The trend of fundraising through social media has been evident within the last couple of months, with ordinary people the world over sharing the fundraising message within thousands of networks on the online community. Of course, the most  impressive effort to-date was the ‘Helping Haiti’ response, but it seems to be  happening all over again with the likes of Sport Relief. Using the simple combination of Facebook applications, celebrity Tweets, throw in a few funny you-tube teasers videos and even the simplest of blogs and you’re well on your way to a winning formula for a fundraising campaign.

Using social media is helping to fundraise in ways that traditional media has previously  been less effective at doing, by skipping the ‘middle man’ and adopting a more engaging approach. Social media proves that anyone who is willing to – even a seven year old with a bike who raised £55k in three days - can campaign to raise funds on a level that hasn’t been possible before –without rattling a single bucket.

One thing’s for certain - it’s fast becoming clear that the importance of social media in 2010 could overtake traditional media within almost any successful campaign – and not just in times of fundraising. It’s changed the way we think so it’s now expected by many that there will be a social media source for all campaigns, and all brands for that matter.

Posted by Claire Pace

After picking up the newly redesigned Observer at the weekend, I was surprised to find that the much anticipated new look had actually done away with my favourite thing about the paper – my beloved sections!

Failing to Observe the beauty of a Sunday paper, the sections, which couples and mates alike love to share, have all been condensed into four robust bulks of content – News, Sport, New Review (a whopping 56-pages) and the Observer Magazine. Unfortunately, if I now want to keep my vociferous housemate quiet with a paper on a Sunday morning, she has to sing off the same hymn sheet as me, so to speak. Not exactly conducive to domestic bliss!

Firm favourites such as horoscopes and travel have been cruelly axed, causing heated debate amongst die-hards with several Observer reviews being posted online, concluding that the paper is now all style and no substance – and yet the substance might not be so much of an issue in the Observer Magazine, as most readers think the new font size too small to decipher anyway.

Others think the new-look Observer’s move to a new bolder format points to a confidence and focus which perhaps has been lacking before, and the in-depth coverage helps to cement the newspaper’s reputation as an analytical heavyweight.

You might ask why I’m so preoccupied with the newspaper in this digital age? Unfortunately The Observer’s website is as disappointing as its printed counterpart, being merely a sub-section of sister paper The Guardian’s well-established online news site.

One thing is clear – the purpose of the redesign is about as clear as mud, and has left its readers feeling cross and confused, rather than informed and inspired. The paper is clearly out of sync with what its readers want. If it doesn’t tune in soon, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper may struggle to survive.

Posted by Holly Oldroyd

As some of you probably know, we’ve been working on an exciting project for Visit Leeds promoting ‘£10 a night hotel rooms’ around the city.

Both online and offline coverage has been secured throughout our mission to raise awareness amongst potential visitors to the city. The campaign to date has proved very successful, especially online with information on websites, blogs and Twitter. Several independent bloggers (who know a good value offer when they see one) have written posts about the offers for their readership to see, such as Miss Thrifty and Recessionista UK to name a couple.

Travel journalists have likewise seen benefit in the offer and (might I add) our efforts too – thank you Alastair for giving PR’s like us some credit!

In addition to the hotel offers, Visit Leeds is working in partnership with some of the city’s restaurants and attractions.

Posted by Charlotte 

The JK wedding entrance dance (where Minnesota couple Jill and Kevin and their wedding party boogied their way up the aisle to Chris Brown’s Forever) was uploaded to youtube on 19 July and in just eleven days has notched up 12 million views. 

The wedding party have recreated their special moment for The Today Show and the video has already spawned multiple mashups and remixes.  To top it all, the Chris Brown track is currently sitting at number 9 in the US iTunes chart (and climbing fast up the UK chart too). 

