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.

It has been a really busy 12 months, which has seen social media continue to dominate the news agenda and become a bona fide source of news in its own right. Our files are literally full to bursting with great campaigns and stunts that have happened since last Autumn and we’re excited to share our latest hall of fame with you.

Whether you’re one of the world’s superbrands or a small, local supplier, clever social media campaigns can help raise product awareness, increase sales, drive footfall, add fans, improve SEO and online visibility, or just make people think ‘cool, I like that company’.

Some of the world’s best social media campaigns from the past 12 months are highlighted below. They are case studies that, for one reason or another, have made us think ‘great 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.

The Social Media Campaign Hall of Fame is in no particular order and, as is the case with lists like this, there’ll be great campaigns you love that are not yet listed, and others you feel should not be included. This is not a list of the campaigns that have the most followers/biggest fan base/most views. It’s about doing creative, interesting campaigns. And, of course, that’s subjective.

If you have a suggestion for inclusion, email it to social@umpf.co.uk. And please do share your comments at the foot of the page.

Umpf

Definitely not the ‘Wurst’ Facebook App – Reinert Privat-Fleischerei

Reinert Privat-Fleischerei, the catchily-named German sausage manufacturer, decided to turn people’s Facebook profile photos into sausage. The company said; “In Germany, everyone knows the happy “Wurst-Face”. It’s the one extra piece of sausage children get for free at the butcher…We developed a generator, which turns the Facebook profile picture into a happy “Wurst-Face“.

Far from being viewed as a load of Baloney, people used the clever app and turned their faces to sausage in seconds, spreading the brand and its campaign virally over Facebook as friends quickly saw the meat-effect take hold.

Blink and you’ll miss yourself – Blink182 and AT&T

To celebrate their first new single in eight years, Blink 182 created a video sourced from fan-made YouTube videos that were made without crediting the band. Called “Blink-182 Film Festival You Didn’t Know You Entered”, it formed part of a new advertising campaign for AT&T. Blink 182 and AT&T scoured YouTube for videos in which the band’s music was used without credit and used the clips to create the ad hoc video for “Up All Night,” (their new single).

The video shows good humour in addressing what is essentially piracy and instead of punishing fans for celebrating Blink 182?s music, they took the amateur footage and used it for their own devices, while simultaneously rewarding die-hard fans.

Turkish Delight for Tweeters – Turkcell

Turkcell, a Turkish telecom company, showed innovation in this campaign, using some of the most common Twitter features. The campaign revolved around a series of games that were all run through Twitter, with post-it notes being removed from the outside of a box, at each stage for people to try and win the phone. Users had to try and get a celebrity to Retweet them as the very last clue to win the phone. The campaign generated nearly 60,000 Tweets in just three days of activity. We think that’s a great reception (and we’re not talking about Turkcell’s network).

Rapid-fire Response – Grand Rapids

When Newsweek posted an article that outlined ten US cities that were dying, Grand Rapids in Michigan responded with a world record LipDup video featuring 5,000 of its residents. The outraged group of residents, business groups and tourism bosses created the following video, miming to Don McLean’s American Pie, which was produced using $40,000 worth of donations from 29 local sponsors.

Uploaded to YouTube on 26 May 2011, almost 800,000 people viewed the video in just a few days. There were 100,000+ Facebook ‘likes’ and it was the 9th most watched clip on YouTube anywhere in the world on 28 May, coupled with 12,000 YouTube ‘likes’.

A Heavenly Lynx Effect – Lynx

Lynx, the saviour of many a sweaty-pitted youth, rolled out an experiential campaign featuring the Lynx Excite Angels, which used an augmented reality twist that saw people interacting directly with the angels via a digital video billboard.

As passers-by at London Victoria Station walked onto the Lynx “Markers”, the Excite Angels literally fell to earth in the digital billboard above and interacted with the lucky person on said marker.

This AR stunt featured as part of a social campaign called the “Lynx Excite Fallen Angel” which challenged users to visit Facebook and see if they are the one person on earth that could release an archangel.

VW Test Drive looked good on Paper

Volkswagen in Norway offered what it claimed was the world’s first test drive inside a print ad. The ad, placed in several Norwegian magazines, showed a long stretch of road, with both summer and winter versions. Readers were asked to download an app developed by Mobiento which meant you could ‘drive’ the car by hovering your iPhone over the printed road.

Where this idea really excelled was offering users the chance to test three different features of the vehicle (lane assist, adaptive lights and cruise control). Pretty smart idea and great execution, we think.

Beer-faced Cheek – Corona Light

Corona Light launched this campaign, targeted at young adults aged 21 to 29, working on the basis that when consumers ‘liked’ the Corona Light Page on Facebook, their photo would be included on a 150-foot digital billboard display at Times Square.

