Blackberry's 'The Bold Team' has caused quite a stir

1. Twitterati 1, Blackberry 0: RIM (the company behind Blackberry) suffered yet another PR blunder this week after a rather embarrassing attempt at crowdsourcing user-generated publicity from Twitter, promoting the hashtag #BeBold. It all started on New Year’s Eve when RIM ran a campaign asking how folks planned to #BeBold in 2012. Based on some of their responses, RIM created four mascots in the form of cartoon superheroes, provoking global criticism and mockery from disgruntled tweeps usurping the #BeBold hashtag. As a recent convert to the church of Apple, I found @bpollard89’s tweet – ‘#BeBold, get an iPhone’ – the most amusing.

2. Pimp My Page – Twitter introduced a redesign in December, however this week the micro-blogging site announced that it would be launching enhanced profiles for brands. The initial branded pages included: American Express, Bing, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney Pixar, Heineken, McDonald’s, and a few more. With Facebook’s IPO, Twitter will be under even more pressure to become more brand-centric.

3. End of his Korea – Park Jeonggeun, a 24 year old South Korea has been detained for a re-tweet yesterday from a devout Northern Korean about the late despot Kim Jong-Il, which included a satirical edited version of a North Korean propaganda poster. A noted critic of the North Korean regime, Park told Amnesty International “My intention was to lampoon North Korea’s leaders for a joke.” Nonetheless, South Korea officials claim his retweet is a violation of the National Security Law, under the grounds of committing “acts that benefit the enemy.” Park could face upto seven years in prison for his mockery. In a strange twist of foreign policy, North and South Korea are still technically at war with each other however surely imprisoning a citizen over free expression is comparable with the ideology they claim to oppose?

4. Twaped – On the subject of inability to identify humour on Twitter, Labour MP Tom Watson has been in the news this week after his intern jokingly tweeted: ‘I should log out of my Twitter so that my intern doesn’t twit-rape me…,’ similar to the social-prank known as ‘fraping’ on Facebook. The intern shortly posted an apology, however the Twitter-blunder caused an uproar of antagonistic commentators advocating her dismissal as well as many tweeps with a sense of humour orchestrating a campaign to #savetheintern. The media-savvy MP, who lead the charge against News Corp in 2011, was quick to respond on his blog, perhaps amusingly in parts: ‘though my account wasn’t technically ‘hacked’, yes, I do understand the irony of what happened.’ Regardless of certain peoples’ sensitivity to the vulgar word, Mr Watson was wise not to dismiss the intern and respond in a timely, professional manner.

Tiffany's crowd-sourced images depicting couples in true love

5. Love is in the air – Tiffany announced it was partnering with fashion blogger couple Scott Schuman and Garance Doré for an extension of its ‘What Makes Love True’ campaign. The couple is presented as the archetypical couple for the project ‘True Love in Pictures,’ which aims to create a gallery to represent real couples in love from Paris and New York. The project was celebrated at an event at the Tiffany & Co. flagship store in New York last week and from Monday people have been able to upload their own ‘moments of romance’. Users can post their love dovey photos to Twitter, Facebook or email to friends and family.

6. Bayern Munchkins – Prominent German football club Bayern Munich upset thousands of their fans this week in a failed social stunt. The club announced it had agreed to sign a ’spectacular name.’ The news spread like wildfire and soon became a top trend on Twitter. Fans were then instructed to like the Facebook page and accept an application invite to watch a live stream of the new superstar. But when the moment came to do the big reveal, fans logged in to find Nerlinger holding a piece of paper showing the profile picture of the Facebook user watching the video, accompanied by a message reading: ‘Dear fans, you probably already noticed, that we did not sign a new player. This app is for our fans to show the importance of you for our club.’ Within minutes, thousands of angry fans vented their frustration on Twitter and Facebook at the gimmicky stunt. Considering Bayern recently missed out on the signing o Monchengladbach and Marco Reus to rivals Dortmund, this was an insult to injury for many loyal fans.

My talk was on consumer PR.  Here are my slides:

There are so many sector PR award schemes that it’s hard to keep up.  Personally, I think there’s too many and the market is over-saturated and this is having a negative impact on the industry.

Having so many award ceremonies, in my view, devalues the sector.

Even if you can keep up with all the possible awards – and there are at least 11 PR specific ceremonies (see List of PR Award Ceremonies For UK Agencies below), and that doesn’t include PR gongs up for grabs within other marketing awards dos, nor the verticals such as catering/food and drink, gaming, etc etc – the overall cost makes it prohibitive to enter all of them.

Agencies that consistently produce good work will do one of two things: select a couple of award ceremonies and enter many campaigns into each; or – and this is less likely – enter just one or two campaigns into many awards bashes.

The problem with the latter option is that many of the ceremonies request PR campaign submissions around the same time of year, and you’re never sure which of your campaigns stand the best chance of winning.

This year, some of Umpf’s PR campaigns that we thought would do well, didn’t; and some we didn’t think would fare so well, did.  So entering more campaigns in fewer award ceremonies gives agencies better odds of winning those gongs.

Which means that PR campaigns that ought to win are not even being entered into some PR awards; therefore, the standard of the less well known – or perhaps more expensive – PR award ceremonies is not as high as the most popular ones.

So back to cost.  Umpf’s average cost for a single award entry this year was £170.  Enter five or six at one event and you’re looking at £1,000 outlay straight away.

And then there’s the cost of attending – we’re attending four award ceremonies this year and the ticket prices range from £150-£195 for each member of the team.

And then you have to get to the venue.  Of the ones we’ve entered, three are national awards gigs so there’s travel costs away from our base in Leeds to factor in.

Add in the cost of the drinks – and you can’t really win without splashing out on Champagne and shots – plus taxis home and you’re looking at another £50-£60 per head.

So, entry fee, cost of attending and drinks works out at approximately £400 per person for each ceremony you attend.  More entries, higher cost.  More staff attending, higher cost again.  And that’s without travel or hotels.

That said, it’s one of the nicer cost to have as an agency as it it shows that your PR campaigns are being recognised by your peers and industry experts.

List of PR Award Ceremonies For UK Agencies
1. Cannes PR Lions http://www.canneslions.com/awards/categories_rules.cfm#9-27-120
2. CIPR Excellence Awards http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/events-awards/excellence-awards
3. CIPR PRide Awards http://www.cipr.co.uk/content/events-awards/pride-awards
4. Communicate Corporate Awards http://www.communicatemagazine.co.uk/awards
5. Corp Comms Awards http://www.corpcommsmagazine.co.uk/awards/corpcomms
6. European Excellence Awards http://excellence-awards.eu
7. Fresh PR Awards http://www.freshdigitalawards.co.uk/pr
8. Golden Hedgehog PR Awards (yes, they’re really called that) http://www.goldenhedgehogprawards.com
9. PR Week Awards http://www.prweekawards.com
10. PRCA Awards http://www.prca.org.uk/networking_events_2011_prca_awards
11. SABRE Awards http://www.holmesreport.com/uploadedfiles/news/2012EMEASABREENTRYFORM.pdf

The CIPRs recognise excellence and achievement in public relations and communications – ‘PRoof of success in the PR industry’ according to our industry body.

We had eight campaigns shortlisted – no mean feat in itself – and collected four gongs which highlights the strength of the PR talent within the agency.

We’re particularly pleased with the CIPR judges’ comments on our ‘Royal Fridge’ PR stunt: a “gob-smacking volume of positive media coverage and social media buzz”.

And kudos to Umpf’s Jon Priestley who won the Outstanding Young Communicator award.

Special mention to our friends at business-to-business PR agency The Right Agency who won Gold for the best Corporate and Business Communications campaign.

Umpf’s PR Awards Roll Call

1. Consumer PR – Gold winner, Umpf for GE.  Campaign:  The GE ‘Royal Fridge’: Global awareness from a £250 stunt

2. Best Use of Social Media – Gold winner, Umpf for Belling.  Campaign: Tweet Pie – The World’s Shortest Recipe Book

3. Best Use of Media Relations – Silver winner, Umpf for MyJobGroup.co.uk.  Campaign: Social ‘Notworking’

4. Outstanding Young Communicator – Gold winner, Jon Priestley, Umpf

CIPR judges’ comments:

Fronted by Poppy, the virtual face of the Royal British Legion, the campaign has more than 10,000 Facebook and 11,000 Twitter followers and its own Legion Live portal hosting videos, blogs and images.

As well as being used as a platform to host content, the British Legion once again led the campaign for Twitter to fall silent for two minutes at 11am (#2minutesilence) this morning as a mark of respect for Remembrance Day.

Last year the British Legion saw its Remembrance Day iTunes single bring two minutes of silence to the charts. And in 2009 a mobile poppy app was launched featuring a virtual poppy which grows every day.

A number of other social media campaigns to honour veterans and communicate the First and Second World Wars have also been launched this year.

This week, The Imperial War Museum launched its Faces of the First World War campaign which today saw 100 previously unseen portraits of those who served in the First World War made public for the very first time via Flickr.

Photographs will continue to be uploaded every week day until the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War in August 2014.

Elsewhere a Twitter account (@RealTimeWWII) is reporting the events of world war two as it happened, minute by minute, for the next six years. Being led by Oxford graduate, Alwyn Collinson (24), the account has more than 73,000 followers and is being translated into Russian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Finally, this year’s PR Week Digital and Social Media Award went to the RAF Benevolent Fund for a social media campaign chronicling the events of the Battle of Britain. Set up as an online newspaper featuring daily news, pictures and video footage, blogs and Twitter feeds were also created for a number of fictional characters.

The campaign amassed 2,000 Twitter followers, 16,000 Facebook fans and the 1940 Chronicle has been chosen to become part of the British Library’s digital archive of British documentary heritage.

Chevrolet Sonic bungee jump – Chevrolet used a stunt last month to launch its new Sonic car to younger buyers.

People were invited to bungee a brand new car off a tower in LA by visiting a website and clicking on a button, with every click taking the car one step closer to the edge.

After nine hours and 2.5 million clicks the car took off. The launch was streamed online so people around the world could watch as it nose-dived towards a paddling pool before being bungeed back up into the air.

The campaign gave the term car launch a whole new meaning!

When I Were a Meerkat – The UK is mad on meerkats – fact. So much so that the Daily Mail devoted a whole double page spread to the launch of a new book, When I Were a Meerkat, by Andrew Davies.

A take-off of Davies’ original book, When I Were a Lad, the meerkat version super imposes pictures of meerkats on to old black and white photos in a fairly amusing manner.

Even though we originally thought it was, the book has nothing to do with Compare the Market, although there is a cursory ‘seemples’ in the intro of the article.  Proof that the Compare the Market campaign is now so ingrained into day-to-day life that the media can’t reference meerkats without mentioning it.

