Warner Bros shows its face on social media

This month Facebook announced that Warner Bros will be using www.facebook.com to allow its customers to rent and stream films.

Launching with The Dark Knight, users will pay $3 (roughly £1.85) per to rent a film for two days. Crucially, if Facebook decides to use personal data to decide which films to suggest to you, the outcome will be scarily targeted, and the move into this sector makes Facebook a serious challenger to iTunes and Spotify.

However, the ability to pause, fast forward and rewind films will have a big effect on the current user experience. This may prove something of a challenge for Facebook, as users are accustomed to rapid browsing and not staying on a single screen for more than a few seconds.

Working as a Facebook app, another issue may be content management. Facebook currently has no facility on the site to track your apps or list them in order of preference, and with more apps available than we can count, it is likely that items such as this may get lost in the games, shop and other retailers all fighting for the space on your Facebook homepage.

Stores such as ASOS already allow products to be bought directly from the Facebook page, and at this rate, it won’t be long before Facebook controls your entire web experience. It’ll be interesting to see what rivals can come up with to even the scales.

"I've been robbed - someone tweet @999!"

The last thing the internet needs is another post with a five step plan telling you how to "do" Twitter. Instead, we want to point you in the way of someone who's doing it well. Last week, we chanced across Sevenoaks Police's Twitter page. What's so special about it? In a world full of social media experts/gurus/ninjas (delete as applicable), its a breath of fresh air: instead of the endless self promotion, retweets and follow Fridays that fill Twitter, this police force concentrates on original information that people following it are actually likely to find useful. it's a way for the force to demonstrate what it does, and also to get warnings out to the people it serves.

If you've read this far, you're probably thinking that this is not the first time that a police force has used Twitter, and you'd be right - Greater Manchester Police famously took to Twitter last year with a hugely successful project where the force tweeted every call that came in. However, this is no publicity stunt; police forces are using Twitter for its own sake, and it's very interesting to see what they're able to do - check out this picture of a siezed cannabis farm found by Salford North Police - especially given that these guys are operating on public sector budgets.

It's not perfect (from a PR point of view, it's probably unwise to tell people about successful speeding prosecutions) but it's refreshing to see Twitter used to inform rather than promote.

Using global to go local

Plenty has been written about social media as an effective tool for global brands, and growing number of small businesses have been getting in on the act too. Penderyn, the Welsh whisky distillery, has won praise for using social media to punch above its weight and develop an international presence, for example. While researching local businesses for this month’s Swift Awards, we’ve found that more and more local businesses are getting in on the act too - using social media to keep their finger on the pulse.

A desire to attract new customers and keep existing ones is vital to local businesses’ use of social networks. As a result of its uptake, service will no longer stop when the doors are closed. People are constantly connected and a 24 hour working day is likely to become a reality, at least as far as customer service is concerned.

One Swift Award winner consistently using social media in a local capacity is Reading-based poultry breeder Widgit’s Birds. Businesses don’t come much more local than this, but enterprising staff members are using Facebook to keep in touch with existing customers and build the business’s reputation. As well as the usual customer service support, the suppliers offer free advice, particularly important when keeping animals during the winter months. It’s great to see social media catch on locally – a clear sign that it’s here to stay.

Online versus traditional coverage

When developing proactive campaigns, brand mentions in the right places remain the most important thing to our clients, not necessarily how we incorporate social media in to existing plans. The core for all those in the communications industry is still about identifying the target audience before building a campaign which is relevant and interesting to the target audience; the appropriate medium – whether that includes social media or not – should always remain secondary.

What print journalists write (or indeed blog about) will always be important to brands - no question. However, a social media comment on a client’s story or brand mention is much more personal, which may well exceed the reach and power of a newspaper mention. Understanding and being able to evaluate this for a client is imperative.

With every client, we instill Brazil’s philosophy of adopting a proactive social media strategy for the right reasons, rather than simply as a ‘me too’ exercise. This approach allows us to measure exactly what we set out to do, which our clients clearly appreciate.

Brazil’s recent swiftcover.com campaign to reach mid-to-late ‘20 somethings’ about the dangers of drunk passengers in the run up to Christmas is a classic example. We prioritised social media activity alongside targeting major online news channels such as MSN and Yahoo! as well as the national newspaper websites such as the Mirror, Guardian and Daily Star – all of which we gained coverage in. The knock-on effect and planned seeding of the story resulted in thousands of tweets not necessarily mentioning the brand but each and every one linking to the coverage, which mentioned swiftcover.com throughout. A hugely successful campaign based through an online strategy – and we got significant articles in a few national newspapers too, which is always welcome!

See our thoughts on this in prmoment, or, for more information, get in touch!

PR Trends 2011 - Five of the Best

PR, like any other marketing discipline, is going through major transitions, and in 2011 I think we will see a number of significant trends which may evolve our industry further.

