Alex Myers, Director of Manifest Communications presented us with a very clever and witty campaign for Brew Dog beer, including some risky but entertaining PR stunts that generated natural word of mouth on a huge scale. The basis of their strategy was to develop a craft beer that highlighted personality and left a community feeling as though they were part of the brand. Alex’s presentation that included the use of taxidermy and extreme tattooing  was very witty and entertaining.

Nokia and Elle magazine

Molly Flatt business Director for 1000 Heads, talked us through a campaign that increased Nokia’s profile by simply approaching those who were all passionate about the same thing, fashion! The Next Style Correspondent’ with Elle and Nokia, aimed to transform up-and-coming fashionistas into fashion journalists.
Molly stressed that finding influence-rs that are most suited to your brand is essential for success.
Within this case study a much personalised technique was used to encourage conversation around Elle and Nokia.
Key fashion bloggers were selected to carry out various creative activities during New York fashion week. Each participant was given a Nokia phone that they could use to be extra creative by capturing images, generating movie footage and demonstrating various activities throughout the week.
A couple of sticky key quotes from Molly,
“Tapping into passion, not trying to make them passionate”
“Listening to whole communities, not just conversations that are brand-related is, key.” So important and often forgotten”

As everyone presented their case studies, all very different and based on varied clients, important message were very much repeated. I learnt that if you are running a competition or a customer based challenge it is sometimes better to think bigger and not the case of just sticking with a simple idea. Challenge people and they will get more out, along with engaging better with your brand.

A community of influencers can spread a campaign message further by feeling involved and close to your brand. Tapping into communities is essential and finding the root of conversations helps you to build on this.

A tweet to remember
78% of people trust their social networks vs 55% who trust TV #smw4x4

I have been a member for 6 months and agree that it is a great place to share products, imagery and everything of personal interest.

However to get the most out of it, you have to remember normal everyday people are using the website and a large percentage of them do not have the same interests as marketing experts. Since being a member I have tried pinning a number of things to see what actually gets picked up and shared the most. I noticed that the images receiving the most re pins and likes are those that are unusual or humorous.

One that springs to mind is the Yoga Cat

Pinterest  via Crucodile .

I keep getting updates about this crazy but amazingly cute cat that has been re pinned many times and has received over 4000 likes since the date it was posted.

Tips when using  Pinterest

Stay genuine and make sure you engage with other users on the website. Start following those that interest you and sets that are similar to those that you pin.

Comment on other images and like those that catch your eye.

Start following other people and show that you care about Pinterest as a community.

If you are posting on behalf of a business then don’t purely spam! For example pin one or two images and then leave it a few days before you pin more. You need to show other people that you are serious about sharing your interests and are not just on it to purely plug a business.

Create a theme with the images that you pin, so that they are categorised and your followers understand why you have pinned. For example, images that catch your eye can be pinned under photography I love. Fashion can be pinned under My style and so on.

If you are a serious pinner, then pin more than twice a week to build up your profile.

The great thing about Pinterest is that you can share absolutely anything and use it as a mood board for inspiration! I am still learning how to engage with people on the website and figure out what interests people the most.

What do you think about Pinterest and how do you use it?

If you are struggling to remember when to post or forget those genious ideas that pop into your head for five seconds, then the editorial calender would definitely make your life easier.

You can add in blog posts for the full week and set them live at a time that suits you. This enables you to produce content at the beginning of the week and feed them out to those who follow your blog on allocated days. The calendar lets you minimise to one week or maximise to five weeks if you wish to plan ahead further.

Once you have added in a blog post, you can go back and perform quick edits if you wish to change anything before making it live to the public. You can still preview and also save draft versions.

Watch the video below and take a look for yourself,

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Screen Cast from Zack Grossbart on Vimeo.

What is Polyvore?

Polyvore is a social sharing website that is image based. People from all over the world are invited to create profiles and join the website to share their love of fashion.

This website enables people to discover style and set their own trends to influence other people and anyone with a keen interest in fashion and trends will use it to express their creativity.

With 10 million monthly unique visitors, Polyvore has generated a mass following.

Once you have signed up and created an account you can start putting together your mood boards (which can be a little addictive, trust me). With a simple widget that you can install and add to your toolbar, it is very easy and straight forward.  Visit your favourite online stores and start selecting products that catch your eye, then using the Polyvore widget hover over  products and save them to ‘My Items’.

The great thing about creating your own library of Items is that other people can display and share them on their mood boards. As each member will have their own following and unique way of displaying their fashion inspiration, the amount of shares and likes of your products will increase.

