Author Archive

This week we’re loving #blogadesh and Reynholm Industries

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Here’s our regular roundup of stories that have caught our eye this week – as ever, thanks to the Shiny team for some great suggestions.

Facebook Places

Lots of news coming out of Facebook this week about forthcoming features and changes to the service. Most notably, Facebook Places has launched in the US and just as they were influenced by Twitter to create the “what’s on your mind” feature, Mark Zuckerberg and his team have responded to the interest in location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, both of whom they’ve partnered with for this launch.

As with Foursquare, Facebook Places allows you to check in to places like bars or shops, and if you wish, tell your friends where you are via your profile. You can also tag friends who are with you, and see who else has checked in there, with each destination having its own Facebook page. Users will get rewards and incentives for checking in, something that to date has been missing in the UK from location-based networks.

It’s a savvy move that will be coming to a smartphone near you soon, and yet again shows Zuck’s determination to make Facebook the only social network most people need – which in turn increases interest from brands, and advertising revenues…

Facebook will also be rolling out some changes to how profiles are displayed from Monday so if you start to spot some changes on familiar pages, don’t be alarmed!

Mummy Bloggers help Save The Children

Twitter’s been full of positive buzz around a great initiative from Save The Children to invite three mummy bloggers to Bangladesh to highlight the issue of child deaths from diseases including malaria. This has huge support from the blogging community, with over 40 supportive blog posts appearing in a matter of days, and a huge number of tweets using the hashtag #blogladesh.

The link-up is explained by one of the chosen bloggers, Sian To (who also organised Cybermummy), and you might have spotted Shiny Red alumni Jaz Cummins, now at Amnesty, giving the campaign her thumbs-up in PR Week.

Chatroulette bites back…

Our video of the week has to be this one from Lionsgate films which is a brilliant use of Chatroulette to promote The Last Exorcism. Teen boys watch expectantly as a girl flirts with them, only to freak out when all is not what it seems…(warning kids – contains strong language…) Subverting Chatroulette like this sees the campaign deliver genuine shock factor to exactly target the right audience who love a scary movie, and the video is a brilliant way of taking that to the wider world.

…and Reynholm Industries online

You might have spotted Aleksandr Orlov’s latest online venture, Compare the Muskrat, but our favourite spoof site of the moment is for Reynholm Industries, workplace of The IT Crowd. If you’re suffering from withdrawal since the show went off air a couple of weeks ago, never fear – Reynholm’s Facebook profile takes you through to Reynholm’s own site where Moss, Roy and Jen are dispensing their usual helpful advice …

Tags: mummy blogging
Posted in Digital download, Facebook, Foursquare, PR and Marcomms, Video, social media | No Comments »

Our pick of the Cannes Lions, and World Cup finale

Friday, July 9th, 2010

The annual Cannes Lions awards celebrate the best worldwide PR, advertising and marketing creativity amid a frenzy of networking, partying and sunshine. This year, I wasn’t swanning along La Croisette but sunning myself in Cornwall when the winners were announced, so I’ve (slightly belatedly) picked out a few favourite campaigns for our regular end-of-the-week update – click on the links for short showreels. And of course, after weeks of footie fever, we can’t let the World Cup Final pass unremarked…

Facebook Showroom – Ikea Sweden

This smart campaign to drive awareness of a new store opening shows how Facebook’s ability to tell your friends what you’re doing can be harnessed for brands. It centred around a Facebook profile created for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson where showrooms from the store were displayed . By becoming a friend of the manager, Facebook users could then tag any product they liked the look of, from sofas to crockery, and win it for themselves. Their own Facebook friends would be notified that when they’d won something which in turn drove them to Gordon’s profile to do the same. This showreel tells the full story of this campaign that went on to win a Gold Cyberlion for successfully taking the brand into social media in a compelling way.

Chalkbot – Nike Livestrong

A good example of an idea that had physical outputs based on digital input, in this case crowdsourcing via the social web. Writing messages on the road in chalk has long been part of the Tour de France so to promote the Livestrong foundation, Nike’s team created a Chalkbot – a giant robot that would leave messages sent in by its fans via Twitter, web banners or SMS, often from people living with cancer, or their loved ones. Here’s a video of the Chalkbot in action. This campaign picked up a Grand Prix in several categories.

