Not the usual beast!

Mobile network Three has chosen Brando as its retained agency to lead its social media presence and engagement strategy within the UK.   The agency, which will report into Three’s newly formed internal Social Media team, will be responsible for ongoing consultancy and campaign work.   They’ll work in conjunction with the Social Media team to manage Three’s social media presences, create new and engaging content, and build upon Three’s existing blogger relations programme.   Brando won the account following a five-way pitch and will start work immediately, replacing Three’s incumbent Word of Mouth agency, 1000heads.   Margaret Burke, Director of Brand & Integrated Comms said: “Social media has become much more of a focus for Three this year, something that’s been reflected in the creation of a four-strong internal team. The timing was right for us to re-focus our priorities for social media, and we took the opportunity to evaluate the external support that was available in the marketplace.   “Brando’s strategic thinking impressed us right from the creds meeting and we’re confident that they’ll give us the right level of direction to take us forward in leaps and bounds in the social media space.   “1000heads’ commitment and dedication to our account over the years has been hugely commendable, and we wish them all the best.”   Shelley Morrell, Brando Managing Partner who will be heading the account, said: “Three is a visionary brand with a real appetite to make a mark in social media.  We are thrilled to be appointed as their partner to help turn all these exciting plans into reality.”   Three is currently recruiting to fill two of its remaining internal social media vacancies. The team, which sits within Three’s Sales & Marketing department, is responsible for the management of, and strategy behind, Three’s social media presences to deliver a meaningful customer experience.   Brando will join Three’s existing rosta of marketing agencies, including 3 Monkeys Communications and Glue Isobar.

Brando launches the world's first Google street view Zombie game on behalf of Virgin Trains. Launch has received widespread online, print and broadcast coverage from The Sunday Times In Gear to Capital radio! Hosted at www.dontgozombie.com, the game celebrates Virgin Trains’ new ‘Don’t Go Zombie’ campaign that urges commuters ‘zombified’ by the monotony of motoring to swap their cars for the freedom of travel on a Virgin train. Brave zombie-rescuers will be catapulted onto any UK street, armed with nothing more than a Virgin Trains ticket machine. To prevent them ‘going zombie’, players can save mindless motorists wandering the streets by issuing them with train tickets. Successfully ‘ticketed’ targets are humanised, transported onto a Virgin train and rescued from wasted time behind the wheel. Each month, the highest scoring players will enter a draw to win First Class travel with Virgin Trains*. If caught, the player’s Facebook profile picture will be zombified creating a zombie avatar that’s launched into the game. The player then has the option to galvanise support from friends by posting a ‘rescue me’ message on their wall. And if that isn't enough frenzied fun, later this summer Sir Richard Branson himself will be appear in the game as a zombie. The public are invited to seek out the Virgin founder and transport him to the safety of a Virgin train using their expertise in targeted ticketing. Sir Richard Branson said: “At Virgin Trains, we aim to make your journey as quick and stress-free as possible. Anyone who has ever experienced the M6, knows very well that long motorway journeys can suck the life right out of us, turning us into zombies! So we are urging people to ditch their cars, and hop onboard. Over the years I’ve appeared in many fun guises but never as a zombie –at least I’ll know what I’ll look like if I ever come back as one of the undead!”

High street optical retailer Vision Express has appointed Brando to launch its eco-friendly eyewear range. The Modo Eco range claims to be the nation’s first range of affordable luxury eyewear with a green conscience available on the high street. Brando will work alongside sister agency MCBD, which looks after the above-the-line account. As part of the brief, Brando will run an integrated PR campaign including media relations, a launch event and partnership marketing with celebrity Eco stylist Jocelyn Whipple, who counts Alexa Chung and Laura Bailey as regular clients. For every pair of Modo Eco glasses sold, a tree is planted in developing communities and recycled frames are donated to Vision Aid Overseas to help people with poor vision in these countries. Brian Linnington, product and marketing director at Vision Express, said: ‘We know how environmentally aware our customers have become in recent years, so the new range launch is something we feel passionately about.’ Brando managing partner Mandy Sharp will head up the account.

