Tag: Facebook

Movie wins Swedish digital PR award

This year I have had the honor to be in the jury for the Swedish PR awards Spinn 2009. I’ve been impressed by the amount of creative work that Swedish PR and advertising agencies create for their clients, and even more of the business value these campaigns have delivered. Public relations once again demonstrates how valueable and cost efficient it can be in driving business goals. But even more apparent was that almost all successful activities this year had a digital element to it. It is no longer unique to be active in social media channels when launching PR initiatives.

kennybegins On Thursday night this week, the prizes were handed out at a gala dinner in Stockholm and the gold in the digital category went to the Swedish movie Kenny Begins. The campaign cleverly used social media channels such as Facebook groups (Kenny Begins – The Countdown) in combination with traditional marketing to engage with potential fans and create a buzz in the target audience early on. The character Kenny Starfighter currently has 1,740 fans on Facebook.

Client: Nordisk Film
Agency: Prime PR.

One of two silver prizes went to technical consulting firm ÅF, previously Ångpanneföreningen, for the digital rectruiting campaign Welcome to the List. An almost empty site was launched with the objective to recruit 100 programmers and developers. The get on the top ten list you had to program your way through the campaign site. The campaign brilliantly excluded non-programmers and instead focused on creating the right word-of-mouth in the main target group.

welcometothelist

Client: ÅF
Agencies: Jung, Peacock and Lonley Duck.

The second silver went to the Swedish Tourist Association for a blogging campagin called “The most Swedish job in Sweden“, in which a young man travelled through Sweden in 60 days and documented his experiences via social media.

Client: STF
Agency: Syrup

Tags: , , , . Ping.

Audi taps social media for car design

audi2

audi

For this year’s Los Angeles Design Challenge, Audi turned to social media for ideas and input on the design of new cars. Audi invited the community of nearly 400,000 Audi fans on Facebook to interact and come up with suggestions for the design of a Youthmobile that would come out in the year 2030. Designers engaged with fans in a numbers of ways, such as discussion threads, polls and feedback on photos and videos.

“With its nearly 400,000 fans, the Audi Facebook audience is composed of passionate brand enthusiasts who have a mutual affinity for automobiles. They yielded feedback for the design team that proved uniquely thoughtful. Additionally, the broader Facebook community was welcome to participate as well, increasing the potential input. Collectively, Facebook participants played a key role in shaping the design and functionality of the Audi models submitted for the competition.”

The challenge resulted in two concept cars: Audi eSpira and Audi eOra. More images and videos can be found via the Audi fan page on Facebook.

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.

Ideal length of breaking news tweets is 120 characters

About one hour ago, the Nobel Foundation announced that Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2009. As I blogged yesterday, the Nobel Foundation announced this via Twitter, as a complement to other channels.

nobelprize2009

I think it’s great that the foundation wants to experiment with social media. But regarding the tweet, I have one tiny comment and that is, if you know you have something to announce, that many people will retweet on Twitter, you should ideally make room for that in your original post. Otherwise you are forcing people to change your message, in ways you might not want. For example by deleting the link to the original post.

The tweet above is 136 characters long. For someone to retweet this with the @nobelprize_org included, the new tweet will be at least 155 characters, including “RT” and spaces. This is of course too long, the maximum is 140 characters. In other words, the ideal length of a breaking news tweet is about 120 characters.

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.

The Nobel Prize 2009 announced on Twitter and Facebook

Social media makes Swedish companies frustrated, according to an article in Computer Sweden this week. The companies that CS talked to all know that you can do a lot of smart things with social media, but few know where to start or have had time to come up with any specific plans. One company says it can’t afford to lead the way and “it expects more things to happen in 2010 anyway”.

I’d say that those excuses aren’t valid any longer. Blogs and other forms of social media have been around for many years now and there are plenty of examples of businesses that have used these digital channels to their advantage. It really doesn’t have to be very complicated. I like this example. The Nobel Foundation is the Swedish foundation that manages the Nobel Prize. It knows it has stories that many people around the world are interested in. That’s not new. But they are modern enough to realize that media consumers today may want that information directly from the source, through new channels like social media. Today, many get breaking news via for example micro blogs.