United vs. City – two great Manchester derby stunts

Making the most of the fact that everyone in Manchester now hates Carlos Tevez, Betfair used last month’s Manchester derby to give fans of both sides the chance to bin their Tevez shirts in exchange for new ones.

Skips were placed outside Old Trafford to collect the shirts which were then shipped to Argentina to be given to local charities  – everyone’s a winner!

Another cheeky stunt came from Tesco after this picture emerged – apparently the work of a ‘rogue employee’ and not the global supermarket. We have seen a few ‘pricing error’ stories from Tesco make the news in in recent weeks – smell a rat anyone?

One from the archives – Lakeside’s Living Christmas Fairy

The annual PR Week Awards took place last month and 2011’s campaign of the year went to …. Lakeside’s Living Christmas Fairy by Clarion Communications.

Simple yet highly effective, the campaign saw Chantelle Houghton placed on top of a 50ft Christmas tree as a living Christmas fairy.

A masterclass in the perfect picture story, the stunt combined newsworthy celeb, clever branding (the tree was positioned outside the store’s main entrance) and eye catching image and resulted in a whole raft of national coverage. Beats Matt Cardle turning on the Christmas lights any day!

Other notable mentions ….

There have been two notable PR hoaxes this year – the ‘Momzilla’ mother-in-law from hell email and last month’s giant slipper.

A mistake with an overlooked decimal point lead to a Chinese slipper manufacturer sending baffled Tom Boddingham a gigantic slipper. The company behind the product, Monster Slippers, blogged about the mix up and promised to send Tom a replacement in the correct size straight away. Then it transpired that the unwitting Tom, splashed across the world’s media, actually bore a startling resemblance to Monster Slippers’ website manager Joe Jennings. All of a sudden Monster Slippers were unavailable for comment.

Was it a good idea? Well, we’re still talking about it a month or so on making it a cert to go down in PR hoax history. And, many of us in the office did comment on how nice it would be to snuggle down and have a little nap in that giant slipper.

Mario Balotelli firework saga

Mario Balotelli made the news last month after allegedly setting his bathroom on fire when he and a group of friends decided to let off fireworks out of a window.

No sooner had the fire brigade left the premises had Mario been snapped up to front a Manchester firework safety campaign. Apparently the media had misreported the story and this was his way of putting things right.

Whether it was a quick thinking publicist or a clever approach from the firework safety organisation, it generated tones of national coverage, for what was a regional fire safety campaign, and gave Mario the chance to correct the negative press.

I’ve sat in on brainstorms before where the idea of using Groupon for a client has been brought up, this was before all the bad publicity and at the time it was seen as a great tool to get your business in front of hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise would be none the wiser to the services you offer.

The thing with Groupon is it wasn’t very well thought out. Yes it’s a discount site and recession or not, we consumers love a good bargain. However, retailers only like to give away a bargain of the Groupon kind during tough times, making the business immediately unsustainable.

Once the recession passes, companies won’t want to use sites such as Groupon. With the site taking 50% of sales revenue the profit margin is so low, if not non-existent, that there’s no point.

There’s also the perception that going on Groupon can damage your brand. If you scour the deals, 95% of the time you won’t have heard of the salons offering ultrasonic-liposuction or the beauticians offering teeth whitening or the restaurants offering £30 of food for £7.

These small businesses will most likely be thinking that an online discount site sending out a mailer to the masses is a brilliant marketing tool for attracting hundreds of new customers who will hopefully turn into repeat customers.

What they don’t see is that as soon as you associate yourself with any type of discount scheme, to most people that says ‘we’re in trouble’, which can be extremely damaging to a business or brand.

If you’re not in trouble then why do you need to offer a heavy discount to get people through the door? And if your business is in trouble, why? Is quality of what you offer not very good?

Also, how will your usual, loyal customers feel when they see that they’re paying full price for a service that a new customer is only paying a fraction of the full price for? Its risky business managing the perception of the value of what you offer whilst also keeping your loyal customers happy and satisfied.

Small businesses need to recognise that there are a number of free tools that are already out there which could help build your brand without having to resort to mass mailer sites such as Groupon to try and get people talking about their business.

A good social media strategy can help you educate and excite the general public. You can also optimise loyal customers and brand ambassadors using tools such as Twitter, spreading the word and building your reputation far and wide.

Hopefully small businesses will wise up as discount website – related horror stories spread. It seems that as Groupon’s head of PR quit after just two months, so is everyone else.

Recently we were provoked by the idea that the next revolution on the web would involve filtering.

Let us explain.

If you’re like most users of Twitter, you’ll have several hundred profiles you’re following. If some of those profiles are rather prolific, you’ll find that your Twitter stream is more like a torrent, with tweets appearing faster than you’re able to read them and a growing sense of frustration that you can’t read the ones that really interest you.

Perhaps the same is also true of your Facebook profile. It could be so crammed full of  ‘friends’ that your nearest and dearest are pushed to one side, overtaken by a tidal wave of Farmville requests, meaningless photos of drunken nights out and gushing comments about someone you’ve never met and their new pet tarantula.

And so we start filtering.

After all, it’s a natural process that happens every day, all around us.

We filter when we go to the supermarket and we’re faced with 250 different types of wafer-thin ham. Most of us (those on the Atkin’s diet aside) only buy one. Likewise, when it comes to buying a new home, we naturally filter what’s on offer; by location, bedrooms, garden etc.

Filtering is our way of not being overwhelmed by choice and it’s arguably one key development in the web over the coming years. The truth is, every day we’re bombarded with more information than we know what to do with. And our social media profiles are no exception. We will be forced to filter in light of the amount of information we just can’t process, nor want to deal with.

If Web 2.0 was about ‘opening up’ then Web 3.0 is most definitely about ’shutting up’. Shutting up the brands, profiles and people that simply don’t interest us and filtering the way we receive information online. Getting ‘behind the veil’ to really speak to consumers is going to become increasingly challenging for brands. Clever, creative and interactive social media campaigns will be needed.

But before you all run screaming for the hills, the good news is that Web 3.0 will be more about building brand advocacy; inspiring consumers to do a brand’s bidding on their behalf. Apple is a fantastic example of this. Yes, their advertising is spot on, but we’re really won over when our friends talk up the new iPhone4S, tell us about the latest iPad app, or wax lyrical about AppleTV.

Brand advocacy may be harder to develop, but the results and rewards make it the holy grail for marketers. We’ll leave you with a rather irritating song that just about sums up our point:

Photo: http://info-wars.org/

I think it was American showman Phineas Taylor Barnum who said “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”.

The ‘all publicity is good publicity’ mantra can be a dangerous furrow to plough.  However, if you don’t mind the flack, it’s cheap brand awareness tool.

And great link bait, too.

Take Ryanair – the slag of slags when it comes to the cheap PR stunt – which last week ‘announced plans’ (the first phrase they teach you at PR Stunt College) to remove up to three loos on its planes to squeeze in more seats.

But Mr O’Leary, above right, the airline’s ringmaster and CEO, is the master at this sort of story.  Have a look through most of the online coverage and, just like Ryanair passengers, low cost key messages are squeezed in all over (“The company said ticket prices would fall by about £2 from a typical £40 tickets”).

So, yes, less lavs; but it’s cheaper to fly with Ryanair.

The bigger question for me is does ‘making stuff up’ to garner column inches and backlinks count as ethical behaviour?

That’s a bigger debate.  In the meantime, here’s my five favourite Ryanair PR stunts:

1. Ryanair ‘plans’ to have standing seats on its planes http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8779388.stm
2. Ryanair ‘plans’ to ban luggage – passengers should “buy or hire” what they need when they arrive at their destination  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3878641.stm
3. Ryanair bans staff from charging their mobile phones to save costs  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4467877.stm
4. Ryanair ‘considers’ charging passengers for using the toilet while flying http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7914542.stm
5. Ryanair ‘proposal’ for one pilot planes (part of wider Ryanair story) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-11282834

One thing you may notice about these five examples – every one on BBC.co.uk, and every one with a gold-quality backlink from BBC.co.uk to www.ryanair.com… D’oh, that Mr O’ Leary is very good.

BTW, read Louise Woodward’s blog on some really clever travel social media campaigns.

With the internet war between Facebook and Google becoming increasingly hard fought, Google’s social media platform enables the company to give consumers more specific search results, because, it assumes, we will stay logged in to our Google account even when we’re not connecting on Google+.

In its desire to challenge the supremacy of Facebook (which has a logged in and ‘captive’ audience to entice advertisers to spend on the platform) Google needed to create a similar platform to offer advertisers that ‘logged-in’ and highly specified audience. The simplest way to summarise it is that it’s all about the Benjamins.

So, what’s the knock-on effect for us PR people? And what’s with this +1 button, we hear you ask?

Well, it’s all pretty straightforward, really. Google’s algorithm (whilst never seen outside of a small group of mega-wealthy Silicon Valley residents) is sure to favour its +1 button when returning search results. Of course, the inference is that we need to be logged-in in order to give a web page, posting or site a +1, but these all add up over time to create a more social approach to search.

The truth is, for those specialising in online PR and SEO, we need to generate +1s with as much fervour as we look generate online coverage as they both have a positive effect on SERPs for the brands we represent. So, next time you post something, blog about an event, get some online coverage for a client, think about how you can translate this into improved search rankings.

It’s difficult to read a paper, mag, website or blog without seeing a pop-up restaurant/bar/cafe/shop/you name it.  There’s even been a pop-up ad agency (more below).

And with good reason.  The pop-up concept:

1. Offers great photo opportunities (see our recent post on how great photography can elevate your PR campaign)

2. Gives an experiential opportunity for sampling your product/service to customers you may not typically reach

3. Creates a ready-made story – pop-ups are, by their nature, unusual in design and location and around for a limited period ie great news fodder

4. Can quickly drive change in the public’s perception of your brand

That said, with so many pop-up concepts out there, how soon before it becomes a tired concept and joins the list of most over-used PR ideas?

Until then, here’s four great examples of pop-ups, including: XXXX Gold’s pop-up bar (from way back in 2008); Illy’s Adam Kalkin-designed fully-furnished pop-up cafe; Smirnoff’s Nightlife Exchange pop-up nightclub; and the pop-up ad agency from Ogilvy.

You might ask how we know this. Well, at Umpf, we’ve seen, heard and read about many examples of clever research catapulting a story onto the front page of the nationals, or as a programme lead on the regional or national news on TV. We’ve also had firsthand experience in using research to do just this for our clients; transforming a good story into a great story through research, whether that’s in consumer PR or B2B PR.

When online job board MyJobGroup.co.uk asked us to increase their prominence across the UK, we used research to tailor a news manufacturing campaign that gave them blanket media coverage. We chose an emerging issue that was relevant to their field of expertise; the misuse of social media in the workplace.

