I recently stumbled upon this cool collection of advertising stickers on StumbleUpon, the bookmarking website.
It’s a fun list and shows the creative ways advertising can be used. I would also say it’s in the realm of experiential marketing as these kinds of stickers always make people look twice, which is a form of brand engagement.
It just goes to show, not all effective communication is online these days.
I’d never really noticed it before, but Burger King has a really cool homepage.
Take a look for yourself, but the website has three volume bars (‘Fun’, ‘Food’ and ‘King’), which control how big the central icons are.
For example, if you max out the ‘Fun’ bar, and minimize ‘Food’ and ‘King’, it makes it easier to see all the advertorial video content on the site. Read the rest of this entry »
Working in PR, marketing, advertising etc, we need to pull ourselves back from situations and realise that we don’t all spend the entire day behind a computer screen engaging with Social Media.
We should always, at the very least, ask how the offline is being influenced by the online. Jeremiah Owyang recently alluded to this in a post on his Web Strategy blog. If we don’t, then we can end up with a campaign overflowing with clever ideas that create dynamic online communities, but build limited relevance for the company in question and, as a result, limited revenue and ROI. Read the rest of this entry »
Nobody has the definitive solution for how to measure the success of Social Media. At least not yet.
Sure, you can talk about online ‘buzz’ created by how many blog posts, tweets, videos, status updates etc. that occurred for a certain brand, person or topic, but what’s ‘buzz’? Virtue, a company which does ‘technology solutions for social media marketing’ has just released its second annual list of the ‘most social’ companies in the world on this basis. I was interested in the result, which was, unsurprisingly, the iPhone, but took it with a pinch of salt. Of course, Apple, and others on the list, have built strong online reputations, but ‘buzz’ doesn’t necessarily mean success and it certainly doesn’t guarantee revenue as the mentions could as easily be negative as they could be positive.
Experiential marketing is about bringing the customer closer to the brand and, by its very definition, creating an experience. It’s fair to say New Zealanders love experiences like anyone else; tons of graduates take an OE and the country is full of different tours, promising the ‘Kiwi experience’.
In addition, there are plenty of campaigns that tap into Kiwiana and play on the strong sense of national identity. You only have to look at the extremely successful ‘Tourism Paeroa’ campaign by L&P and the newly launched ‘Get Some Kiwi in Ya’ concept from Kiwi Bacon to see that we all love engaging with a brand that feels alive.
With news that Google has just announced the next step in its plan to take-over the world , one tech sector at a time, it seems like an apt moment to highlight how it does PR/marketing. Read the rest of this entry »
In the media we are always speaking about ‘trends’. Twitter was/is a trend; Google Wave is a trend; apps that drive core business revenue also seem to be an increasing trend (just take a look at the Pizza Hut app )…but what’s a ‘megatrend’? Well, according to Adam Kleinberg , CEO of a Traction, a creative agency out in San Fran, it’s something that transforms society as we know it; “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” and all that malarkey. Read the rest of this entry »
Check out this YouTube effort by Canadian band Sons of Maxwell who have been fighting United Airlines since March 2008 over compensation for damaged guitars while touring. Clearly, the band felt they weren’t getting a satisfactory response from the airline, so after a frustrating 12 months or so, they finally took matters into their own hands. The video was loaded onto the Sons of Maxwell YouTube channel on Monday, and after only three days it’s already had 640,000 views!! It’s certainly not doing any harm to the band’s reputation at the moment, with loads of coverage both online and offline. Read the rest of this entry »
When the National Business Review interviewed me recently on the role of Twitter, I told marketing reporter Hazel Phillips that those companies contemplating Twitter shouldn’t get too distracted by the early adopters who may appear to dominate the conversations with endless updates of banal goings-on. The fact remains that there is a remarkably high level of serious communication taking place on Twitter and, more significantly, much of this is exclusively taking place on Twitter. So my first comment to our clients is: if you are not there in the first place, how can you take part? Read the rest of this entry »
I spoke at an Auckland Chamber of Commerce event this week on the benefits of blogging for small to medium businesses. It really is an ideal channel for companies offering niche products and services that lack the brand presence of larger organisations. Here are five reasons why blogging is such a great tool for SMEs:
Yes, the now ditched Aussie tourism slogan grew on me! Maybe it’s because I’m Kiwi; we have that much more cultural affinity with Australia than just about anyone else - I think it appealed to us. And of course, it spawned a whole bunch of amusing variations, particularly so at Bledisloe Cup matches!