This is great for fashion brands as you see an increase of products being shared regularly and the best bit of all, a link to your website is still included.

However remember to remain genuine and get involved yourself. This online community is not for those who simply want to SPAM.

Below are a few examples. Enjoy !

Tips and Tactics
Don’t spend time writing long press releases! Generate a longer email that is captivating and straight to the point. As long as you identify what you want to achieve from the email then this can work in your favour. Journalists are getting busier and busier so they don’t always have time to read long releases.

Pick up the phone- you will hear most PR professionals say the same thing but it is very true. Getting your message across is easier voice to voice rather than on paper. Make more of the effort to call and engage in conversations rather than pestering with email after email.

Use Twitter- We all know that twitter is becoming the most powerful communication tool in the online atmosphere. Sending a tweet takes two minutes and you will be surprised what response you get in a short space of time. People are turning to twitter rather than email.
Think more and be clever! Coming up with creative ideas can help you win the coverage you deserve. Look at what competitors are doing and take a trending topic you can work with. Creating mood boards and infographics can appear more appealing than wordy articles and saleslike spiel.

Lastly it’s not always what you know but who you know. Look at your list of contacts and think about whom you could use in a time of crisis, formulate a plan that is simple but effective.
It is no fun working in PR with a broken hand but in the last few weeks I have learnt more than in my whole career path to date. If you do break a hand or just need a little help coming up with some simple but catchy ideas, feel free to message me

A great way to ‘stay connected’: Facebook proves how credible it is with some astonishing figures:
1)    Over 800 million active users, over 50 % of which log-in daily
2)    Over 250 million photos are uploaded per day
3)    More than 2 billion posts are ‘liked’ or commented on per day
4)    And, the site is now available in more than 70 languages.

So for the average person, using Facebook has become part of daily life. It’s how we keep up-to-date with friends, family, co-workers, events, photos and who ‘likes’ what. We even might be ‘friends’ with people who are actually just acquaintances and enjoy the odd ‘Facebook stalk’ of someone we wish to know more about. Whichever way we use it, Facebook is a central aspect of our day-to-day life… and it’s not going away.
Reaching such a huge global platform makes it easy to see why Facebook has to remain up-to-date, user friendly and safety conscious: to protect its users and keep them engaged. However, although many of its new changes have been met with praise Facebook is not without its critics. Latest updates like larger image displays and the opportunity to download images are amongst new features that are particularly user-friendly. It seems that to the digital-native, constant developments to Facebook are easy to overcome.

However, this is not the case for the non-digital native, the kind of person who has just got to grips with how to use Facebook. For this category of users, the renovation could appear some what confusing. Making it easier to group friends into categories is a good idea, overall. This means that when you post something, you can either make it visible publicly to either friends, to a certain ‘group’ of friends, friends of friends or a custom set of personally selected individuals. A good idea in theory, this new change may work well, however I am unsure how many people will actually feel the need to use this feature. It  is also eerily similar to the new Google+ ‘circles’ feature which encourages users from the offset to categorise all contacts in such a way.

Another new change Facebook has introduced is the ‘subscribe’ feature. This new aspect allows you to subscribe to the status updates, events, photo’s, comments and likes of an individual or organisation without actually being friends with them. This could be seen as an addition to the privacy settings, or indeed a flaw in them. Subscribing to a user means that you can learn all sorts about that user but without having to send a request of friendship. The subscribe feature has been likened to the concept of ‘following’ someone on Twitter, which poses the thought, is Facebook just trying to keep up with the Joneses?

Finally, and possibly one of the most important of the new changes to Facebook, is the talk of how the social media platform is now offering more information about users to its advertisers. The new package for advertisers allows them access not only to the information of their ‘fans’ but also ‘friends of fans’- ultimately widening their audience. This new tool allows companies to see what is being discussed on their page, and utilises the ‘people talking about this’ feature to encourage discussion. Although these changes may be positive for companies, Facebook’s ‘big brother’ knowledge is getting increasingly more difficult for people to control, no matter how many privacy features Facebook installs. Even when logged out of your account, Facebook has access to all sorts of our online activity and uses such information to sell to big companies wanting to promote their products and services.

However, although people make complaints against Facebook, they still use it and always will. The fact of the matter is: to the bog-standard user Facebook is free. If we wanted to set up a page to network and market one of our own products or services, Facebook would be there at the forefront of Social Media allowing us to do so at little or no cost. So for that, I say thank you to Facebook for “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” it does exactly what it says on the tin!

