reviews on recommendations websites such as TripAdvisor or Qype. I also really like the idea that restaurants, cafes and even brands can send real-time discounts and offers to ‘locals’.
As I logged onto the Fourquare website yesterday, I noticed that they are appealing to the community to create new city badges. New York already has a ‘Far Far away badge – welcome to the world above 59th Street’, and I think it would be quite fun to have North, South, East and West Londoner badges.
Saying that, I don’t see much value in Foursquare badges in their current shape and form, so I started thinking about how Foursquare could add value to its community of users.
I am not sure what the deal with Foursquare’s API is, but it has the potential to spawn a multitude of cool applications very much like Twitter. Now imagine a Foursquare/Google Maps mashup where you could map out the venues you’ve been to on holiday, and generate a guide of places worth checking out. Based on this concept, you could create ‘city experts’ badges, ‘certified foodie’ badges or ‘bar hopper’ badges thus establishing Foursquare users as experts in a certain field, whilst benefiting from their recommendations. How cool would that be?
Do you use Foursquare to find out where your friends are or perhaps to discover new places? Do you see any value in Foursquare badges in their current format?
As always, thanks for reading!
Relationship status – it’s complicated
Jan 7th
Here are a few questions I’d like you to answer…
- Have you ever ‘liked’ a Facebook advert?
- Have you ever clicked on a Facebook advert?
- Have you ever blogged about a Facebook advert?
If you’ve answered ‘no’ to these questions then we’re not dissimilar. Except, today I am blogging about a Facebook advert for the first time since this blog was created.
Facebook advertising effectiveness is arguable, but i did however manage to find a few Facebook advertising stats on Dan Calladine’s blog.
Blake Chandlee of Facebook EMEA Commercial Director points out that:
- CPMs [cost per thousand impressions] on Facebook’s home page are three or four times those of Yahoo’s
- On click-through, the engagement levels we’re getting are 10-15 times that. Not 10% more, 10-15 times Yahoo’s click-through rates
- 80% of Facebook’s Ad Space Units are driven through a self-service auction model; they sell 50bn of them a month in the UK
50bn ads sold each month in the UK!! Imagine how many ads you see when within a month just on Facebook. How many of these ads do you act upon? Hardly or never, as far as I am concerned.
Until yesterday when I saw this ad for Meryl Streep’s latest movie, It’s Complicated.
I thought the copy was spot on for Facebook (pretty funny if you ask me) and the fan page is very well managed with polls and a few extras such as behind the scene interviews.
This ad has made me want to see that movie and is a great example of successful Facebook advertising. They also managed to bag an extra 1000 fans since I screen-grabbed the advert yesterday… not bad.
French Art of Loving
Jan 2nd
I recently spotted an interesting campaign for French lingerie brand Aubade, which I thought would make a lovely case study on how to engage with bloggers.
To support the launch of their new (and really cool too!) French Art of Loving website, Aubade teased a few bloggers to death (quite literally!) and invited them to a saucy event in Central Paris.
The agency behind this campaign firstly tipped off the bloggers with this saucy video. The bloggers who wrote about the video where then Facebook befriended by the person who originally posted the video on YouTube and invited them to a ‘let’s see if the sexy lady strips off again tonight’ Tweet up in Central Paris.
This is what happened on the night:
Key Learnings:
- Be clever, different or even crazy when engaging with bloggers – we’re hard to please for sure. Use Twitter to catch our attention, leave comments on our blogs/Flickr accounts – you name it!
- Is your content blog-worthy: we mostly like cool campaigns… fact
- Get your bloggers offline (whenever possible): we’re a social bunch. Yes, really!
- We like it when brands invite us into their world – that’s what Social Media is about, right? Transparency and openness are key
Top Twitter tools – December 2009
Dec 31st
Here’s my selection of tried and tested Twitter tools for December 2009; in no particular order:
1) Listorious - a fantastic site to discover Twitter list and a great tool to identify other Twitters of interest.
2) Brizzly is an aesthetically pleasing web-based Twitter client, which lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts / Facebook profiles, whilst also offering a number of nifty ‘extras’ such as being able to view full URL (as opposed to bit.ly tiny URL links) and the definition of trending topics. I personally love the threaded DM feature.
3) Must Exist – a cool little site that lets you create a personal lists-based tag cloud
4) True Twit – a site that validates your followers for a spam-free Twitter experience!
5) Twitter stats – in their own words, a service which help you to see Twitter stats based on your chosen keywords!
6) The Twitter Times – just like the Times newspaper but for Twitter
That’s all for 2009 folks! Have a fantastic time tonight and see you all in 2010!