New BMW Advert - no test pilots

BMW have without doubt got a fantastic and valued brand that has its values deeply embedded, which makes for a great platform for creative advertising and marketing.

This interesting new advertising campaign draws on the implied faultless nature of their pre-owned cars, making a (nearly) seamless jump from a car manufacturer to human beauty, with all their brand values intact. A great example of advertising brand value rather than product.

I was going straight to my local dealer to kick some tyres and arrange a test drive (!!) before I realised that the ad would work just as well as part of a Government STD awareness campaign.

Replace the BMW inset panel with "Get yourself tested" - hey presto!

Are you missing out on a social network opportunity?

The BBC report that Gartner have announced that many businesses are failing to embrace the "huge" opportunities of social networks.

The point of the article, however, is for once not about trying to market via social networks, but about how firms can understand and embrace how their staff engage via social networks to make efficiency savings and improve communications within their business.

But the opportunity goes further. Open-minded businesses can help be involved as staff build tighter communities in their organisations, places where they can share and innovate, in really constructive ways that are so fluid that staff will not even realise they are doing it.

So you get innovation.
And honesty.
And communication.
And community.
Which gives stronger loyalty and almost without doubt, numbers that hit the bottom line and therefore please the men in grey suits in finance, too..

Of course, this will not happen on its own, but an open-minded business can use social networks to truly engage with it's staff to ask questions and embrace collaboration, understand (and then potentially counter) areas of distrust or disenchantment and, in a broader sense, start to show the external world how they are listening to issues and feedback internally.

Its not just about listening, or even throwing sheep - careful use of tools like LinkedIn enable individuals and businesses to use the power of referral and networks of contacts, resulting in richer relationships and ultimately, better business with shorter lead times.

We all like to be heard and social networks enable ALL of us to share our innermost (or shallowest!) thoughts with our friends and peers.

Whether a business likes it or not, its staff, stakeholders and clients WILL be talking about it online, somewhere. So it is best to, at the very least, open an ear to what is going on and try to understand. If the business can engage, then there are potential riches that are otherwise almost certainly out of reach in this new, open World.

Picture credit Powi

Our government using social media to engage us?!

I am going to have to bite my lip very hard to avoid becoming partisan regarding the current (and past!) government, as this is most definately NOT a political post!

As I have posted before, I use Twitter frequently to update my peers and co-workers on what I'm up to, and to keep track of other people's news, views and movements - this is very insightful and I often find things out well before they are reported in the daily press, or even on major news feeds.

So I was delighted recently to discover that I could use Twitter to track events and developments at Number 10, even though I do only have a passing interest.. The point is, Twitter enables a rich stream of news and events in real time, but you dont have to read everything and dont need to respond or save the communication, either.

And, you might even get greeted by this in your inbox, too, which is nice:


The way Number 10 are using it appears to be a combination of manual updates (so they must have a social media manager employed!) and some automated routines that feed a "ticker" of short news clips through the twitter engine. The balance of collaboration over transmission is pretty good too, as I felt included rather than spoken at; many of the "tweets" (a message post to Twitter is called a tweet) offer a link to a webpage where you can interract and feedback on opinion or news.

Whatever your political persuasion, I dont think you can deny that it is a useful and interesting way of keeping up with what is going on at the core of our Government. (And I reckon, due to the limit of 140 characters for each tweet, there is a lower chance, though not impossible of course, of spin!)

Show us a better way!
I was also pointed to another interesting engagement attempt via Twitter - The Power of Information Workforce has launched a competition to find and develop better ways to publish the vast swathes of non-personal information that the government collects & creates along its way. Its an interesting social media project and some of the ideas already submitted show how relevant and how much desire there is for such an initiative.

I was slightly disappointed that no real effort had been made to provide any social bookmarking tools (such as Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, thereby rendering sharing and conversations about it more difficult, but I guess they have to start somewhere!)

I shall be keeping a close eye on it to see what wins and what else happens as spin-off social projects from this.

What do you think? Is this further careless spreading of our private data, or do you agree its an interesting and progressive project from the traditional and protective civil service?

The Orange Balloon race is on!

Here's an interesting viral brand campaign. Orange have commissioned this fantastic social media project where you can race a balloon across internet miles and the winner gets a VIP trip to Ibiza with some mates.

The graphics and execution of the race are superb, and the team at Poke have done a great job on it, though I think it is seriously aimed at techies as there is little instruction on how the thing actually works for the layperson. It feels like they got so caught up in the clever trickery of making it all work that someone forgot about the user experience as there is little to help you through some of the registration and starting stages - it seems to assume you already know how it all works already?!

However, an innovative viral concept from which Orange get a rich stream of prospect data and huge amount of brand presence in exchange for interraction with a truly innovative and fun application!

You get to choose a balloon, then steer it over websites along the course (that you can also submit, so other balloons can visit your site, too) and friends and contacts can give you a boost to help you on your way.

We've joined the race, so search out the "preview" balloon and give us a boost! You can see the progress of our little blimp in the panel on the right of this blog.

Hurry, there's less than 6 days to blow our sleek dolphin (yes, I did that on Porpoise!) balloon along!

Get your press releases up to scratch

I was forwarded some information on an intriguing application recently - Hubspot's Press Release Grader.

(hat-tip @mikeashworth) "A friend of mine has developed a tool which evaluates your press release and provides a marketing effectiveness score. This score is based upon basic factors from public relations experts including the language and content of the release, plus advanced factors from Internet marketing experts such as links and search engine optimisation characteristics."

Sounded interesting, but the email sat in my inbox for a few days until I had a chance to write something appropriate (conveniently, I was then asked for something on Go4Fresh's launch to go out to the wider vending and retailing community)

Now, I don't pretend to be an expert copywriter, or indeed, a PR guru, but my experience in marketing has given me an insight into what my target audience is likely to want to see, and in my opinion, the chance that a PR expert is going to know about MY skill, product or service as well as I do is slight, so I am better placed to draft or write the initial release at least. However, since I don't do this every day, it is still a case of learning as you go as to how to construct a press / news release.

So, I duly wrote about 250 words and structured the document as I would for a news release, conforming to expected formats for contact and the level of technical detail. I was happy with it, and without the grader application intervention, I would probably have sent it on for release as it was.

The application is really simple to use, intuitive and helpful - a good start.

It assumes no technical knowledge or PR expertise (so probably will bother PR professionals - though I think that gaining an understanding of how an expert does something helps you to better engage their services; there's only a minority who would want to take it all on and cut the expert out)

The fully-automated report takes moments to come back with a decently organised and well-structured report on your release. I was shocked that I only achieved 32/100 on my first pass, but easily fixable things including; slightly too few words (I needed over 250), I'd missed off some contact details (easily done!) and a slight restructure to provide the information in a better hierarchy, quickly gave me a more respectable 60/100.

The great thing for me (apart from the service being free at the moment) is that it provides a great opportunity to have someone else (something else?) proof-read the document without fear of them rewriting it totally. It is very easy to miss something obvious, or to forget to structure in a certain way.

It is very online-savvy, so helps to create releases that are social media friendly and, if I were using a PR agency, they would now be getting something from me that is virtually ready for them to distribute and work on immediately..

I suppose the only downside is that there is a danger that releases could start to look too similar if all were parsed through this software?

But that's a way off, so try it for yourself (whilst I go and try to eke out another 30 points at least before I distribute it), let me know what you think.