It’s fair to say that most people would be aware of the detrimental effect of people spending time on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr when they should be working, but what made the campaign stand out is that we used the research to quantify the specific cost to the UK economy; £14Billion per year in lost work time.

This stand-out stat, which generated global coverage for the brand, is now part of the general journalistic conscious, with it being cited in pieces independent of MyJobGroup.co.uk’s direct involvement; surely the litmus test for a successful piece of research.

Enough of us blowing our own trumpet, though. We’ve seen some other fantastic examples of research stories that are well deserving when it comes to the column inches they generated:

1. Thomas Cook and Radboud University in the Netherlands – How it takes just two days for the good of a holiday to wear off

2. Jarlsberg Cheese – How the first argument on Christmas Day happens at 9:58am

3. Bullguard Security – How more than 50 per cent of parents have used social media to spy on their children

Research methods may be changing, with online panels now the primary method used, but the outcome is still the same; headline-grabbing statistics that generate lots of press coverage.

[Click image for full size]

Since way back in 1880 newspapers have been full of colour pictures alongside the obligatory headline and necessary paragraphs of copy to tell the story.

In fact, it would be pretty hard to ever imagine a newspaper without pictures to illustrate or accompany the news.

Press photography innovatively showcases stories with as little as a caption beneath, whether it’s the latest celeb getting ‘papped’ or a current affairs event like conflict being documented; each story is brought to life by a supplementary photo.
So, with that comes the importance of photography within a PR remit. Photographs have been used to enhance PR techniques for years.

There’s not been a day in most PR careers where any sort of event or announcement hasn’t been accompanied by an image. Not only does the photo add another dimension to the story but it also gives the story a wider appeal.

Whilst the news desk might pick the story up, getting the picture desk to choose an image is twice as good – twice the coverage and the chance for added branding.

Similarly, a story can be make or break depending on the strength of a photograph so it’s increasingly important for PRs to ensure a good photographer captures press shots that exceed expectations and help to give your story that extra injection to help it hit the headlines.

Typically us PRs aren’t experts in taking photographs (just take a look at our Facebook profile uploads), so that’s why we’d always recommend to a client that a professional snapper attends any events or launches that we manage.
That said, we do pride ourselves on knowing what makes a good press picture. PRs see several pictures, some great, others not so great, but all in all we understand that just like any other newspaper or magazine editor, that a picture is always what grabs attention on a page.

A picture always intrigues the reader in the first place and then helps them digest the story.

At Umpf, we recently executed a campaign for one of our clients, Engage Mutual, who sponsor the Super League. Working alongside Leeds Rhinos player, Ryan Hall, we hired a world champion body painter to illustrate the top five injuries sustained in rugby league across five areas of Ryan’s body. Naturally the piece had picture story potential as the body painting element was a great way of showing how the injuries looked ‘inside out’.

Initially we were faced with a dull changing room facility where the photos itself weren’t doing the story justice. Having access to a rugby field and the Leeds Rhinos stadium as a backdrop our photographer, from Guzelian, managed to set up a shot that we thought had picture desk appeal as well as news value.

The story secured coverage as an exclusive in The Sun as well as full page three picture story leads in The Yorkshire Post and The Yorkshire Evening Post. Of course it was covered in all the rugby league media, too.

It was certainly a picture that exceeded our expectations and one that in future campaigns another photograph will have to live up to.

Four more examples, below, of fantastic PR photos.

To launch Eden, a new natural history programme, Taylor Herring set up this stunt -with great PR photography to match- which saw a Polar bear floating down the River Thames.

Rain Communications staged a horseback fashion show to capture an image that demonstrated excellent fashion in conjunction with the Badminton Horse Trials for client McArthurGlen in Swindon. It bagged some great national coverage as a result.

To raise awareness of the Doctor Who experience at Olympia, four Daleks were staged crossing Westminster Bridge. An image with a Big Ben backdrop has got be be a sure fire way of securing the attention of the national press.

The engineering firm, Balfour Beatty were behind the PR pictures that graced most nationals throughout this week. The pictures told the story of the Forth Rail Bridge which after a long 10 years has now been successfully repainted.

With Ofcom now allowing product placement on TV programmes made for UK audiences, the sector has turned into a big money business (PR Week’s feature on product placement is a good read) but free opportunities do exist.

We secured the Belling oven and hob into the Big Brother house without a product placement fee; clearly, a fantastic opportunity for maximum exposure with – our fees aside – zero third party cost.

Whilst the antics of the housemates can sometimes be questionable, the house interior is renowned for being cutting edge, quirky and luxurious which is something brands are keen to be part of.

And the results speak for themselves – as well as its nightly appearances on the show, the oven was featured in the official PR launch pictures for the new series on Channel Five and went on to appear across print and online media, including a ‘get the look’ piece in Heat magazine.

It’s no secret that PRs, TV production companies, celebrities, journalists and, more recently, bloggers have been working on a reciprocal basis for years. From clothes, jewellery, home appliances and cars, right down to the greetings cards that appear in the shops within our favourite TV soaps, there’s a whole host of opportunities for brand exposure in return for free product.

But the landscape is changing. Ofcom’s new rules may be have impacted the broadcast arena but social media has started its own revolution. Word of mouth now has an even bigger voice and it’s the men and women on the street that are coveting considerable power online, with bloggers and key Twitter users now also an influential target audience.

Klout and PeerIndex’s measurements of online influence have grown in popularity and respectability this year and as such both have launched ‘perk’ reward programmes which link brands and key online influencers.

From free test drives of new cars, advance screenings of new films and previews of new albums and novels, you no longer have to be a celebrity to get up close and personal with new products – just a decent Klout/PeerIndex score and influence in a particular field.

So whether it’s an appliance featured on the latest reality show, a celeb pictured wearing your product or physical products placed in the hands or key online influencers its clear that more than ever the opportunities for product placement are endless.

So where else have you seen our client’s products recently?

BBC Good Food and Breat British Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood:

Top food blogger, The Pink Whisk, raves about us too …

1. The Financial Times has pulled its iPad and iPhone apps out of the Apple App Store, following losing a battle to keep control of customer data. Apple has recently begun to insist that subscriptions for apps it hosts goes through its own store, giving Apple ownership of customer data and a 30% cut of revenues; something which Pearson-owned FT and Apple have been negotiating about for months.

2. Those clever people of Google have now incorporated a weather feature into Google Maps (see video above). Weather comes in a layer, just like everything else and if you want to see it, you’ll need to hover over the right corner of Google Maps and select Weather from the dropdown menu. Once you do that, you’ll get weather overlayed at any location you choose. Selecting a specific point will give you an information window that gives a forecast, as well as current conditions.

3. Confectionery brand Maynards is transforming fans into their favourite sweets. The ‘Make Your Face a Maynards’ competition, open until 30 September, is being managed via Facebook. Users first have to ‘like’ the Maynards Canada Facebook page in order to then upload a photo. Using the trace tool they cut their face from the picture and can choose to transform it into one of Maynard’s most popular treats: Sour Patch Kids, Fuzzy Peach, Sour Cherry Blasters, or Swedish Berries.

4. Facebook is preparing changes designed to make the site a hub for listening to music, watching movies and playing videogames, according to people ‘familiar’ with the company, in much the same way people already use the social network to share personal media like photos and videos. Facebook has told media executives in recent days that it will begin letting online music services such as Spotify AB and Rdio Inc. publish user activity on Facebook pages, much like actions such as adding friends or “liking” websites. The move is part of a larger effort at Facebook to improve the discovery of all types of media content on the site.

5. Beyonce’s announcement on the red carpet of MTV’s Video Music Awards that she was pregnant has set a new Twitter record of 8,868 TPS, @twitterglobalpr announced. In a very public announcement, Beyonce told photographers at the event that she had a “surprise” for them, before pulling in her flowing orange dress to outline her baby belly. Just to be sure everyone got the message, she also opened her jacket onstage after performing Love on Top and rubbed her bump saying, “I want you to feel the love that’s growing inside me.”

Three of the award ceremonies we submitted campaign entries for have now been shortlisted.  And 15 of the 17 awards we entered have made the cut.

At the end of July, the Dadi awards (“Awarding Digital Excellence”) shortlisted both of our entries: The World’s First Ouch Map, which we created for Health365.com, is up for best Financial Services Campaign; and our entry for MyJobGroup.co.uk is shortlisted for best Recruitment Campaign.

All four of the social media campaigns we entered into the Some Comms Awards (“A celebration of the best in social media”) have also made the cut.  We’ll find out on October 19 how our Best Use of Twitter, Best Social Media Campaign (two entries shortlisted) and Best Social Media Agency entries fared.

Then, on Friday last week Umpf was shortlisted for an incredible nine CIPR PRide Awards – among the highest number of nominations ever seen in the Yorkshire & Lincolnshire region*.

The CIPRs recognise excellence, and reward achievement, in public relations and communications.  In the CIPR’s own words: “PRoof of your success in the PR industry”.

Categories we are shortlisted for include Best Use of Media Relations, Best Consumer Relations, Best Campaign under £10,000, as well as Outstanding PR Consultancy.

And Umpf’s younger talent has also been recognised with Jon Priestley shortlisted for the Outstanding Young Communicator gong.

So, three ceremonies down, five to go – the shortlist for the international WOMMY word-of-mouth awards and the social media Social Buzz have yet to be announced.

All-in-all, it caps a fine summer for Umpf which was named in the Top Ten Social Media Agencies by digital marketing business Econsultancy earlier this year – Umpf was the only agency outside London/South East to be included in the list.

1. For our client, cooker manufacturer Belling, we have created the world’s shortest recipe book (see video below), using recipes crowdsourced over Twitter. The 50 shortlisted recipes have been compiled into a book, complete with illustrations from a variety of artists, which were themselves crowdsourced and voted for on Belling’s Facebook page. All proceeds  from the sale of the book will go to food charity Foodcycle, which collects surplus produce locally and prepares nutritious meals in unused professional kitchen spaces to distribute to those in need. You can buy your copy here.

2. Facebook has denied that it is phasing out the controversial Places feature on its mobile app due to fears over privacy. The social networking giant has announced a swathe of updates to give users tighter controls over who can view their profiles and photos. Places was previously a separate feature on the mobile app that allowed users to publish details of their exact location. This will now disappear, although Facebook told The Drum that it was not because the feature posed a security risk to users.

