Mobile: the next big thing in Marketing and PR

The number of people accessing the internet via mobile devices may reach 1 billion by 2014, meaning mobile will overtake the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web. At the same time, more users will be consuming mobile apps with the mobile app market reaching $8.3 billion in 2014 compared to $3.8 billion forecast for this year.

This makes thinking about the marketing opportunities of mobile and mobile apps all the more pressing and exciting. Many brands are already incorporating mobile apps into their marketing and PR campaigns. Deodorant brand Lynx has launched a mobile app which encourages consumers to share their party experiences with selected friends by streamlining their social media activity in one place. The application will be promoted through the company Facebook page, YouTube channel and a dedicated website and will act as a media channel for future brand and marketing campaigns.

What’s significant about this example is how it makes the most of how the mobile platform allows marketers and PR professionals to interact with consumers regardless of time and location. The increase in mobile internet usage is a great opportunity for brands to engage consumers through social networks, while using dedicated apps and location-based websites to make their messages relevant to consumers. Additionally, mobile apps can be used to create innovative, interactive and engaging forms of content using specific Smartphone functionalities such as multi-touch navigation, cameras, GPS, etc.

Not surprisingly brands and media companies are focusing significant efforts on tapping into the mobile platform. In the era of mobility and social networking, mobile devices will have a profound impact on how marketers and PR professionals communicate with their target audiences.

The Royal Wedding: A Fairytale PR Opportunity

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for last 5 months, you may have noticed the media frenzy surrounding the impending Royal Wedding. Whilst regular updates on the guests (Fergie has not been invited,) best man (Prince Harry, of course) and bridesmaids (small Royal children) have fuelled the nation’s anticipation, the real stars have been the creative minds behind the many opportunist PR campaigns.

Following the announcement of the engagement at Clarence House, QVC released the Epiphany Platinum Clad Diamonique Oval Cluster Ring, a replica of the engagement ring for snip of the price at only £34.42. VisitBritain created a royal wedding itinerary complete with a tour of St Andrew’s, where the couple “went from students to soulmates.”

Boutique Hotel, Ten Manchester Street, offered all engaged couples called William and Kate a complimentary afternoon tea with chilled bottle of champagne, and confectionary brand Swizzels Matlow, created a mosaic image of the couple using Love Hearts, though it takes a few minutes of to realise the couple is William and Kate.

Even toy brands got a piece of the action. At Toy Fair Sylvanian Families launched its Royal Wedding Celebration Set featuring two rabbits called Catherine Chocolate and William Balmoral, with the help of a Wills and Kate look-a-like for a photo call. Lego issued a series of images depicting their take on the big day using mini figures and building blocks to represent the monarchs and Westminster Abbey.

Topping the list of more bizarre announcements: Benidorm Tourist board invited the happy couple to honeymoon on the island with a promise of “unforgettable days very near of your British people.” Whilst Revolver Entertainment has gone to the lengths of producing a film – Will & Kate: The Movie – a fictionalised documentation of their love story, shot in LA.

So why has the wedding served PRs to well?

Firstly, love them or loath them, the Royals get column inches. Like a good celebrity brand ambassador they have high profiles and are of interest to both the media and the Great British public. Secondly, weddings are one of the few events that almost any brand can be linked to. From Travel and Tourism to Food and Drink, and everything in between, there is a Royal Wedding themed story within almost every industry.

Thirdly, it’s a celebration, and celebrations mean special limited edition offers, products and services i.e. something ‘new’ to approach media with. Another key factor is that details of the day have been kept under wraps meaning PRs can take advantage of the nation’s curiosity to speculate and make assumptions to help their clients take centre stage.

Although it might seem like an easy target, securing standout coverage with a Royal Wedding-related campaign takes skill and PR nous. This has been demonstrated by the varying success of the stories over the last 5 months.

All that’s left for Wills and Kate to do is say “I do,” marking the start of their happily ever after, and the end of the PR coverage fairytale.

April Fools Day on the Web

April Fools Day 2011 was rife with all sorts of clever pranks, from the Metro’s rather obvious edible news papers to stories about recycling schemes for ebooks and even the news that Richard Branson had bought Pluto. And the internet was no place to hide to avoid being hoaxed.

Google itself advertised a job for an ‘autocompleter’ – someone who guesses what people are searching for in Google, and responds in real time to enable its auto complete function. Yeah right! And fans of Ribena on Facebook were largely not fooled by the mock up picture of a new tomato variant posted its official page. Yuk.

