Get your photos on Getty

I’m enjoying the ads on Vice at the moment.

They’ve had some really good photo-related campaigns recently, and I thougth I’d start with the Olympus Stories of the Eye.  For this campaign, Alice Dellal, Lovefoxxx, Miquita Oliver and Daisy Lowe were given a PEN camera to capture their daily lives.  Also, Vice users were invited to submit their images for the scenesters to pick their favourites.

It is/was a partnership, so it sits up there on Vice and is pretty cool.

A more recent campaign I’ve seen on Vice is Getty Image’s lost/found where you make a Flickr set of 10 images, and ping it over to Getty.  They have a look, and if they like it, they’ll add it to their library.  Presumably they’ll then sort out licensing with you and ask what control you want over your work.

What I like about lost/found is that it gives you a way of getting your images onto Getty (beyond the usual review process), whilst creating a feed of the submissions.  Unfortunately, the Getty photo pool on Flickr is disabled.  Surely this would be a great way of getting the images together and creating a focus for the campaign.

Nevermind.

In both cases, what works about the campaigns is that they’re using an existing site and inviting users to take part, rather than creating something new and driving traffic to it.  They also give something of value; for Olympus it’s entertainment from relevant celebs, whilst for Getty it’s the chance for photographers to distribute their work and get paid for it.

image CC – LeatherHeart on Flickr

Are you LinkedIn in London or Bebo in Belfast?

Jam took a close look at social networks and where their audience resides.

Social networks are just that – social. You’re on one over another because that’s where your peers, friends, collegues and collaborators are. However, it’s good to take a step back and objectively look at the extent to which other demographics or regions use the various platforms.

Whilst from our London office Facebook appears to be an unrivaled leader, the Scots and Northern Irish are in fact 15% more likely to be on Bebo than Facebook.

Furthermore, whilst Twitter is clearly 2009’s media darling it still has less unique users than Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. When was the last time you read an article on Bebo?

The data-maps above show the regionalisation of various social networks, as of September 2009. They are very much a snapshot in time. With Facebook and Twitter’s growth leveling off, Bebo and Myspace continuing to lose audience it will be very interesting to run these diagrams again in 2010.

What are your predictions?

Snippet: What is fashionable online?

(This is a snippet from a longer blog article)

During September, 22,781 online conversations circled around one major topic: fashion. This autumn’s major fashion events displaying collections for spring and summer 2010 have now ended.

When people are talking about fashion week, the main forum used is Twitter with 25% of all the conversation. Probably not all that surprising, but certainly highlighting Twitter’s integration with mobile handsets has now made it easier than ever to let the world know about the latest ‘must have’. What is also interesting to notice is that the major social media platforms are the main medium for discussion and not the dedicated fashion forums. That blogs hold 57% of the mentions, compared to forums with 9%, shows that, as with the designers themselves, fashion bloggers want their own stage, rather than sharing it with others.

The Graph to show where Fashion conversations are happening online. Twitter is considered a Micro blog, hence placed under the category ‘Blogs’. Source: Brandwatch

However, when people are willing to listen they want to hear from the experts and fashion brands need to be there. Gucci is one of the major brands that have understood this and their Facebook page has yielded over 450K fans to date. Marc Jacobs on the other hand, who is not engaging with the fans on Facebook, but is only hosting a fan page, has only 150K fans. Gucci consequently is the most mentioned fashion brand relating to the recent fashion weeks, and has three times as many mentions as Marc Jacobs. – perhaps not just a co-incidence.

So learnings for fashion marketers, head to the next event with your iPhone in one hand and your influential blogger in the other.

Spreading Jam on the Mashable Open Web Awards

The Mashable Open Web awards are currently live and kicking. It’s an opportunity for social media campaigns, apps, agencies, non profits and individuals (across all platforms) to get a nice little ego boost. I say ego boost, as there is no prize attached beyond Kudos. However, ‘social media agency 2009’ does have a nice ring to it.

For Mashable however, it’s the perfect marketing tool. Entrants are encouraged to vote in any of the 50 categories once per day (or twice if you cheekily log in through Facebook and Twitter). By casting your vote, you automatically and compulsorily post to your social network of choice. With no option to turn this functionality off 64,004 link-laden tweets and Facebook posts promoting Mashable have so far been generated – creating one heck of a good viral campaign for next-to-no expenditure (albeit quite spammy).

I’m sure it helps that Mashable is massive (1.6m twitter followers and 349k UU’s in October) so it began with an excellent communications platform to get the ball rolling.

Votes are being cast at a rate of around 5-10 per minute, with some 100k+ Facebook fan pages battling it out fiercely and imploring their fans to cast their vote.

Not being one to miss a trend, Jam are hoping you’ll take a moment to:

1. Go here: http://mashable.com/owa/votes?v=Jam&c=12
2. Log in through Facebook or Twitter
3. Drop “Jam (spreadingjam.com)” into the Nominate box
4. Check the for box says “social media agency”
5. Hit Submit!