3. Not everyone gets to stay in the Big Brother house but you can, possibly, stay in an authentic replica of Del and Rodney Trotter’s Nelson Mandela House residence, in promotional celebration of the 30th anniversary of Only Fools & Horses. Those who want a chance of winning need Nelson Mandela House residencto become members of TV channel Gold’s Facebook page and try their luck. A nice campaign and with a stay only costing the 1981 price of £18, we’re sure people will be queueing up to say ‘Rodney, you plonker’

4. Some information about the next venture by Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have emerged, and although detail is scant, it is very intriguing. Dubbed ‘Lift’ at the moment we hear that it is a prototype relating to how ‘technology can help unlock human potential, especially through the use of positive reinforcement’. At the moment, Lift is asking people to leave their email addresses if they’re interested, but warns ‘we’re a long way from opening the doors’.

5. Channel 4 is inviting web users to take part in what it claims is the world’s first interactive rap beatbox choir on YouTube. The broadcaster commissioned TV production company Fresh One and Leeds digital agency Numiko to create the online app as part of its Street Summer season. Visitors to the YouTube channel will find the track ‘We are the People’, which has been made completely by the human voice and comprises rapping, singing and beatboxing. They are then encouraged to pick one of the song’s 13 parts to learn and record. The best auditions will appear in a final film to be broadcast on Channel 4, thus bringing together the world’s first beatbox choir.

1. The phenomenon of Horsemaning looks likely to steal planking’s crown as the next internet picture-led craze. You’ll see from our own Umpf ‘Horsemane’ (right) that the concept is simple. Horsemaning takes its name from the Headless Horseman and gives the impression that the photo’s subject has been decapitated. One person hides their head as best they can, and another hides their body, creating a kind of optical illusion if it’s done right. You heard it here first, folks. It’s time to lose your head.

2. Social media has come under fire for its role in helping coordinate the efforts of looters in the UK over the past week.  Blackberry’s Messenger service, in particular, was singled out for its ‘closed circuit’ communications, enabling groups of looters to communicate off  the record and organise where they would next attack. Whilst platforms like Twitter and Facebook came under fire, the better side of social media was shown in groups like Riotcleanup which managed to amass nearly 88,000 followers on Twitter and coordinate a mass clean up of riot-hit areas.

3. Twitter has launched a new camera button which allows its users to post a photo within the body of a tweet, without needing to use a third party photo-sharing site. The site began rolling out the new tool on Wednesday night, which allows users to post a photo within the body of a tweet by clicking on the small camera icon below the tweet box.  The icon then takes users through to their files so they can browse them and upload the photo of their choice. All photos are being hosted by a third-party company called Photobucket.

4. Computer hacking group Anonymous has described a threat to “kill” Facebook over privacy concerns and the alleged use of user information by authoritarian regimes as a hoax. A warning purported to be from the loosely-affiliated group of international hacktivists was issued through YouTube last month. It said it would take down the social networking site in November. “Prepare for a day that will go down in history. November 5th, 2011,” the video warned. “Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed.” Only time will tell if this is a double bluff!

5. Rapidly growing Social Network Google+ is “well-positioned” to become second only to Facebook in the social networking world in the U.S. within the next 12 months, according to a survey by YouGov. With the momentum the new site is showing, it should quickly pass by struggling MySpace and microblogging site Twitter and LinkedIn. Google+ was unveiled at the end of June and quickly amassed millions of users, despite the fact that the social network is still in field trials and membership is invitation-only.

1. Parents-to-be can now add their unborn children to their Facebook profile as family members. Facebook members have been able to add other members of their family to their profile for some time but the new option allows the addition of an unborn child.  A spokesman for the social network said: “We develop new features, in part, by seeing how people use the service. For years, people have been using Facebook to share the joyous news of expecting a child and, a few months ago, we began testing a feature designed to make that process easier..”

2. More Twitter threats have been directed at Duncan Bannatyne, including one that read ‘dirty b****** we slaughter f****** Hollie Bannatyne’ – the Dragons’ Den tycoon’s 25-year-old daughter. The fresh Twitter threats prompted Bannatyne to post on his own page on the microblogging site: ‘Living in a nightmare’. Earlier this week, he put out a tweet – swiftly removed – offering £50,000 to anyone who broke the arms of ‘Yuri Vasilyev’ (which, some have pointed out, is the Russian equivalent of ‘John Smith’…) after he vowed to kidnap Hollie unless her dad handed over £35,000.

3. Twenty-five million users have signed up to Google+ from its launch date in June 28, reports the research firm, comScore. By comparison, Twitter took 30 years to amass this number of subscribers, and Facebook three years. Andrew Lipsman, comScore’s VP, industry analysis, is quick to assert that fastest does not equal the best. “Sometimes, that slow build can lead to a strong network effect that pays long-term dividends,” he added.

4.German data protection officials have requested that Facebook disable its facial recognition software and delete any previously stored data. Making facial-recognition technology opt-out might run afoul of European and German data protection laws, John Caspar, Hamburg’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said in a Tuesday letter to Facebook. Caspar likened the facial-recognition software to the collection of biometric data. He said Facebook is likely sitting atop the world’s largest database of biometric information given that users have uploaded an estimated 75 billion photos to the social-networking site and tagged 450 million people.

5. Our latest infographic (right) is a comparison of the key functions of Facebook and Google+

1. Twitter introduced its most prominent advertising yet on Thursday by adding “promoted tweets” to users’ main timelines, a gambit aimed at generating greater revenues but that risks provoking members’ anger. Users will see tweets from companies and organisations that they follow appear near the top of the central stream of 140-character messages when they log in, even if they were posted hours or days previously.

2. A month since launch, a new report from Experian Hitwise shows that Google+ has hit a mid-summer traffic slump. According to Bloomberg, the report shows that the number of unique visitors to the site have been falling, as has individual time spend on the site. Google+ is making several tweaks to its social network regarding businesses and public figures, particularly after a small debacle over its policy requiring a user’s real name.

3. In an effort to keep pace with Google+ and its business unit, Facebook has announced a special unit to help businesses advertise with Facebook as well as maintain a presence on the social networking giant.

4. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been ranked Number 1 in a list of the top 100 most powerful people in the media. The MediaGuardian100, which is published annually by British newspaper The Guardian, is compiled based on candidates’ cultural influence, economic clout and political power. Of Zuckerberg’s position, The Guardian writes: “Zuckerberg has been transformed from an awkward and unpromising geek into the world’s richest and most famous twentysomething, listened to by world leaders.”

5. Our latest infographic (right) shows how Facebook effects relationships.

1. Netmums, a popular online forum for mothers and Mumsnet’s biggest rival, has attracted more than 500 unpaid bloggers to write for the site in just over a fortnight. A further sign that parenting sites are becoming increasingly popular and powerful groups to be reckoned with, Netmums, a UK site founded in 2000, at roughly the same time of its better known rival Mumsnet, launched its new bloggers network on July 1 and has been inundated with both enthusiastic mums and dads wishing to write about their experiences ever since.

2. In a move reminiscent of one done by Facebook in 2009, Twitter is close to completing an $800 million funding deal that will include a second part in which around $400 million of the total will be used to cash out current investors and also employees. According to several sources close to the situation, the complex transaction could be completed within two weeks.

3. Google’s latest offering ‘ Google Plus’ is steadily gaining ground in the social networking space, so far dominated by Facebook , with the internet giant’s social network attracting about 20 million visitors in the initial three weeks and nearly half of these visitors hailing from US and India . According to estimates by research firm ComScore, Google Plus had 19.93 million unique visitors between June 29 and July 19 period.

4. Facebook should have access restricted to people older than 18, some Australian politicians say in response to concerns over online bullying that led teenagers to commit suicide. Australian top law enforcement officials, attending a two- day forum that began yesterday, discussed proposals from South Australia’s Attorney General John Rau that would require Facebook to verify the ages of people creating accounts or force the website to guarantee parents access to their children’s accounts.

5. Google announced in a blog post that the company will discontinue Google Labs – an online testing environment where users can play with prototypes. Bill Coughran, Google’s senior vice president for research and systems infrastructure, said the company has learned a lot by launching very early prototypes in the labs. But he added that the company’s “greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead”. Perhaps the company is looking to invest more time and money in Google+ as it looks to capitalise on a successful first few weeks.

6. Facebook is the most hated of online social, search and news sites, according to the newly released annual e-business report by American Customer Satisfaction Index and Foresee Results, a customer experience analytics firm.

Here’s the new ratings:

Google 83
Bing.com 82
FoxNews.com 82
Ask.com 80
Yahoo! 79
MSN 78
Wikipedia.org 78
ABCNews.com 77
USAToday.com 76
AOL 75
CNN.com 74
MSNBC 74
YouTube.com 74
NYTimes.com 73
HuffingtonPost.com 69
Facebook.com 66

7. Our latest infographic (above) is a comparison of Google+ and Facebook.

1. Twitter has changed the restrictions on sending direct messages (DMs) to other profiles. Formerly, you wouldn’t be able to ‘DM’ someone unless you were friends, but now Twitter has removed this to enable anyone with a profile to DM anyone else. Whilst we can think of a few positive reasons why the restriction has been lifted, many may not be so keen.

2. Microsoft yesterday accidentally revealed a test version of a social search service it has codenamed Tulalip, Winrumours reports. The site appeared at socl.com for a short time, a domain owned by Microsoft. The project is still meant to be under wraps and it commits many grammar and design sins (so we’ve been told), but it’s interesting to see that the company is trying its hand at social endeavors.

3. It was revealed this week that activity on Foursquare would affect Klout scores, but people are still a little confused as to how activity on the location-based platform would feed into the Klout algorithm. “We are still figuring this out,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. “Obviously things like tips that turn into to-dos are interesting as is the ripple effect of a checkin through a network. In the next few weeks we’ll be testing and perfecting the algorithm.”

4.  Google+ could be on the brink of reaching 10 million users after just two weeks, according to one researcher. Google has made several failed attempts to launch a social networking service in the past, but the initial response to Google+ suggests it will fare much better. Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, has estimated the number of users on the service and predicts that Google+ is about to welcome its 10-millionth member, if it hasn’t already.

5. The British Medical Association recently issued a new guidance advising doctors not to accept friend requests from former and current patients because of how doctors’ personal information could be perceived and shared. “The accessibility of content on social media however raises the possibility that patients may have unrestricted access to their doctor’s personal information and this can cause problems within the doctor-patient relationship,” doctors wrote in the BMA guidance.

6. Our infographic of the week is all about fcommerce (above).

The first, a lunchtime seminar hosted by the heads of Yorkshire’s leading SEO agencies, takes place later this month* and the second, on social media, will run in August.

We’re helping organisers to plan the social media event and already key staff from Finn PR, Kilo 75, Lucre Social, Ptarmigan Bell Pottinger, Umpf and Wolfstar have been lined up.

Over to you: of the other key social media players/agencies in the region, who would you like to see at the round-table event? Leave a comment below or email in confidence to adrian@umpf.co.uk

Now in its fourth year, the Leeds Digital Festival will run throughout November and covers everything from the making and playing of computer games to cinematography, animation, web design and development, graphic design, art, photography, radio, television, viral marketing, social networking and music.