The jokers over at Google were also responsible for reverting YouTube’s look and feel to “it’s original design from 1911”. Who knew YouTube had been around decades before the internet itself!? Another pretty obvious April Fools right there, but they even went as far as creating a video of the top viral pictures from 2011.

However, few embraced their inner prankster more than the guys at thinkgeek.com, who added no fewer than eleven fake products to their eshop. These included a pair of ‘De-3D’ glasses which were said to eliminate the 3D effect from 3D movies and packets of green pork scratchings supposedly made from the green pigs from Angry Birds. But our favourite April Fools product from thinkgeek this year was their highly amusing Apple Store playmobil play set, designed to “fuse the fun and sensibility of playmobil with the design cliché and hubris of apple”. Maybe we are a tiny bit biased, what with Playmobil being one of our clients, but feel free to decide which is your favourite fake thinkgeek item.

We loved the accompanying video, a parody of an apple ad promoting the play set, which features a mini Steve Jobs presenting a keynote speech on an iPhone 4 transformed into a miniature plasma screen and a hilarious optional ‘line pack’ which would make kids “wait in line to get that chance to wait in line”. Other quotes such as “we wanted to define the experience of childhood and create a seamless transition to the new realities of adulthood” suggest that the thinkgeek team regard apple’s marketing as a little over the top.

Here’s the video, which has been a trending topic on Twitter and received over 400,000 views and 250 comments on YouTube.

Who is Rebecca Black?

In weeks where world events have been grabbing headlines, an unlikely target/social media sensation has also been born in the form of Rebecca Black. 

 While many of us were blissfully unaware of this unknown tween’s “music video” it appears to have gone viral, attracting all kinds of attention and receiving nearly 70,000,000 views on YouTube.  I, myself, wondered what on earth Rebecca Black was as I checked the trending topics du jour and found it every day.  Ordinarily something like this would be a good thing, especially if you remember overnight tween sensation Justin Bieber. But poor old Rebecca appears to have become a victim of some serious cyber bullying (though I must add that there is something good that came of it in the end). 

 So how did a $2,000 parentally funded video made by using a boutique studio come to be such a “hit”?  Apparently it was considered so bad that people forwarded it to their friends for a laugh and the video has gone viral, culminating in a TV appearance and earning $1m (donated to Japan).   Some may think that it was some cynical marketing ploy, but the saddest thing about Rebecca Black’s video and Twitter trending is that it attracted an incredible volume of excessively negative comments. 

In a day and age when people are entitled to widely share their thinking that something is rubbish and also post comments directly to the individual in cyberspace, is it really necessary to threaten their lives?  Does some sort of filter need to be put in place to prevent such comments or is it just part of normal life?  As creatively ‘interesting’ as the single is, catchy through its limited vocabulary and interesting style of rapping, why the need to be so incredibly barbaric and hateful? It’s a thirteen year old girl at the end of the day.   Rebecca Black’s case has managed to highlight a vicious tendency that is quite worrying in young and old alike.  Lots of people seem to be commenting on it, but perhaps it will take a brand or a NGO to campaign the issue before ‘normal’ people realize that in this case they are the bullies…

Video below, for those who are yet to see it. *Warning* May not be to everyone’s taste and is very catchy.

Communications today is about relevance say Brodeur

A great blog from Andy Colville and our friends at Brodeur on the changing world of communications and how ‘relevance‘ now sits at the core of their agency’s mission. Brodeur is committed to helping clients become—and remain—relevant in an increasingly noisy and turbulent environment. Relevance moves people from passive to involved and actually gets them to act. As we know, simply shouting louder does not make you relevant. For communications to succeed in today’s rapidly changing communications world – campaigns have to be ‘relevant’. Here in Europe, onechocolate is doing something similar – listening to each client’s particular communications challenges and then delivering campaigns that have them joining the important conversations and getting them talked about in all the right places. Like the blog Andy and good luck with the new vision, it’s very exciting.

Social Media – A British Love Affair

Hold the press everyone – it’s finally official. Social networking is now top of the list when it comes to our favourite British online pastimes. It’s even overtaken portals such as the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and Sky Sports.com in popularity.

The stats are massive – last month Facebook accounted for over 12.46 per cent of all internet activity and there were 2.4 billion visits to social networking sites just in January 2011 alone.

Similarly Linkedin has more than 90 million registered users around the world and there are over 1 billion tweets a month on Twitter.

It seems the tipping point has finally come, with social media leaping ahead when it comes to influencing our online lives. And there’s apparently no end to this British love affair.

But despite all the numbers and stats, one fact remains clear – this revelation surprises no-one.

Social media is so much part of our daily lives, most of us don’t even think about using it. So it’s hardly a shock it’s dominating our internet usage.

