What a treasure: Ash from Soap explains social media…in 2006. Everything is still true, so I am not giggling about what he says. It’s more the cyber-tacky intro animation, the interviewer’s vocabulary (“Life caching is taking off in the US!”), and most of all the fact that we have been talking about the same things for 5 years.
Posted in Advertising, Social Media, Video
Tagged agency, ash, interview, ringrose, soap, soapcreative, socialmedia, sydney
This SOAP presentation is currently going gangbusters on Slideshare and deservedly so. All points are valid and true, my favourites are 2, 4 and 9. Actually, I regret not having written something like this earlier, as our hands-on experiences are very similar to theirs. Oh, and on the same day Amnesia have posted a story from their P&O cruise ship facebook page. It is unusual to see such a steady stream of posts, continuous threads of comments and obvious community feel to a group of facebook fans.
Reminds me to share. more. knowledge.
Posted in Social Media, Strategy, user generated content
Tagged agency, amnesia, community management, content management, digital planning, facebook, insights, mythbusting, P&O, planning, soap, soap creative, sydney
This FIFA World Cup features the usual array of cheats, drama queens and bog standard klutzes on the field. So it is overdue that someone offers a fantasy league for the ugly masters of cheating: The FCL.
FCL logo
Our friends from across the road, HOST have spared no over time to not only watch all games, but also around 20 people note and analyze with bleary eyes what goes on behind the back of the referees. Not that the guys in black are having a particular successful time anyway.
Firstly, I find agency initiatives like this are a sign of a healthy internal culture – and that builds a good reputation and attracts as well as retains the best talent. They are doing it for fun because they love football and because it deserved to happen.
Secondly, quick, off-the-cuff projects like this (and without a real client) allow you to showcase abilities in strategy, creative, digital, social media… you choose what you want to show off in as core competencies. And apparently with 2 weeks of development time in the case of the FCL you can also prove how agile you are.
An FCL screengrab
Thirdly, you might be lucky like HOST that brands came on board once they’d built it. Skins sportswear because it fits with their brand positioning of Cheat Legal and radio station Triple M because they found it funny and appropriate for their audience.
Without any media budget the word got out through classic PR and blogger outreach – targeted football communities, influential bloggers, the Irish (as major victims of hands-on rule interpretation they were very receptive). The essential integration across platforms (Twitter, Facebook, blog) was important to distribute content, facilitate conversations, and recruit people into the campaign.
FCL on The Spoiler blog
Strategically, there’s an interesting human truth at its core. The World Cup isn’t just about the football – the cheating and (lack of) gamesmanship causes just as much conversation and discussion amongst fans, gets the public involved, and can last long after the goals have gone. How Les Bleus got through to the South Africa and how then Thierry Henry (“Hand of Frog”) and his fellow drama queens managed to implode and eliminate themselves proves more memorable than a lot of game results.
Preliminary results: 33,000 visits, 2,500 people from over 120 countries around the world playing the game, 430 mentions in social media, and some nice coverage form traditional media as well (several radio stations and The Age picked up the story). As they themselves put it: “What could a big global brand (and media budget) have done with this cheeky idea?” Does anyone know of a similar campaign going on right now?
Posted in Advertising, games, Social Media
Tagged agency, cheating, cheats, fantasy footbal, FIFA world cup, football, hand of god, Host, WC 2010
If you want to check who the competition on your next pitch really is, don’t bother trying to coax it out of your client-to-be. Simply “Become a fan” of whatever your client is doing on facebook and voila, there are your usual suspects.
My next Facebook pitch competition
Caveat: This only works if you are “friends” with at least one of the guys from competing agencies or they have diligently joined a network showing their allegiance. OK, and if the brand you are suiting has thousands of fans it might also get a bit tiresome.
Posted in Advertising, Social Media
Tagged Advertising, agency, facebook, holler sydney
On Feb 11 I made the spontaneous (and potentially premature) decision to stop twittering. Or let’s call it taking a serious break to re-evaluate. I joined Twitter during its geeks-only phase in April 2007 with the ground breaking statement “back to the office with Pascal” (what was your First Tweet?). I then let it rest for a year or so before picking it up once there were “enough people like me” on it. I ran several campaigns with it, including a gargantuan stream of more than 1600 tweets for Beck’s beer. And sat on the couch (among other places) staring at TweetDeck on my iPhone, trawling through links and private minutiae. And then I made this abrupt decision…which I promptly announced on Facebook. I couldn’t keep that to myself:
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Tim Buesing “just had a thought: how about I stop twittering? Would it even matter?”
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So except for a few automated tweets coming via my linked accounts of blip.fm, slideshare or this blog I have been silent.
My TweetDeck columns
My “Industry” column inside Tweetdeck fell from about 30 active, daily twitterers (out of 65) to about 5 – 10. Events such AIMIA awards or AdTech give it a “real-time info” jolt but it still feels slower. And recent converts like ex-SMH’s TheRealSamNorth got christened at The Digital Citizen meetup and instantly slacked off as well. Admittedly, that’s all very anecdotal evidence. But the people still twittering are mostly senior agency people with a vested interest in keeping the Twitter conversation going.
Is Twitter going 180 degrees back to (social) geekdom? I am happy for you to call me a traitor and prove me wrong with (Australian) stats but does it only work for real-time events and breaking news?
Posted in Advertising, Social Media, user generated content
Tagged agency, facebook, microblogging, Social Media, tweetdeck, twitter
Between 0 and 1 