*Although all tickets for the SEO event were snapped up in a few days, you can read more about it here and add yourself to a waiting list.  The SEO panel this month will include Stu Owens from Bloom, Fergus Clawson from Blueclaw, Martin Davies from Brass, Pete Young from Brilliant Media, Andy Heaps from Epiphany Solutions, Craig Broadbent from Fusion, Peter Cobley from Home James, Lee Allen from Stickyeyes and Jono Alderson from Twentysix.

1. Payment processing service PayPal suffered an embarrassing lapse of security on Wednesday when its Twitter account was hijacked, apparently by a disgruntled ex-customer keen to make his feelings regarding the company known. PayPal shot to fame as an easy way for individuals to accept credit card payments for goods and services without a traditional merchant account, allowing money to be sent and received with just an e-mail address. When eBay bought the firm back in 2002 for a whopping $1.5 billion in stock, it rapidly became the only way to pay for certain eBay auctions.

2.Wild parties organised on Facebook could be banned in Germany after a series of gatherings advertised on the website descended into violence. Authorities have called for parties promoted on the social networking site to be prohibited in advance if police believe they pose a threat to law and order. Last month 100 Hamburg police offers made 11 arrests when 1,600 people gatecrashed a 16-year-old girl’s birthday.

3. Google is to retire its Blogger & Picasa brands as the search giant looks to concentrate its marketing efforts on Google+ – according to reports on Mashable. Both products will remain available to consumers but will henceforth be known as “Google Blogs” and “Google Photos” respectively.

4.Twitter is raising hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding at a valuation as high as $7 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the newspaper said it was unclear which investors were participating in the new round of financing for the short-messaging service. In December, Twitter received an injection of $200 million in funding from investors to help fuel its growth, reportedly giving the San Francisco-based company a valuation of $3.7 billion.

5.  A Queensland student says she owes her life to Facebook after barely escaping a house fire which set alight the mattress she was sleeping on. Hunter Matthews, 17, awoke to find her bedroom alight when a Facebook alert was sent to her iPhone at 1.34am on Tuesday. The schoolgirl was asleep when a nearby heater ignited clothing and the mattress she was sleeping on in her grandmother’s Toowoomba flat.

6. With recent disasters such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami proving the worth of Twitter to get information out fast, this tongue-in-cheek fire notice (above) goes some way to show how quick people might be to use Twitter to inform others of an emergency.

1. Twitter on Thursday revealed that it is now handling 200 million tweets per day. That’s up from 2 million tweets per day in January 2009 and 65 million per day in June 2010, Twitter said in a blog post. “For perspective, every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” the company wrote. “Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.”

2. Music superstar and actor Justin Timberlake has signed on as a new partial owner of MySpace, along with Specific Media, which bought the service from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Timberlake will play a significant role in the reboot of the website, developing a strategy for a new creative direction for MySpace.

3. It has only been around for a matter of days but new social networking platform Google+ has already run into a privacy issue. Google+ has a feature that lets you reshare what someone posts. By letting you reshare, the post goes beyond the circle or circles it was intended to be seen by. This loophole was first spotted by the Financial Times.

4. Ever wondered why some people get so many retweets and their content on Twitter goes further? Well, don’t say we never give you hints and tips; here’s a five point guide, courtesy of New Scientist on how to increase your retweets and spread your content far and wide.

5. There has been widespread speculation about whether we’re entering the second dot.com bubble. Our infographic (right) should give a bit more context.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. In just a little over two years, location-based social network Foursquare has amassed more than 10 million users. To mark the milestone Foursquare tallied up some of its most notable check-ins and fun facts – 225 weddings at NY City Hall, 1,061 birth announcements on hospital check-ins, plus check-ins at 6,230 sake bars in Japan and 1,105 beer halls in Germany (see infographic  – right – for more information).

2. Brands looking to connect on Facebook now have a way to sniff out fans with the biggest social media following. Companies can add the new Klout Coupon App on their Facebook page, which asks visitors for their Klout scores. Based on their Klout “value” (which measures one’s social media use and following), companies can decide what pages the visitors see, and reward the fans with the highest Klout scores with goodies. Audi’s Facebook page was the first to roll out the app on Wednesday. Visitors to the site are offered a downloadable desktop graphic in exchange for their Klout score.

3. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Leo Burnett released the details of a new interactive ad unit created for Facebook.  Designed by Leo Burnett Chicago, the new Comment ad lets brands spark conversations among friends by posting a video, photo, link or status and allowing people to respond.

4. Twitter is looking at introducing advertisements among the short messages that users see in the most active part of the social networking service, according to people with direct knowledge of its plans. The move comes as Twitter looks at a wider range of options to generate revenues from a service that has so far failed to make money from its audience as effectively as rivals such as Facebook.

5. A police constable has been sacked for posting offensive messages about a colleague on Facebook and harassing a female colleague. The 35-year-old Met officer, who was based in Islington, referred to another officer as a “grass” and a “liar” on the social networking site last year.

6. Social media security took another step forward with news that Chelmsford-based Precreate Solutions claims a number of its clients had announced holiday plans on Facebook or Twitter and then had their properties broken into. For a small fee, the firm will now also run “virtual updates” while clients are away to make sure prospective burglars still think they’re at home.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. In a landmark ruling Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of some of its users.

2. Eric Schmidt of Google has admitted the company didn’t react quick enough to emergence of Facebook.

3. Apple’s Steve Jobs is expected to take centre stage at the Worldwide Developer Conference next week to profile Apple’s latest product, the iPlay, which will allow users to litsen to their entire music catalogue wherever they are.

4. Twitter has hit headlines after unveiling a raft of new features, including a new follow button which makes it easier for people to follow a user’s content. Mike McGrail explains more.

5. Sean Kingston has been the fastest rising search term in the UK on Google this week, following his accident on a jet ski.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. A new study commissioned by National Family Week has revealed the amount of technological effort parents expend keeping track of their children. Apparently an average parent sends 600 texts a year in an effort to find out just where their children are and also uses Facebook to try to track them down. The research also showed that they send 312 emails on average per year.

2. Leo Messi attracted a further 100,000 fans to his Facebook page following FC Barca’s win over Manchester United in Saturday’s UEFA Champions League Final.  The ‘world’s best player’ is no stranger to breaking records on Facebook when he gained seven million new fans seven hours after opening his Facebook account on April 6.

3. Twitter has been forced to hand over the details of users of its website in a landmark legal ruling. The case was brought by a council seeking to uncover the identity of a blogger who criticised officials and councillors. South Tyneside Council went to the U.S. courts to force Twitter to reveal the person behind the ‘Mr Monkey’ account.

4. Twitter is to launch its own photo-sharing service to compete with existing services such as Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr, according to multiple sources. The announcement is expected this week at the D9 conference in California, where the company’s chief executive Dick Costolo will be speaking on Wednesday. The service may be provided via the website twimg.com, which Twitter has owned since July 2010, according to Techcrunch, which first reported the plans.

5. Research by the Sunday Times appears to have disproved the theory that a disgruntled journalist started the Twitter storm which led to Ryan Giggs being named as the footballer at the centre of a privacy row. According to the Sunday Times, James Webley, 37, a digital marketing analyst at a high street bank posted the following Tweet: “So if Ryan Giggs wanted to cover up a hypothetical affair with Big Brother’s Imogen Thomas would that be a super-injunction or a regular one?”

6. Our latest infographic on the most popular Foursqaure badges (see above).

1. Twitter has bought UK-based Tweetdeck for a reported £25Million

2. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that he wants to create a safe and educational website for under 13s.

3. The UK government has appointed a digital tsar with a £142,000 salary in an effort to save the country £6Million in web costs.

4. Following the superinjunction row, Twitter has confirmed that it will hand over the identities of those breaking injunctions to the authorities if it is legally required to do so. Steve Kuncewicz, media lawyer, explains more.

5. Superinjunction searches have dominated google searches this week in the UK, but with the onset of half term holidays, it’s no surprise that ‘Ash Cloud’ is this week’s top search term.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. Twitter has passed the 300 million registered account mark.  According to Twitter tracking site Twopcahrts Twitter is adding around 5.5 accounts per second and has already hit more than 301,331,151. The social media platform has been increasingly positioning itself as a credible news source and press stream over recent months, with the ‘Super-injunction’ scandal of two weeks ago pushing it further into mainstream media.

2. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview last week he would like to create a safe and educational social networking environment for kids younger than 13. Whilst the remarks proved controversial, the fact remains that many under the age of 13 are already using social networking sites to connect with others.

3. Saudi authorities detained a female activist who uploaded a video of herself behind the wheel of a car on to YouTube, in a campaign to overturn a ban on female drivers in the deeply conservative kingdom. More than 600,000 people have now watched the video, a seemingly mundane scene where Manal al-Sharif, 32, is seen chatting to a female friend as she drives around the eastern city of Khobar.

4. An eight-year-old boy has clinched his dream job by becoming a toy tester.Not only will James Childs review each new Ben 10 toy before it goes on sale, he will be paid monthly in toys and will get to suggest his own ideas for new products. James, from Luton, landed the role after winning a competition where children had to write to manufacturer Bandai to say why they should get the job.

5. Linkedin announced this week that the professional social networking giant is now valued at $8.79 Billion, roughly 38 times sales figures reported in 2010, after it’s first day as a publicly traded company on May 18.Founder Reid Hoffman’s stake in the social networking site has now been valued at $1.7 Billion.

6. Our latest infographic (see above) shows social media by demographic.

1. Twitter has announced restrictions for third party applications

2. Sony Playstation’s network is hit by fresh security fears

3. Glasgow has been named host city of Global Social Media Week

4. Facebook has launched its own social coupon service — could this challenge Groupon? Paul Fabretti, Director of Digital Strategy, tells us more.

5. We outline the top ten rising Google searches in the UK this week.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

Social media has taken the world by storm over the past five years. Facebook has gone from dormitory-geek to global-chic in less time than it takes to, well, update your Facebook status.  Similarly, brands are fast recognising the value of promoting their goods and services on platforms such as Twitter, Quora and YouTube.

In light of the sheer explosion of social media, it seems perhaps justified that the value of these platforms has risen at a similarly rapid rate. After all, the growth in audience, advertising opportunities and routes to market make platforms like Linkedin more than just a place to connect and share. They are the advertising hoardings of the future, with brands large and small clamouring to have their voices heard and their value is intrinsically linked to the increase revenue they can generate for these companies.

