Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

Digital Download – World Cup Special

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Here’s the Shiny Red team’s pick of the most interesting social web stories around the World Cup, seeing as things kick off (haha) today:

BBC Radio 5 Live has kicked off a social media campaign calling for the public to join in creating a giant digital Mexican wave video for the World Cup, hoping to attract a younger audience and boost engagement with listeners. Fans can upload photos of themselves in one of four Mexican wave poses at bigmexicanwave.co.uk, which will turn them into 30-second videos showing members of the public alongside 5 live presenters and celebrities. Celebrities including Dizzee Rascal, Justin Lee Collins, LL Cool J, Miley Cyrus (!) and Richard Hammond are backing the campaign, which will also run across BBC Radio 1. The images are then being beamed onto the network of 19 BBC Big Screens across the UK. Users can then share the finished result on Facebook, Twitter and via email. The video will be available to watch on YouTube.
Meanwhile over on Twitter there’s a special hub where fans can view live tweets from around the world. In typical Twitter-style, they’ve kept it quite simple: click on a flag to see what everyone’s Tweeting alongside upcoming match times. If you’d like to join the conversation, use the relevant hashtag- #eng for England and so on. In fact Twitter have just introduced icons that appear alongside the hashtags every time they’re used – a small change, but a fun one.
Mashable have pulled together a useful guide on how to follow the tournament on Twitter – including lists of the best people to follow, the most used hashtags, and the best news and views from across the network. Along the same lines the team at footie blog Whoateallthepies has pulled together guides to top showboaters as well as best players and hard men – if you’re a footie fan, agree or disagree and if you’re a bluffer, great if you want to do some quick World Cup swatting.
If you’re interested in stats, this article shares some fascinating numbers around the World Cup, including Nike having the biggest share (30.2 percent) of blog, forum and social network mentions when compared against the other sporting brands, despite not being an official sponsor.
Sticking with big brand involvement, there’s an introduction here to Adidas’ digital strategy for the tournament – involving Facebook, Youtube, auctions, and a virtual comic. They’re giving away prizes to fans who accurately predict the outcome of various statistical and skill challenges – so one for the true football nuts.
The FA themselves have got some nice stuff going on, including a new Facebook page that allows fans to get their own team number, create a shirt, and show support. In addition they have a branded Youtube channel with interviews and behind the scene clips (including a popular one of Becks getting a dressing down for kicking the ball), and an official Twitter presence sharing teams news, updates, and links to all other channels.

And finally:

Best ever world cup England song, World in Motion – can this really be 20 years old? And why oh why did John Barnes wreck a beautiful thing for Mars money?
My personal favourite of the many ads / virals flying around trying to tap into World Cup fever – if only for David Beckham still managing to sound like a wally with only one line.

Tags: blog, football, news, shiny red, social media, south africa, world cup
Posted in Digital download, Facebook, General, New Media, social media | 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 »

Shiny Red’s take on the iPad – is it worth the hype?

Monday, May 17th, 2010

As iPad frenzy builds ahead of its UK launch on May 28 the Shiny Red team have been getting a sneak peek and playing with a rare US import. It’s fair to say we’re pretty divided here, with a few of us completely won over and planning to buy our own as soon as they hit the shops, but others less blown away.

Elements that have gone down particularly well with the admirers in the office include:

The overall design – the iPhone owners in the office all love the look and feel of the iPad, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it’s more or less a supersized version
The apps – from what we’ve seen the choice of apps is already very promising, with a great selection on offer for both fun and practical purposes, to keep gamers and less frivolous users happy

Having said that though, there’s some obvious potential problems that, in our view, may deter some potential purchasers from investing in a first-gen iPad. For example:

No Flash – thanks to the ongoing squabbles between Apple and Adobe, you won’t be able to access any content that requires Flash on your iPad, which means many websites end up full of holes when viewed, and perhaps more importantly: no iPlayer
No camera – the size and portability of the iPad mean it feels naturally suited for using with Skype video chat, but the lack of camera renders this impossible. A good reason to wait for later incarnations of the iPad for sure…

UK prices have just been announced and feedback has been less than enthusiastic, as we’ll be paying a fair bit more than iPad purchasers State-side. Even despite the cost difference, it’s worth comparing the cheapest iPad (£429) with a similarly priced netbook, as you quickly realise the netbook can actually do more.