The images on the TVC were simply spectacular - that mouth-watering variety of visual slendour from the great vastness of the Australian continent. It certainly made me want to visit Oz!
But apparently Canada and the UK didn’t like the language or something; Tourism Australia ditched it… and now the Aussie PM himself is having a go!
Ultimately the slogan fell victim to the tighter travel market - there was little or no discernible increase in inbound travel from specifically targeted countries.
But maybe Australia doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all global slogan - after all, what attracts New Zealanders, for example, to visit Australia may be entirely different to that of Japanese or Germans. What happened to targeted marketing?
So, bloody hell, whatever they come up with next, I hope for their sakes, it isn’t treated as a sacrificial lamb should greater macro-economic forces once again take their toll on tourist numbers.
Interesting article in The Australian last week. Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News cites research finding that 80% of stories in British newspapers were rewritten wire copy and press releases, or “churnalism” as Davies puts it.
It’s true that newspapers around the world are cutting costs and trimming editorial staff. But the selected findings of Nick Davies don’t tell the full story. In a post-Enron world, the likes of Sarbanes-Oxley and equivalent laws in other jurisdictions, mean there is an increased demand for greater corporate governance in the private sector, and greater statutory obligations for transparency in the public sector. The reality is that many organisations must use PR tools by necessity in order to ensure full disclosure and regulatory compliance.
At the same time, the media has a greater need than ever for content due to the demands of their expanding online channels. The NZ Herald, for example, frequently runs material on its site that is not replicated in the print version. It is an unfair expectation on already stretched journalists that they fulfil this demand themselves, which is where PR-driven content comes in. As long as the content that’s provided is newsworthy, relevant and of interest, then PR serves a valuable purpose to the media.
The public relations industry has long been an easy whipping-boy for media commentators like Davies, who would have you believe that PR is responsible for devaluing or undermining journalistic standards, that in some way the industry is corrupting the integrity of the media. Well I’m sorry Nick, but that’s nonsense - it’s simply up to publications to ensure they cut the wheat from the chaff, and ensure that what makes it into print is relevant to their readers.
We recently noticed a couple of incidences of comment spam on one of our clients’ blogs.
Comment spam is usually pretty obvious since it more often than not links you to sites selling products to help you cope with sexual inadequacies, or ‘genuine’ Rolexes and the like.
However this particular spam was far more subtle, hidden in fairly innocuous comments from supposedly encouraging readers.
And they both pointed to credible, if not plain-looking blogs (see below), loaded with Google AdSense ads. Nevertheless, one of them hid links to unsavoury content at the bottom. And there were other clues, such as a lack of detail on how to contact the supposedly expert blogger, or any biographical info about the author.
Not surprisingly, both blog domains were registered to the same person. Whether the spam was being distributed automatically or manually, this was an attempt to direct traffic to these blogs to make money from the Ads. So, Brian Fleming, knock it off…
As spammers get smarter, you need to watch out for these kind of comments, otherwise you may find yourself approving them in the moderation process when in fact they are dishonest attempts to redirect users to their blogs or boost their rankings by adding in-bound links.
So if it’s your job to monitor and moderate your company’s blog, make sure that every link embedded in a comment goes back to a bona fide blog on similar, relevant content. And read those blogs carefully!
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The recent travails of a young Brit by the name of Max Gogarty has highlighted one of the principal rules around blogging. Max, the son of a Guardian journalist, was given his own blog on the Guardian?s website, where he would post on his travels as a backpacker. Unfortunately for Max, a combination of his apparent upper-class background, the manner in which he got the blog in the first place, and his inability to write a decent sentence resulted in him being pilloried by the Guardian?s readership.
The incident reminds me of why it is so critical to know who your blog is targeting, and how much thought you must put into your content. Max was something of a sacrificial lamb to the Guardian?s liberal readership, but surely it should have occurred to the editorial team that maybe he was not a particularly good match as a contributor? It smacks of a rush job, and when you?re preparing to launch a blog, consideration is critical ? get off on the wrong foot, and your blog is doomed to fail (Max?s blog has since been pulled). You need to be sure who your audience is, and your content should be tailored to suit that audience. Young Max is a shining example of how paramount relevance is. If you?re not relevant to your targeted readership you will either be ignored, or at worse be on the receiving end of a Gogarty-esque flaming.