The billboard ran for a month with images from across the square posted to Facebook so participants can share photographic evidence of themselves in an ad at Times Square – and help spread the Corona Light brand message at the same time.

Within a few days of the campaign going live, 600 people had already taken part, with Corona Light’s Facebook page collecting a lot of Facebook ‘likes’ in the process; all handy for future marketing campaigns.

FCUKing Great YouTique – French Connection

French Connection opened what was arguably the world’s first YouTube store called the YouTique by French Connection last year. Capitalising on the trend around video-based fashion tips, the Youtique uses YouTube’s annotation feature to great effect.

Stylist Louise Roe hands out tips and tricks in a brand channel, before showing you how each outfit looks on a model, along with annotations on each item that take you seamlessly to product pages on the French Connection Online Store. Slick, well-designed but a pain for your bank balance.

Choo’s Treasure Hunt is a Shoe-in – Jimmy Choo

Jimmy Choo, world-renowned footwear brand, organised a real-time treasure hunt around London via Foursquare, courtesy of Fresh Networks. One pair of Jimmy Choo trainers checked in at various locations and those who followed the campaign, and were lucky enough to arrive at a venue before the trainers left, got to pick up a pair in the style and size of their choosing.

The sneakers checked in to uber-fashionable locations such as Lounge Lover and the Hummingbird Bakery. A great campaign, considering this was Jimmy Choo’s first foray into social media marketing. A marketing rep for the company said the campaign probably represented “the first time Foursquare has been used to check in an object (rather than a person) at locations.”

You can read more about the campaign here, courtesy of Fresh Network’s case study.

Tippex’s Campaign is a Whitewash

The clever people at Tippex devised a campaign on YouTube that went truly viral. Using a simple annotation function on a recorded video of a bear and a man in the woods, viewers could choose what happened next. With a number of pre-recorded endings and the novelty of being able to ‘change’ a YouTube video, the campaign was an instant hit and to this day, has had more than 17 million views. That’s equivalent to the entire population of The Netherlands (just in case you were wondering).

Sweet Tweets for Sweet Treats – Belling

When cooker manufacturer Belling decided to create the world’s shortest recipe book, they did it in an innovative way; using recipes crowdsourced over Twitter. The 50 shortlisted recipes were then compiled into a book, complete with illustrations from a variety of artists, which were themselves crowdsourced and voted for on Belilng’s Facebook page.

Belling printed and sold the book, with all proceeds going towards food charity Foodcycle, which collects surplus produce locally and prepares nutritious meals in unused professional kitchen spaces to distribute to those in need.

‘Sounds’ like a Great Campaign – British Library

The British Library came up with an innovative way of capturing life in the UK in 2010; by building the UK’s first ‘Soundmap’. Users were encouraged to record the sounds of their neighbourhood, using Audioboo and then upload them to the BM’s interactive Google map. The result is an ever-growing repository of sound data, showing generations to come what the UK sounded like in 2010-2011, all with specific geographical references.

Smiles Better – Unilever

Unilever worked with SapientNitro in London to create a smile-activated vending machine to spread some extra joy at Cannes in 2010. Globally, the Anglo-Dutch giant owns ice cream brands including Wall’s, Ben & Jerry’s and Klondike. Using facial recognition technology and AR, the machine tracked a customer’s smile and rated it on a ’smile-o-meter’. The user could then directly post their image to Facebook and select the ice-cream of their choice.

Levi’s Water Tank

On March 22, the planet celebrated World Water Day, and Levi’s used this to remind consumers about its commitment to save water and engage them in a new online activity, which raises awareness about vital drinking water issues. The WaterTank game, launched on Facebook, encourages users to ‘unlock’ clean water by taking up various challenges ranging from tweeting to answering water-related questions.

The key element of the interactive project is Levi’s Water<Less jeans, a collection of denim made using less water during the finishing process. Launched in January 2011, it is helping to save millions of litres of water. Through WaterTank, Levi’s is going to donate $250,000 to water.org to support its programs, which will fund at least 200 million litres of water to people in needy areas.

Every Dog has its Day – Pedigree

The 2010 Pedigree Adoption Drive focused on a hard-hitting message: one dog is put down every hour in the UK. Central to the campaign was a four-part film ‘Charlie’s story’; for every 25,000 views, a new chapter of the story was unlocked. For every view received, Pedigree donated £1. People rallied behind the idea and helped drive up viewing figures and spread the message. Successful re-homing stories were also celebrated on YouTube in the form of ‘Dogumentaries’ (we like this!).