Another day, another post about the Old Spice campaign. It would be amiss of any social media or indeed PR company to not take notice of something like this, not just to marvel at its genius but also to take a few pointers.   If you have been living under a rock for the last few months, here is a recap. Old Spice launched their new campaign in February of this year, staring ‘The man your man could smell like’ Isaiah Mustafa. The advert is funny, the content is funny and social media helped bring it to the masses; at the last count the first advert attracted 19 million views across all platforms.   With the advert being such a huge success, not only in the US but the UK and Europe too, they needed to do something bigger to keep the buzz going, and with that they created another advert and started communicating with the ever-growing fans. Not through DMs, @replies or an employee; Isaiah started responding directly to the YouTube comments, Tweets, Yahoo Answers and blog posts about him in over 180 videos hosted through the Old Spice YouTube channel and sent out via Twitter. Some of the videos were clearly created before the social media divulge but he was working quickly, with nearly all the videos being posted in a 3-day period.   What happened next is definitely something for the social media history books. The internet went mad with the buzz about the Old Spice videos, in the  3 day period, there were nearly 200,000 tweets relating to Old Spice. To guarantee maximum exposure, the brand had ensured that a predominant amount of the bespoke videos were directed at the big hitters on Twitter; Ashton Kutcher, Perez Hilton, Biz Stone, Ellen Degeneres and Gizmodo to name just a few. They even managed to create a suggested but non-direct response to ‘4chan’, the message board thankful for Lolcats and Rickrolling, and those guys hate everyone!   But, and this is important, they didn’t forget the little guy. They responded to comments from the average tweeter as well, making it accessible for all, including everyone in the joke and ensuring people become personally invested in the brand. This is often the crux of a successful campaign, whether it is considered social media or not, making everyone a part of it enables it to reach a wider audience, ensuring more people talk about it.   No-one could have expected such a phenomenal response, especially one that happened so quickly in real time. ReadWriteWeb acquired a direct quote from Iain Tait, of Wieden + Kennedy, the marketing agency behind the campaign.   "We're looking at who has written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we're editing it as it happens."   But one of the main reasons it worked so well was its infectious humour and element of fun.   And just as soon as it began, it was over. After 3 days and nearly 200 videos, Isaiah brought the sad news that the end had arrived with his goodbye video;   Without a shadow of a doubt, the Old Spice campaign was a landslide success; they got everyone talking about the brand (online and offline), they were able to promote their new-look branding, gain thousands of new followers on Twitter and sales of their products nearly doubled. But above all, they made people laugh with a couple of funny videos, and really isn’t that what social media should be all about? Providing users with something that you would want to share with your friends.   And for those of you thinking of creating your own viral video, I’ll leave you with this thought ‘Brands don’t make viral videos, users make videos viral’ – Dan Greenberg, Sharethought

“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we do it” – Erik Qualman. When my 71 year old father-in-law brought up ‘social media’ as the topic for an after dinner discussion, it drummed home yet again just how MASSIVE a deal it is.Anyone in our industry knows how much of an impact social media has had on our day-to-day work.  Now, I’m old enough that the arrival of email saved me getting paper cuts from stuffing press releases into envelopes and I thought that was a pretty epic step forward…nope, small fry!  The advent of social media is more comparable to the industrial revolution and has been such a huge force on the PR and marketing industry, everyone in it has had to sit up, take note and in some cases train-up quick!We’ve all seen a decline in the number of print consumer lifestyle mags and papers we can target as PRs and a shift to more and more of them existing solely online.  Erik Qualman says that consumers no longer search out news, it finds them and we will no longer search out products and services, they will find us via social media.  Now, I’m not sure that the ‘searching’ element will ever disappear, as we all need to go shopping now and then, whether high street or online, but the point has merit.  Clever companies will be using social media to (subtly) push products to a community they consider their target market.  Those that are really clever can sometimes use the impetus of a social media ‘groundswell’ to dictate what the traditional media report – we constantly see the media’s news agenda reporting on something that’s been such an online phenomenon, they simply can’t ignore it.  Those of us that can figure out how to do this in a positive light will strike gold. Another nugget of info from Qualman was that 50% of mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook and we should all think about what that would mean for bad customer experiences?  There are apparently 200,000,000 blogs out there – 85% of the UK population now online and 60% of those actually read and trust what’s written.  A whopping 78% of us trust peer recommendations and, perhaps unsurprisingly, only 14 % of us trust advertising.So, the big question on everyone’s lips in our industry now is “which discipline, if any, should ‘drive’ social media?” – is it the PRs, media buyers, marketing agencies, ad agencies, digital agencies?  WHO?  Clearly, if I had to, I’d opt for PR as it has always been about creating stories and eliciting a response. Therefore the conversational, dialogue and third party endorsement elements of social media are closer to public relations than any other discipline. And we’ve also been doing it for so much longer than many.  Either way, it’s clear that the days of advertising leading and channel-based communications following are numbered.  It’s evident that a cross-fertilisation of disciplines is paramount to make this work for our clients.  What I know we’re really enjoying now is being more involved in the development stages of a client’s communications plan, so that we can ensure from the outset that PR has a relevant fit and role alongside any ad creative or company ethos, rather than the old days where we’re given a pre-determined theme to a brief and told to run with it. To end with a final Qualman quote: “Social media is not a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.”   Now, the hard part for all those brands and agencies out there – getting it right…!For those who haven’t seen it, watch Qualman's YouTube video here