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Android KitKat, trolling BA, fish finger fun and this week’s bits and bytes

KitKat Android: The clever bods over at Google have launched an update to their Android mobile operating system. And as with previous versions (Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean), the new OS is named after a desert: KitKat 4.4.

The entire campaign is a no holds barred parody of Apple – not in itself a new idea, Samsung have done it in the past and Nokia have even parodied the spat between Samsung and Apple – but with this one you can really see that they’ve committed completely to not only shooting their ad in the same style…

… but the copy and product descriptions on the über-slick site built to showcase the future of confectionery is a pitch-perfect piss-take of Apple’s tone of voice and dictionary.

My favourite features of the new KitKat:

  • Works perfectly in portrait or landscape for a panoramic taste experience
  • Maximum breakability is guaranteed due to the refined praline software, crisp waferware and its unique chocolate unibody
  • It comes in 2 mega-bites, 4 mega-bites or a chunky-bite option

and, my favourite

  • Compatible with all liquid accessories

Screen Shot 2013-09-05 at 21.54.39

How much does this kind of a perfect partnership cost?

Nothing.

“This is not a money-changing-hands kind of deal,” John Lagerling, director of Android global partnerships, told the BBC. “The idea was to do something fun and unexpected.”

You’ll be able to buy special packs of KitKat Four-Finger and KitKat Chunky multipacks at Sainsbury’s.

Man buys promoted Tweet to troll British Airways: I’ve been flying regularly all my life and I’m lucky to say that I’ve never had my luggage go missing (writing this, I realise that my next trip is bound to be a disaster). I have however had many a ‘mare with Airline customer service. I’ve tweeted to complain but that tends to result in silence, stock responses or requests to call customer service numbers.

This week, British Airways passenger @HVSVN bought a promoted tweet after the airline had lost his baggage and hadn’t responded to his tweets for seven hours. After some rather snarky, nasty messages – borderline tolling, basically – the first ever promoted customer complaint made its way into the Twitter history books. Also, BA finally responded…

It doesn’t get better.

@HVSVN bought the tweet in the New York City and UK markets Monday night using Twitter’s self-serve ad platform. While he at first didn’t confirm the cost in media interviews, he has since tweeted the final cost and reach of the promoted tweet: 76,000 impressions for $1,000. Time has a bit more info on how @HVSVN went about targeting the tweets to make sure that it reached all the existing followers of British Airways.

Was it worth it?

That’s sooo 2006: The Guardian published their Media 100 list this week, a ranking of the most powerful people in the UK’s media landscape today.

Who came in at No.1?

I did.

Well, technically, so did you. All of us really.

An unbelievably unoriginal idea – after all, I’d already made it onto the cover of Time magazine as Person of the Year way back in 2006.

Source: Time Magazine

Communicating CR: With people demanding greater transparency, authenticity and accountability from companies than ever before, @SimonMainwaring writes that brands are increasingly taking three steps to respond:

  1. Sharing their purpose, core values and mission
  2. Moving sustainability marketing to corporate communications to tell the story of the good work companies are doing in ways that build their business
  3. Working with customers to fulfill the brand’s mission because they understand that “the future of profit is purpose, authentically executed”

New Yahoo logo: Yahoo updated their logo this week, after 30 days of changing the logo on their homepage to a different version. The familiar purple colour and famous exclamation mark remain – the later has been rotated to the right by exactly 9 degrees, which according to Marissa Mayer adds a bit of “whimsy”.

Source: Marissa’s Tumblr

I’m no typography expert so I don’t know if this is a good or a bad logo. But if you’re into that sort of thing, you should definitely give Mayer’s post about the relaunch a go where she ‘geeks’ about all the wee features and ideas behind the new logo. Quite frankly, I would never have picked up on any of them. I’m sure that a hell of a lot of work went into it and I think it looks good. But is it going to make Yahoo relevant to today’s web audience? For Flickr’s sake, I hope so…

Way To Safety: Mobile apps have become a part of life for many people. They help us organise our lives, check our email, find our way around town, figure out when the next tube is due, post updates to our friends, hurl birds at naughty piggies. Increasingly, augmented reality and layers of data are added to make apps even more powerful and helpful – possibly even to a such a degree that they could literally save your life.

Way To Safety is an app currently in development that  would help civilians steer clear of gunfire in urban warfare environments:

“Within 30 seconds after a shot is fired, the application will determine the source location of the shooter, the direction he was aiming at, the type and caliber of the weapon used and the number of bullets fired. This data will be sent to the nearby residents for free and we will also send it to the army, paramedics, press.” 

Terrifying and brilliant at the very same time (HT to Simon French for this one).

Fish finger sarnie challenge: Sainsbury’s new ad featuring by Sainsbury’s Fish Fingers kicked off a bit of a discussion on Twitter this week. Turns out that not everyone would stack the fish fingers like we did!

http://youtu.be/W_l5Tth_qpo

So, we decided to open it up to the weird and wonderful people of Twitter and asked them to show us how they make a fish finger sandwich. Our favourite photo, video or Vine stands to win a £25 Sainsbury’s voucher.

There’s already some good efforts coming through, some even made without any bread or fish fingers. We’ve had saucy combos, little umbrellas and even the inclusion of cheese, bacon and onions.

