Blog

Our news highlights from the past few weeks.

Facebook Timelines

Facebook introduced timelines for brands, bringing brand pages in line with individual user profiles following the recent design changes.  Timelines give brands a more visually impactful page with the addition of a ‘Page Cover’ banner, and provide some new features such as the ability to ‘pin’ a post to the top of the page. There’s also a new customer service feature that can be activated, allowing users to talk privately and directly with brands.

Timelines give brands the opportunity to tell the story of their history, filling in important milestones in their development and business. Visitors can scroll back through time to see these key events, be it the year they were founded or a previous advertising campaign.

Many brands are already using Timelines which become mandatory from 30th March. Our own clients, Lurpak and Glenrothes have made an early start, showcasing their current above the line campaigns and heritage.

Explore further at https://www.facebook.com/TheGlenrothes and https://www.facebook.com/LurpakButter

Absolut x Instagram

Alcohol brand Absolut recently launched a promotion using iPhone photography app Instagram. The competition gives participants the chance to win a limited edition bottle of Absolut designed by renowned artist Jamie Hewlett. Entrants take a photo of something that sums up London’s great features, adding an #absolutlondon hashtag.

The ever popular app is a great way for brands to tap into the creativity of their audiences, generating lots of branded assets in the process.

Find out more at http://www.ukstreetart.co.uk/absolut-london-instagram-competition/

Prepare for Pinterest

The buzz tool everyone in the digital sector’s talking about at the moment is Pinterest, a platform that allows users to compile a virtual scrapbook of pictures, ranging from products they like to things that inspire them, and everything in between. Many brands are already jumping on board, seeing it as a great way to give a visual representation of their positioning.

During London Fashion Week, Harrods created a Burberry board, inviting their audience to like or ‘pin’ clothing items that they most wanted to see the store sell. The most popular item then hit the shelves.

Take a look at http://pinterest.com/source/harrods.com/

London Fashion Week

On the topic of London Fashion Week, it was great to see some brilliant examples of brands using technology to various degrees. From rechargeable handbags for smart phones to live Twitter streams and video broadcasts, the week’s events set the mark for the digital teams of its international equivalents.

Take a look at http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/technology/lfw-goes-tech-in-2012

Cereal Tweeting

Breakfast giants Kellogg’s recently showed how extensive and reactionary their buzz monitoring is. Rock star Tim Burgess tweeted to say that he’d come up with a name for a new cereal and joked that he was available if Kellogg’s were interested. Shortly after, the brand created a one-off limited edition box of cereal based on Burgess’ idea which he went on to tweet a photo of, gaining lots of coverage across the marketing and music press.

Read more at http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/kellogg-creates-totes-amazeballs-cereal-response-single-tweet-138447

Female Behaviour Online

Last week, our very own Lloyd and Ronnie took to the pages of the Guardian online to talk about differences in the behaviours of men and women online and how the sexes respond differently to certain types of communications.

Have a read over at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/mar/02/female-species-more-digital-male

Twitter is great. It allows us (among other things) to keep up to date with the latest news, watch events unfold in real time and pass comment on them for the whole world to see. For brands it’s an invaluable resource, providing them with the means to easily converse with fans, generate buzz around their products and potentially reach whole new markets simply by word of mouth.

So far, so good. Until, of course, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong…

Recently there have been a few high profile examples of Twitter backfiring on brands – moments where the angry teeth of the internet are bared in all their grizzly glory, leaving social media teams wishing the earth would swallow them whole. But as these brands found out, when something goes wrong on Twitter there’s no getting away from it, it’s there for everyone to see.

The majority of Twitter-related brand jams are the result of a poorly conceived hashtag. In the mind of the brand it’s easy to see why starting a personalized hashtag might seem like a good idea; if it begins trending then that’s some of the best publicity the internet has to offer – all for next to no money. However, when looking through those rose-tinted spectacles it’s easy to overlook one very key factor: as a brand, you don’t get to dictate how the Twittersphere uses your hashtag.

Take the recent debacle surrounding Qantas Airways, for example. The Australian airline recently fell foul of its own #QantasLuxury hashtag in spectacular form, after it was hijacked by irate Twitter users looking to vent anger about its poor customer service and spate of grounded planes. The same later happened to McDonald’s, whose #McDStories tag was overrun with unsavoury anecdotes from unhappy customers and brand-baiting animal rights activists alike. Finally, in the wake of their spectacular collapse of service at the end of last year, Blackberry recently found itself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse after it invited users to #bebold, and share their thoughts via Twitter.