The agency behind the campaign, Hypernaked, distributed branded refuse skips and ghost dog leads in five cities nationwide as a powerful reminder of the 107,000 dogs abandoned every year in the UK. The campaign received over 145,000 views on YouTube, and over 31,000 Likes on Facebook.

Toyota Swagger Wagon

One of the world’s largest car manufacturers decided to add some ‘West Coast’ to their social media presence by producing a YouTube video with more than a hint of irony. Toyota’s Sienna is a mini-van perfect for the middle class suburbs of America but the company put its tongue firmly in its cheek when it produced ‘Swagger Wagon’; a spoof rap video that has been viewed over 9 million times since it was uploaded last May. It is a full length rap video, performed by ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ of the Sienna Family, is full of great one-liners and will have you asking “Where my kids at?” for weeks to come. The Sienna Family raps about the joys of parenting, pretend tea parties, baking cupcakes, and the perks of owning a Toyota Sienna, AKA a Swagger Wagon, while their little daughter busts a move.

We’re Loving It – McDonald’s does Fourquare

McDonald’s increased foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare campaign that cost a mere $1,000. The fast food giant used Foursquare Day (April 16) as a hook to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as check-in bait to lure in potential diners.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 follows and fans were generated for the brand on social media sites. More than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special also appeared in the press.

Fiat Crowdsourced Car

Car manufacturer Fiat Brazil took crowdsourcing to the next level when it launched a campaign for people to create their next car. Using the online hub at www.fiatmio.cc, people were invited to submit design ideas for the car, whose name translates as My Fiat. The best were trialled by the Fiat design team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. More than 11,000 ideas were submitted by a registered community of almost 17,000 members. The design has now been released and can be viewed here.

Feeling Lucky? Try Uniqlo

Clothes retailer Uniqlo launched this unique campaign which saw its prices determined by customers themselves. Consumers were encouraged to Tweet about featured items they had seen on the Uniqlo website and in turn, the price of the product was reduced. The promotional site featured about 10 items, along with the price and by how much it had been discounted thus far. A special price was announced on September 9th for redemption and purchase on Uniqlo’s UK website. A neat campaign and one that helped to spread Uniqlo’s audience far wider than a traditional sale.

MTV’s Campaign is Music to our Ears

Working much like a conventional music chart, MTV Music Meter is a service that scans social networks for bands generating an increasing number of comments and is available for devices using Google Inc.’s Android software and Apple Inc.’s iPad and iPhone. Bands and songs are then placed in a chart depending on their relative popularity.

Dermot McCormack, who oversees digital operations at MTV Networks, said “Music Meter provides music videos and 30-second samples of tracks. Full songs can be purchased at the site and MTV is working with Rhapsody International Inc. to provide full tracks in the near future.”

Ken and Barbie reunited – Mattel

Mattel began its foray in the social media world with a campaign to try to reunite plastic power couple Ken and Barbie after the toymaker famously broke the dolls up in 2004. Ken attempted to woo back blonde-haired Barbie through campaigns on Facebook and on his Twitter profile. A video on Barbie’s YouTube channel showed Ken signing up for Match.com, only to find that Barbie is already listed there.

Through Foursquare Ken checked-in at locations including the famous Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan, where he customized a cupcake for Barbie. Fans voted on Barbie’s Facebook page as to whether she should take him back and in February the news we all hoped for came true; they were reunited.

BART

Commuters on the BART rapid transit system in San Francisco saw images of oil rig platforms, Lake Tahoe, and the little furry endangered pika at train stations last summer and using Foursquare helped to support these environmental causes. The ads were part of a new set of public service announcements by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit, which aims to attract new supporters using Foursquare’s ‘check-in’ function.

Realizing that the San Francisco Bay Area boasted the largest number of Foursquare users in the US, Earthjustice approached one of its younger major donors in the Bay Area with the proposal of donating $10 each time a commuter checked in at an Earthjustice poster on BART. They agreed and the rest is a piece of Foursquare history.

Fine Young Cannibals – Vegetarian Foundation

This guerrilla marketing campaign by Serviceplan for the Vegetarian Foundation in Germany centred on a mock cannibal restaurant that was preparing to open its doors in Berlin. First they advertised for various staff, including surgeons with an open mind, to start generating some buzz. When the restaurant called for people to donate body parts, the campaign went global, featuring on hundreds of news sites, Facebook, Twitter and even opinion videos on YouTube.

Most worrying of all is that within 24 hours, the 63 seats in the restaurant were booked with people willing to donate body parts. Just five days later the website had 120,000 visits and huge media interest. They seized the moment and called a press conference to tell the world about their views on vegetarianism. With a budget of just 5,000 euros it is said to have one thousand times that in media exposure and 50 million impressions worldwide.