So if you fancy a go at the classic fish finger sandwich, tweet a photo or video with #JSFishFinger and you could be in the running for a £25 Sainsbury’s voucher.

Here’s @SainsburysPR‘s humble entry (with huge thanks to @a_little_wine and @TillieSeymour):

Video of the week: LG uses their ultra-realistic TVs to scare the wits out of poor job applicants. Brutal really – after all, they’re all leaving that room no closer to a job.

And finally: What Bale Earns

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Royal Baby, Loving every naughty mouthful, the art of Vine and this week’s bits and bytes

Royal Baby: I tried to go all Guardian on this, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to install a ‘Republican button‘ to rid my blog of any reference to the Royal offspring. But it was impossible to escape anything Royal Baby related last week, so let’s have a look at how it all goes down on t’Interwebs?

Even though the Beeb and Sky went into Royal Baby screensaver mode and my Twitter feed was absolutely bursting with tweets about the imminent arrival of the little nipper, the news didn’t seem to go that big on Twitter: while #royalbirth generated more than 25,300 tweets per minute at its peak, this was still way behind the new Pope (130k), Murray winning Wimbledon (120k), and Usain Bolt’s 100m victory at London 2012 (80K). Now, this probably has something to do with the fact that the Royal Baby circus was spread out over a number of days, while all those other events were much shorter. Also, 60 million Brits don’t really stand a chance again 1 billion Catholics.

The Internet loves Zombies. Mind you, it does look like something out of World War Z.

In a nice gesture, Clarence House acknowledged that while the world’s cameras were trained onto the doors of the Lindo Wing, there were other children born on the same day and encouraged people to share their photos on the #WelcometotheWorld hashtag.

I admit I watched Wills and Kate come out of Lindo Wing with baby George in their arms as they were greeted by the cameras. But it was only until I saw this amazing 360 degree shot by Lewis Whyld of the couple leaving the hospital that I could even begin to fathom the terror that the three of them must have felt. To remain so calm, serene and happy in the face of a wall of cameras, flashing lights and screaming journalists really was bloody impressive.

What does the Royal Baby mean for PR? Carte blanche for pitches and releases tentatively linked to baby Cambridge: the Daily Mail newsdesk received 22,000 Royal Baby related stories on the day the little prince was born.

Of course marketers weren’t far behind their PR colleagues in coming up with cringe-worthy, branded tributes to Prince George. Buzzfeed have pulled together some real shockers, and there’s a marvellous Tumblr full of Royally Desperate real-time marketing efforts (HT @Victoriadove). My personal favourite though would have to be this shocker from Ryanair.

To finish, I leave you with the brilliant Jon Oliver from the Daily Show to sum up the wall-to-wall media insanity in the lead up to, during and after the birth of the future King George.

http://youtu.be/uFgRl93CP0g

#LoveEveryMouthful: Just a few days before the arrival of the Royal baby and on a day that David Cameron announced his (rather ridiculous) anti-porn filter (pushed by a special advisor that doesn’t know the difference between a screenshot and a hyperlink), Tesco launched their newly launched food campaign with a promoted trend on Twitter. Mirroring the strapline of the campaign, they went with the hashtag #LoveEveryMouthful.

I’d like to think that I’d have spotted, flagged and binned this hashtag before it went live – but hindsight is always 20/20. Either way, the hashtag brought out the snickering, pubescent teen many a Twitter user, encouraging them to let their imagination run wild. Tesco’s juicy melons were combined with all kinds of innuendo, naughtiness and – there’s no other way of putting this – flat out porn. It got so bad that Tesco changed the promoted trend to a more safe #TescoFood by mid-day and then removed it entirely.

Perhaps Cameron’s porn filter would mean that we would have been spared this hashtag?

Hacks on flacks: PR agency Twelve Thirty Eight are at it again with a useful – if a bit repetitive and more than a tad hypocritical in places – summary of what journos find annoying about PRs, their view of PR pitches and press releases. Well worth a browse, but if you just want the key messages in one go (thank you @TreebD):

  1. Keep it short
  2. Keep it real
  3. Keep it neat
  4. Don’t be cute
  5. Do be grammatical
  6. Put the news in the first paragraph

SEO is dead, again:  A provocative post from @dangraziano reveals that a Google search may display only 13% organic results; “the rest is ads and junk”. Rather than concentrating on search engine optimisation, businesses would be better served if they focused on customer-centric interactions rather than pinning their hopes on an ever changing algorithm to drive traffic. After all, we all know that recommendations from friends count for more than what Google tells us!

The Social Media Manager has grown up: A great piece from @sweissman about how the role of social media manager within business has evolved along with the ever-changing digital media world, but that these roles have matured and are increasingly about exercising nimble judgement in difficult situations, continuous listening for possible problems and delivering on-brand and human customer service and stories.

Following on nicely from the trend of experienced social media managers, it was great to see that even a leading business mag such as Forbes wants to know if social media is a career? The answer, I am very pleased to tell you, is a resounding ‘yes’. Just don’t call yourself a social media guru, ninja, Jedi or master. Grounds for immediate dismissal, that.

The art of Vine: I’m a big fan of Vine and always impressed at the possibilities of creating six second looped videos on a phone. It sounds so basic, so rudimentary at first, but in the hands of an experienced producer and using the nifty loop feature to full effect, your imagination is the limit. 

