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British Airways has utilised a number of social media platforms to unveil its London 2012 Olympics advert, according to an article published by Marketing Week.
Entitled ‘The Race’, the 60-second advert debuted on the airline’s Facebook page yesterday; it was then made available on Google+ – a platform expected to become hugely popular amongst social media marketing professionals – shortly after.
The light-hearted advert features British Airways staff and follows a young girl as she eagerly awaits her British bag, as it races against luggage from rival nations to make it first to the baggage collection hall.
Other parts of British Airways London 2012 Olympics campaign include a print advert, emphasising the fact that the airline’s cabin crew will serve passengers with enough tea to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools this year alone, while another ad will feature a gold medal with the tags “To Fly. To Serve” and “2012. We’re Ready.”
‘The Race’ is set to make its TV debut tonight (February 10) during Coronation Street on ITV.
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Are you selling products online? Then you should check out Pinterest…. It gives you an opportunity to showcase all of your products, with photos, and Pinterest is fast becoming a buzzword in the social media world. It is driving more traffic to corporate websites than Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin together, so ignore it at your peril.
Why should businesses be interested? Pinterest offers a great chance to link your product photos back to your website, offering another traffic driver to your site. However, it is also social media and – the clue is in the name – the ability to comment on photos and share offers an additional opportunity to engage with users.
By pinning other people’s images on your boards, as well as your own, you can open up the doors for pins (rather like Facebook posts) to be repinned, shared or sent to other users, and also to go viral if an image is particularly good. The images you pin do not necessarily need to be directly related to your brand or products, as you can create multiple boards for different topics. In fact, Pinterest, unlike many other social media sites, puts subjects and topics before people in its search capabilities so you could create an artistic images board, photos of landscapes, funny shop names or anything that will encourage users to find you when searching on a specific topic.
As with all things social media, this is not a static site and requires engagement to reap maximum benefit. This means finding and following users or subjects that are of interest and interacting with those people. Pinterest is very much not about ’sell, sell, sell’ and anyone pursuing a purely promotional strategy on Pinterest will quickly lose ground. Social media users want engagement, they want conversations, they want dialogue not monologue, they want to be treated as people rather than as a potential customer.
This change in tack for marketing and PR teams has exercised many, who have been slow to realise what social media is and what it most definitely is not. There are few social media tools that work purely as a broadcast channel; yet many companies are still only using their Twitter, Facebook etc accounts simply to put out marketing messages. This works until one person complains on your wall, posts on Twitter that you don’t respond and then others will come out of the woodwork quickly to add their negative comments, whether or not they have any experience of the company, products, brand etc.
Agile responses are required and many social media crises can be avoided by monitoring your socmed accounts and responding promptly to any input, positive or negative. Pinterest gives a gentler arena, particularly whilst it remains new and novel, and is an ideal opportunity for you to use any images you have (don’t forget to also put them on your Flickr account and on your Facebook page) whilst also giving your company the chance to develop a personality through the boards you set up. Allowing your staff to contribute funny pics, or examples of great design, or quirky photos, will help you to attract more followers who will then share your pins on their boards and lead more traffic back to you.
As ever, content is king so choose your images and boards carefully to give the appropriate image of your company. You can optimise your descriptions of your photos with keywords so pick from your keyword list wisely and this should also help the Google and other image search results. Don’t forget to include your brand or product names in the description, and actively follow people so that you can easily engage with a wider audience.
Happy Pinning!
Although celebrated by many in the Silicon Valley, it has been suggested that the monthly and daily users figures released by Facebook might not be entirely accurate, according to an article published by ZDNet Asia News.
The social media site – popular for social media marketing campaigns – claimed in the filing of its IPO (initial public offering) that it had around 845 million active users per month and 483 million active users per day.
However, New York Times columnist, Andrew Ross Sorkin, has argued that Facebook failed to mention that a good section of those users might not actually be visiting Facebook.com.
In its S-1 filing papers, Facebook state: “We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day.”
Others such as Barry Ritholtz, director of equity research at Fusion IQ, have said that the number of users visiting Facebook on a daily basis is actually much lower than the figure of 483 million presented by Facebook.
Speaking from a business perspective, Ritholtz went on to add that those not visiting the site “cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, has previously stated that the site’s measurement of success has shifted away from the amount of users on the site to how engaged they are.
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Cadbury’s has announced the launch of a new social media marketing campaign to coincide with the launch of a new Wispa product, according to an article published by the Drum.
Fans of Wispa’s official Facebook page will be able to enter a Daily Lottery competition to win two bags of the new product, entitled Bitsa Wispa.
To enter the competition, which opens at 10am and closes at 4pm every weekday, fans are simply required to state who they would share their Bitsa Wispa prize with if they won.
The competition is the second launched by Wispa in as many weeks, with the previous one – lasting 24 hours – culminating with Kate Mead being crowned Wispa’s ultimate fan – receiving the first bag of Bitsa Wispa in the process.
