Archive for the ‘PR and Marcomms’ Category

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 »

The Perfect Pint… At Home – new Shiny Red video

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Our client Molson Coors has recently launched Home Draught, the biggest innovation in home drinking for years, and we’ve been helping them spread the word. If you haven’t heard about Home Draught yet, it’s a draught beer system filled with ten pints of beer that fits easily into the fridge for the perfect cold pint at home.

We’ve set up a dedicated page at www.facebook.com/homedraught where 5,000 lucky beer fans have already won free Home Draught units to try for themselves, and we have lots more activity planned for the rest of the year. One of our key objectives has been to get across how easy Home Draught is to operate – and one of the ways we’re doing that is through video, such as the clip below:

Of course, as part of the creative process, we’ve had to drink a fair bit of beer to get acquainted with the product. Life can be tough sometimes…

Tags: beer, Carling, coors light, grolsch, home draught, lager, Molson Coors, shiny red, social media, Video
Posted in Client News, Facebook, PR and Marcomms, Video, brands, 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 »

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 »

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 »

Red Wins Global Campaign Award

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Congratulations to our sister agency Red, whose campaign for McAfee was named Global Campaign of the Year at last week’s PR Week Awards in New York.

The ‘ Dangerous Celebrities’ campaign by Red’s San Francisco office wowed the judges with one judge commenting: “My favorite overall. So clever and so eye-opening. Took a behind-the-scenes business product and brought it up front. Great results!”

The campaign made consumers as interested in web safety as they were in A List celebs by showing how cybercriminals use celebrities to lure internet users to fake websites that look legitimate but contain malware embedded in content. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool was used to create data indicating which search topics are the most dangerous, including which stars turn up the riskiest results.

As well as delivering coverage in the USA, Red provided content and guidelines so that McAfee’s global PR teams could replicate the campaign themselves using popular celebrities from their region.
The campaign was also a finalist in the Best Use Of Research category.

Tags: McAfee, PR Week Awards, The Red Consultancy
Posted in General, PR and Marcomms | No Comments »