In such a short time social media is now firmly in camp ‘Status quo’ – now that’s surprising!

Are user made virals good for the brand?

When brands attempt to create “viral” content, they have very little idea of the impact they will have.  A vast number of blogs and articles discuss the effect of viral content in great depth making it an almost academic subject.

One thing that is clear, is that when a video, for example, goes viral, if there is a brand involved, it can create a host of positive results and brand views.  When the old spice guy videos hit our computer screens, he changed the image of old spice, and this caused a huge upturn in sales. 

An incredible example of when the consumers do it them selves, is one of onechocolate’s favourite videos that has been bouncing around the office this week.  so head over to our home page and watch our video of the week.

Social networks? Watch out for friends’ posts while you are searching for information online

Last week Google announced that it was planning to implement changes to its Google Social Search platform to include posts from people’s online friends into its standard search results. The social search results, which previously appeared at the bottom of the page, will now be mixed throughout the list of results based on their relevance. Another interesting change in the search engine functionality is that users will be prompted to connect their social networking accounts any time Google’s algorithms find a public account that might belong to the same user.

As social networking profiles become more interconnected, people will be able to see publicly shared links posted by online ‘friends’ and connect their Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or Quora accounts. However, the upgraded social search engine will not include posts from the social networking giant Facebook. This does not come as a surprise as the two companies have a long history of trying to ‘steal’ each other’s market share with Google tapping into social media and Facebook developing its own email platform.

Despite excluding Facebook, Google’s Social Search platform will offer access to much more information about users than it was previously available. Some people will question whether this is entirely a good idea. Google seems sensitive to the privacy issues and allows users to opt out of the social sharing service by not connecting their online accounts to the search platform. However, if any of your online friends is ‘connected’ and shares or retweets your posts, they will become publicly available in the search results. Moreover, it remains uncertain how you would be able to control who sees to your online posts once you have connected your social networking profiles to Google.

Overall these changes highlight a number of trends which will potentially impact social media PR and marketing. As social networks are increasingly woven into online search engines and online profiles can be easily linked, businesses will be able to reach wider audiences and niche customer segments. SEO practices will be adjusted to take into account the rising importance of social networks for placing content in the top ranking of people’s search results. This will result in more intricate and subtle integration of social media tools into PR and marketing campaigns and will place higher importance on online networks.

Yeo Valley Farm – a truly integrated and memorable campaign

It was no coincidence  that just before Christmas, I was reading an interesting editorial profile in the Sunday Times magazine on the family behind Yeo Valley Farm when their ad campaign was also breaking during the finals of the X-factor.   This editorial along with many other articles were appearing in conjunction with a TV ad campaign that’s edgy and also quickly became a youtube hit . The Yeo Valley campaign is one very recent example of a powerful PR campaign working alongside advertising and also integrated with social media.  The campaign  introduced Yeo’s digital presence encouraging viewers to access their new website. Very quickly, Yeo Valley has 19.3million tweet impressions, and 1.5 million youtube views. Great to see a campaign that had such a strong mix of marketing tools and working so well together.

Embracing social media – different paces abound

We have all embraced social media in a big way – particularly in PR where it is such a natural fit for us – it’s pretty much second nature after all, we are so used to having dialogues with journalists, sharing stories and having on-going conversations with all types of people.

So it’s easy to forget, perhaps, that social media is still evolving at a rapid rate and that businesses aren’t all embracing it at the same pace.

Just in the past few days, I’ve heard of two global brands who are way behind the curve. One has flatly refused to have anything to do with social media and the other, is ‘way behind’ in their social media conversations according to an inhouse marketeer. For those kind of brands struggling to persuade directors to embrace social media – here’s a useful post from an interesting US online publication, ‘the social media examiner’, ‘9 ways to sell social media to your boss’.

And then of course, there’s the other problem that businesses are online but don’t know what the guidelines are. The rules are still evolving and changing, again at a pretty rapid rate. Twitter is still largely unregulated and businesses are still learning and experimenting with it. Here’s some latest guidelines that have come out of oatmeal.com. They are not necessarily right, in fact I would question many on the list, but it’s interesting to see guidelines attempted to be set.

And then of course, there’s the fact that Facebook is only just starting to be used as a valuable marketing tool for businesses. The largest social media tool on the planet provides a huge opportunity to businesses – the social media examiner has lots of ideas on how to maximise your Facebook profile to generate interest among customers and prospects as well as some great recent campaigns that have really worked for brands.

So as we all move at different paces, and standards and guidelines continue to evolve as time passes, once the revolution is over, it’ll be great to see what transpires.