So to help you decide whether to buy or not to buy here’s our guide to the iPad in action:

Tags: Apple, digital pr agency, iPad UK launch, iPad UK price, iPad video demo, shiny red, social media agency, social media marketing
Posted in Blogging, General, Mobile, New Media, Traditional Media, Video, iPad, social media | No Comments »

Shiny Red’s research into the UK Mummy Blogging community

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Conversations With Mummy Bloggers

View more documents from Ashleynorris.

One of the biggest growth areas in social media in the UK is the so called Mummy Blogging sector. This is where bloggers share their experiences of parenting (among other things) with a growing and vibrant community.

Mummy Blogging’s roots are in the US with writers like Dooce who now attract hundreds of thousands of readers. It has however grown significantly this side of the pond, and we think that there could now be as many 1000 parenting blogs in the UK.

Mummy Bloggers are also becoming increasingly influential with core writers attracting thousands of readers each month and creating posts that generate large numbers of comments. There is also a very powerful social media footprint emerging around the Mummy Bloggers powered not just by Twitter and Facebook but also by the Ning community site of The British Mummy Blogger network.

As an agency Shiny Red has already worked on several campaigns that have involved talking with mummy bloggers. This autumn though we decided that the time was right to take the temperature of the UK scene by surveying 20 of the key bloggers and engaging in conversations with several others. We also gleaned a lot of information about the scene by simply reading their blogs.

Among the questions we asked them were

Why they blog?

How they feel about brands approaching them?

How they use social media?

Where they go for advice and support?

This presentation was developed a for a Mummy Blogging event that we hosted along with our sister agency The Red Consultancy on October 20^th. Here we gave representatives from brands and government agencies the chance to not just hear our views, but more importantly to meet and have a conversation with two of the UK’s leading mummy bloggers.

It is hard to sum up our findings in a couple of sentences. However we feel that the Mummy Bloggers are powerful and vociferous community, but one that is ready and willing to engage with brands, but only on their own terms. They are also well educated, influential women who between them wield an awful lot of economic power.

We also noted there is also a splintering of the Mummy Blogging community with a new breed of writers emerging who are much more focussed on monetising their words than some of their contemporaries.

Feel free to read through the deck and tell us what you think in the comments.

Tags: mummy blogging, Mumsnet, research, shiny red
Posted in Blogging, New Media | 2 Comments »

Would Britons pay for online content?

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

The big issue in UK media at the moment is how to make money out of online content. Currently most sites rely on advertising to generate income, but it is now clear that the money from those banner and flash things just isn’t enough to fund most newspapers. Plan B, as outlined by Rupert Murdoch, is to charge readers to look at the sites. So the Sunday Times will go subscription only very soon and other newspapers may follow. There’s also talk of a micro payment system being created whereby you pay a small amount for each bit of newspaper content you read.

But will the British public cough up for something that has been free since the dawn of the web? Well according to a survey commissioned by Paid Content UK and run by Harris Interactive, apparently not

Asked if their favourite news site were to charge three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source with just five percent of readers prepared to commit to paying for the site.

The survey also concludes that younger, poorer and lower class readers are more likely to pay the subs than older, richer and posher ones. There’s a regional bias too with people in London and the south east more likely to pay a subscription than those in the north and west.

“This does not look like good news for a pay model in a competitive environment,” Andrew Freeman, Harris’ senior media research consultant told Paid Content. “As long as free alternatives exist, consumers will turn to them for their daily news information, meaning heavy losses in terms of audience figures for those that charge. ”

Media for free

British consumers do have a point too, for even if every major British newspaper charges for content they will still have places to go.

The two things that will make it very tricky for media organisations to charge for content are -

1 Blogs. Walled content gardens could actually spark a renaissance in blogging, especially when coupled with tools like Posterous (which works incredibly well with Twitter), as bloggers simply cut and paste (either physically or intellectually) subscription content from media sources and publish it freely.

2 The BBC. At the time of writing the corp is still going to offer all its content for free, so readers can still access one of the world’s premium news sources for nothing. It makes paying that few quid each month to The Guardian looks a lot less appealing.

There is some debate about whether the next government will curtail the BBC’s online ambition, but this remains to be seen.

