By Sarah Wood, Founder & Director, Unruly Media
The Pittsburgh Steelers will take on the Green Bay Packers in Dallas in the so-called ‘biggest show on Earth’ on Sunday, but the match itself has not been the main topic of discussion – it’s the ads that have dominated discussion, and that’s because the Super Bowl is not only America’s biggest sporting spectacle, it’s also the biggest event in the US advertising calendar. It’s been said that the real winners of the Super Bowl are not necessarily those wearing pads and helmets, but those in the slick suits and skinny ties; however, with a 30-second slot during the main event costing almost £2million, and with over two thirds of America watching, the stakes could not be higher and ad pundits around the world are whipping themselves up into a frenzy right now, eager to predict which big brands will return victorious and which will see their hopes ground into the Dallas dust. Read more…
By Tom Gray, Imagination
On the 1st of December, World Aids Day, a raft of celebrities from to , to Serena Williams “died” on Twitter, with the promise that they would only return to life once their fans had pledged $1m. The response so far tells us a fair amount about how much people actually value celebrity tweeting.
So what happened? Well, the celebs fell silent. And the world kept turning. And five days on, less than a third of the money has been raised. Read more…
Yesterday saw our final session on the IAB’s rising voice in social media course. The installment was rounded up with presentations from Nick Stringer, director of regulatory affairs at the IAB and , senior marketing manager at Skive. Nick took the delegates through why it’s important to be ‘safe’ in social media, covering the all important ASA remit extension that comes into place in Spring 2011. Tom Ollerton, senior marketing manager at Skive spoke about his opinions on whats next for social media with some great examples.
See below to view both presentations in full…
, Head of Social Media at Microsoft Advertising, talks to the IAB about social media from an advertising and product perspective. Kicking off with a simple explanation of what social media is and why it’s so vital for CMOS, she uses her own case study from the Windows 7 launch as a great example of how you can use dialogue with consumers to inform business research and product development. Watch the interview in full below to also find out what future trends she feels will be hitting the social media industry next.
Another month, another ‘Rising Voice in Social Media’ session, this time based around the concept of earned social media.
, commercial director at Unruly Media, took us through how to use viral to drive word of mouth citing case study examples from Durex, Nike and The Sun. Catch the presentation below.
, Managing Director of Diffusion provided insights on reputation management, how the PR industry has been turned on its head due to social media, and how to successfully protect your brand online whilst remaining approachable. Daljit’s slides are available below.
Reputation Management
, managing director of We are Social spoke on social media and customer service, including the trials and tribulations that come with using social media as a customer service channel with some great examples of how to do it right.
By , communications executive, IAB
Last Wednesday saw the IAB’s biggest mobile event to date – IAB Mobile Engage – which promised a whole day of mobile marketing ‘without the hype’. Some 350 delegates filled the newly refurbished conference room at the Millbank Media and Cinema Centre, a majority of whom were UK brands, eager to escape the waffle surrounding the industry and just get simple, straightforward advice on how to do it.
The bulk of the programme was, as you’d probably expect, about mobile, but one presentation in particular really stood out for me, on Creativity in Mobile, presented by Mark Freeman, creative partner at Movement. During his presentation, Mark said something that really resonated with me, and made me realise how ’social’ creativity is in general nowadays, that ‘little actions lead to big results’. Read more…
, Associate Director-social media, Tamar
Brand Building Through Search Guide
Recent announcements from Twitter on its decision to base its new sponsored-tweet model on results returned through search highlight the growing relationship between search and social media. At the same time, Google and Facebook have made big changes recently that blur the line between ‘search’ and ‘social’. These changes- real-time search results in Google SERPs, Google Labs ‘social graph’ experiment, expansion of the ‘universal’ results being returned to users and so on – are focused on giving people more relevant results.
This has always been Google’s defining vision but Twitter and other services are fast becoming searchers’ first port of call when looking for emotional or opinion-based answers to their queries.
Keep updated on changes to well publicised sites like Twitter and Google, you also have to keep one eye on smaller, up-and-coming sites like Topsy and Collecta. Real-time dedicated search engines that crawl the social space for live opinion and news on any topic you could think of.
Here are our top-tips on how to keep yourself ahead of your competitors when it comes to social search:
• Find and utilise a social monitoring platform/tool that suits your needs and use it regularly. One-off reports and 500-page dossiers aren’t going to help you in the fast-paced new world we live in.
• As well as using sites like Twitter for your business, use them personally to keep your eye on industry news. Following tweeters like Mashable, AlleyInsider and, of course, the IAB will ensure you always know the new sites and services before the mainstream do.
• Apply SEO techniques and strategy to your social objects as you would do with your classic site. Keywords in titles, optimised tags and site-specific meta data will help your content get found in all the search engines, no matter how they decide rankings.
• Be everywhere. You have to make sure that when people are doing searches that are relevant to you, your brand is dominating as much of that search real estate as possible – whatever engine they choose to use.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) –has partnered with search and social conversion agency Tamar to educate marketers about the importance of using search to build brands, with a step-by-step guide to putting the discipline at the heart of online strategies.
The full guide is available for download from the IAB site here or to request a copy please contact .
For more information on how you can contribute/sponsor one of the upcoming handbooks in the brand building series (Brand Building Through Integration, Brand Building Through Creativity and Brand Building Through Relationships) contact
by , senior marketing manager, Skive
It is an important part of Skive’s business to partner with agencies that we admire and who have complimentary skillsets. We regularly go into the agencies to present new work we are doing but also our observations on digital marketing. I was recently asked to give a presentation on “The Future of Digital” to the brand teams at a large PR agency.
I started off by asking how many people in the room are on twitter. About 80% said that they were and a fair proportion of them said they use it regularly, at least once a day. I then asked them how many of them were on it a year ago and the number was greatly reduced. The point is this shows how quickly technology changes and that as digital marketers we need to stay ahead of the game. The purpose of this blog post is to look at what is the future of digital and what we might expect from it in the near future.
First off we’ll start off with a quick reality check. Twitter is great right? I mean it’s everywhere, you can’t move for it. I think this is very true if you work in marketing and you spend all day plugged in to tweetdeck for the latest Social Media tidbit from Mashable or other. I’m not dumbing down its importance to those interested in the realtime web but none of my friends outside of work are on it. Let’s put it another way. Farmville has over 80 million active users that are more than the number total twitter users. When did you last suggest to a client that they try and leverage Farmville as a viable social platform?
Read more…
By , Skive and , TMW
Here’s some thoughts on the biggest challenge with the content user-generated space, and a couple of things we can do about them, complete with UGC checklist. Let us know what you think!
, commercial director at Unruly Media explains what viral success looks like and how you measure it. Steve also talks about the vital characteristics your video needs to make it stand out and have the ‘shareable’ factor, using ‘Charlie bit my finger’ as an example.
Watch the below videos to see the interview in full…