One such Vine master is @origiful, who not only produced the Vine above, but he’s also pulled together six really useful tips for creating better Vines.

Video of the week: A brilliant clip to promote Sainsbury’s Back Tu School range featuring some ridiculously talented kids busting serious moves and breakdancing in their school uniforms.

And finally: You can’t write proper English under pressure (HT @usvsth3m).

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Sainsbury’s Christmas, pilot name shenanigans, how to use Hashtags and this week’s bits and bytes

Christmas in July: Yup, hottest days of the year and the @SainsburysPR team spends them in a beautifully made up basement in Covent Garden to show off Sainsbury’s gorgeous Christmas collection, from fantastic festive food and drink to classy home and clothing ranges and even floral!

Our Twitter Wall was back, encouraging the assembled press and bloggers to tweet their impressions using #SainsburysChristmas. In turn we posted photos and tasty Vines (shot and directed by our very own @a_little_wine) to show off the crimbo collection that will be coming to a store near you this Christmas.

Of course, we were all well chuffed when The Daily Telegraph’s Steve Hawkes tweeted his approval. Bring on Christmas!

Sum Ting Wong: Not long ago, an Asiana Airlines flight crash landed in San Francisco. In one of those ‘I can’t believe this actually happened’ moments, KTVU, a local news station, announced that the pilots of the Asiana flight had been named:

  • Sum Ting Wong
  • Wi Tu Lo
  • Ho Lee Fuk
  • Bang Ding Ow

I kid you not.

http://youtu.be/YU2m3xf99R4

Soon after – and unsurprisingly – KTVU issued an on air apology, saying that the names were “not accurate, despite a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) spokesperson confirming them”.

Who was this spokesperson? This from the NTSB website

Earlier today, in response to an inquiry from a media outlet, a summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft.

The summer intern has since been fired, but I’d suggest the NTSB revisit their crisis comms procedures. Something is clearly not quite right there…

Above the cloud advertising: Staying with air travel for a bit longer – Ryanair has decided that sticking ads on every conceivable surface inside their planes and annoying passengers with ads blasted at full-volume on the PA system isn’t enough. After all, the whole outside area of the plane is still pretty much blank! It’ll only cost you £20,000 a year to get your creative on a Ryanair’s plane, for example the tips of the wings and the main body of the plane. Doubt BA or Easyjet will take them up on it.

Source: Business Insider

Facebook fangate: You know the bit you get on some Facebook brand pages where you have to “like” the page first before you can see the content? That’s a fangate. With Real Life Connect you can now set up a real-life fangate that uses RFID technology to identify your Facebook fans as and when they come into your stores and reward them with real life perks. The example in the clip below of showering customers with confetti and kisses is somewhat cheeseball, but you get the idea (HT @mike_mcgrail).

A nifty way then of breaking down those barriers between your Facebook and bricks and mortar stores. Although the key will be to come up with an in-store/real-life perk for the customer (discounts, free stuff, or even just the recognition) that balance with a benefit for the retailer (increased loyalty, personal connections).

The link between off and online will need to be seamless and automatic. Even with something as simple as Foursquare mayorships, which provide much the same mechanic and opportunites as Real Life Connect’s RFID approach, this approach to rewarding loyalty have found little pick up. Not once have I been rewarded for being the Mayor of a cafe or restaurant – and I’ve looked!

Combine this with existing loyalty schemes or apps however, and you might be on to something!

Tweet and thou shall be saved: In terms of rewarding fans for following a brand on Twitter, the Vatican may be on to the ultimate incentive – absolving Catholics of their sins. The Pope this week announced that anyone who follows his World Youth Day service on TV, radio or via Twitter will receive plenary indulgences.

When bylines go wrong: The heat might be getting to the subs at the Sunday Mirror. They carried a nib about a bridge funding scandal; and where you’d usually find the name of the journo that had written the piece, there was a rather colourful snippet of a sentence (HT @tabloidtroll).

https://twitter.com/tabloidtroll/status/356455793605877761

How to use hashtags on Twitter: A great little 2-minute-guide to how you should use hashtags on Twitter by @garyvee. Instead of trying to make your own hashtags trend (as Gary notes, only The Bieber has that kind of power, infuriatingly), you’ll be much better off listening to what is already popular and then adding to those conversations and trends where you have the authority/content/right to play.

Videos of the week: Johannesburg Zoo were keen to get in on the social media action, but rather than hire a social media team, they decided to promote from within. Their resident honey badger “BG” got the gig (HT Alex Crouch).

A spectacular ad for Johnnie Walker starring none other than martial arts über-legend Bruce Lee. It took nine months to produce, with every shot, every detail was painstakingly assembled, animated and rendered through CGI. As the director puts it – a sculpture in a different medium (HT @KaiFischer).

A great little clip from Arsenal Football Club from the pre-season tour through Vietnam (not signing anyone or winning any titles, don’t be silly). A fan runs alongside the team coach for a good five miles, the bus finally stops and he climbs aboard. Dream come true (HT @stangreenan).

The Superhumans are back. No pressure.

And finally: Desk safari (HT @AndrewDumont).