Estimated values for social media platforms:

1. Facebook – $50Billion

2. Twitter – $10 Billion

3. Linkedin – $4.1 Billion

4. Quora  – $1 Billion

Whether or not Linkedin is really worth $4.1 Billion remains to be seen but one thing is sure, social media platforms represent big money and, regardless of whether the market adjustment arrives, brands will continue to see them as such.

If you are interested in seeing how social media can help you reach out to potential consumers, why not speak to us?  Email us on social@umpf.co.uk and we’ll get back to you.

1. News broke this week that Facebook had hired PR agency Burson-Marsteller to oversee a smear campaign against Google. Far from leaving the search giant running for the hills, the campaign back-fired and Facebook are now the ones looking at crisis management to minimise the damage caused.

2. Youtube has launched its ‘YouTube 100′ which aims to track the popularity of the top 100 user-generated and professional music videos across the site. The chart will also monitor user-uploaded videos and viral debuts and provide a “holistic” view of song popularity. J-Lo’s song ‘On the Floor’ topped the first chart.

3. A programming bug on Facebook’s website may have accidentally given advertisers and others access to a treasure trove of personal information, according to security researchers at Symantec. They posted deatils of the issue on Tuesday saying it may have affected nearly 100,000 Facebook applications for years now.

4. The iPad 2’s new camera doesn’t seem to be its most popular feature. According to Flickr’s camera usage statistics, the iPad 2′s camera is used by very few people — only 23 active daily users. And so far, 12,811 photos have been taken and uploaded to Flickr with the device. By comparison, the iPhone 4 has 4,402 daily active users; more than a million photos have been taken with the device.

5. Lady Gaga has become the first celebrity on Twitter to amass a following greater than 10 million. Gaga, who refers to her followers as “monsters” crossed the landmark threshold whilst in London recording a performance for Radio 1.

6. UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that 90% of Britain will have superfast broadband with minimum speeds of 25Mbps by 2015. Speaking at a conference in London, Hunt said that broadband speeds of 2Mbps should be available across the country by 2015, adding that 90% of homes and business will have access to superfast broadband of 25Mbps or better.

7. From last week, Facebook users will be able to tag pages in their photos. Page tagged photos will adhere to a user’s privacy settings, and will only appear on a Page’s Photos tab if set to be visible to everyone. Initially, Facebook is only allowing Pages categorized as “Brands & Products” or “People” to be tagged, but it says it is “looking to expand this functionality to more Page categories over time.”

8. Are we obssessed with Facebook? check out the infographic (right) to see.

The paper is aiming to use its considerable clout in the list-building world  – which includes the likes of the Sunday Times Rich List, The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For and The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 – to muscle in on online territory which is hot right now.

Time will tell whether it will be as authoritative as the likes of Klout (”The Standard for Influence”) and Peerindex (”Understand your online social capital”) which are already well-established in this sector.

On the home page of The Sunday Times Social List, there’s an of-the-moment video (slick production,zoom-in-zoom-out graphics, funky tables, word clouds, etc) voiced by Richard Bacon which shows how the tool works.

It appears to use a similar ranking algorithm to its competitors which measure data from your social networks.  The Sunday Times Social List currently allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts.

By comparison, my Peerindex profile allows me to connect my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora accounts, plus a Blog.

The one area that has seen Peerindex gather such momentum in the last few months is the ability to curate your own lists, such as this list of Top PR Agencies in the UK; it will be interesting to see if The Sunday Times Social List adds this functionality

This might be just a short-term stunt to either a) publicise The Sunday Times Rich List, whose logo appears througout or b) engender positive sentiment  ie encouraging social media types to talk about, and interact with, The Sunday Times brand.

Or it may become a serious contender to social media influence measurement.  It’s certainly a tool to keep your eye on.

1. Microsoft has bought Skype in a deal worth $8.5Billion – the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history.

2. Google has launched its ‘Chromebook’, enabling users to ditch paid-for Microsoft applications like Word and use online free versions instead.

3. Twitter has had its busiest day ever for UK traffic, with news that superinjunctions were being breached on the social media platform. Media lawyer Steve Kuncewicz explains more.

4. Google has reported a 5000% increase in searches using the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘injunction’. The search giant also reveals the top ten search terms for last week.

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. Social media users boast double the amount of friends online as offline, according to the latest research. It found that whilst the average patron of a social networking site such as Facebook can boast 121 separate connections, the reality is that the individual is likely only to have 55 physical friends.

2. Facebook is driving an increasing amount of traffic to news sites but Google remains the top referring service, according to a study published today.The study examined the 25 most popular news websites in the United States, looking at how users get to the sites, how long they stay there, how deep they explore a site and where they go when they leave.

3. A Twitter user today made a mockery of the celebrity trend for using privacy injunctions to hide their identity. @superinjunction, who quickly attracted a following of 5,000, set up an account claiming to ‘out’ those behind the legal gagging orders. So many Twitter users began exchanging messages supposedly naming high-profile figures who have hidden their secrets that part of the site crashed.

4. Forget Silicon Valley in California, the governement has just announced a £1Million funding competition for investment in the British equivalent; Silicon Roundabout. The competition, Tech City Launchpad, started last Friday and was announced by David Bott, the Technology Strategy Board’s director of Innovation Programmes, at the inaugural Digital Shoreditch Festival.

5. YouTube’s livestream of the Royal Wedding was viewed more than 72 million times last Friday, the company has revealed. That’s a higher number than the number of people living in the UK. In fact, if royal wedding web viewers were to form a nation (perhaps one in which everyone wears fancy hats), it would be the 19th largest country in the world.

6. The latest research from Beyond suggests that privacy concerns are stalling the growth of social location apps, with the findings in this infographic (above). We’re not sure whether we agree with the findings, but it’s certainly food for thought.

1. Sony’s PlayStation hack nightmare as 77m customers’ details are lifted; compensation could follow
2. Yahoo buys Into.Now
3. YouTube to stream Hollywood blockbusters online?
4. iPhone privacy concerns
5. Julian Gratton from Red C talks about the social media Royal Wedding

In the second Trending bulletin:

1. Anonymous denies any involvement in the Sony hacking
2. How much is Facebook worth? Do we care?
3. The ‘Chinese Facebook’ RenRen floats on the New York Stock Exchange
4. Amazon working in on iPad rival tablet
5. Death of Osama Bin Laden is broken on Twitter – Tom Cheesewright at Canddi comments

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns.

1.  Facebook could be worth $100bn by spring next year, after 2011 profits ‘exceed expectations’, according to people close to the fastest growing social network. The company is understood to be on track to make more than $2bn in 2011, pre-tax and interest, after exceeding all expectations of advertising revenues set last year.

2. Two teenagers may face legal action over a royal wedding party organised through Facebook that left a council with a £25,000 clean-up bill. Glasgow City Council is speaking to lawyers after almost 6,000 attended the unauthorised event, leading to 22 arrests and 11 people being injured.

3. New mother Mariah Carey has taken to Twitter to stir up some guesses about her twin babies’ names. The proud pop diva, who gave birth to a girl and a boy on April 30 in LA, revealed that both names begin with the letter ‘M’ and is urging her followers to submit their theories. At Umpf we’re guessing ‘Matthew’ and ‘Megan’.

4. News of the death of Osama bin Laden prompted Twitter to receive record traffic on Sunday night as America’s most wanted was shot dead at a secret compound in Pakistan. Twitter peaked at 5,106 tweets per second Sunday night, and sustained an average rate of 3,440 tweets per second, the company said.

5. Social media ad spending will hit $8.3 billion in 2015, up from $2.1 billion last year, according to a new report. BIA/Kelsey, a media consultancy, predicts that display ads will retain the lion’s share of the business, but innovations like Twitter‘s Promoted Tweets will make inroads as well. By 2015, $7.7 billion of that $8.3 billion will be from display ads, the firm predicts, and most of that will belong to Facebook, though the report didn’t break out Facebook’s exact share.

6. Because we’re such fans of the lovely William and Kate/Princess Catherine/Duchess of Cambridge, we couldn’t resists sharing the following inforgraphic with you (right).

As a football and beer fan, any excuse to watch football, drink beer and play an interactive, badge-collecting, global, league table-based game which hooks into Facebook isn’t one to be missed.  Here’s the skinny.

Concept: ◊◊◊◊◊

Aesthetic: ◊◊◊◊

Execution: ◊◊(and-a-half)

Overall: ◊◊◊(and-a-half)

Download Star Player from the App Store and connect it to your Facebook account (so you can let your Facebook mates know you’re watching watch football, drinking beer, playing an interactive game…etc).

The aim is to score as many points as possible during the 90 minutes.  Points are awarded in a number of ways:

1.       Predicting a goal – but only within a 30 second passage of open play.  For example, if team A is attacking and you think it looks a promising move that could lead to a goal, hit the “Goal in next 30 seconds?” button.  If they so score within 30 seconds you receive up to 2,000 points (points awarded on a sliding scale: the sooner you predict the more points you collect.  So if you hit the button 29 seconds before the team scores, you’ll receive far more points than if you do it 5 seconds before the ball hits the net)

2.       Predicting the outcome of an event such as a corner or free-kick (presumably there will be a penalty option, too, but there were no penalties in last night’s game to check).  There are four options: Goal, Cleared, Saved, Missed with different points awarded for each

3.       Answering random questions correctly (see right)

You can also earn up to ten badges for completing certain tasks such as correctly predicting the outcome of three free kicks in one match.  There are ten Heineken Star Player Badges:

1. Roaming Player

2. Free Kick King

3. Corner King

4. Football Legend

5. All-Round Ace

6. Heineken Hero

7. Goal Rookie

8. Goal Pro

9. Goal Master

10. Sharp Shooter

The app is bang on the money in terms of concept: dual-screen is where we’re at, watching TV and Tweeting or updating Facebook; and real-time game play is a great draw.  Add in badge collecting and the incentive of a global league table and we’re hooked.

The graphics are what you’d expect of a global brand: pretty slick.  You’re initially shown a menu of the remaining Champions League games and asked to choose a match you want to participate in.  However, seemingly, you can’t select a match.

I faffed around trying to click the Real Madrid vs Barcelona icon, but you just can’t do it. I tried and re-tried and almost gave up (how many others gave up trying?). as it turns out, you can only select a match 10 minutes before kick-off.

So why ask users to select a match when you can only do it in a ten-minute window?  Better to either, make it obvious that you can only select a match within 10 minutes of kick-off, or, add an option to pre-select a match and receive a push notification ahead of kick-off.

You can play alone and be in the global league (at the time of writing there are 671 participants worldwide), create your own league so you can challenge your mates, or, if you have an invite from another league, take part in that.

I used the code from the Star Player app write-up in Creative Review and joined their league.   At 7.45pm the Real Madrid-Barcelona Champions League semi-final 1^st leg kicked-off.

