When social media goes bad
I spoke recently at a NMA Live event on Online PR and reputation management. Here’s the video of me talking. The case study I shared was around how not to do social media and how easily brand reputation’s can be destroyed by ill-thought out social activity.
Warning: You’ll need some stamina to watch the video. It’s over 20 minutes long.
Blue Peter ‘Send a Smile’ Appeal
Some projects are an absolute delight to work on. Our send a smile campaign for the Operation Smile charity is one such wonderfully inspiring project.
Operation Smile funds medical treatment for children in developing countries who suffer from cleft lips and cleft palates.This is a condition that really blights young children’s lives, destroying their confidence and often meaning they can’t speak properly, don’t attend school, and often can’t even smile.
Earlier this year Operation Smile approached Rapp and asked us to help them develop a campaign that would persuade the BBC to base their famous annual Blue Peter Appeal around Operation Smile’s work.
We developed the ‘Send a Smile’ idea and proposed that Blue Peter encourage the UK’s schoolchildren to make surgical gowns out of their own clothes. Each gown would save Operation Smile £3 which would go towards funding more operations.
Blue Peter loved our idea and this week (Wednesday 21st November) they dedicated an entire programme to the launch of the appeal (you can watch it here in iPlayer - warning: this link will expire in a couple of weeks). That’s 25 minutes of prime time exposure for the charity brand. It’s almost impossible to put a value on that kind of media exposure.
As part of the campaign we’ve also mailed schools across the UK and developed an education pack which thousands of teachers are now using in classrooms, while also encouraging their pupils to support the charity by making gowns.
Hopefully all this great work will lead to many children undergoing the medical procedure which will transform their lives.
Singing Pets
Like singing dogs and cats? This new campaign we’ve just launched for the Blue Cross animal charity features a bunch of pets doing a cover version of Staying Alive. Production courtesy of the inimitable Joel Veitch – whose new singing kittens video is also tremendous.
The singing pets campaign, follows last year’s hugely succesful talking pets campaign – see the running theme? Any suggestions for the third execution in this campaign gladly received 
E-commerce comes to Facebook
I wrote a little while back about the Facebook beta test in the US, allowing a small group of retailers to sell real goods through Facebook’s gift application. Well very soon, Facebook is going to become an e-commerce platform in a major way. See this techcrunch post here.
That’s because of a number of developments, the most interesting of which are Paypal’s opening up of their Adaptive Payments API. This allows developers to build applications that can accept and distribute payments. The first interesting application is Payvment which enables anyone to set up a retail storefront on Facebook. For small retailers this is huge news, as there is pretty much zero infrastructure cost now to opening an online store. But even for bigger retailers a facebook storefront will be interesting. More and more brands have a presence on Facebook – now they can monetise that presence by allowing facebook users to make purchases for themselves or their friends.
Payvment features a regular shopping cart and has the huge advantage over previous Facebook e-commerce applications of keeping the transaction within the Facebook environment. In the past users had to jump out of Facebook to complete a transaction, which is why so few retailers have built e-commerce Facebook applications.
That is set to change very quickly. Payvment is opened up to the public from November 1st. It wouldn’t surprise me if we very quickly saw quite large shopping portals opening within Facebook.
Volkswagen Fun Theory – excellent viral campaign
DDB Stockholm’s Fun Theory campaign for Volkswagen is excellent. The piano stairs viral shows how you can change human behaviour just by making something fun. Simple insight, really on brand, over 1 million views on YouTube already. Excellent work.
Google sidewiki – the web gets even more social
Awesome. Now the entire web can be co-created. A few weeks back Google introduced Google Sidewiki – a browser extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer (coming soon to Chrome).
What Google Sidewiki allows you to do is comment on any webpage or content on any webpage. That means any user can correct information, add more useful information or links, make a comment, etc, etc.
Google Sidewiki appears as a sidebar so you can see the content alongside the page you’re browsing. There’s also some very cool additional functionality and of course it’s all on an open API so other developers can play at will.
I’d be very happy if somebody installed the Sidewiki extension and used it to leave comments on this site.
Sketch to photo technology
Art directors dream comes true. Scamp an image, then watch at it trasnforms into a photograph.
PhotoSketch is an “Internet Image Montage” technology created by Chinese five students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore.
The technology is created quite a stir on the net, with stories appearing on Mashable, ZDNET and Gizmodo. A surge in traffic has taken the student’s site down, but you can see the technology in action above.
Facebook makes e-commerce play
Facebook have just started running a trial to allow users to purchase real gifts from four partners at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll soon be expanding this globally.
Virtual gifts have been around for a long while now, but the ability to send friends real gifts marks a whole new game-changing step. Added to that last years change from buying gifts with dollars to buying gifts with Facebook credits, and the Facebook Connect functionality, and suddenly Facebook looks like it’s setting it’s sights on becoming a socially enabled e-commerce powerhouse.
How does the Internet see you?
Personas is part of an exhibition at the MIT Museum. It uses natural language processing to reveal a picture of your aggregated online identity.
Bye bye big media buy
Thanks to Giles and his great blog for the heads up on this video – ‘The year media died’ to the tune of ‘American Pie’.
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