Here’s an idea. Buy 2 minutes of silence for the bargain price of £1 and contribute to the British Legion Poppy appeal. This is a brilliant idea to complement the annual sale of poppies and from the stars in this teaser video video, it’s well supported. As well as raising money, the team behind it want to get the single to the top of the charts. As it’s now supported by The Sun, they may have a chance. The campaign has a simple page to buy the track and is also being promoted through the Facebook Poppy Single page. Go on, pre-buy it now.
(Disclosure: the originator of this idea is a friend…)
Yesterday, T-Mobile staged their latest event, this time at London Heathrow, with 500 actors providing a singing welcome to arriving passengers. The pre-shoot press talks about the logistical difficulties of getting this done at the airport, providing lots of lovely stories for BA, Heathrow and the phone company. Although I’m not sure why the coffee company were involved?
The logistics behind the filming have been immense, due to the sensitivities of shooting at an airport, with careful negotiations required with the airport owner BAA and British Airways, which operates from Terminal 5, as well as Costa Coffee. Sixteen hidden cameras will capture the action.
It’s going to be on all the commerical channels Friday noght – again witht he accompanying press, so they’re out to make a splash.
But are Flash mobs over (or should I say staged marketing events, as they’re not really flash mobs given the organisation required). There’s definitely some backlash, although lots of people still like the idea. From a social media perspective, they can still drive the views and impression, although I’m of the opinion that stunts are not the only thing brand should use social for.
Personally, i’m also with with TimReynolds who posted to the T-Mobile YouTube channel. If I’d just got off a long flight, the crowd of singers would have probably been the last thing I wanted to see.
An extremely annoying obstruction: After a very long tiring flight all I want to do is to get in the car and go home. The only way we could get through this pathetic so-called ‘event’ was to aim the suitcases & trolley at the participants and just walk. They finally got out of the way when it was obvious we had no intent to stop.
Here’s the final ad that played out across 80 stations just after 10 on Friday. One hte one hand, I love public group singing; on the other, how many times will T-Mobile continue to play with same idea and on a third hand, I would have been so annoyed if I’d been trying to get home!
Which was qualified by saying that Transmedia had become so much more fulfilling for him as a producer and a storyteller that he was no longer as excited by the prospect of creating something in the dark, crafting it in private and then launching a shrink-wrapped product on the world. Instead, he enjoys the process of dialogue with fans, building a mythology together and feeling the adrenaline rush of watching events unfold ‘live’.
The geolocation space is the one to watch right now — celebrities are flocking to Foursquare (Foursquare), location is finding a unique purpose in many mobile apps, background location is becoming a commonplace feature on smartphones, geofencing is evolving in purpose and function, and location-based social networks are proving to be the perfect platforms for cause marketing.
And yet, there are just as many B2B organizations successfully conquering social media. While their stories might not be as well-known, we think these 5 B2B social media winners are doing a pretty doggone good job
At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare (Foursquare) ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.
On May 19, @BPGlobalPR started sending out messages about the Gulf oil spill to Twitter. The parody account took on the persona of an inept and insensitive public relations pro working at BP—and it viciously skewered BP’s messaging attempts from behind a veil of anonymity. Within a week, it ate Twitter.
Nina Jones is a 17-year-old student from Buckinghamshire, and one of the four finalists. Earlier this year, projects were selected from over 1,300 entrants and given the chance to turn their ideas into real research projects.
Together with her mentor Bernie Hogan of Oxford University's Internet Institute, Nina has discovered some surprising – and some not-so-surprising – things about Facebook profile pictures.
After analyzing popular film and game videos online for a year, HBS marketing Professor Anita Elberse found one pretty dependable predictor of viral success: big traditional advertising buys.
I watched this video this mornign when it had <500 views. It's since then appeared on icanhascheezburger.com and it's now got >150k views. the power of a decent seeding plan! Question is, where’s the original ad, can’t find that yet (Update: it’s out and added below). There’s a Ikea cats Facebook page, that says you can watch the ad, but it takes you to the making of video below. Interesting turaround of tactics, release this first before the finished product.
The latest from The Viral Factory, this time promoting the Samsung Galaxy S. It’s a cute video that made me smile, a lot, as well as wondering how many takes they needed!
I’m not too sure on the connection between the video tag line, ‘Use your Influence’ and the rest of the site, though, It seems to be a standalone not really backed up when looking at the product site, however nice the timeline video is. The video is a very good standalone, but I still like to see a narrative connection across marketing elements.
SCVNGR, which makes a mobile game with real-world challenges, has a playdeck. It is a deck of cards listing nearly 50 different game mechanics that can be mixed and matched to create the foundation for different types of games. I’ve republished the accompanying document below, which should be interesting to anybody trying to inject a gaming dimension into their products.