The main problem in all three of these cases is that the brands allowed themselves to forget one of the golden rules of the internet: any skeletons in your closet can (and often will) come back to haunt you. In each instance it resulted in a profoundly embarrassing (and above all public) episode, and one that had to be openly acknowledged as a failure of marketing strategy.

Of course, that’s not to say brand hashtags always fail. Click here to see a rundown of some of the more successful ones nominated for an award at the SHORTY social media awards this year.

With this in mind, our advice to anyone considering the hashtag route of viral marketing would be to think long and hard before providing the internet with its own, unmoderated soapbox to voice opinion on your brand.

In the right circumstances it can work wonders, but get it wrong and you might just find yourself pushed off it…

Google+ Search results and SEO implications

Search king Google this month launched ‘Search Plus Your World’ where people logged in to their Google account and searching the internet see relevant content from their contacts on its social network Google+ as well as the wider web. Seen by many as a move to compete with Facebook and Twitter, the launch means that when someone searches ‘Garden Furniture’, they no longer just see sponsored links and natural search results determined by SEO, but any posts made by their friends on Google+ about the same topic. This increases the importance of brands considering a presence across Google+ if only to be amongst those top search results to then drive people out to official sites.

Learn more at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8643-google-adds-social-content-from-google-into-search-results

Facebook Timeline

Most regular Facebook users will now be familiar with Facebook Timeline, a stylish upgrade to how individual profiles appear. As it starts rolling out across Facebook accounts, one brand and another developer are already playing with the new feature.

Business card printers Moo have partnered with the platform to allow people to order business cards based on their Facebook Timeline Covers. http://mashable.com/2012/01/05/facebook-moo-business-cards/

Meanwhile, marketing agency Definition 6 has partnered with the platform to turn people’s timelines into sentimental personal movies spanning a user’s lifetime on the social network. http://www.timelinemoviemaker.com

Facebook Actions

Towards the end of 2011 Facebook made a series of announcements including the now rolled out Facebook Timelines design for user profiles. A more interesting one for brands perhaps, was that of Facebook Actions, now starting to build in prominence. The platform now allows for developers to dabble in verbs, whereby someone using Spotify through Facebook needn’t type a status update manually informing their friends, because a ‘Mark’s listening to Madonna’ note is automatically published.

Learn about some of the initial partnering apps using Facebook Actions: http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/18/facebook-actions-rollout/

Advertising Within Facebook

New research by TBG suggests that a discount of up to 45% on cost-per-click Facebook advertising is being offered by Facebook when adverts point to another Facebook destination rather than an external site, an interesting revelation for brands running media campaigns on the platform to promote standalone websites away from it.

See a closer glimpse at the research at http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8699-50-off-facebook-ads-if-you-keep-users-on-site

Curators of Sweden

Some of the most interesting digital campaigns have come out of the travel industry, be it an airline’s random acts of kindness or a tourism board’s job of a lifetime offer. Curators Of Sweden is the latest creative use of social media, granting one resident of Sweden authorship of the country’s @Sweden account each week. A campaign of variety and collaboration, we think it’s a great way to tell the country’s many different stories.

http://curatorsofsweden.com

The advertising space during Superbowl Sunday is famously the most expensive on the planet.

The price of a 30-second slot can run to more than $2.5million – a figure only justified by the event’s equally gargantuan viewing figures. Last year’s Superbowl officially became the most watched piece of television in history with a staggering 111 million viewers, so there’s no denying the prestige of the slot. However, when you’re spending over $83,000 a second, you’d better make sure that what you’ve got is worth watching.

Historically, Superbowl ads tend to be some of the most flamboyant and outlandish ever created. This year, however, it seems major advertisers are jumping aboard the social bandwagon, using interactive methods to bridge the gap between traditional TV advertising and its cutting edge digital counterpart.

Outside Line’s own Ronnie Crosbie has just written a piece on the subject for online marketing gospel The Wall. Click here to read it in full and see what everyone will be talking about come Sunday 5 Feb.