No ‘Mickey Mouse’ campaign – Disney

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts used user-generated content at the centrepiece of its “Let the Memories Begin” campaign last September. Using photos and videos from families both visiting the park and children finding out they are going, the campaign gave the global brand a very personal feel.

Disney asked users to submit their own memories online using YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and DisneyParks.com/Memories. Beyond the advertising campaign, Disney incorporated family memories into its theme parks with its “Let the Memories Begin” nighttime experiences. At Disney World in Orlando, for example, guest photos were projected against the spires of Cinderella’s Castle.

Ouch Map – Health365.com

Health insurance is often viewed as a dry subject so to target a younger demographic, online health insurance provider Health365.com launched the world’s first ‘Ouch Map’; a way to map the minor injuries Brits were experiencing on a day to day basis.

Created by Umpf and programmed by UKSNowMap supremo Ben Marsh, the glowing skeleton lit up from green through to amber and red, based on the level of pain experienced, with live tweets containing the hashtag #ouch365 being scraped from Twitter to populated the site. The monthly sales average for Health365.com policies doubled when the map went live, with site traffic trebling over the same period. Who says insurance needs to be boring?

A crisp and clean campaign – Pringles

‘Crisp’ (note the inverted commas) manufacturer Pringles went to war against the ‘oversharers’; the people who tweet at least 300 times a day, update their Facebook profile when they’re on the loo and generally report the minutiae of their lives.

Using a dedicated microsite, Pringle encouraged users to download an ‘overshare’ button for their Facebook and Twitter profiles that enabled them to report friends and family who shared that little bit too much. The campaign took off with users being able to download the updates of their ‘oversharer’ friends into a spoof YouTube video that would then be emailed to them to shame them into changing.

What this has to do with crisps, aside from the brand association, remains to be seen, but it was a neat campaign that dealt humorously with an annoying habit.

Motoring Campaign – Local Motors

Local Motors has taken the concept of crowdsourcing and really developed it (and cars in the process). The company, which operates through using a collective of designers and engineers, offers the public the chance to have a truly bespoke car. Elements of the car are decided by the commissioner and the community, with final designs (which are copyrighted under the ‘Creative Commons’ protocol) then turned into reality in the company’s micro-factories which are located across the US. Watch out big manufacturers – car crowdsourcing could be the future of motoring.

If I ruled the world – Radio Shack

90-year-old business Radio Shack wanted its rebrand to go with a bang and so it ran the #ifihadsuperpowers campaign during December 2010. It was announced via a promoted tweet on its account. To be in with a chance to win one of several prizes, users had to follow @radioshack and upload a photo of themselves with their hand outstretched like the thumbnail above.

They were then asked to tweet this photo on Twitpic, along with what they would do if they had super powers, using the #ifihadsuperpowers hashtag. Radio Shack then spent time responding to each and every tweet with the hashtag, adding a mask and cape and transforming the Twitpic photos into Holiday Superheroes. They also randomly selected a handful of winners that would receive a prize. Some of the prizes included an e-reader, a Samsung Galaxy Tab, an AUVIO Portable Digital TV, aGarmin GPS and Radio Shack gift certificates.

12 days of sharing – Starbucks

Starbucks helped fans get into the Christmas spirit by launching its 12 Days of Sharing program. One offer each day from December 1 – December 12, 2010 was made available, with people signing up by sending a text message containing the text, “12Days” to 29943.

Following on from its 2009 program called “12 days of Wishing”, a variety of items were offered including mugs, VIA coffee and a bunch of tumblers. Whilst it used an old-school device of text, the response was positive. Perhaps this year they’ll use Foursquare or Gowalla to greater effect.

Hypermiling for Toyota

iCrossing UK ran a programme of social media activity for Toyota GB to help raise awareness of its iQ city car, based on a core blog (http://blog.toyota.co.uk) and a series of activities designed to create word-of-mouth referrals that drove traffic to the blog and generated interest in the car itself.

Simon and Mark set off on their Toyota iQ Hypermile attempt from Toyota_UK on Vimeo.

One of these activities was a bold experiment to drive the car to as many cities in the UK as possible on one tank of fuel. Two members of iCrossing’s Content & Media team undertook a ‘Hypermiling’ road trip in the iQ that was covered on social media. The hypermiling attempt reached over 105 million people worldwide, including 3.7 million people in the UK, as a result of coverage on high profile blogs, including Wired magazine, and led to a 200% uplift in traffic to the iQ blog.

Read Ayn Rand

Nick Newcomen went a little further than most literary fans when he spent a month driving more than 12,000 miles to inscribe his message “Read Ayn Rand” on a vast swathe of US land.

