'Let me take a selfie'

Here in the UK it is Mother's Day today and it would appear that THE QUEEN has jumped on the bandwagon of taking a 'selfie'. The well loved corgi's feature on the back of her iPhone case and other members of the royal family can be seen posing.

Whilst this photo looks convincing, they are indeed FAKE!

The photos were commissioned by NotOnTheHighsStreet.com  and artists Alison Jackson for a light-hearted Mothers Day PR stunt.

There are more pictures and youtube video (below) of the PR stunt.

140 characters twist

Disney released a tweet to announce their latest bi-coastal all night extravaganza on memorial weekend. The company took a new twist on the 140 character limit of tweets by including 140 disney characters shaped into a hashtag (picture below). The tweet told people to 'rock your disney side'. I loved the simple nature yet inventiveness of this tweet and using a trademark of disney (the characters) and humouring it to the twitter tweet limit.  

It will be interesting to see if this tactic will be used by other organisations in the future. 

The Brits get social

So I have just been watching The Brits and I loved their all new idea of getting people to vote for one of the categories through social media platform, Twitter.

James Cordon hosted the event and at the beginning of the night introduced this new way of voting. The category was Best British Video. This included names such as One Direction, Ellie Goulding, Calvin Harris, Naughty Boy and John Newman.

People were given hashtags to use to vote via twitter. An example of one of the hashtags was #BRITsOneDirection. Viewers of the show could vote throughout and this was the last award to be given of the night one all the votes and data had been counted.

It was called 'the social vote' and it created a new element to engaging with the audiences at home without them having to pick up the phone and pay.

This tactic worked really well and there was so many votes on Twitter that it will be interesting to see how this tactic will be adopted in further shows to increase engagement with the 'at-home audience' and online community.

The winners of this award were One Direction.

 

LEGO movie... everything is awesome

I went to go and watch the LEGO movie today and was amazed at the effort that was put in to ensure that the whole experience of watching the film was LEGO orientated. The experience started as I was walking into the theatre. Outside the screen the number had been changed to a LEGO block stating the screen number.

When we went inside the cinema and sat in our seats we noticed that all the adverts were in LEGO. These included companies such as BT, Premier Inn and Confused.com.

Although this was all the effort within the confines of the cinema it left me wondering how far Warner Bros. had gone to get coverage everywhere. So I turned to the online community to see what was happening online. I noticed that the film had a twitter account, a Facebook page and a website.


TWITTER

Lego fan of the week - Followers uploaded pictures of them in LEGO related situations. An example of some winners of Fan of the Week include a boy who got his whole family to dress as LEGO blocks for Halloween and a lady who baked LEGO cake pops.

The chance to build your own LEGO mini figure - a link was provided to a site where you could create your own mini figure.


FACEBOOK

Lego fan of the week - Followers uploaded pictures of them in LEGO related situations.

Sharing the photographs its followers have taken of themselves with the LEGO Movie stands found in cinemas around the country - In cinemas cardboard stands were set up with cutout for peoples faces and LEGO encouraged people to upload these pictures, which they then shared through Facebook.


You can also upload photos on to Instagram using the #LEGOfanoftheweek hash-tag.

Muppets: Most Wanted Trailer

During the Superbowl last night a trailer for The Muppets: Most Wanted featured (as seen below). It was deemed hilarious as it used some of social media’s most used phrases, acronyms and emoticons to pump up the famous puppet gang’s upcoming big screen release.

The same technique was used with a different trailer.


The other trailer showed an apparent real life Twitter spat between users @HotFudge1218 and @Babybean1128.


Whilst this would be classed as advertising it definitely provides for a good story and that is at the heart of any campaign, which in turn can lead to us, as PR practitioners, learning about what makes a good story.


Muppets: Most Wanted is in cinemas March 21st 2014. Superbowl trailer

 Other trailer

Wedobuyanycar.com

Jamie Jones posted a letter on Twitter that he claimed came from car dealership website WeBuyAnyCar.com.


In the letter, they ‘reached the conclusion that you sent your request to simply waste our time’. He had tried to sell them a Little Tikes play car for children.





It received over 28,000 retweets in a day and was widely shared across social media, being picked up by sites like the Mirror. However, the letter was exposed as fake, with the Twitter user that posted it doubling his followers in the fallout of the stunt.


However, the condescending tone of the fake letter posed a PR challenge for WeBuyAnyCar.com. Yet how they dealt with the situation was amazing. They turned criticism around with some humorous responses.





Their tweets were even mentioned in The Metro.

KEEK - Shower Cam

Keek, a new and exciting video blog app for my iPhone. I love watching 40 second clips of people and think it has great potential. Lots of so called celebrities are already using this new craze.
I have found a great example of a member of the "Geordie Shore" cast used the app.
Gary Beadle recognised his target market and their interests and used keek to make video updates in the shower. His fanbase have gone crazy and he is maintaing his image at the same time. He has definitely thought about who he wants to attract and people just can't seem to get enough. This was a brilliant use of social media and understanding his stakeholders.


 http://www.keek.com/!vRyrbab - see Gary's shower cam video here