Facebook really is first among equals when it comes to social networks. Worldwide around 500,000 new people sign-up every day and the average UK user spends three solid days a year on the site.
The network is a strange mix of public and private, and besides advertising those with pages for their business or organisation need to think creatively about how to attract fans.
Here are a few ideas you can put into practice very quickly and form a good basis for Facebook marketing campaigns. Read more >>
Everyone loves a good viral video and when successfully executed they can deliver a real boost for your brand – spreading a message or just getting you mentioned and noticed. But can you replicate viral success time and again?
The question came to mind when I heard that one of my favourite virals of recent times was getting a sequel.
J’aime la Tour
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Commissioned by visitBlackpool to promote tourism, this clip gives a humorous take on the Lancashire town, comparing it to Paris with a cinematic nod to French cinema thrown in.
This video is undoubtedly very clever, but by viral conventions isn’t particularly humorous, is a little slow paced and doesn’t really wow.
Despite that it still attracted 60,000 viewers on YouTube because what really made it stand out when uploaded earlier this year was its ability to jump vertically between different media channels. It had crossover appeal which was capitalised on by an effective PR campaign.
While people sharing your video on facebook, twitter, or even through good old fashioned emails is great, it is never likely to have real penetration unless it migrates to other channels.
Mainstream media remains the biggest game in town and successful PR increased viewers and the video’s spread. National TV coverage included BBC News and Sky News, with newspaper coverage including the Daily Mail and a host of regional newspapers and websites.
This was in effect a great PR campaign based around a solid, but not spectacular video.
Repeat success?
A lot what we do online is about the ‘new’. People want a succession of exciting, fun and interesting experiences (as trendwatching.com pointed out, describing it as ‘nowism’).
The media is no different and is constantly looking for fresh content and stories – especially in the 24-hour news cycle we now inhabit.
In that environment can we expect virality to strike twice? It does sometimes as Blendtec’s Will it Blend? series and VW’s recent Fun Theory videos have shown - but they are the rare exception.
If you can get one of your viral masterpieces off the ground you should consider it a success – thousands have failed in the same quest, lacking the resources to mount a PR campaign that would help it jump between channels and gain mainstream penetration.
In essence though viral videos are an opportunity to look creatively at your brand or products. While they might not lead to overnight YouTube stardom they can give you a fresh perspective on marketing . People like fun, engaging content –whether it is a video, news story, tweet, picture, or podcast.
So will the second video share the same success at J’aime la tour? I’ll let you be the judge of that…
This new dilemma was highlighted to me yesterday as I tried to update my LinkedIn social profile to include my involvement with MajesticSEO. LinkedIn’s privacy statement is robust and reassuring, but they have a new beta section asking me to add details about my company. The ”number of employees” section was a compulsory field. Now I am not especially precious about this data, but I serve many masters. My legally binding contract with MajesticSEO includes a confidentiality clause, naturally. Even if it didn’t, I think that I should make it just a LITTLE difficult for prying eyes to build up inside knowledge about businesses where I am not the controlling interest. What if you work for TESCO. How many employees even KNOW how many people work there? Read more >>
Parting the dark clouds that have surrounded the British banking sector since the beginning of this recession is not an easy thing for those trying to market them.
Cutting through the mistrust that surrounds them requires personal relationships with customers, something that many of the bigger banks had lost interest in.
Not an easy job, but one that UK internet and telephone bank First Direct is trying to tackle head-on. The bank, a subsidiary of HSBC, has no branches yet consistently proves a consumer favourite.
Marketers and PRs have always enjoyed a fairly uneasy co-existence. Often based on mutual misunderstanding that unease has only grown in recent times as both come to terms with the power of online advertising and PR and the growth of  social networking sites.
Traditionally the ones with the bigger budgets, ad agencies have been staking their claim and winning some high profile social media accounts. Invariably when an ad agency muscles in PR execs claim they’ll lack the ‘right tone of voice’ and the ability to ‘position’ brands. They also suggest that the PR skill set is a better fit for social media.
While marketing agencies can comfortably integrate social media into their campaigns (they already often have responsibility for online advertising, email marketing and to a lesser extent SEO) the main criticism levelled by PRs remains their inability to handle the mysterious duo of tone of voice and positioning.
So what the hell do they both mean? And is that the only difference between PRs and marketers when it comes to carving up the social media cake? Read more >>
Coca-cola has said this week that it intends to pursue a much more aggressive digital marketing presence.
While that choice of words is probably best consigned to an industry magazine, the soft drinks giant is clearly reaping the benefits of brand engagement – claiming to have a mailing list of 13 million customers in the US thanks to its My Coke Rewards site and similar success with its UK counterpart, Coke Zone.
Running a social media campaign is a great way to get lots of visitors to a website but its very hard to target the campaign to a particular country. If your goal is to generate links, buzz or blog subscribers then worldwide traffic is fine but what happens if you are primarily interested in local visitors?
In the past most people have used Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon as the main networks to seed a viral article or blog post and this week I loaded up Google Trends to see which of these was biggest in the UK. As you can see below the daily traffic figures are nothing to get excited about and traffic to all of them seems to have dropped a lot in the UK during 2009.
You may well have noticed this story over the past couple of weeks. It is about one web developer’s battle with Thomson Holidays for compensation following a disastrous holiday in Tunisia with the tour operator.
Thomson eventually capitulated after his blog gained higher search rankings for the keyword ‘Thomson Tunisia’ than their own site. This type of online consumer activism was recently mirrored in the US by Dave Carroll, who had his prized guitar damaged by United Airlines. The Canadian musician decided to post a series of YouTube protest songs until the airline properly compensated. They did, but not before his high profile stunt caused the airline’s value to plummet by ten per cent.
These two high profile episodes bring about an important question – how can brands protect themselves from the growing trend of online foot stamping? Read more >>
Ritchie the author of the post has emailed me the following image (they use some kind of heat map package) showing that visitors from Digg seem to click like mad anywhere on the page even when no links are present.
Yesterday I was speaking about SEO & social media at the Digital Editors Network meeting in Preston.
It was my first time at the event and it was extremely interesting to hear about how newspapers & news websites are coping with the challenges of the current climate.