But we pay for TV…

It should be noted that many Britons who were very opposed to the idea of paying for subscription TV quite happily now pay for Sky and Virgin Media. Also 5% may sounds like s small figure, but it would generate a substantial amount of income, probably much more than the media companies are getting via advertising.

So what about you? Would you pay for The Guardian? The Mirror? Or even the Sport?

Posted in New Media | 1 Comment »

Stuff we like – May; Seesmic’s desktop, Spoonfed’s iPhone app and blogs about bus shelters

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Every so often the Shiny Red team gets together over lunch to talk about stuff we like and don’t like while chomping merrily on posh, but overpriced crisps.

Today’s session was exceptionally good as it threw up a series of very cool links, which we decided we’d like to share.

So here’s what we have been arguing the toss about this week

Seesmic’s new desktop tool ““There are fans at Shiny Red who love the new Seesmic tool as it brings together Facebook status, Twitter, Seesmic and images in a very clever Tweetdeck style desktop tool. Funny how two years ago all the pundits were championing web based apps at the expense of desktop ones- but now desktop ones are everywhere ““ Tweetdeck, Spotify etc

Microsoft’s Vine ““ We are keen to check out the beta version of Microsoft’s Vine, which we’ll call a Twitter for emergencies. Basically it allows you to notify your friends if something bad eg flood, tidal wave, T-Mobile Flashmob, is about to happen in their area.

Hudson Jeans Twitter feed ““ a good example of a small-ish company working proactively using Twitter. Made our resident Hudson fan very happy.

Ilike.org.uk ““ Fantastic example of a vibrant niche blog (it has loads on interesting 20^th century architecture ““ bus shelters anyone?) which has a lively community.

Zaproot.com ““ Still the best online news video show. Amazing editing, superb use of images and a hugely talented presenter.

Spoonfed’s iPhone app ““ We have been banging on about how location based services will start to get seriously sexy for a long time now. Spoonfed ““ a what’s on for London ““ has now got a really cool iPhone app called Spoonfed Radar which shows you where exciting stuff is happening. You have to see it in action to get it. It is a bit basic at the mo ““ but has huge potential.

Twitter.com/justforgirls - Interesting example of a Twitter news feed ““ this time picking up on cool stuff online for girls, which isn’t linked to a website. We all wondered out loud why she was doing it and if she wanted to make money out if, but cool content whatever.

New York billboard art ““ Apparently some old NY billboards have been whitewashed which has give a green light to the city’s art collectives to come up with really cool things ““ see here . Wouldn’t it be great if we could do the same thing in London?

ASOS Community ““ Interesting attempt by a brand to develop its own community. Our resident ASOS addict thinks that it is doing well so far, but we wonder if a lot of that UGC is actually generated by ASOS staff. Only time will tell if it works, but a bold and ambitious move

Thru-you ““ The best music mash up we have seen on YouTube in a while. Genius

Tags: Asos, bus shelters, Hudon jeans twitter, iLike.org.uk, Microsoft Vine, seesmic, shiny red, Spoonfed iphone, spotify, Thru you youtube, tweetdeck, twitter, zaproot
Posted in New Media | 2 Comments »

How the Guardian’s Ian Tomlinson G20 video changes the media landscape

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

An astonishing piece of amateur video obtained by the Guardian shows just how much the world has changed for big media players. The footage shows Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, being struck by a police officer and falling to the ground minutes before suffering a fatal heart attack.

You can view the film and make up your own mind about the incident, now the subject of an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. My focus here is to discuss how the footage and surrounding story has played out across old and new media in an exceptionally powerful and converged way.

The Guardian has scored a major coup, not just in getting hold of what is an extraordinary news exclusive, but for how it has successfully delivered the story via its traditional print product, its own web site, and across social media too. (I have to declare an interest as my husband David Taylor works on the Guardian’s home news desk and has been pivotal in developing this story over the last few days.)

Consider this: The Guardian had an exclusive, yet it chose to share its content before it appeared in print, running the video and a first break on the story on its web site yesterday evening. In the ‘old’ days of print journalism this would have been inconceivable, to the point that the red top tabloids would regularly run weak front page stories in their early editions, revealing their big exclusives only in final 3am print run.