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80 social media rules, Google+ is The Matrix and this week’s bits and bytes

@SainsburysPR’s favourite tweets: As ever, at the end of the month at @SainsburysPR, we look back at our favourite Tweets of the month. May was yet another fun month, with a range of Tweets from fashionable ways to wear Sainsbury’s carrier bags, the Sainsbury’s Summer Series to Tweets about products our customers love.

Animated business review: Sainsbury’s published its Annual Report this week and to tell the story of how we performed over the last financial year, we created five quirky stop-frame-animated clips of our five areas of focus and why we believe our values make us different.

Screen Shot 2013-06-06 at 22.01.49
Source: Sainsbury’s Annual Report 2013

3 Must read posts this week:

  1. Adobe’s head of social media and general good guy @jeremywaite pulled together a rather brilliant list of 80 social media rules. The kind that you can happily print, frame and hang on your wall and follow.
  2. The Guardian’s tech editor @charlesarthur believes that we’ve all been looking at Google+ the wrong way: It’s not a social network like Facebook. Yes, you can follow friends and people and add them to circles and message them and post stuff and comment on things. He reckons that Google is more interested in all the other things you’re doing when you’re logged in to Google, Gmail, Youtube and Google Maps. Because that’s when you’re feeding Google information about your needs, likes and interests and wherabouts as well as movements. In turn, Google learns what you want and delivers that reality to you.
    Arthur compares Google+ to the computer construct of The Matrix films, where humans are kept in suspended animation, plugged into a dream world as their bodies’ BTU power the machines that have taken over the world (man, I love that film).
    Next time you’re searching for something, or looking on a map, or searching on YouTube, you’ll see what Google has decided are the “most relevant” results (and of course the “most relevant” adverts). If you frequent climate change denial sites, a search on “climate change” will turn those up ahead of the sites run by rational scientists. Whatever your leaning, politically, sexually, philosophically, if you let Google+ see it then that will be fed back to you. It’s the classic “filter bubble”.
  3. Rory Sutherland writes in Wired about four psychological theories as to why Amazon enjoys unrivalled success – and his argument for how we go about saving marketing.

Social media assistant: Gary Vaynerchuk, prolific über-blogger and boss of VaynerMedia, has hired someone to shadow him and produce content for dissemination across his social media properties. A full-time social media shadow. The idea is that while Gary is speaking at conferences, discussing social media in meetings or just chatting with people over lunch, there will always be someone to record and publish his thoughts.

My first reaction: “That’s bonkers”. Surely it can’t just be about the amount of content? But then, this:

Vaynerchuk’s broad-based social media push goes back to his belief that “it’s not good enough to just produce long-form content; you have to put out micro-content to drive awareness to it.” He’ll be creating “content native to the platform where the audience is,” which means that he [as captured by his assistant] might take a concept and write a blog post about it for his WordPress site, film a video, create an animated gif for Tumblr, post a quote on Instagram – or all of the above.

I think the point is that you or your organisation has to embed social media infrastructure, processes and training into the way you do business. Only then will your people  be able to produce content that speaks to your customer, tells the corporate story and helps achieve your business goals. For Gary that means socialising his every utterance, for others that could be as basic as making sure that more people at your company are savvy enough to understand what kind of message would play well in the outside world, how to capture it and how to get it out.

Vine now on Android: How else to announce that Twitter’s six second video sharing app Vine is now available for Android phones than through a Vine? The Android version has everything that the 13 million iPhone users already know, as well as a unique to Android function: zoom.

Visualising Tweets: Nifty work from the guys at Twitter who’ve plotted some incredibly accurate maps using nothing but the geographic information from geotagged Tweets. Unsurprisingly, major cities appear as bright spots of heavy Twitter activity, with major roads and even ferry traffic routes clearly visible when you zoom in.

Source: Twitter Office on Flickr

Videos of the week: Last week we had Hahn sort out the problem of spilled beers, this week it’s Burger King at the forefront of fast-food R&D with their Hands Free Whopper technology.

How much is a can of Pepsi? One Facebook Like.

A marvellous new campaign from the community run mobile network Giff Gaff: Don’t be scared.

http://youtu.be/04CR3NZPm_4

And finally: Actors laughing between takes.

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BVB’s PR masterclass mobbed by Puma, Guardian Coffee and this week’s bits and bytes

BerryLove: Judging by the weather today and last weekend, it looks like Summer might actually be happening after all. The @SainsburysPR team (thank you to @MindyB_ for the art direction!) decided to post our first Vine to celebrate the arrival of British strawberries into our stores. Wooo!

Sing when you’re winning: Dortmund and Bayern played out the first ever Germanic Champions League final last weekend and even though Dortmund lost the game, they clearly won the PR battle. Their Deckchair Tour of London in a big, bright yellow bus was particularly brilliant, placing the chair in strategic locations around the capital (including, of course, the obligatory beach towel).

Source: Borussia Dortmund

Before the game, The Guardian published their excellent interview with Dortmund’s coach, Jürgen Klopp. Even after Bayern were crowned champions of Europe, the indomitable spirit of Klopp shone through in his press conference and the way he summed up the game.

http://youtu.be/bWopczW-IQs

But then came Dortmund’s kit sponsors Puma with probably the world’s worst flash mob: Defeated by the Lederhosen-clad Teutons of Bavaria and on their way back to Germany, the Dortmund squad were greeted at Stansted Airport by a troupe of Puma clad street-stylers (is that what they’re called?), beat-boxing and break-dancing to an audience of utterly nonplussed BVB players.

