Who owns social content?
A year later, most clients are now active in social media – they are asking for Facebook apps, one of them has even replaced their corporate website with a Facebook Page and many of them are even using Twitter, personally if not for their brands. The legal/creative issues for user generated content have not gone away – the clients lawyers are still saying “no” to many creative, social content campaign ideas.
It goes like this:
1. Creative team pitch in a cool, engaging user generated/social content, game/application/tactical campaign
2. Client loves it
3. Digital producers spec it out, and it all looks like its all systems go.
4. Then it gets run past the lawyers
5. Lawyers say no
6. Campaign gets killed or its “Back to the drawing board”
Social mashup goes mainstream: Pepsi Hit Refresh
Earlier this week, Pepsi Australia’s Hit Refresh social media and heavyweight outdoor campaign started it’s promotions activation phase, via a Twitter treasure hunt and the engagement so far has been extremely high. This is a campaign I’ve been working on since late 2009, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing social brand advocacy in action at a grass roots level in the Gen Y and Gen Z demographic. Particularly on Facebook, Fans of the page are spontaneously sharing their love of Pepsi, requesting the treasure hunt come to their city, and enjoying the MTV TV spots.
There are a few points about this campaign that makes it distinctive in both the social media and advertising landscape in Australia:
Death of the microsite a casestudy: Bonds Art Attack
The microsite is dying, only most clients and (traditional above-the-line) agencies have not woken up to this yet. Adam Ostrow asks Is Social Media making corporate websites irrelevant? I agree with him and with We Are Social and say microsites are being killed off by social media (and search). Even David Armano just killed his website. Microsites are usually part of the silo’d channel marketing that clients (and some agencies) seem to love. So to have a brand campaign, you put out a TVC, some print ads, outdoor and then online is just the tacked on afterthought – and its usually the “matching baggage” banner advertising, and the microsite. Microsites exist because of a need for a campaign extension: a place to enter a competition, a place to go to when you’ve clicked on a banner to “find out more”, sometimes it’s a story that continues on from a television commercial. Except in most cases there’s not enough story to keep people hanging around to engage at all.
PepsicoZeitgeist visualizes Twitter
I have a quiet obsession with visualizers, so I’m jumping on the SXSW bandwagon only because of this amazing Twitter mashup PepsicoZeitgeist. It combines mapping (swarm) showing where there are multiple tweeters in one spot, with the SXSW streams of tweets (stream), tracks hotspots, (party), and trending topics (popular). Pepsico are also putting out a [...]
Why it takes balls to Skittle
The Skittles social media mashup site works on so many levels. Firstly, it shows confidence in the strength of the Skittles brand. The social media strategy behind Skittles site shows confidence in being able to go with the conversation about the product. While I was on Twitter yesterday, the chatter around Skittles wasn’t necessarily positive, but it added to the general momentum of Skittles being talked about and staying in the top 2 or 3 trending topics on Twitter (a bonus really). Lesser brands would be feel buried in negative conversation.
Trends in data visualization: NY Times interactive Twitter mashup, Web Trends Map 4
Data visualization can do so much to simplify the complex, so was very excited to see this amazing interactive timeline mashup of Superbowl Tweets on NYtimes site. The creators kindly even put a separate stream just for the ad mentions and the Audi spot I wrote about yesterday got noticed. I think the IP settings [...]
iPhone 3G and the killer apps
I got an iPhone 3G on the first day it was released and its been a love affair ever since. It’s replaced more than my old 3G phone – it’s all about the iPhone applications which makes it more like a mini mobile computer. Fun stuff like Twinkle – which delivers on my wish list [...]
Mash-ups – visualising data
Twitter is such a cute concept – tell everyone what you are doing in 140 characters. It’s classified on Wikipedia as a micro-blogging and social networking service, and I was fascinated to read that it was an internal R&D experiment from a San Francisco startup. You can sign up, micro blog & follow people on [...]
Mash-ups & customisation – not just the American dream
Its telling when a blog on fashion would feature a fab little snippet about iGoogle customisation and Google teaming up with top artists & designers from around the world. Admittedly, it is a blog from New Yorker Magazine, but surely indicative of how the desire for customisation has become the interweb’s interaction du jour. My [...]