Twelpforce – Best Buy

US gadget and tech retailer Best Buy prides itself on the knowledge of its sales team or “Blue Shirts”. While lots of brands have played with using Twitter as a customer service tool, Best Buy embraced it wholeheartedly by turning its 2,000-strong workforce into a 24/7 Twelpforce on hand to answer any questions from the public. The result was sales targets smashed during at the back-to-school buying time, a drop in customer complaints, positive consumer and corporate PR – and a well-deserved Titanium Grand Prix award.

Facebook footie buzz

And finally – Alex spottted this great World Cup visual tool from the New York Times that shows which players are getting most Facebook talkup by showing images of the players proportionate to the number of mentions they’ve had. Sadly if you click on June 12 you’ll see Robert Green dominates, while Ronaldo had lots of buzz yesterday – maybe for modestly calling his baby boy Cristiano?

Posted in Events and Conferences, PR and Marcomms, Social Networking, brands | No Comments »

World Cup fever: we’re Shiny Red and White for charity

Monday, June 7th, 2010

As you might have seen from our new-look logo, Shiny’s gone football crazy ahead of the World Cup.

For the next month or so, we’ve changed our name to Shiny Red and White to support the England football team and our official charity Centrepoint.

Along with our parent company Red (now Red and White) we’re aiming to be the UK’s most football friendly workplace and raise enough money to fund 25 Centrepoint rooms for the young homeless for the next year. We will be making donations for every goal England score and for every front page snap of a WAG, and hoping to raise £3,000 for Centrepoint along the way.

We’ve also launched a World Cup-themed Twitter feed, @redwhiteconsult – so come and follow us! And let us know what you’re doing to show your support for England over the next few weeks.

Tags: fifa, football, pr, redandwhite, shiny red, soccer, twitter, world cup
Posted in Blogging, General, New Media, PR and Marcomms | No Comments »

Digesting the paywall debate

Friday, May 28th, 2010

In the week the Times launched its new standalone site behind a £1-a-day paywall (still free to trial now), there’s been a lot of debate around how long it will be until the presses stop rolling altogether, and whether a free vs paid-for online model is the way to go.

With the cost of keeping a journalist in Baghdad estimated at £1m a year and £100m needed annually to run a newsroom, the ability of media organisations to create original and valuable content and get people to pay for it when they increasingly expect “stuff for free” is a huge challenge for the industry – and in turn of huge significance for all PR and comms people.

This piece for Wired has some interesting number-crunching by Peter Kirwan based on comments from Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and Sunday Times ed John Witherow. It’s a long read so some highlights and predictions:

- Digital ad revenues at the Guardian are increasing by 100% year on year

- Even so, it could still be 5-10 years before the Guardian is earning enough from digital revenues to pay for its operations

- Unsurprisingly, neither editor expects to ever build new printing presses – quoted in Media Week, both hedge their bets on how long it will be before they stop printing altogether but admit that date is “telescoping” ever closer and certainly less than 20 years.

Meanwhile over at the FT, John Gapper argues both papers need to become “more focused, deeper, with rarer data and information”. This “elite” style of content is how other publications from the Wall Street Journal to the Racing Post and the FT itself have managed to make pay walls work. Another route that both the Times and Guardian are looking at is brand extension: keeping their loyal and most valuable readers close via clubs that give added benefits and content in return for a fee.

The other unfolding aspect of this is of course Google: if the search engine can no longer index Times content, then advocates of the free model would argue this devalues the overall Times brand as it becomes less influential in a global discussion of ideas. Pay wall advocates would counter that they’d lose more influence if they couldn’t afford quality journalism…

Finally, some eye-watering stats: the Times and Sunday Times are reported to be losing £240,000 a day, while the Guardian has just announced £26m-worth of cost-cutting to reduce the £100,000-a-day loss it was making last year.

(Disclosure: my husband works at the Times)

Posted in Digital download, PR and Marcomms, Paywalls, Print, Traditional Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hung Parliament shortcuts and General Election update

Friday, May 7th, 2010

We’re a bit bleary-eyed at Shiny Red after a night spent watching the political and media world grapple with the outcome of an extraordinary – and still unresolved – General Election. So for this Friday’s Digital Download we’ve got some social media shortcuts that will help you make sense of a fast-changing landscape over the next few days, as well as a snapshot of key online news from polling day.

What happens now?