Again. This was a good 12 hours after the final whistle. So I have to assume that the marketing bods at Puma knew their team had come out second best but decided to go ahead regardless. I suppose the performers had been paid and everything was ready to go. After all, it can’t be that easy to get permission to do this kind of thing at an Airport.

Unsurprisingly, the video bombed and was shared for all the wrong reasons.

But it gets better.

Two days later and in response to some rather colourful language and malicious glee on Twitter, Puma decided to put out this promoted tweet (fair play to them for engaging with the conversation and not just hiding away):

The Tweet takes you through to a poll on their Facebook page where Puma acknowledge that the best time for a celebratory flashmob is when you have something to celebrate. I suspect they deserve some brownie points for apologising – kind of – but I cannot understand why they went ahead with the flashmob in the first place.

Just to finish off on the Champions League final, here are some facts on the match from Twitter: 4.8 million Tweets with Robben the most mentioned player.

The long tail of the press release: Research from PR Newswire shows that the average life span of a press release is about four months. While findings like this from a company that distributes and hosts press releases should be taken with a pinch of salt, it does also show that good stories and releases will be found by interested readers and remain relevant long after they’ve been published (HT @CorpCommsMag).

#GuardianCoffee: Following in the footsteps of TAZ, NRC daily and the Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe, The Guardian launched their own coffee shop this week. No, really. Aptly named #GuardianCoffee, the café popped up in Shoreditch’s Boxpark and is meant to provide journalists a place to work. The reception’s been mixed: GQ thought it more suited to “those more interested in Instagramming their latte art rather than enjoying a conversation”, while Vice felt “the vibe was sterile and deathly”. The best summary of events though goes to Us vs Th3m (HT @stangreenan).

Still, it’s got nothing on the Czechs and their Newsroom Cafés where local newspapers are produced jointly by editorial staff and guests of the café.

Tumblr launches ads: Yahoo didn’t waste any time in getting ads onto Tumblr, rolling out sponsored posts to their entire platform (they’d already been live for about a year on Tumblr’s mobile app). Somewhat predictably, the reception has been negative with some users quick to post ways to remove the ads from their pages.

Updates to both Twitter and Facebook: Twitter updated its mobile app, refreshing the tweet composer screen, making it easier to tweet images. The new layout also makes it easier to see which account your tweeting from (useful for those people who don’t want to mix their work and private Twitter accounts).

Facebook meanwhile took a leaf out of the Twitter playbook (read: flat out copied) and launched verified pages. They’ve not even bothered to come up with their own symbol – they’ve just gone and used Twitter’s blue tick.

What’s in a ringtone? A good one for the next time you’re down the pub with your friends. Did you know that the sound that Facebook makes when you receive a video call is made up of the notes F, A, C and E (HT @stangreenan)?

Google MotoX: Google have announced plans to build a smartphone that will predict what you’re going to do before you do it. Gyroscopes and other sensors will continuously track the whereabouts and movements of the phone so it will know if you’re walking around your neighbourhood and pulling it out of your trouser pocket or if you sitting in the back of a cab on your way to the airport. Expect to be out of battery by the time you get to work (HT @TreebD).

Videos of the week: A brilliant stunt from Samsung in Zurich to promote the new Galaxy S4 and its ‘smart pause’ function.

You and nine of your mates happen to be in flat, open area and have a hankering for some 5-a-side footie action? Nike’s ‘Mi Pista’ app/campaign has got you covered (HT @stangreenan).

http://youtu.be/67XL6A16jZA

Aussie brewer Hahn is working to put an end to all those beer spillages on dance floors around the world.

http://youtu.be/0mv7OhXYThk

And finally: Beardvertising. Yes. This is real.

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GoPro understands social rewards, POTUS rocks and this week’s bits and bytes

Sainsbury’s: Remember when you could slap Jamie Oliver via Youtube? Well, we’ve come up with our own version of that interactive Youtube clip to accompany our Kitchen Heroes campaign. Check it out to see what you can do with a carton of by Sainsbury’s chopped tomatoes (needs some work in the juggling department though…).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D0WvyrlHzs

Also, make sure you watch the über-tasty food pornography that is the new by Sainsbury’s ads. Probably the greatest sausage sandwich you’ll ever see.

And yup, another month has passed which makes it time for a look back at our favourite tweets from April. Highlights were the new Gok for Tu collection, the Cake and Bake Show and of course the news that Sainsbury’s is sponsoring the British Athletics Summer Series.

Twitter safety: After high profile Twitter accounts from news organisations were compromised – most recently that of AP which caused a dip in the DOW – Twitter has sent a memo directly to the newsdesks with some tips on how to keep their accounts safe. Key points to remember are to use secure passwords and change them regularly, keep your email secure and keep an eye out for suspicious activity from any apps you may have authorised to have access to your account.

So far, so sensible. But then they go on to say that you should designate one computer to use for Twitter exclusively. So no email or browsing the Web. Bizarre. Here’s hoping this is all just a temporary stop gap before Twitter rolls out two-factor-authentication.