Using a GPS tracking device as a “pen”, Newcomen took about 10 days to complete each word, turning on his GPS logger when he wanted to write and turning it off between letters, videoing himself at landmarks along the route for documentation. He drove 12,328 miles in total, across 30 American states, inputting the data once he was finished into Google Earth to create the world’s largest book advertisement.

A Golden Radio Voice

This one has feel-good factor written all over it. Picture the scene; a down and out called Ted Williams has a ‘golden voice’ for radio and one day he is filmed (see clip below). Said clip is placed on YouTube and Ted goes ‘viral’ in the truest sense of the word. Following years of drug abuse and hardship, Ted is inundated with job offers and it looks like he might have turned his life around, thanks to a little help from a commuter and YouTube.

Moby Destroyed

Musician Moby took the album stream to a whole new level when he launched a microsite to premiere his new album, Destroyed, that ties in Soundcloud and Instagram. The site merges music and images into one interactive experience. Upon visiting the site, tracks from the disc begin playing.

The site also contained a map of the world littered with pins. When a visitor clicked on a pin Moby’s photos from around the world were displayed. Fans also added their own images to the map by snapping pictures on Instagram and adding the tag “#destroyed.”

V&A Decode

To mark its ‘Decode’ exhibition, the V&A commissioned Karsten Schmidt to design a digital identity using open source code. The museum then gave the general public the opportunity to recode Karsten’s work and create original artwork. Selected works were displayed on the London Underground. A great example of a museum using open source code and encouraging creativity through programming.

Expedia hands over Facebook page

Expedia Australia devised a new way of winning Facebook fans in February this year: offering a $10,000 (£6,200) cash prize to the person who did the best job of administrating the brand’s new Facebook page.

Inevitably, people wanting to enter started by ‘liking’ the page then competition entrants were asked what experience they have running online communities and what ideas they have for the page. The shortlisted candidates were judged, in part, by how many more likes they were able to generate for the page.

Save BBC 6 Music

In response to the BBC’s plans to shut BBC Radio 6 Music, a Facebook campaign was set up to try to save the station. The group managed to attract 180,000 members and pressure from this loyal following forced the corporation to change its mind and save the station, to much public rejoicing.

A ‘classic’ from Heineken

Heineken pulled out all the stops for this stunt which saw over 1,000 die-hard AC Milan fans sacrifice seeing the match for the sake of their partners’ or editors requests to go to a classical music and poetry recital. Willingly the men obliged, but picture the surprise when the orchestra struck up to begin playing the Champions League music and the curtains opened to reveal a cinema screen with the game playing.

A great way for Heineken to underline their affiliation with football and certainly some brownie-points earned for both the men and women. Viewers of Sky watched in their millions as the joke unfolded and 10 million saw coverage of the event the following day.

Sphere of Influence for Nokia

Global phone and telecommunications giant Nokia was having trouble making sure people were collaborating on a level playing field with its 50,000 employees across the world. Its solution was simple – create the ‘sphere’ – a social media platform that would enable any employee to interact with other employees for ideas generation and to make sure work wasn’t being replicated. The results – clearer thinking and better ideas.

Playboy Campaign

Most people know what the Playboy brand stands for and this latest campaign from Germany really caught certain people’s attention. An interactive video was personalized to include someone’s photo and name and included various scenes featuring the famous Playboy bunnies which was personalized to show the bunnies fighting over the recipient. At the end the recipient is sent their own personalized Playboy magazine (online version).

The campaign really took off, with 13 million people watching it and it is getting widespread media attention. Whilst we’ve not tried it ourselves, our ‘friend’ tells us the videos look very slick and not mass produced.

A campaign that won’t be forgotten – Post-It

This simple but heart-warming campaign comes from 3M, makers of Post-it notes. ‘Things we Forget’ shows what happens when Post-its are left to their fate in public places – each day, the ‘Post-it guy’ left an annotated Post-it note somewhere in Singapore with a proverb, wise saying or encouraging message somewhere in Singapore.

Soon, people were clamouring to see the next Post-it note and the campaign gained global prominence. Such was the appeal that its Facebook group counted nearly 38,000 fans and the Twitter stream had nearly 5,000 followers. Posters featuring some of the more popular notes are now available to buy via the blog.

The Heidies Take Over – Diesel

The Heidies hijacked Diesel.com on a quest to become famous and get their 15 MB of Fame, courtesy of agency Farfar from Sweden. Not only did they hijack the retailer’s website, they also stole the new and unreleased Diesel Intimate collection, kidnapped a Diesel employee named Juan, and held him captive in an undisclosed hotel room until their demands were met.