Traditional media owners have done a superb job of getting journalists to write live blogs with real-time updates from the campaign front line. Two I’d recommend as events unfold are The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow and The Times’ Judith Evans both of whom are hard at it today despite blogging into the wee small hours this morning. These are unbeatable as fast pull-togethers of events, combining the analysis you’d expect from good writers, with the personality and commentary that mark out great blogs. Nick Robinson for the BBC has also been feeding into Auntie’s election blog.

And of course there are also the politico bloggers and tweeters we mentioned a few weeks ago too…

What happened where I live?

For a drill-down into what happened in your constituency, the BBC has an excellent map that allows you to zoom into your area and get a detailed breakdown, as does the Times (again).

I voted and I’m proud!

In a poll where turnout was always going to be key, Facebook became a hub for getting out the vote with 14,000 people registering after seeing ads on the site. That number was dwarfed by the 1.8m Facebookers who proudly clicked the “I’ve voted” button on the home page yesterday. Over on Twitter, around 25,000 people used the hashtag #ukvote yesterday to declare where they’d voted according to Tweetminster, with around 27% hailing from London.

I couldn’t vote and I’m furious!

Twitter beat old media in reporting lengthy polling station queues last night, and now the angry students of Sheffield and other disenfranchised voters have taken their stories online via Facebook (the student’s group has more than 3,000 members) and YouTube. Citizen journalism from the front line…

Looking back…and forward

The first election with digital at its heart saw traditional media breaking the biggest stories: the raised profile of Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems post the leaders’ debates comes to mind, as does Bigotgate. Social media then added live engagement, debate – and humour: Twitter provided a gag-fuelled running commentary on events, demonstrating the renowned British love of a good joke, while online games and video spoofs lent an irreverent slant.

On which note, here are a few web funnies we’ve found – happy weekends all!

If Nick Clegg was called Nicholas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxaiaxkLQA
Leaders’ wives react to the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GLW4weHrj8&annotation_id=annotation_145191&feature=iv
Downing Street Fighter game – now with added Gillian Duffy: http://www.t-enterprise.co.uk/flashgame/playgame_new.aspx?id=dsf
Leaders’ speeches remix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmNpEdSqPxs

Posted in Blogging, Broadcast, Digital download, Election 2010, Social Networking, Traditional Media, social media | No Comments »

The social web and the General Election: How Labour, Conservatives and LibDems shape up

Friday, April 9th, 2010

We hope we’re on to a (vote) winner with this week’s digital download as we take a look at how the social web will play a central role in the General Election.

All the main parties have seen how Barack Obama mobilised US voters through social media, integrating Facebook groups and Twitter alerts with mass media set piece broadcasts and milestone policy statements. His campaign successfully activated a groundswell of activists, bringing them together in each other’s homes and at local events, who in turn went on to get out the Democratic vote.

Here, the social web will play a similar role if the parties can successfully integrate it into their campaigns, and use it to augment what is happening via the established mass media. And the audience they’re particularly hoping to engage this way is first- or second time voters: research from Lightspeed published this week suggests 46% of 18-21-year-olds and 41% of 22-25-year-olds are now more interested in the election because of increased political activity online.

Each of the three main parties have staffed up with social media insiders: according to the FT the Conservatives have nine digital specialists in-house, to Labour’s six, with an unspecified number of additional advisers and agencies. Expect these to be increasingly active both proactively and reactively as the campaign continues.

Social media is an opportunity to lend a running commentary on the 2010 campaign, with Twitter proving the channel of choice. John Prescott’s streetfighting style makes him a feisty Tweeter, while Alastair Campbell casts a weary comms guru’s eye over how the story is being delivered. Former Tory leader William Hague provides upbeat updates from his tour of the nation via his mobile phone and the Lib Dems’ Vince Cable dispenses pithy observations on the economy, attacking Labour and Tory alike.

Comedians too – who unsurprisingly have taken to Twitter like ducks to water – are finding the election a source of entertainment. The Thick of It’s Chris Addison has taken to acidly Tweeting along to the BBC 10 O’Clock News while Phill Jupitus has been sharing some Viz-style voting top tips.