Facebook fans have played an integral role in getting the chocolate bar back on shelves, following its discontinuation in 2003 , with a successful campaign carried out on the social networking site.
Bitsa Wispa is set to go on sale nationwide on April 2.
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Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, has become the latest big name to experience what happens when a social media marketing campaign on Twitter goes awry, according to an article published by ZDNet.
Having launched the BeBold campaign at the beginning of year, RIM asked users to tweet their resolutions for the New Year – using the hashtag #BeBold.
The campaign got a good response until RIM unveiled four cartoon characters designed to reflect the main themes featured in the resolutions – Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.
Tweeters lined-up to express their criticism of the characters, with one Tweeter writing: “The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully.”
RIM has responded with a post published on the BlackBerry blog.
It read: “We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to be bold in 2012.
“More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organise the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign,” the statement added.
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Unsurprisingly, a recent study has found that Facebook remains the most popular platform amongst advertisers and businesses looking to conduct social media marketing campaigns, according to an article published by ZDNet.
Conducted by Strata during the fourth quarter of 2011, the study displayed that 89 per cent of agencies said that they planned to utilise Facebook for their clients in the near future. Around 39 per cent responded by stating that they planned to use Twitter with 36 per cent opting for YouTube.
The majority (81 per cent) of agencies expect their approach to marketing to remain the same – representing an increase of 14 per cent compared to the same study carried out during the third quarter of 2011.
Commenting on the results of the study, Strata CEO and president, John Shelton, said: “The key word for advertisers in 2012 is growth.
“The STRATA Survey shows that many advertisers are confident that their business and the economy will return to a strong period by midyear. That sentiment, coupled with strong numbers from the political race provides an overall positive barometer for advertising in 2012.”
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Unofficial Google+ statistician, Paul Allen, has forecast that Google’s first foray in the world of social networking sites will reach 100 million users at some point this week, according to an article published by ITWeb.
Allen’s prediction follows an official announcement made by Google’s CEO Larry Page in mid-January; Page revealed that Google+ had 90 million users at that point.
The ancestry.com founder has also forecast that Google+, which is expected to become a popular platform for social media marketing initiatives, will have a user base of 400 million people – almost half the size of rival, Facebook – by the end of 2012.
He said: “If that rate holds steady, Google+ will end the year with 345 million users. But as I have said before, Google has many dials and levers to use this year to increase sign-ups and usage, including its Android 4.0 roll-out. I stand by my prediction of at least 400 million users by the end of 2012.”
According to unofficial statistics, Google+ is currently growing at a rate of 750,000 new users per day.
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A recent study has revealed that not only is Facebook the most popular social networking site in general, but it’s also the social network of choice for marketing and advertising executives, according to an article published by BtoB Magazine.
Conducted by California-based firm, the Creative Group, the study asked: “If you had to limit yourself to only one social media platform, which of the following would it be?”
Just over half (56 per cent) of the 500 marketing and advertising professionals interviewed for the study chose Facebook; while LinkedIn came in second with 12 per cent; Google+ rounded out the top three with 4 per cent stating that they would limit themselves to the search engine giant’s first social media offering.
The participants were also asked what they thought was the most common mistake made by creative professionals when using social media sites.
Responses ranged from not updating their profile enough (29 per cent) to providing inappropriate information (24 per cent).
The release of the study results follow Facebook’s – a platform popular amongst social media marketing professionals – decision to file an IPO (initial public offering) application.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Some of the United Kingdom’s biggest brands are taking part in a beta trial group for Twitter’s new brand profile pages, according to an article published by New Media Age.
Unveiled in December, the pages offer businesses a greater amount of freedom to customise their page – allowing the chance to display a banner, customise greetings and a select a top tweet.
Chocolate manufacturer, Cadbury, Asda, Sky HD and EA Sports Fifa are currently the only UK brands to have access to an enhanced page on the micro-blogging site – popular with social media marketing professionals.
UK sales director at Twitter, Bruce Daisley, stated: “Brands want to be able to customise what they are doing on Twitter and personalise their profile. When we first announced the new profile pages in December we had huge interest from UK brands.
“One of the key features is the opportunity to show off a tweet,” Daisley added. “It means that when people come to the page, brands have the opportunity to make sure their brand message is on top.”
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To coincide with the build-up to Valentine’s Day, Heineken has unveiled a new themed app, according to an article published by New Media Age.
Titled the Serenade app, it will allow fans of the brand on Facebook to select one song from a total of 640 (in 20 different languages) to send to their Valentine; each of these songs is performed by Paul “Kiss” Kissaun - who previously appeared in the company’s The Date advert which aired on TV last May.
Heineken has also revealed that it is looking to move towards social media marketing campaigns based around events that their target audience – young men – can relate to.
Senior director for the global Heineken brand, Cyril Charzat, stated: “We want our Facebook profile to be the hub of all our conversations with our consumers and are using events like Valentine’s Day, as well as last month’s Australian Open final and the Champion League final later in the year, to generate tactical content to target young adults around the world.”
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