So as a complement to traditional reporting, consumers this year can choose to get the news about the Nobel Prizes through Twitter, Facebook, RSS or a number of other ways, including a widget that you can post to your blog.

The first announcement will be tomorrow, when it will be official who wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (Monday, October 5, 11:30 a.m. CET at the earliest). Just follow http://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org and you will get the news right into your Twitter stream.

Not all businesses have news of the magnitude that the Nobel Foundation has, but almost all companies have stories to tell that are of interest to a number of stakeholders. Social media can be one channel to use. So businesses need to stop hiding behind arguments like “we haven’t got time to engage in social media”. Start experimenting now. A curious and learning organization will always be better at managing change. If you always wait to next year, you will never get off the ground.

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.

Many U.S. newspapers still don’t use common digital channels

This is quite astonishing. The American Press Institute surveyed 2,400 newspaper executives and asked if their papers “provide access to stories or information such as sports scores, headlines, stock quotes, etc via Twitter, Facebook, Email alerts, Mobile/PDA, YouTube, Kindle, Flickr, e-readers, etc.” As many as 24% indicated that they do not provide this type of content on any of the listed digital delivery channels.

The full presentation can be viewed below.

API ITZ Belden Revenue Initiatives Surveyhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=apiitzbeldenrevenueinitiativessurvey-090914111423-phpapp01&stripped_title=api-itz-belden-revenue-initiatives-survey

View more documents from NiemanLab.

Tags: , , , . Ping.

Unofficial pages attract Usain Bolt fans on Facebook

I spent the weekend in the archipelago on the Swedish east coast and drove for about three hours to get back home on Sunday evening. We arrived only five minutes before the start of the 100 metres final in the World Championships in Athletics in Berlin. I sat with my two oldest kids and watched the amazing new world record (9.58) set by Usain Bolt and it was a magical moment that I will remember for many years.

Usain Bolt When we get to experience such an amazing performance we sometimes like to show our graditude and support for the athlete. After 9.58, more people will become fans of Usain Bolt and search for information about the fastest man on earth. His own website is of course one such place, but people will also want to become fans of Bolt on Facebook for example. But there are as many as 62 pages for Usain Bolt on Facebook, which one is the official page? Well, there is one page with more than a million fans and it appears to be some kind of official page. It contains a lot of information and it can be reached via the personalized URL http://www.facebook.com/Usain, so it appears to be legitimate.

Another fanpage has managed to attract 127,000 fans, and there are several others with a few thousands Bolt fans. Others are piggybacking on celebrities by “borrowing” their names on different social networks. For example, someone called Jimmy Hawarny has managed to get the personalized URL http://www.facebook.com/UsainBolt for his personal page. And there are several Usain Bolts on Twitter, none which seems to be the real one. While Twitter has tried to solve the problem with fake accounts by creating verified accounts, to my knowledge, Facebook has no such indicator that a page is “official”.

One the other hand, creating fake fan pages is a violation of Facebook’s terms:

Fake Pages and unofficial “fan pages” are a violation of our Pages Guidelines. If you create an unauthorized Page or violate our Pages Guidelines in any way, your Facebook account may be disabled.

Unofficial fanpages may not be a huge problem, in fact they may even become the biggest asset for a brand or a celebrity. The biggest fanpage for Coca-Cola on Facebook has attacted well over 3 million fans, and it was started by two regular Facebook members who had trouble to find a legitimate Coke page. The page has also been embraced by the Coca-Cola Company.

In the case of Usain Bolt, it’s not extremely hard to find the official page, even though hundreds of thousands have become fans of unofficial pages. But when there are so many unofficial pages, maybe it is time for Facebook to launch some form of Verified Pages? Just so that you know what’s what.

Update: In a Google search, the page with 1 million fans and the page with 127,000 fans are both presented as official: “Welcome to the official Facebook Page of Usain Bolt. Get exclusive content and interact with Usain Bolt right from Facebook.”

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.