With six cameras in the hotel room and 24/7 live coverage viewers were able to watch the ridiculous, and sometimes scandalous, things that the Heidies did with Juan. The Heidies used MySpace to spread the word about their hijacking and shared videos on their YouTube channel and photographs on Flickr. Five days later after the hijacking, Diesel agreed to the Heidies demands for a professional fashion photographer.

Ink your colours the mast – The Social Tattoo Project

Nailing your colours to the mast is one thing, but this clever campaign from Social Tattoo Project saw people inking theirs to their backs. The project, based in New York, is tackling the issue of empathy and finding ways of making it more lasting by giving people tattoos of trending topics from Twitter.

However, the twist is that people don’t get to pick which trending topic they get. Followers of the Social Tattoo Project vote for their favourite, for example #poverty or #haiti, and the volunteer has the hashtag etched onto their skin. Permanently. A campaign with real longevity, we’d say.

Coke drink app

Coca-Cola rolled out a Facebook app in August 2011 that lets consumers mix their own Coke drink. The app is no online-only experiment, though: Real Coke vending machines that do the same thing are rolling out across the US to coincide with this campaign.

The Coca-Cola Freestyle app, created by digital marketing agency 360i, lets you mix a drink using 125 Coke beverages, including Coca-Cola, Sprite, Fanta and Powerade. After choosing each, you hold down a “push” button to fill a cup of your choosing. When you fill your cup, you can name it. There’s also a game designed for the iPhone and Android formats.

Boxing Clever for Help for Heroes – Lbi

Staff at LBi London were challenged to a charity boxing match at the Emirates Stadium by Execution Nobel, the agency’s local rivals. Following a few months of training they wanted to raise funds for Help For Heroes. Instead of spamming friends and colleagues with donation requests, they decided to do something a little more engaging and interactive.

In short, they sold ad space on the sweaty flesh of one of their boxers via bespoke Facebook landing page. The boxer’s body was divided into 69 ad sections. People could buy one of these ad spaces by tagging themselves in a body part/ad section, then posting a design to the wall and then donating at justgiving.com

On the eve of the fight using special body transfer printer paper, a team tattooed the Brawling Billboard’s body. During the fight they captured pictures and videos of the Billboard’s every move and immediately after the fight staff tagged each investor in the pictures and videos featuring their ads in action. Results were impressive, with £1600+ raised by Brawling Billboard in only 2 week and 500+ in attendance at The Brick Lane Brawl.

Rock on – Bury

Bury’s Rockstars from Democracy PR on Vimeo.

To mark the launch of Bury’s new shopping centre, The Rock, PR agency Democracy scattered 2,500 rocks featuring individual Facebook codes within a 15 minute drive time of Bury. Each rock was geo-tagged and redeeming a rock populated the news feed on the Rock’s Facebook page.

To support the opening, the people of Bury were filmed on a green screen, singing along to Nickelback’s song ‘Rock Star’ which was then superimposed on an ever-changing background of Bury landmarks.

Over the opening day and weekend, the Democracy PR team took hundreds of photos of people at the launch event and posted them to the Facebook photo gallery with a simple call to action – tag yourself to be in with a chance of winning. Nearly 10,000 people became fans of the Facebook page, with over 530 Twitter followers to boot.

Starbucks Card

Mobile application consultant Jonathan Stark purchased a Starbucks Card and registered it via the Starbucks Mobile App for iPhone which allows coffee lovers to pay for coffee and baked goods with their mobile device. He then took a screenshot of the barcode and let anyone on the web download it for their own use, also prompting them to donate to the card.

Over $4,000 was donated to the card for coffee lovers and almost 15,000 people followed the card on Twitter, as well as over 7,000 on Facebook. Unsurprisingly, Starbucks shut down the card, tating that it violated the “no sharing” clause in their TOS.

It was an interesting experiment as some added money to the card without even purchasing anything from Starbucks, whilst some simply used the card without giving back, but most took a drink or two and donated some money for others to enjoy. Some people even thanked Stark for renewing their faith in humanity.

Milky milky

Agency Kindred was tasked with encouraging more people to drink milk, following a 20-year-long decline in milk sales. Using the slogan ‘Make Mine Milk’ and a host of celebs (including Gordon Ramsey and Tess Daly sporting ‘milk tashes’), the campaign kicked off, with a Facebook group launched where people could pledge their allegiance to the white stuff.

Results included more than 48,000 fans on the Facebook page, with PR coverage exceeding 50 million and 500,000 views of the video content on YouTube.

Cordial Campaign is Berry Good – Ribena

During the summer of 2010, Brass Agency took Ribena into the world of social media with Tales from Ribena Farm: a campaign that exhibited how Ribena squash really is made from blackcurrants grown on British farms.