Reward & inspire: A customer that has bought your product and created something beautiful will most likely be a fan of your product. Should they chose to share this beautiful thing they’ve created, all you need to do is share that with your community. Your customer’s creation will serve to inspire other people to do the same or inspire their own ideas.

Much like Lego, the people at GoPro are brilliant at using the things their customers create and share them through their own social media channels. GoPro sells tiny HD cameras that can be mounted on pretty much anything, from tripods/helmets/skis/skateboards, to guitars, dogs and mouthpieces. The videos that they chose to share are some of the most incredible, inspiring, awesome clips you’ll see on the web. Sure, it helps if these videos feature a host of beautiful (often scantily clad) people doing awesome things, gratuitous use of slow motion and time-lapse photography as well as a pounding electro soundtrack, but you get what I mean.

Case in point – a video of a dude solving a Rubik cube. Not interested? How about if it’s three cubes at the same time. Still nothing? OK then. How about a video of a dude solving three Rubik cubes simultaneously WHILE JUGGLING THEM (are you listening @AlexCole71?). Thought so.

Facebook fatigue: There has been much talk about Facebook fatigue and the latest numbers from SocialBakers don’t show any turnaround in fortunes for the big blue social network, especially not in developed markets such as Europe, the US and Australia. In the last six months, Facebook has lost nearly 9m monthly visitors in the US and 2m in the UK. Why is this? The Guardian asked readers why: it’s superficial, boring, gimmicky and there’s too much fighting. An interesting point from a reader: It’s no longer a place where you can keep up with what’s going on with your friends and family – it’s a place where business can farm your information from.

Facebook’s demise seems somewhat exaggerated though. Its first quarter figures show that monthly and daily active users are up to 751 million and 665 million respectively. Even though net income was less than what analysts expected, mobile revenues is what seems to have saved Zuck for now: they’ve doubled this in six months. Still, as Nikhil Kumar notes in his excellent analysis for the Evening Standard notes, there is room for caution.

SMS is dead? Well, perhaps not dead, but definitely green around gills. Turns out that in 2012, more people sent messages using chat apps such as BBM, What’s App, Skype, iMessage than using good old fashioned SMS. A study by Informa found that almost 19 billion instant messages were sent using chat apps in 2012, compared to 17.6 billion SMS texts. All of that of course means a massive whole in revenues for mobile phone carriers. Suppose we can all expect data tariffs to become more expensive!

POTUS standup: President Obama spoke at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week. Not only was he funnier than Conan (not hard), his 20 minute routine just shows how charming the man really is and how important it is to count Steven Spielberg as one of your friends. For fans of the US version of House of Cards, please make sure you check out Kevin Spacey and a host of democrats and republicans come together for an excellent “Prom of the Nerds” spoof.

http://youtu.be/dCzI521sgqE

Still on POTUS – the White House this week joined Tumblr and in its first post, outlined exactly what people can expect from the blog with a nifty, hand-drawn pie chart. The administration will tumble quotes from Potus, videos, behind the scenes stuff and updates from Vpotus and Flotus. So far, so good. A sign that Obama’s social media bods are very much plugged into to the Internet Zetigeist comes in the form of a stand on how to pronounce the word “gif”. Rather than go with the soft G as in ‘gist’ (which, mind you, is the way that the inventors of the gif format intended it to be pronounced), the president has decided to go with the hard G as in gift. Let the battle of the geeks begin.

Source: White House

No. 10 Twitter first: Not wanting to be left out, Downing Street plans to use Twitter to give preferred journalists a heads up on announcements before they are made in parliament. I have a feeling we’ll be getting many more The Thick Of It moments as a result.

Can you tell a story in 6 words? Hemingway allegedly penned: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. But what about a story in 6 seconds of stop/start footage via Twitter’s Vine? Here are the award winning 6 second vines from the Tribeca film festival.

Anticipatory computing: Imagine you’re talking to a friend about planning your weekend, talking about potential restaurants, destinations and activities. You’re using an iPad app called MindMeld that listens to what the two of you have to say, conducts Internet searches on some of the keywords you use, and displays them in real time. As someone who has been in a long distance relationship and dependent on technology like Skype and FaceTime, I cannot imagine anything worse. But make up your own mind with this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NGGSBt0hkw&feature=player_embedded

Videos of the week: every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera – a fact that Apple have gone and used as the idea for their new ad (and going by Flickr data, it’s actually true!).

http://youtu.be/NoVW62mwSQQ

Apple fan boys (why hello there!) and Samsung owners fight all the time on who has made the better tech choice. Have a look at this for a clever bit of advertising.

http://youtu.be/kArYpB2eLjA

Budweiser’s ‘Buddy Cups‘ makes toasting friends instant friends on Facebook.

http://youtu.be/9FdnssHlcRk

Ecotricity comes up with an excellent clip to promote alternative power sources.

And finally: Ed Balls breaks the Internet.

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Twitter is for PR, giftastic Jennifer Lawrence and this week’s bits and bytes

Sainsbury’s Twitter faves: Here are my favourite tweets about Sainsbury’s from February 2013. You’ll see some amazing Red Nose Day cookie creations, Goktastic reviews for collection 6 and lots of love for Lulu Guinness’ Red Nose Day totes. And, of course, a few customers declaring their undying love for our cookies. 