Politico bloggers are enjoying the spotlight, with mainstream journalists closely following them for breaking or leftfield news – and it’s a win-win as the mass exposure that follows gives the blogger a hugely increased profile. Five sites that are worth watching over the next few weeks either as opinion-makers or as aggregators of party news and views:

Iain Dale (Cons) http://www.iaindale.blogspot.com/
Labour List http://www.labourlist.org/
Lib Dem blogs http://www.libdemblogs.co.uk
Labour Home http://labourhome.org/
Guido Fawkes http://order-order.com/

Despite this, all the parties are still looking to control the message, and the Tories most notably have a direct-to-consumer brand in Webcameron that’s been regularly updated over the last couple of years. We’ve already seen though that the social web becomes national news when people are subverting the top-down message, as with the multiple spoofs of the David Cameron posters via a dedicated website. (The politicians themselves aren’t above taking the same approach – this week’s Labour effort, portraying Cameron as DCI Gene Hunt was rapidly respun in a positive light by Conservative Central Office.) Expect more web-to-news crossovers in the next few weeks, particularly if politicians use the web to create their own banana skins – the unguarded Tweet or rash comment on a website will be this year’s Prescott Punch…

If you’re still undecided on who to choose, there’s a few new web tools to help you choose. Vote For Policies a pro-bono non-partisan tool, asks a series of questions relating to issues that matter to you to reveal which party you’re most aligned to. After 60,000 surveys it appears the UK is a nation of Greens…meanwhile the Vote Match tool from Telegraph.co.uk is now on Facebook’s UK Democracy group (a central focus for debate on the network) where voters click through 30 questions to see which party most closely echoes their views.

Finally, a Facebook fact: if the election was decided by Facebook friends the Tories would be romping to victory with 34,723 fans compared with Labour’s 14,971 and Lib Dems on 13,589… compare and contrast Kate Moss’s 276,493 and Lady Gaga’s 6 million…

(As ever, my vote of thanks goes to the Shiny team especially Matt, Lewis, Gill, Alex, Nina and Kate for contributing to this week’s update.)

Update: Twitter…banana skin…prospective Parliamentary candidate Stuart MacLennan has just been sacked by Labour after some extraordinary Tweets (some about bananas funnily enough), Paul Waugh at the Standard has the story.

Posted in Digital download, Election 2010, Facebook, Social Networking, Traditional Media | 1 Comment »

Digital download: Times paywall, iPad magazines and 3D Grazia

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Welcome to Shiny Red’s end-of-the-week digital download, our summary of the things we’ve been chatting about at the office over the last few days. We’ve been sharing our thoughts with our colleagues at Red for a couple of months and are now adding them onto our blog too. If you’d like to get this and other regular updates from us, you can now sign up either by email or RSS – simply click the button on the home page.

It’s been a big week for traditional media companies showing how they plan to maximise – and monetise – their digital presence so we’re rounding up some of the key developments here. Next week we’ll be back to our usual overview of digital creative highs and lows.

Paywalls and papers…

The Times finally announced details of its planned paywall, with readers being charged £1 a day from June to access the site, or £2 a week after an initial free trial. The strategy underlying the move seems to be to build a smaller but more valuable group of readers who are firm loyalists – for instance subscribers to the paper who currently get a discount on the combined cover price of the Times and Sunday Times won’t be charged extra to go online.

So opposed is Rupert Murdoch to seeing stories from his news organisation repurposed online for free – even describing Google as a “parasite” – that he is on the record as saying he could block all News Corp content from Google’s search indexes. It’s a puzzling play: Google would barely notice, still having access to multiple other authoritative news sources, while News Corp advertisers would lose millions of views. However only a player with the scale and strength of News Corp would even consider a strategy that sees it go head to head with the biggest game changer in business since the Model T Ford.

Certainly subscriptions can work – the FT has pioneered this space and successfully sells weekly premium subscriptions at £4.99. However the FT provides highly specialist information not widely available elsewhere, and I’d guess that the majority of takers aren’t paying for it out of their own pockets but have a corporate account. Whether he’s right or wrong, whatever Murdoch does is closely watched across the global news industry desperate to reinvent itself in profitable ways.

(Disclosure: My husband works at The Times.)

How monthly magazines will look on the iPad

With iPad frenzy building ahead of its April 3 on-sale date, magazine publishers have been hard at work re-imagining their titles on the touch screen device. Apple fans believe this is a leapfrog technology that renders a previous generation of more limited gadgets like the Kindle book reader obsolete, while publishing houses are hoping consumer hunger for the iPad could also give them a new audience for their wares.