As soon as the video appeared other newspapers’ sites were linking to it and capturing the footage or still images to use themselves, and crediting the Guardian. Meanwhile broadcasters including the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 featured it extensively on their news bulletins, again promoting the Guardian name.

At the same time, social media was fuelling the story, with Guardian journalists using Twitter to share the video URL. Mass retweets followed and within hours, “Ian Tomlinson” was trending on Twitter as one of the 10 most written about topics.

Today the Guardian’s print edition has extensive and detailed analysis of the film by reporter Paul Lewis to augment his online story, while the web site is offering bloggers the footage to embed. And rival media from the agenda-setting Today programme to competitor broadsheets are still crediting the Guardian as the source.

So what does this tell us? Firstly that high-quality content is crucial - without an exceptional story none of this would have happened. Second, strategic use of the right media channels – print, social media, web site – can have a multiplying audience effect not a minimising one. Third, that media businesses now are not “papers” or “web sites” but brands, regardless of how we consume their content. The Guardian’s liberal stance helped it secure the story, and its brand has been strengthened by the extensive cross-promotion it has since received.

Tags: David Taylor, death, G20, Guardian, Ian Tomlinson, Paul Lewis, Video
Posted in New Media, PR and Marcomms, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Video, Web 2.0 | 11 Comments »

Are you prepared to save Tango?

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Brtivic have made a great effort in fighting their declining sales with an upbeat integrated marketing campaign which portrays Tango as a British institution and asks the public to get behind the brand.

For the campaign they have rolled out some amusing but captivating videos ““ here’s my favourite:

Their website, Save Tango is a great resources for the fans of this campaign. It holds content for you to do your own offline PR ““ you can download and print off stickers, stencils and letters to lobby shops to bring back Tango. The website also includes games, chances to sign a petition and watch vintage adverts.

No doubt inspired by the award winning ‘Bring back the Wispa!’ campaign, this strategy of saving or reviving a traditional brand through new media has a precedent of success. The fan page already has 343 members and has been running for two weeks.

Posted in New Media, Video | 1 Comment »

Kudos where it’s due…and who’s your unsung tech hero?

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Apologies for blowing our own trumpet, but I do so on behalf of people too modest to do it themselves…

Congratulations to Ashley, Chris and Katie, founders of Shiny Media and subsequently of Shiny Red, who’ve just been named among the 1,000 most influential Londoners by the Evening Standard. Also namechecked in the new media category are Apple’s Jonathan Ive (slightly stretching the definition as he hails from Chingford and now lives in California…), James Murdoch and, er, Lord Rothermere, chairman of the DMGT which owns the Evening Standard. Elsewhere Kate Moss, Stella McCartney and of course Boris Johnson also feature.

And Ashley’s also bigged up in T3’s list of 50 most influential people in technology alongside that man Ive again, Steve Ballmer, Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang among others.

As ever a depressingly small number of women make the cut – two suggestions from me would be Jemima Kiss of the Guardian, and former Microsoft exec Judy Gibbons, now at Accel Partners and heading up innovative UK start-ups like mobile content aggregator Mippin.

Any other unsung tech heroes out there who you think deserve a shout out?

Posted in Blogging, Mobile, New Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

FDA report shows healthcare blogs are as influential as traditional media

Friday, October 10th, 2008

My work often takes me into the realms of healthcare blogs and every time I learn a lot. Often I am looking though personal blogs where people are blogging about the medications that they are on. I’ve always thought that the diary like style and unbiased approach has given them a weight that traditional media doesn’t have – so it’s always nice when official reports are released supporting your thoughts.

There is a new MHRA report that has looked at the influence and popularity of a range of online information sources for people interested in learning about the drug Seroxat, and found that people who write them are as influential as many traditional media and corporate websites.

There are many issues facing pharmaceutical companies talking on line without a firm strategy in place, but the outcome of this report shows that ordinary people can blog both truths and untruths about medicines that they are on, each having a strong impact on key audiences. The first step (and one in which many pharmaceutical companies are taking) is to start listening to the online world, auditing the key themes and the most influential sources. Then strategies can be put into place, ensuring that the flow of correct information is reaching the correct people.

Posted in Blogging, New Media, PR and Marcomms, User Generated Content | 2 Comments »