Twitter for PR, Facebook for branding: Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP Group chief executive, spoke to the Harvard Business Review about everything from where we are with the advertising business, to social media and emerging technology like Google Glass. He also said some interesting things about Twitter and why it’s a PR medium and Facebook and how that is a branding medium.

I get myself in deep doo-doo when I say this, but Facebook to my mind is not an advertising medium. It is a branding medium. So if I can get you to say something nice about WPP or me or one of our companies on Facebook to your wife, your friends, or whoever, that’s good. But it’s a long-term mechanism. Compare that with Google. Say you’re searching for a car: We know that up to 90% of car purchases in the U.S. are search-influenced. Depending on where you are in the purchase cycle, that number one ranking on Google seems more important than a Facebook “like.” This doesn’t deny the potency of Facebook. But it has to be seen in the context of a long continuum of brand building.

I’m going to get myself shot again. I think it’s a PR medium. Again, it’s very effective word of mouth. If you look at the Olympics in London, the big winner was Twitter. It wasn’t Facebook. It wasn’t even Google. We did analyses of the Twitter feeds every day, and it’s very, very potent. But—and this is the old fart speaking—I think because it’s limited in terms of number of characters, it reduces communication to superficialities and lacks depth.

The fail trail: This great infographic from social media monitoring firm SDL illustrates really well some recent case studies of how Nestle, Dominos and United dealt with their respective social media crises.

Social media magic: Two things you need to fulfil to have a chance at creating a successful social media campaign are the need to be loved and the need to be heard.

Oscars! The Internet fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence for being so darned down-to-earth and genuinely lovely – and heck, if you can recover from falling up the stairs of the stage to collect your award for best actress that gracefully, then you deserve all the adulation you can get. My theory though: Jennifer Lawrence is just animated-gif fodder.

Source: justnormalfangirl.tumblr.com

AAANYWAY. In terms of predicting winners, turns out that social media beat Google. Looking at the top categories (film, director, actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress) Google got 4/6 and social media got 5/6 right.

Pope wiped: So the Pope finally said his goodbyes this week and the holy social media quickly changed the name on the Papal Twitter account to ‘Vacant Seat’, and wiped Benedict’s tweets. No chance for Ratzi to walk away and do the disgruntled former employee thing with the 1.6 million followers. But what about all those (well, 39) tweets Pope Benedict? Worry not digital Catholics, all of his have been archived on the Vatican’s news site and you can read all of them in nine different languages.

Source: @Pontifex

I want to be a cop: When looking for inspiration for clever web design that puts people and their stories at the foreground I immediately think of Coca Cola and their new(ish) site. Seriously. Google ‘corporate website story telling’ and whole first page is nothing but links to articles about Coke’s page. So when @davidjstocks emailed me a link to the Milwaukee Police’s website, I was a bit surprised. But within about 5 minutes I was looking for how to become a US citizen and sign up to join the men and women in blue. The site uses some of the slickest combination of parallax scrolling and floating navigation I have ever seen alongside gripping photography and a fantastic arrangement of infographic type visuals to convey the PDs story. Well worth a visit.

Source: Milwaukee Police

On Twitter? Don’t break the law: An overview of some court cases that suggest that ordinary social media users need to have a grasp of media law to make sure they stay out of trouble (HT @a_little_wine)

Videos of the week: Samsung are working with Tim Burton on a new flick about the ‘Unicorn Apocalypse’;

http://youtu.be/ItPiWmBqYkM

Nike combined GPS data, maps and Facebook to drive their ‘Run Like Me’ campaign (it’s from Nike Japan, so it’s especially mental);

and Heineken conduct probably the best intern interview process I have ever seen!

http://youtu.be/j5Ftu3NbivE

And finally: Ever been to Starbucks and they totally mess up your name when they write it on your cup? You’ll love this (HT @stangreenan).

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Hacking Burger King, social content and this week’s bits and bytes

It’s finally happened. The awesome colleagues in Sainsbury’s Washington have pulled off a great version of the current Harlem Shake craze. Even better: it’s for Red Nose Day so watch it and donate!

The advertising campaign is dead – A must read article in the Harvard Business Review about how the campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction. The Oreo moment at this year’s Superbowl is seen as just another reason why advertisers should act more like newsrooms, reacting to current events not only in real-time but with useful and appealing content. What to do? Create just the right piece of content at the right moment by bringing the day’s zeitgeist together with your brand ethos and your audience’s expectations.

Memories and brands – A fantastic and inspiring report by Franck Sarrazit, Global Director of TNS’s Brand & Communications practice about how we make memories and what that means for brands.

Bang with Friends – Remember the scene in ‘The Social Network’ where Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg hot-flipflops it back to his dorm to add the ‘Relationship status’ field to Facebook profile pages after realising that in real life, there’s no easy way to see if someone is available or not? Well, I can’t believe it’s taken this long, but there’s a new Facebook app called ‘Bang with Friends’ that takes things one step further. Boasting to have already generated 100,000 ‘hook ups’, the app allows you go through your friends and mark the ones you’d like to, well, bang. Unlike other Facebook apps, this one works in private, matching friends that have expressed a mutual interest in, you know, banging each other. Once matched, the two prospective friends with benefits are notified by email and go about their business…

Source: Bang with Friends

Meanwhile, people on Facebook are hiring fake girlfriends so that they can change their relationship status to ‘In a relationship’ and make their lives seem romantically complete – even if it’s just virtual. WTF.

