I had a really interesting meeting this morning with a fairly senior figure from the UK PR industry. Our conversation steered towards cool consumer campaigns and how much social media can enhance and shape brand reputation. The train of thought evolved naturally to the B2B sectors and the consensus was that there is still a lot of relatively untapped potential in social media that B2B brands could dip into and use to their advantage.
But far too often, the comms industry tends to reserve new platforms to showcase consumer campaigns leaving …

The Real Life  Social Networks is a presentation that I discovered via Twitter (thanks @nero) and I’ve decide it to share it all with you as it is one of the best slide shows that I have come across which attempts to debate the usefulness of the ‘friend’ culture currently being fuelled by platforms like Facebook.
The deck is the work of Paul Adams (@padday), Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. As the research lead for sociability, Paul works with teams building products and features for the social web.  His studies into how …

QR codes and their equivalent prophets of innovation have been around for some years now and have yet to be embraced by the masses despite several attempts from global brands to incorporate them into the marketing mix. However in these iPhone/Smartphone times,  drinks company Pepsi recently announced another new experiment around barcodes this time in collaboration with a startup called Stickybits.
Using a barcode-reader application on a smartphone, users can scan barcodes on Pepsi products like drinks cans or bottles and access videos and links hidden in the code. Users can also upload …

This current clip is one of a few that are currently doing the rounds on the Internet. It’s a great example of an inexpensive ‘stunt’ that can spark a torrent of talkability around a relatively new brand. Kudos to Germanwings!
Enjoy:

Click here if you cannot view the embedded clip above.

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Remember Socialnomics? The video was an immediate web-viral amongst social media and comms professionals. Well prepare for a reboot with updated stats for 2010…

Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

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I love this really creative marketing stunt from Yellow Pages in Australia.
Melbourne-based pizza restaurant Hidden Pizza opened a few weeks ago, offering free pizza to anyone that could find the restaurant.  With no address or phone number listed on the website, hungry customers were encouraged to look up the venue as you would any other business through YellowPages.com.au (orders could only be made over the phone). Unlike normal business listings, the Hidden Pizza Restaurant search returned:
Congratulations, You’ve Found The Hidden Pizza Restaurant.
Call us to discover our location and order your free pizza.
ph: 1300 …

and that four letter word is… “LIKE”.
Now, instead of clicking a button that says “become a fan” to start following a given brand, users will simply have to “like” them.
Fb Language Change PDF
View more documents from biznickman.

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You’d have to have been living in a cave over the past few months to not have heard about Foursquare, the location based mobile social network. Even more so, if you happen to work in PR/communications, as the platform is being hyped by many as the “next big thing since Twitter” for consumer-savvy brands (for whatever that’s worth).
Foursquare is a really interesting service which has attracted a lot of interest from brands like Starbucks who see an opportunity to tap into friend networks, offering discounts and special deals to loyal …

OK, my second post on Chatroulette in a week but this piece of news (which floated my way via the all seeing, all knowing, all-round good bloke Ashley Norris at ShinyShiny.tv) merits a mention.

French Connection has launched a competition asking men to try to get a date on Chatroulette as part of its The Man, The Woman campaign. In its own words, the brand is “going boldly where no manly man has gone before”:
The internet poses men a challenge. Can you wade through the virtual minefield of girlie inanity to …

What the HELL is social media explains in 2 minutes using 10 key facts why brands need to take notice of social media:
Here is a breakdown of the reasons listed in the video (via JD Rucker):

Social media is now the number one online activity, beating porn and personal email to the top spot.

Because 2/3 of the global Internet population visit social networks.

Because time spent on social networks is growing at 3X the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time.

Because online, including social media, has become the most …