Here are five for your consideration:

1. No More PR Boxes

Everyone has their own perception and interpretation of exactly what PR is – thus the difficulty I had in explaining to my mother what I actually did for a living. However, the boundaries of this loosely defined discipline will blur even further in 2011. We are now seeing brand owners looking for creative campaigns rather than generic PR support – so PR can’t be put in a box and must innovate and collaborate in order to maintain a stand alone image.

2. Social media – common sense please!

Possibly more of a wish than a definite trend, however we’ve becoming increasingly jaded by the plethora of “social media gurus” and specialist social agencies trying to capitalise on the ignorance of marketing directors.

Much of social media is a combination of common sense and old fashioned communications techniques – it shouldn’t cost an arm and leg to implement nor should it be mandatory for all businesses to jump on the bandwagon.

3. Bloggalists

We have journalists, we have bloggers and we also have journalists with blogs. However 2011 be the first year in which those seeking a way into journalism become a bloggers with a loyal following first, with newspapers and magazines giving commissions based on the popularity of a blogger. Those with the most followers win!

4. Mob.Com

Everyone who is anyone has a smartphone now – and 2011 will see a further evolution. While those brand owners who produced an iPhone app last year probably think they are leading the way in mobile communications, in reality "mob.com" will be about much more than designing “cool” (but often useless) apps. QR (Quick Response) codes are starting to infiltrate popular society and there is great PR potential in developing mechanisms not just for data capture, but driving traffic to websites, shops, retail outlets and brand-related events. Also watch out for how PR can use augmented reality on mobile can engage with consumers in new and creative ways.

5. The Price is Right

The retail space is constantly being challenged. Twelve years ago the revolution started when online retailers went head to head with their “bricks and mortar” counterparts, and the pressure hasn’t subsided. This year we will see how retailers can connect to savvy consumers to offer instant deals, special offers and exclusive products. KGB Deals and Groupon have already made inroads into this market, and this model will be replicated (and improved) by established retailers, and of course shamelessly promoted through social media.

More shameless self promotion...

Well done to everyone at swiftcover.com and Brazil for pulling together yet another fab story yesterday! Following a Metro front page in November and the successful Digital Britain story (check it out in the Sun here), the guys did it again by hitting seven nationals including the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star.

The threat of drunk drivers is well documented so the team turned the ‘drunk’ story on its head and investigated the effect of drunk passengers on the concentration levels of drivers and whether they have been the direct result of accidents. The results were shocking and showed that drunk passengers are causing thousands of accidents and hundreds of thousands of near misses. On a serious note, we all want everyone to have a good Christmas and New Year so please take note of the story!

Furthermore, have a great Christmas everyone! A few nationals is always a nice way to wrap-up the year – although we will be doing at least one other story for swiftcover.com before the year’s out.

Feliz Natal! (‘Happy Christmas!’ in Brazilian/Portuguese)

Whisky's new world order

Ten years ago, whisky was something old men sipped by fires, made almost exclusively in Scotland by people who claimed to have been making whisky the same way for 20 generations.

Flash forward to 2010 and the whisky industry has been invigorated by a host of whisky distilleries springing up in the most unlikely places. Much to the chagrin of the Scots, a surprising number of these whiskies are extremely good, and we should know - we’ve been working with one of the most established brands, Penderyn, for a good few years now. We never get bored of seeing someone’s face light up when they take their first sip of Aur Cymru – that’s ‘Welsh Gold’ to you and me.

However, for all the good things the experts say about Penderyn, we still find people need to taste it for themselves. To make this easier, we’ve been putting free bottles of whisky behind some of London’s best bars to keep Londoners warm, but we recognise that there’s still a mistrust of world whisky in general, which is why we decided to put on an event with the best whiskies from around the world to challenge those perceptions.

Firstly, we invited renowned whisky expert and author of The Whisky Bible, Jim Murray to host the event. As someone who takes a truly unprejudiced view of the whisky world, Jim is ideally placed to extol the virtues of our guest whisky brands. When it came to the guest whiskies, we made sure that the invited brands were not only exceptional in their own right, but also held in high regard by Jim Murray. Amrut, from India, presented their ‘Fusion’ expression, a whisky that has been awarded 97 points in The Whisky Bible; and we were also joined by the Belgian Owl, whose Single Malt Spirit aged 44 Months expression, with 95.5 points, is everything you’d expect of the finest scotch but comes in modern, cool packaging.

When someone’s really passionate about something, people watching can’t help but become enthusiastic themselves, and the lucky journalists and bloggers (including writers from Imbibe Magazine, Bar, Love Food Love Drink and The Arbiturian) were captivated by Jim, and, of course, the whisky. Despite Jim’s insistence that we spit the first few we tried to really appreciate the flavours, I doubt anyone left completely sober at the end of the evening...

So, it went very well. So well in fact that there’s already talk of us doing one next year. If you want to come along, drop an email to luke@welsh-whisky.co.uk and we’ll see what we can do...