Social content that works – An excellent presentation by @JeremyWaite from Adobe about the social media purpose pyramid – or why social media does six things really well: emotional messages (entertain, challenge, inspire) and rational messages (inform, solve, educate). Jeremy notes that understanding what motivates people to share is at the heart of every successful social marketing campaign.

You could argue though that there should be one more element to the social media purpose pyramid, one that LinkedIn capitalised on these last few weeks. Social media provide you the perfect platform to brag about how great you are. A simple enough email then from LinkedIn to their users congratulating them that they are one of the most viewed profiles on the network. That ego boost was gratefully accepted and shared by many LinkedIn users, resulting in over 80,000 tweets mentioning individual greatness. TechCrunch takes a closer look at the LinkedIn email campaign (HT @tomparker81).

The King is hacked – Another week, another Twitter disaster. This week it was Burger King’s account that got hacked (apparently their password was ‘Whopper123’) and while it did get them 30,000 new followers in one day, it probably wasn’t worth the hassle/brand damage. Of all the many articles, Gizmodo probably has the best summary, including the wonderfully smug tweet from McDonald’s saying they had nothing to do with the hack. The lesson is clear: use a strong password, change it regularly and don’t use the same password for all your accounts.

How to create a strong password? XKCD has the answer.

Source: xkcd

A quick side note on hacking – this interview on the BBC with Jeff Jarvis was supposed to feed into the usual media panic of ‘oh my God, we’re all getting hacked’. It doesn’t quite go to plan. You can almost hear the Facebook PR team cheering in the background…

Also: is the Beeb really that precious that it feels it needs to cut an interview short because the interviewee has used such vitriolic insults as “crap” and “BS”?

Creative CVs – Could you get your whole CV across in 6 seconds? Aspiring journalist Dawn Siff has published her CV on Vine. Other recent advances in CV formatting have brought us Philippe Dubost’s Amazon page and Sonya William’s eBay page. Meanwhile, Enterasys – a wireless network provider – is considering applicants for a six-figure senior social media position, but no paper résumés will be accepted. Instead, the company has decided to recruit solely via Twitter.

And finally: You had one job.

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The Harlem Shake and this week’s bits and bytes

Sainsbury's Giraffe Bread
Source: Sainsbury’s

What does Sainsbury’s have in common with Apple, Zappos, Trader Joe’s, the Ritz-Carlton and Lexus? According to Business Insider, they’ve all shown examples of big businesses actually getting it right. Some really wonderful stories, all showing that going above and beyond customer expectations will generate a lot of positive sentiment towards a business.

I’ve talked about the growing trend of second screening. 80% of Twitter users in the UK us the service via their mobile – or to put that differently, they tweet from the sofa and while they’re on the move. Twitter recognised this and even published a book on the link between TV and Twitter – how people talk about what is happening on telly while it’s happening. Not a big surprise then that Twitter acquired a social analytics start-up that measures just those two things what’s happening on TV, and what’s happening on Twitter.

The Harlem Shake is the newest Internet meme to take the world by storm. The 1-minute videos have already amassed over 44 million views on YouTube in two weeks. The meme is a combination of a track by Brooklyn-based DJ Baauer that was released in 2012 and the popular dance move from the ‘80s, both called ‘Harlem Shake’. It all seems to have started with a video by DizastaMusic where a group of people wearing bizarre outfits dance to the an extract of the track. Since then, the meme has mutated slightly, with videos now following the pattern of one person dancing while the rest are either going about their business or there’s no one else in shot. Then, once the lyrics kick in, everyone goes into a frenzied dance off. Completely mental but obviously brilliant fun for those taking part – and YouTube. There have been versions from Westpoint Cadet’s, the Norwegian Army, Western Uni students and the British Army. My favourite has to be this one from two DJs who incorporate their entire audience.

Cheeky Valentine’s Day advertising from Ikea in Australia: a free baby cot (some assembly required, I’m sure) for babies born on 14 November 2013. All you need to do is show them the coupon and a birth corticated.

Source: Coloribus.com

A great stunt from Nivea in Germany for the launch of their new ‘Stress Protect Deodorant’. Titled ‘The Stress test’, the stunt plays out in real time as an unsuspecting passerby is photographed and their image used to create newspaper splashes and breaking news reports showing that same person as the main target in a nationwide manhunt . It’s an idea that’s been done before in different guises but I think this execution in a German airport, bringing together a host of extras is excellent. You can really see the panic in their eyes increase, especially when the PA system announces in minute detail what they are wearing. And they say Germans don’t have a sense of humour…

http://youtu.be/_gWk_yKtEdo

Econsultancy provides a good overview of some of the common pitfalls for brands and their social media initiatives. In summary, stay away from campaigns that are only geared to gaining followers, promoting a purchase, offer a lame prize, or only serve to make something simple more difficult.

And finally: Love reading the Guardian but can’t quite come up with an appropriate comment? Try the random Guardian comment generator.

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