The media and digital industry blog Paid Content has pulled together a series of short videos showing how magazines will look on the iPad and other touch screen devices. One of the most compelling is Conde Nast’s Wired where readers will be able to share content with friends via social tools like Twitter, and interact with images – so you can click on a car in an ad and rotate it 360 degrees to get a full view. Meanwhile at Marie Claire the vision is for a richer version of the existing magazine experience as its debut product.

Overall, Paid Content sees five main trends emerging, all with different implications in terms of start-up and monthly running costs:

Print shovelware: Those that merely recreate the page-turning experience on the digital screen.
Interactive editions: They’re recognisably a magazine, but navigation and animation really take advantage of what is essentially a screen.
Motion-heavy mags: Co-produced by film makers, they’re as much a video narrative as a magazine.
Web shells: Lazy apps that merely funnel through a publication’s existing website.
Live info: Divorced from monthly print cycle, an article can take advantage of the real-time web.

The day Grazia went 3D

Grazia published its first 3D edition this week designed to work with web cams and iPhone apps to give readers a richer experience including a private concert by Florence Welch. Some readers felt the augmented reality was underwhelming, while others thought it genuinely broke new ground. Either way, it was a smart PR move within the industry to excite advertisers and show innovation, and certainly created a word of mouth buzz, so smart PR.

Mail inches ahead in battle for online readers

Finally, the way the newspaper industry measures its readership has switched from a roll-up of all monthly users, to a more accurate daily total. Bn this count in January the Mail scored 2.16m readers per day putting it ahead of the Guardian, Telegraph and Sun (still biggest daily newsprint sales but in fourth place online). However the Guardian still attracts the most UK readers per month – more than 15m – compared to 13m for the Mail.

Posted in Paywalls, Traditional Media, augmented reality, iPad | No Comments »

5 outtakes from Social Media World Forum

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

I’ve spent part of the last couple of days at London’s Olympia attending Social Media World Forum. To be honest it was a mixed bag – a lot of familiar territory covered, interspersed with a few interesting insights. Here are a few outtakes and observations…

Brands who try social media want more: When asked ”How much do you pay your social media agency?” Talk Talk comms director Mark Schmid admitted: “Not enough”. The good news (for his agencies) is he’s planning to spend more as he’s seeing the value of what it brings to his business, from PR to customer comms. Mark said he had nine people working “in a bunker” answering questions on forums – a drop in the ocean compared to the 3,000 in Talk Talk call centres but he expects the balance to shift as people increasingly seek more online interactions.

Measurement is important and challenging: This was a much-discussed topic and one that doesn’t have a single simple solution. Some felt “return on engagement” was a better metric than ROI but I suspect that they’re both two sides of the same coin. Generally, people agreed that business goals define the objectives and therefore the KPIs – not rocket science, admittedly…

“Social” is a mindset not an end in itself: Headshift the enterprise-focused social agency who was one of the event sponsors, has long looked at how the ethos of social media can be applied to big companies to promote a more collaborative way of doing business. Other speakers talked about how “social is a feature not a destination”. On a smaller scale, Kerryn Dinsdale from Barclaycard said internal comms had improved as departments as diverse as legal, HR, comms and customer service came together in social media steering committee. (While attendees weren’t wild about the term “social media”, thinking it’s fast losing any meaning, it’s still the shorthand most people are using until something better comes along..)

Mobile is big and getting bigger: We’ve been excited for a while about the conversion of mobile devices, GPS and the web. According to Chris Tradgett of buy.at 40% of online retail in Japan is now done via mobiles…with app sales set to increase tenfold in three years according to Gartner, smartphones fast dominating the market, and Foursquare a bellweather for a compelling new style of social interaction, this is an area to watch.

People first, technology second: Social media is not about bits and bytes, it’s about human interaction. The reason why giving gifts on Facebook is still huge is because it speaks to a basic human urge to be in contact with loved ones. Recommendations from friends and family via social networks make it easier to help you buy something or seek out a new piece of news or music - but they were already being made in a pre-web age. Some of the most interesting ideas for future social trends combine people power and technology: social commerce where people join together to buy cheaper, more use of crowdsourcing as an R+D tool, and social search.

Recommendations for SMWF 2011: cut the price, increase the opportunities for interaction, have more on mobile, and run two parallel sessions – one for newbies, one for existing practitioners.

Posted in Events and Conferences, Foursquare, PR and Marcomms, social media | 1 Comment »