Written by: Sophie Bratt 22, a Psychology graduate from Cheshire, North West England.  She is currently looking to break into the field of marketing and advertising, and is presently seeking work experience in these areas. 

The Elephant parade- Milan

In support of  a fundraising event to protect Asian elephants, international artists, designers and celebrities have decided to paint over eighty elephants with their unique designs and place them around the city and suburbs of Milan. This is the largest open air art exhibition to take place and I even found one in the airport!

You can see a quick collection of the elephants below (some of my favourite) This white one particularly made me look twice with the tag line ‘out of sight’ ‘out of mind’ written across its back end.

I think this is a great example of gorilla marketing that gets you to stop and take a look at the unusual creations. The elephants will be present from Friday September 16^th through to 15^th November if you get a chance to see them for yourself. At the end of this period of time, all elephants will be auctioned off at Duomo in Milan with the aim to raise money for the Asian Elephant Foundation.

Imagine having one of these in your front room?

 

 

 

This infographic was brought to you by Ebuyer.com, the UK’s largest independent online electrical retailer.
laptops at discount prices, look no further than Ebuyer.com.

I get called a geek by friends and family on a regular basis but I can’t be that much of a geek as the City I work and breathe in, Leeds, ranks as one of the least geekiest cities in the UK. This is somewhat shocking as Leeds is known as a digital hub with many working as developers and SEO wizards. It is lucky that Leeds is above ‘Bradford or we would be getting our shame faces on.

Maybe we need to step up our game?

Where does your City rank?

The competition will run for 2 weeks and there is no catch, it is just for fun

How do you win?

All you have to do is find the hidden cherries in one of my blog posts and comment below this post with your name and email address. Follow me on twitter and let me know you have entered. (optional)

Please be aware that the tickets expire 4/11/11

You are looking for the cherries shown below;

Clue: They are hidden in the online influence of social media

Happy  cherry picking

• A winner will be selected at random and will be notified on Tuesday the 30th of August 2011
• Only one comment allowed, per entry
• Tickets will be sent by Royal Mail, first class recorded delivery

1.Social Media Top Trumps Infographic
I love top trumps and I think this is a genius idea, combining facts with pure fun images. My favourite card is the Silver surfer = Google +

2.Peripheral Vision: PR Communication in 2021
This blog post grabbed my attention as I have always been interested in communication and how it will alter in the future. Ogilvy look at the changing dynamics of PR and predict how it will be in 2021, illustrating information with some bright images and easy to follow graphs.

3. A dozen blogging lessons after one year on the job
As a blog owner myself, this post has some really useful advice and emphasises how much time blog owners put into keeping their content fresh and readable.

4.Blogger Engagement Study of ‘Moggers’ and ‘Daddy Bloggers’

I have included a blog post from James Crawford  as I find his blog rather engaging. He always chooses topical subjects and puts his own spin on them.

5.Conversation Matter in Google+

Chris Brogan gives us a quick break down of how important Google + conversations can be. With a short video and screen shots of what he discovered.

6.Why Pictures are Powerful Social Meida

Quest PR demonstrate how pictures can be very powerful when trying to put messages across. In this blog post Flickr and twitter are used as examples, focusing on the images from Eric Fishcer

7.PR/Social Media Round Up

I follow the Umpf PR blog on a regular basis as their social media round up gives a very straight forward but informative view of what is happening in the social media world. I have put a link to this particular blog post as the image made me giggle on a day that I was feeling down. ‘Exit building before Tweeting about it’

8.10 Steps to Better Content Marketing & SEO

Another great blog post from Lee Odden at Top Rank, giving us a list to follow when optimising content for marketing purposes.
Step 9 ; Promote – “Make it part of the editorial plan and content marketing process to promote content on the social networks and off site content destinations that you’ve created.” Is something I have been working on for a long time and is the most useful way of promoting yourself.

9. Brands & Blogs: Building Better Relationships at Savvy Blogging Summit

This is descriptive blog post about the savvy blogging summit in Atlanta. As I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the event I found this post from Kevin and Jessica most helpful. Learn how to tap into the blogging networks.

10.The Social Power of Trivia

My last blog post takes us back to January but I have included it because I think it is worth reminding people how social media should be used.  True personality is often hidden behind strong marketing message and advertising.
“The trick here is, understanding the medium. Social media is not your company newsletter, or your newspaper advertising campaign. It’s closer to chats in the pub with your mates than traditional communications activity.”