(You can enter every day until November 15th, so daily votes will be met with karma and kindness)

Heal the world, make it a better place

For one day only Jam are social media observers no more and are joining other bloggers to tackle climate change. So far 8,263 from 146 countries have registered for this year’s blog action day.

But what’s it all about? I hear you cry. We all write a post that helps unite the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.

I cannot stress to you enough how important climate change is. So I went to a very serious website to get this very serious fact:

“The bottom line is that temperature and CO2 concentrations are linked. In recent ice ages, natural changes in the climate, such as those due to orbit changes, led to cooling of the climate system. This caused a fall in CO2 concentrations which weakened the greenhouse effect and amplified the cooling. Now the link between temperature and CO2 is working in the opposite direction. Human-induced increases in CO2 are driving the greenhouse effect and amplifying the recent warming”

We can all make a difference and at least try to offset Las Vegas

How to deal with a social media PR crisis

There always seems to be a celebrity tweeting about a brand they’re unhappy with – two weeks ago it was Rob Brydon with O2, and since then, Perez Hilton has been informing more than 13.5 million people about how T-Mobile and Danger and Microsoft have all failed.

But what’ s a company to do in a situation like this?

1. @reply to any celebrities talking about it (but only if they’re not overly angry)

You can generally tell what overly angry is based on word choice. The two examples above put Perez Hilton on the list of people to ignore. Chances are, if you respond to Perez Hilton and tell him you’re working on it and you’re very sorry, it will add more fuel to the fire.

2. @reply to all the customers with questions.

Be proactive about it; it’s okay to respond even if they haven’t tweeted directly at you. If you don’t know the answer, try to find it, and if you can’t, be honest.

3. Issue statements and updates as often as possible.

You might have nothing to say, but that’s okay. Just assure everyone that you’re still working on it.

4. If you can’t solve the problem right away, start giving away free stuff.

Free merchandise, gift certificates, contract releases, upgrades. Plan it out. If this problem persists longer, how big should the giveaways be? Pay attention to what your customers are saying and if they think it’s enough.

5. Make sure that when the problem is resolved, they are happier than before the problem started.

This might mean a free upgrade or extra services for extended period of time. Make people who ditched the brand think twice about it. Solve a problem well, and your customers will be more loyal to your brand and less likely to jump ship.

T-Mobile is doing rather well in this situation by using all of the above tools so far, but we’ll have to see if in a month’s time Perez Hilton is wishing he had been more patient.

Tweet for a cab ride

As the number of twitter users grows more and more business are seeing the benefit of adding Twitter to their digital media strategies.  Green tomato cars an eco-friendly taxi service in London is no exception. They claim to be the first private hire service in the UK to take bookings via twitter. There’s no need to rely on a phone to get a ride with them. Simply direct message your booking details to @greentomatocars a tweet back is then recieved containing a unique booking reference number. You then sit back and wait for a Toyota Prius, (the world’s most popular hybrid car, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as a traditional black cab does) to pull up and whisk you on your ‘green’ journey. A cool idea in theory the take up isn’t huge with just 423 followers, but I’m sure the more people become aware of it the more it will be used…Spread the word.

A business-to-customer communication strategy such as this example is great at  immediately engaging with their customers providing intimate social conversations that fit in with our digital lifestyle. Doing this also creates brand loyalty, which for any brands should be the up most importance.

Customer Service: O2 versus @RobBrydon

I’ve always been a big fan of O2, they succeeded in turning Britain’s most famous white elephant into a trendy live music arena, they were the first to get the iPhone exclusivity contract and all in all, I have been a happy customer of theirs over the years, but when it comes to their social media, I think they are missing a trick.

So, ok, they do have some presence on Twitter (@O2) but it doesn’t have  a clear purpose, one minute it’s advertising the PalmPre, the next it’s talking about its entrepreneur awards, now it’s moved onto customer service with a few @replies appearing on their page.

They obviously know it is important to be involved in social media, but they do not seem to have a clear purpose or strategy for their engagement with consumers on Twitter. If they did, they might have noticed that a certain star of Gavin and Stacey has been tweeting about O2’s 3G coverage (or rather, the lack of it) and responded to him in the public domain to resolve his issues.

So far, Rob Brydon has tweeted at least 5 times in the last 2 weeks about the coverage:

Rob Brydon currently has 75,169 followers, and counting.  According to TwitterCounter.com his followers grow by an average of 153 per day, meaning that by the time Orange/Vodafone start selling the iPhone “later this year” (which I am taking to mean December), Rob Brydon will have an audience of approximately 85,821 followers who will hear about his troubles with O2 3G coverage.   He has already had many @comments about his problems from his followers, including, rather cheekily:

Ok, not everyone will see his tweets, but as an influential and respected celebrity, his opinion is bound to start impacting his followers’ behaviour.

Word of web + word of mouth = consequences.

Will it stop people getting an iPhone? No. Will it encourage consumers to view other networks more favourably?  I would say so, yes.

My advice to O2: get your customer services team onto @RobBrydon immediately! Ensure your response is in the public forum as an @reply. Now is your chance to make an impact.

Sources: Twittercounter.com, Twitter