The first thing you realise is that you need to keep the Star Player app open and running.  Ninety minutes really saps the battery – I lost exactly 30% of my iPhone4 power (from 75% to 45%) in just one match.

Don’t turn it off, if you do you’ll waste too many valuable seconds turning the phone back on when you think there’s going to be a goal (remember, the quicker you respond, the more points).

And switched off you’ll also miss the random questions the app delivers.  I didn’t have my phone on throughout, so I don’t know how many questions I missed.

I received two questions while the app was running – the sound of a ref’s whistle indicates a live question to which there are four multiple choice questions.  Again, the quicker you answer –providing you get the answer correct – the more points you score.

However, the main issue for me – which seems far more of a flaw in a game which rewards points based on speed of response – is that the match clock on the app and the match clock on the TV I was watching do not sync.

The app’s live timer was 4 seconds ahead of the ITV1’s live match timer. Meaning someone at the game or watching a different live stream has a point-scoring advantage (back to that point about the quicker you respond, the more points you stand to earn).

One bug: at one point I had the phone off (app running); when I turned it back on again it was during one of the random questions; as I’d joined the question late I was locked out, unable to answer and the only option to return to the game was to quit the application and restart.

It’s difficult to know in advance how interactive a particular football match is going to be ie loads of corners, free kicks etc means more for the user to do; in the case of last night’s game it wasn’t an end-to-end, all-action affair (despite Messi’s sublime goal).   I would have welcomed more interactivity last night, such as more of the random questions.

Predicting a goal from open play within 30 seconds is actually pretty difficult.  So, a suggestion: how about the addition of yellow and red card buttons so users could predict cautions or sendings off following bad challenges, hand-balls, etc?

The app is far from being an own-goal and I hope this doesn’t seem too harsh a critique.  It’s a very clever, creative idea that, as mentioned already, is right on the dual-screen, interactive money.  But it probably does need a bit of fine-tuning.

Last night’s match – known as El Clásico – didn’t quite live up to the expectation, which is a pretty good analogy all ways round.

Wayne Rooney on Twitter

1. Facebook has this week enhanced its content sharing functionality with the launch of a ‘send’ button. More private than its ‘like’ counterpart, the new button will allow users to send content to a specified person or group, rather than being visible to all friends.

2. Footballers and Twitter have been hitting the headlines this week. A player from Berwick Rangers has been sacked after making negative comments about Neil Lennon being targeted by bombers. Described in an official statement as ‘a young footballer on an amateur contract with the club’, the player in question has had his contract terminated and since closed down his Twitter account.

3. Meanwhile, Manchester United’s Darren Gibson lasted just two hours on Twitter this weekend after abusive messages led him to close his account – @dgibbo28. Wayne Rooney fared better, joining the social networking site on Sunday as @Wazzaroon08, and quickly racking up around 240,000 followers.

4. West Midland’s Police tweeted through a day in court in the UK’s first tweet-a-thon last Tuesday. The initiative was launched to give the public “peace of mind that justice was being done”. Five West Midland’s Police press officers tweeted real time results from Birmingham Magistrates Court to show the range of offenders that police deal with on a day-to-day basis.

5. Widespread privacy fears were sparked after claims emerged that Apple’s iPhone is secretly keeping track of its users movements, saving the data to a secret file which is copied to the owners computer when synchronised. The file is said to contain details of latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp. Accessible by a simple programme, the details could easily be downloaded if the phone was stolen or accessed by a third party. Steve Jobs has since responsed.

6. The Royal wedding is mentioned online once every 10 seconds a study by Greenlight has revealed. Data showed an average 9,000 posts a day on the subject with online noise on the Royal Wedding rising 700% since March.

7. Facebook has launched a platform aimed at advertising, PR and media agencies. Described by US magazine Adage as a “first step in a give-and-take dialogue between Facebook and the creative advertising world”, Facebook Studio will be a stand-alone community for creatives to share ideas, comment on campaigns and learn how to build successful Facebook pages.

1. iPhone privacy fears over geographic data collection
2. Tesco buys blinkbox and goes head-to-head with Love Film and Sky
3. Buckingham Palace announces Royal Wedding will be streamed live on YouTube
4. ‘Get Twitter to Manchester’ campaign is launched – Lisa Ashurst from Ashurst Communications comments

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns.

1. Presidential candidates for the 2012 elections in the US have embraced social media more than ever. Republican Tim Pawlenty disclosed his 2012 presidential aspirations on Facebook. Rival Mitt Romney did it with a tweet. President Barack Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a digital video emailed to the 13  million online backers who helped power his historic campaign in 2008.

2. Facebook is looking to cash in on user data.  Profiles, status updates and messages all include masses of voluntarily provided information. The social media site is using it to help advertisers find exactly who they want to reach. Privacy watchdogs are said to be concerned about this latest development.

3. Comedian Stephen Fry told a charity benefit concert than he would go to prison rather than allow the verdict to stand in Paul Chambers ‘Twitter joke’ appeal. Paul Chambers famously tweeted “—-! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

4. The FT reports that governments all over the world are increasingly restricting internet freedoms as penetration spreads and activists turn to the still-evolving medium, according to a comprehensive analysis of practices in 37 nations.The report, which is released today, found that some countries imposed their first political controls on internet content in the past two years, while those that had already restricted access redoubled their efforts with new tools and bureaucracies.

5. A great infographic (above) showing how journalists on twitter all follow one another.

Don’t forget – if you see anything that really impresses you, why not let us know by emailing on social@umpf.co.uk and perhaps your suggestion will make the cut next week.

1. Valuations on internet businesses are madness says Boo.com
2. Spotify to cut its free service
3. UberMedia to launch Twitter rival?
4. Bloggers suing HuffPo for $315m
5. CIPR’s Social Media Best Practice Guide: Jane Wilson, CIPR’s CEO, comments
6. Freddie Flintoff in Twitter trouble

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns.

So, with spring in the air and our thoughts turning to summer, we’re taking a look at the sun, sea and Sangria-soaked world of travel to find the world’s best travel social media campaigns.

There is no specific order to the list. We’ve looked at many travel social media campaigns and chosen what we believe to be creative and interesting work; case studies that, for one reason or another, have made us think ‘great travel campaign’.

In deciding what is/is not a relevant case study, our social media litmus test has been to ask if they involve either online social interaction, user participation or user-generated content.

If we’ve omitted your favourite, email it to social@umpf.co.uk. And share your comments at the foot of the page. And click if you need a travel social media campaign to help your business.

So, grab your towel, sun tan lotion and a cocktail, sit back and enjoy our run-down of the top travel social media campaigns the world has to offer.

Surprise, Surprise – KLM

At the end of 2010, KLM decided to give something a little extra special to its passengers waiting to board its flights – some personalised random acts of kindness.

Using information from Foursquare and Twitter, KLM identified passengers currently checked in and waiting to board KLM flights. A quick search of each person’s social media profile garnered info about their personal interests/reasons for flying.

Staff then purchased appropriate gifts which they gave to passengers prior to boarding their flight.

A happy, surprised customer = a tweeting customer. More than 40 people were presented with gifts and the campaign received 1m+ impressions on Twitter alone.

A clever – if time exhaustive – stunt that met its objectives of interacting with existing customers in the online space.

Social Networking Mile High Club – Lufthansa Airlines

Thanks to Lufthansa Airlines’ branded social media app MySkyStatus, air travellers can update their social networks from the sky.

The app allows passengers flying with any airline to automatically post updates about their departure and arrival times, flight locations and even altitudes to their Facebook and Twitter followers while they’re airborne.

Updating your contacts with details about your every move may seem a little bit ‘look at me’, but top marks Lufthansa for keeping people connected in an environment where typically you have to turn off your phone.

Each update also links people back to the Lufthansa MySkyStatus page meaning that customers are effectively promoting the airline to followers for free during their flight.

Elsewhere, in 2010 Lufthansa also launched a virtual pilot game which was endorsed on Twitter by Stephen Fry; and it ran an Oktoberfest campaign with Foursquare which saw over 2,350 people unlock specialist Lufthansa badges, right.

Le Bar Guide – Stella Artois

Though clearly not a travel company, Stella Artois has created a clever travel-related augmented reality app which creates meaningful content for users.

Download Stella’s Le Bar Guide and, if you’re holidaying or in an unfamiliar location, hold up your phone in the street, give it a shake and up pops markers showing the bars selling Stella, noting their distance away from you; hold it downwards and arrows pop up on the road pointing you in the direction of the nearest bar.

That’s not all – you can switch between different views, search for bars by country and postcode, rate the bars, add your own comments and even use it to order yourself a taxi home at the end of the night – genius.

A Map App for That – Vodafone

Simple but effective, Vodafone’s #ukhols campaign brought together Twitter and Google maps to plot the UK’s summer holiday destinations.

People were asked to tweet #ukhols followed by their age, sex, postcode and their holiday destination. The data was plotted on a live map showing who the tweet was by, their destination and the distance in miles from their postcode. Adding an extra layer of interactivity, the map also synced with TwitPic meaning, once on holiday, people could post photos to TwitPic which would then appear on the map.

Where the Gnomes Roam – Travelocity

Travelocity’s ‘brand advocate’, the Roaming Gnome, has been successfully dabbling in social media for a few years. With his own blog and presence on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, most recently he embraced the world of Chatroulette in a bid to drag potential customers away from their webcams and go on holiday.

That’s not all, timed to coincide with the launch of Virgin Atlantic’s first seasonal flight from Chicago to London, the Roaming Gnome used Foursquare to update followers about its location on a recent trip to London.

Fans of the cheeky chappy were able to follow him checking in to various locations as he explored the city. Photos of him on-board the Virgin flight were also uploaded to his Facebook page.

Chocks Away – Gol Airlines

An innovative banner ad from Brazil’s Gol Airlines gave people the chance to ‘fly’ using their mobile phones.

‘Travellers’ were asked to input their mobile number into a banner ad and were then called back with flight instructions as the web page transformed into a flying game.

The plane was controlled using the mobile and could be navigated over the airline’s website, with a few special features thrown in. The purpose of the initiative? To remind customers that flying is easier when you check in using your mobile. Pretty clever.

Klout And About (Part I)
The Las Vegas Palm Hotel has created a ‘Klout Klub’ which will allow high ranking guests access to its amenities in the hope that they share their experiences with their followers. The hotel is already referring to Klout (a social-analytics firm) as part of its reservation process so if you want an upgrade – get social networking.

Klout And About (Part II)

A second Klout example comes from Virgin America which worked with Klout to offer top “Twitter influencers” one free, round-trip flight from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Toronto.

In order to qualify, users had to create a Klout account and link it to their Twitter profile.

Those with the most influential Klout score (which is based on a number of factors including number of Twitter followers, how often their updates were being retweeted, etc) were offered free return flights.