Social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr were used, along with a Ribena blog, a consumer database and an exclusive partnership with Mumsnet; the latter was used to recruit 12 families to win an exclusive weekend at a Ribena blackcurrant farm.

The whole day was filmed and four shorts were released, The Farmer’s Tale, The Robin’s Tale, The Berry’s Tale and A Kitchen Tale, across all social media platforms and within a dedicated hub on Mumsnet. A cute campaign and one that underlines the family values of the brand.

Sticks and Stones – Five Boroughs NHS Partnership

This campaign, called ‘Sticks and Stones’, is aimed at reducing stigma towards people with mental ill-health and learning disabilities in the five boroughs NHS partnership area (near Manchester and Liverpool). The partnership wanted to change perceptions by educating the public about the realities of mental ill-health and learning disabilities, and asking them to make a pledge not to use derogatory words and phrases to describe people with mental ill-health or learning disabilities.

So far, the target of 100K pledges has already been exceeded and the campaign continues to gain following both on and offline.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

It is designed to show a snapshot of the key figures working within PR and social media agencies (not including in-house professionals) and is ranked according to influence by PeerIndex.

PeerIndex helps you understand your online reputation, rating your ‘social capital’ through “topic-based authority rankings”.

The service analyses publicly available data (your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and, now, Quora public profiles) to create a picture of your authority and activity on a given subject.

We have tried to include everyone in the region in the list; if you’re not in the table and you’d like to be added @reply @adrian_johnson.  Please note the criteria for entry, below.

This table was inspired by Andrew Smith’s original PRWeek Power List.

Entry criteria
*First and foremost it is for staff working in PR and/or social media agencies who are based in Yorkshire. Notable exclusions: if you’re from Yorkshire, or one of your agency’s offices are in Yorkshire, but you yourself are based in the London office.

*One of the things the table may be used for is suppliers looking for PR/social media professionals, so in-house PR/social media staff are not included.

*It does not include agencies outside PR/social media eg marketing, advertising, sales promotion, branding, SEO/PPC, etc etc. Notable inclusions: if your agency offers PR/social media services to external businesses (ie not in-house PR/social media to promote your own agency), staff who fulfil those roles for clients will be included.

*Networked PR/social media agencies with multiple offices will only be listed by their Yorkshire office. So @National_PR_Agency_Co would not be listed, but, for example, @GraylingNorth is.

Live stream from PeerIndex of the Top PR & Social Media Agency Players: Yorkshire

1. Facebook says goodbye to the ‘Share’ button in favour of the ‘Like’ button

2. Malaysian airlines launches Facebook check-in and booking service

3. Foursquare gives Manchester the ‘World’s rudest city’ title

4. Facebook for dog lovers.  Yes, really.

5. Lucozade targets social media users via Spotify

6. Charlie Sheen sets new Twitter Guinness World Record

You can see our separate social media campaign video round-up on the Umpf YouTube channel.

Be sure to share any stories you think should be in next week’s round up by emailing social@umpf.co.uk

Twitter is often a popular choice for brands, but as more and more enter the Twitter-sphere we’re noticing how differently companies worldwide are reacting, responding and engaging in conversations in a comparison to the next – some doing it better than others.

Naturally, each of the brands will be trying to satisfy their own objectives for utilising a social media channel such as Twitter – objectives that are often associated with follower numbers or mentions.  However, are these objectives a good measurement of the extent of engagement their brand is achieving within a genuine target audience?  Or are they in fact just a host of numbers to show that a job is being done?

Many brands may measure their success on Twitter by the number of followers they have, something that can actually be counter-productive.  It’s easy to become obsessed with having follower numbers into the thousands or tens of thousands, but blindly following irrelevant people in the hope that some may follow you back is actually a method of spamming (we don’t like spamming- see previous blogs) and besides, it doesn’t really get anyone anywhere.  The key to Twitter from a brand’s perspective is to engage and interact with followers who are relevant to a business, enabling the brand to have conversations online and create a public community.

We also see people attributing the number of tweets they’ve posted as a sign of a successful Twitter account. This might actually signal that the brand is not really listening or engaging with their followers but is posting impersonal, untimely tweets- often about themselves or something their brand is doing.  It’s not a great way of achieving engagement and interaction that we’re looking for when communicating through social media.

On the contrary, numbers can often be useful where retweets or @ mentions are concerned.  Someone retweeting your post normally signals that you’ve said something interesting.  Similarly, if an @ mention is responding to something you’ve tweeted then you have successfully managed to engage with a follower and should continue to try and keep the conversation between them interesting and ongoing.

