So most of you reading this probably spend most of your time following really interesting big thinkers on Twitter. Or perhaps you follow trend setters and link posters. Well once and a while you’ve got run your fingers through party end of the twitter mullet.
That’s right mullet except this one has a lot of business up front and not enough party in the back. Well you just need to dig a little and you’ll discover where the party’s at. So here are my favourite (I’m Canadian) tweeters to follow for a laugh.
So I’ve been trying to collect Holiday cards from Agencies and Companies from all over. I’ve always enjoyed seeing these cards especially from Agencies. Good agencies are always trying to push their creative boundaries every year.
Of course 2009 and it’s economic slump has forced a lot of agencies to scale back. Well Mother London flipped it on its head this year and decided to give its Holiday Card budget to one recipient. Check out the video to see how it all pans out.
A musician posts a video of his experience watching United Airlines staff toss his guitar around. Similar to Dominos this is creating some negative brand sentiment across the internet.
So this week Skittles launched a “radical” new approach to their online property. Well radical for a cpg brand, some could argue they ripped of American advertising agency Modernistas website.
When I saw the site I couldn’t help to wonder if they knew what they had gotten into. Opening the doors to the masses to say what they want and presenting it as representation of your brand online is a slippery slope. You run the risk of unwanted materials being presented on your behalf. This especially true for a brand that primarily targets children and their parents, so everything must remain pure.
Well after one day of presenting a twitter search feed as their main page they’ve done the old switcheroo and presented us with their facebook groups and pages. What happened? Well the twitter feed quickly filled up with innapropriate remarks, and brand bashing. Not really the kind of content you want to present to your consumers.
You can still find the twitter feed burried under the chatter tab if you’d like to check it out here.
I recently worked on a project with a very old and well established institution of higher learning. We were tasked with creating an engaging user experience online that would attract high school students to inquire and apply to the University.
The ask was to be “revolutionary” and not “evolutionary”. We took this as they were willing to take a risk and be out there, and almost uncomfortable with what would be presented to the online users of the website. Our approach was to capitalize on the very social nature of the target audience and utilize technologies like twitter and online video to convey a very real and non scripted about the how life really was at the University. Basically we had recruited students, faculty and alumni to pump the university through unscripted and candid tweets, blogs, and video uploads.
The result was some very engaging content that felt extremely authentic and not the usual canned University propaganda. This however made some people very uncomfortable, and some thought it shed the University in some undesirable light. The reality of it is we all know these things are being said on and offline by student across the continent. (This is a entire blog post in itself, stay tuned.)
What really made this a difficult project was the amount of written content the client demanded be included. The majority of this written content was to be pulled directly from pre-approve written materials already in circulation. With no room for negotiations the site was filled with facts and figures the most studious of students would glaze over reading. Thus we had just repackaged the old and added some bells and whistles.
The engagement of the site was lost, buried deep behind an innumerable amount of mouse wheel scrolls, 12 pt copy had taken over. There was vast amounts of very pertinent and useful information there, but our client lost sight of, or truly misunderstood their target audience. This demographic would never take the time to read it.
Our hope was to use the social media ambassadors to convey these messages and tell these stories on behalf of the school. Of course we would have pdf download support documents, but we wanted the story to come from those who live and have lived it, not from those who think they know what it is or what it should be. I feel this delivery method would have reached the target audience in a far more effective manner.
To reach an audience we must understand how they consume information and how they like it delivered. This is a generation of techie multi-taskers who consume information through txt, status updates, tweets, and video, and demand it that way.
