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.

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.

anyagram - London fashion week

With london fashion week around the corner designer Anya Hindmarch has created a new website to find your anyagram. it says you can fashion a new identity for yourself to tie in with LFW. I used my name to complete the website and have posted the picture below of the anyagrams for my name. The website has brought fun and excitement to everyone, even those who do not care about fashion. So how will be you be using your anyagram?
http://anyagrams.com/

Tweet not speak

I just came across this lovely idea for introducing new Public Relations students to Leeds Met University. The students used Twitter to demonstrate the power of social media. The campaign was called #tweetnotspeak. They had to use twitter and the hashtag to communiate in the class rather than talking to each other. Maybe the University of Greenwich will adopt this hands on and creative approach when looking at social media as I know I would have loved an activity like this in lectures.

http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/news/leeds-met-pr-students-get-creative-with-tweet-not-speak-campaign27112012.htm?type=student

Social Media - good or bad?

Is social media really effective PR or is it a 'cop out'. Whilst writing an assignment for university it got me thinking does social media really class as effective PR. For it could be argued that the practitioner is not doing any work and is using the power of social media as a bit of an easy ride in their job. Is this why so many businesses and organisations are obsessed with sites such as Twitter and creating hashtags because someone somewhere can not be bothered to do their job to an acceptable level. Yet, on the other hand is social media that much of an influence on peoples opinions and behaviour that this is the new way forward and this explains the dramatic emphasis with organisations. Personally, I could see the rise of social media in PR falling just as quickly in the future. For every 'good' PR campaign through social media you see one which has gone terribly wrong. For example, the waitrose "I shop at waitrose because..." campaign which could have said to failed miserably.

So will social media last in the PR practice?