We’re well aware that the quality versus quantity argument is alive and well in the social media arena and despite there being ongoing criticism in the traditional PR remit (we won’t start on payment by results) there doesn’t seem to be any lessons learnt so far, and unfortunately we sense a similar fate for social media channels.  We’re not holding our breath for Twitter to be approached in a ‘best practice’ kind of way anytime soon, but we hope that brands will begin to realise that following any old ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ is not strategic and is in fact just a numbers game.

Each month, Communicate magazine poses a crisis management situation from a historical event and asks agencies for modern say solutions. This month it’s World Cup-themed and we’re rewinding back to 1986 and England’s World Cup quarter-final with Argentina and ‘that’ handball incident…

“Diego Maradona scores the decisive goal with a clear hand ball. England are outraged. With video evidence irrefutable, what advice would you give to Diego to protect his brand, retain his commercial endorsements, and calm the diplomatic crisis?”

Umpf’s response (full article here):

Only ‘sorry’, humility, humour and social media can save brand Maradona.

Because of his outrageous behaviour, first must come a personal apology from Maradona to every man, woman and child in England.

We’d film an apology for an online video. Enter a friend’s name, email and their photo, hit send and they receive a link to a bespoke video showing Maradona personally apologising by holding up a photo of the friend. Spreading virally, Maradona would be seen to be offering personal apologies across the land.

Next, the humour. First, a quick commercial tie-up with a Bluetooth headset company so Maradona can go ‘hands-free’ without losing any more friends.

Second, a short online video for brand Maradona showing what would have happened if his handball had not gone in the net. This time Shilton saves it and England go on to win the World Cup. Back home, Argentina revolts and Maradona becomes reviled.

In the final shot of the film we see Maradona, a broken man, begging on the streets of Buenos Aires. The camera zooms out to show Maradona begging with a friend – fellow handball ‘goal thief’ Thierry Henry.

Hosted on Maradona’s YouTube Channel, and launched through his Twitter feed, the video would demonstrate humility, humour and social media savoir-faire.

Brown & Cameron: social media buddies? Source: Telegraph.co.uk

With social media becoming an increasingly popular tool, it seemed inevitable that 2010’s general election would see parties employing some elements within campaign strategy; however the degree to which it has been embraced by each candidate could not have been anticipated, resulting in it being dubbed: “the first word-of-mouth election”.

In run up to this year’s general election, tech-savvy politicians can be seen unashamedly flexing their weight of knowledge in this latest communication tool, across the worldwide web.

Labour has pre-emptively armed party members with new-media training, ensuring a smooth execution of this newest tactic; and with daily online video podcasts from senior campaign politicians, as well as real-time Twitter feedback, it is not surprising that such rigorous preparation has been undertaken.

Alongside this, Labour has cleverly optimised traffic to its own website using Google Adwords, resulting in constituents who are searching hot debate topics – such as: the economy, education and employment – are driven here primarily, receiving Labour’s take on the subject first.

While the Conservative party, not wanting to disappoint, have released an iPhone app, where users can receive a continuous flow  of up-to-date news on campaign progress, as well as takes on legislation, public policy and party memorandums.

Modern day constituents are demanding more transparency from MPs, social media offers a platform to achieve this. If these latest campaigns are anything to go by, it would appear that politicians are beginning to recognise and appreciate social media as a credible and effective communication channel, key to winning any election.

- Lydia Cambata

NB. Umpf has no affiliation to any political party, with the above comments regarding social media, rather than the efficiencies of one party’s campaign over another.

However, just like Australia and the US, they existed long before they were ‘discovered’.

Although PR cannot lay claim to be the world’s oldest profession (recognised practitioners would have been few and far between back then), PR and word-of-mouth marketing has been around longer than you might imagine.

A quick example.  There are well over one hundred castles in Ireland, but how many can you name? You’d be hard pressed to name more than a couple.  However, you’re probably familiar with the castle at Blarney, if only because of its world famous Blarney Stone.

Millions have puckered up to kiss the Blarney Stone, including Mick Jagger, Winston Churchill, Laurel and Hardy and even Homer Simpson.

The belief is if you kiss the stone you’ll receive the gift of eloquence.  Exactly when the tradition started remains unclear, though it’s thought to date back between the 16^th and 18^th Century.  What’s certain is that the tale was passed from one person to several more, who then passed on the story themselves.   Today, more than 400,000 people turn up each year to kiss the Blarney Stone and I imagine Blarney Castle does not spend much at all on publicising itself.

Think also about the Trevi Fountain in Rome.  Throw in a coin and you’re assured a return to Rome they say.  I’ve been and indeed deposited a few euros.  And when I returned home people asked if I’d thrown a coin into the fountain.  Now I’d call that a very clever word-of-mouth destination marketing campaign.