A pretty simple and straightforward campaign which secured plenty of media and online coverage and talkability.

Powder Dash – Japan Tourism

Encouraging people to consider Japan as a ski/snowboard destination, Japan Tourism launched a Facebook game called Powder Dash.

Allowing players to experience the ‘powder’ that Japan has to offer, the game saw players race down mountains, hit jumps, do tricks, in a bid to score high points and unlock advanced snowboards. Users could also challenge friends.

Buzztastic – STA Travel

STA Travel is a company often cited as an example of good practice in the world of social media within the travel industry.

Its STA Travel Buzz site was created as a central resource for company and customer-generated content. STA Travel’s team regularly identifies and outreaches to travellers through social media to help create meaningful and targeted content for the site.

Known as ‘voices’ or ‘STA Explorers’, they are encouraged to contribute copy, images, and videos about their travel experiences and other relevant travel-themed content.

The result is a meaningful travel site with fresh, interesting content created by genuine brand advocates.

Pig-a-Pult – Manchester Airport

Social media savvy Manchester Airport created this Facebook game to promote the wide range of destinations it serves across the world.

Players catapult Piggles to one of the airport’s destinations in a bid to gain a place on the leader board (you’re scored only if you land near the destination you aimed for).

At the end of the campaign, the player which catapulted Piggles the furthest was rewarded with an iPad; holiday vouchers were given randomly to other players.

Need a travel social media campaign to help your business?

Twitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Twitchhiker

If there’s one travel campaign that demonstrates the power of Twitter, this surely has to be it.

Twitchhiker was started by a guy called Paul Smith who set out on a mission to travel as far from home as possible in 30 days, relying only on the good will of fellow tweeters.

The rules were simple:
* he could only accept offers of travel and accommodation directly from people following @twitchhiker
* he couldn’t make plans any further than three days in advance
* he could only spend money on food and drink and anything that would fit into his suitcase
* if he had two accommodation options on the table, the choice of which to take was his; if he only had one option then he had to accept it and move on within 48 hours regardless
* no options on the table within 48 hours meant he had to go home – challenge over

Paul’s adventures are profiled on his blog and there’s now a book of his story: Twitchhiker – How One Man Travelled the World By Twitter.

Ding Dong Merrily in the Sky – Spanair

Christmas is most definitely the season of goodwill with this second example of an airline bringing some festive cheer with random acts of kindness. On Christmas Eve the Spanish airline Spanair decided to surprise all of the passengers on its Barcelona to Las Palmas flight with a Christmas present. Gifts were wrapped and labelled with each passenger’s name. They were then put on to the luggage conveyor belt for passengers to collect with their reactions filmed and uploaded to YouTube. To date the Spanish version of the clip has received over 320,000 views and the English version a further 285,000.

Drive Time – Avis

Avis was the first major car rental company to introduce a blog; it has since won several customer service accolades.

In 2007, www.wetryharder.co.uk was launched as a place for customers and staff to talk about positive and negative experiences of car rental – since then, the Avis Net Approval rating has increased by 200%.

It has also now launched a customer loyalty scheme using Foursquare and Facebook Places. Working with a company called Topguest, the scheme rewards customers when they check in to partner organisations, as well as receiving money-off codes when they check into Avis locations.

Jump To The Beat – Hotelsbycity.net

An online campaign launched by HotelsByCity.net became an internet craze, picked up by the mainstream media.

If you’re not already doing it, bed jumping is apparently the must-do in-room hotel activity.

The premise is simple – go to a hotel; have someone take your picture as you jump mid-air onto the bed; post it to the website.

Some hotels even took it a step further, holding events and special offers to promote the craze. InterContinental Hotels attempted to break the world record for bed jumping.

Meanwhile, an aerobics team who travelled to the national Australian Championships claimed: “We used bed jumping as part of our pre-competition preparation – and also as part of the celebrations after we won!”

Omissions

If you’re wondering why

- Tourism Queensland’s Best Job in the World campaign

- Virgin Blue’s World’s Biggest Game of Pass the Parcel and

- Trabuddy.com’s travel app

…are not on this list, it’s because they’re over on the original Social Media Campaigns: Hall of Fame

***So that’s some of the best. What about some that do not make the Travel Social Media Campaigns: Hall of Fame?***

There’s Nothing Like Australia – Tourism Australia

When Tourism Australia launched its new $150m ‘There’s nothing like Australia’ ad campaign (URL: www.nothinglikeaustralia.com) it made the mistake of only registering the .com URL.

Within a matter of hours the (now defunct) www.nothinglikeaustralia.net launched – a website spoofing the ad campaign (unfounded rumours were that someone at New Zealand’s tourist board was behind it).

The World’s Best Customer Complaint Letter – Virgin

In 2009 Virgin found itself at the mercy of a customer complaint letter that was printed in the Daily Telegraph – it spread virally around the globe (it was bookmarked on Digg over 6,400 times).

Dubbed ‘the world’s best customer complaint letter’, directed at Sir Richard Branson himself, the complainant writes pages and pages about the ‘culinary hell’ that he was subjected to whilst on a flight from Mumbai. With prose like:

(discussing his in-flight meal) “I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat there with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

“Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this …”

It is easy to see why the letter went viral in the way it did. Luckily for Virgin we were laughing more at the content than being put off its terrible in-flight meals.

United Breaks Guitars – United Airlines

Travel companies beware – disgruntled customers can cause havoc online. And news, particularly when it’s of the negative type, goes viral very quickly.

A great example is the case of musician David Carroll who used Twitter and YouTube to broadcast United Airline’s mishandling of his guitar and its refusal to compensate him for damage.

David created a song called ‘United Breaks Guitars’ that clocked up 3m views in the first week. The mainstream media picked up the story from social media channels, making CNN, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC.

The result – to date the video has received over 9.8 million hits, a further two parts to the song were released, David’s career has benefited greatly and United Airlines issued a full apology and addressed the customer service issues in the song.

And finally, Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines

Similar to the United incident, disgruntled Southwest Airlines passenger and film-maker Kevin Smith caused a stir on Twitter in mid-February 2010 after he was told he could not fly on one of Southwest’s planes because of his size.

Kevin promptly issued a barrage of tweets which resulted in complaints from some of his 1.6 million followers.

Southwest quickly issued numerous responses via Twitter and its blog to apologise and offered Kevin a call with the airline’s Vice President of Customer Service.

In fact, Southwest’s response was so fast and transparent that it is now often cited as an example of good practice.

Click if you need a travel social media campaign to help your business.

Here’s the latest news in the world of social media from the last seven days. In this week’s Trending bulletin:

1. Google to spend over $10Million on creating original programming for YouTube
2. Obama turns to social media to help his re-election
3. The Daily Telegraph denies it will start charging for access
4. Twitter announces new resources to help the platform become a tool for journalists
5. James Franco, star of 172 hours, says social media is dead
6. BBC Radio 4 DJ James Naughtie is photographed at a Japanese love hotel. The photo goes viral and the Beeb complains

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page http://www.umpf.co.uk every week or catch up with previous episodes here.

Click for more on social media campaigns: http://www.umpf.co.uk/social-media

1. Google has launched its +1 button, aimed at allowing internet users the option of recommending sites, products and services to their nearest and dearest. The new feature, which is being hailed by some as the next step in social search, has been likened to the ‘like’ button on Facebook. Third party websites will also be able to embed the button.

2. Facebook has removed a controversial Intifada page that called for the killing of Jews. The page, which managed to attract the support of over 340,000 fans before it was removed, was highlighted when Israeli public diplomacy minister Yuli Edelstein wrote to Facebook urging the page be closed on the grounds of incitement.

3. Mozilla has announced that there have already been more than 50 million downloads of its new browser – Firefox 4 – equilvalent to about 2000 downloads per minute. According to Net Applications, about 3.6% of all Windows 7 users were running the IE9 web browser, just slightly ahead of Firefox 4 with 2.8%.

4. Facebook has scrapped its old approach to mobile phone social networking and has launched a brand new mobile web experience that can be used on any device. “Every time we launched a new feature, we had to build it multiple times across different code bases: once for facebook.com, then again for m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, and in native applications as well. Honestly, we weren’t very good at doing this, so certain features were missing on different devices,” said Facebook product designer Lee Bryon.

5. With the rise and rise of mobile devices, it’s understandable that more and more money is directed towards mobile marketing and advertising. More than 1 billion of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones are now smartphones, which offers a massive opportunity for marketers and advertisers alike (see right).

Don’t forget – if you see anything that really impresses you, why not let us know by emailing on social@umpf.co.uk and perhaps your suggestion will make the cut next week.

Here’s our video round-up of social media news, campaigns and views in the last seven days. In this week’s Trending bulletin:

1. Times & Sunday Times paywall subscription “victory”
2. MySpace’s $100m price tag
3. Twitter’s Dorsey returns after 3 years out at mobile payment start-up Square
4. 50% of Tweets sent by “elite members” of 20,000 users
5. Radian6 bought by cloud computing firm SalesForce for $300m
6. Warren Buffet says don’t by social networking companies: Allan Barr, head of digital & social media at The Big Partnership, and Oliver Chesher, Head of Office at Admiral PR, give their views

Every week we’ll be bringing you the latest social media campaigns, news and views. You can watch the latest broadcast bulletin on our home page every week or catch up with previous videos on the Umpf YouTube channel.

Click for more on social media campaigns.

We were delighted to see Umpf in the list: top 10 social media agencies in the UK.

We were even more pleased when we realised that 9 out of the 10 agencies are based in London or the South East (see the Google Map, right, visualising Econsultancy’s top ten social media agencies – that’s Umpf on the Northerly tip!).

We love London but we also love being based outside the capital (the best creative talent isn’t just to be found in the South East).

Hopefully we go some way to dispelling that myth and being the only agency from ‘the provinces’ to make the list should demonstrate this.

If you’re still in doubt as to whether we should have made the top ten, we’ve outlined five recent examples of our social media work, below. If you’re interested in finding out more about us as an agency, or perhaps how we can help you engage with social media, read more about our Social Media offer or contact us on social@umpf.co.uk

1. Our social media “ouch map”, left, for online health insurer Health365.com  has just been shortlisted for a Marketing Innovation award: best Innovative Brand Campaign

2. We’ve just launched an online PR stunt: The World’s Shortest Recipe Book where we’re publishing a book – Tweet Pie, right – of recipes where each one is less than 140 characters

3. We brought this season’s BBC Apprentice programme to life with a clever online camapign run through Twitter for our client MyJobGroup.co.uk

4. We achieved global coverage for our research on behalf of MyJobGroup.co.uk about how misuse of social media in the workplace could be costing the UK economy £14bn

5. And lastly, here’s a recent social media stunt we did for ourselves: The most lucrative Foursquare check-in