But perhaps rise of the track up the charts isn’t entirely viral - popping over to youtube to enjoy the boogying a second time round I noticed an ad inviting viewers to buy the track on itunes.  Which means that the music industry will certainly be benefitting financially from all this, even if the happy couple’s only reward is their 15 minutes of fame.

Another interesting aspect of the whole hoo-ha has been the redemption of Chris Brown, who has been lying very low since he was convicted of assaulting his girlfriend Rihanna, but is now back in the Top Ten - with a song that apparently started life as the backing track for a Wrigleys chewing gum commercial…

posted by gemmaT

It was interesting to see today the buzz created online and offline about Dr David Walsh’s comments that women should endure more pain and use less pain relief during child birth. Well,  actually that’s not really fair, he didn’t quite say that, and he said a few more things besides too.

But he did say child birth pain can be good, and he’s a man! How would he know what it feels like! And of course that was what the media focused on.  Dr Walsh started his morning with the usual round of Radio 4, BBC Breakfast, and it didn’t take long for the social media wheels to start turning.

As you would expect the online parenting community (well the mums anyway), mummy bloggers and parent Twitter followers didn’t take long to get fired up. So by lunchtime when he was due on Radio 2’s  Jeremy Vine show, I was eagerly anticipating him taking questions from the show’s enthusiastic (opinionated?) listeners.

First he was running late. Then he decided he couldn’t speak to the show. Had he been spooked by the quick reaction online to condemn him?

Who knows.  Perhaps he had expected that the detail of what he was saying would be covered and understood, that his experience would mean more than his gender. But I’m afraid two things were working against him:

1) The media love a good ruk and want to get mummies fired up by his comments

2) Child birth and motherhood are bloomin tough, and the last thing we need is anyone else saying we are not getting itright (on top of grannies, mother-in-laws & competitive mums).

I’m not going to comment on where I side (not on this blog anyway), but I will certainly watch with interest how the debate moves forward online.

Once again the social media mummies are in the news.

Charlotte Renwick

It was interesting to see this week how the media used our survey for first direct about common courtesies. 

The Daily Mail, GMTV and Daily Telegraph all focused on the lack of timeless values, rather than the statistics showing how many people had been courteous to others in the last month, or that 98% never forget to say please and thank you (which sadly I am not able to claim).

It certainly sparked a lot of debate, with a huge amount of comments on the Daily Mail website alone. 

I look forward to hearing what take George Galloway takes when he interviews Dr Wood on TalkSport tonight!

One of the fun parts for us was shooting a video where we saw how people reacted to common courtesies. We also made a web TV show with Dr Gary Wood, which was a great way to engage with people visiting big sites such Tiscali and Supanet.

In fact, we’ve used these with great success for a few clients. It’s great to have something so interactive, with questions coming through as it is streamed live.

We’ve been seeding content this week, and look forward to seeing how bloggers and forums react to the survey. One thing’s for sure, manners and values certainly get people fired up.

Posted by Charlotte

Reading The Times recently, I spotted an interesting story which revealed a changing trend in TV viewing, particularly when it comes to Channel 4’s younger audiences.

Skins, the hit teen drama which brought us Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel, returned to our screens for a third series on 22 January pulling in 1.35m viewers.    But what’s more surprising is that the Channel 4 show, where more than half of its audience is aged under 34, attracted an additional 283,000 viewers online - around one in six of the show’s total audience.

Dan Sabbagh’s article  reveals the shifting viewing habits amongst younger audiences which presents a challenge for advertisers who try to appeal to online viewers, apparently reluctant to accept advertising breaks while watching content on the web.

Although unusual, these figures don’t necessarily mean that younger viewers will eventually abandon their living room all together in favour of their laptop to catch their favourite shows.  It does, however, highlight the need for markettiers to increasingly reinvent their strategy to appeal to a younger, more technology-savvy audience.

While brands in the past have been content showcasing their product alongside popular programmes or including a url which directs consumers straight through to a product’s homepage, more and more we’ll see markettiers embracing new technologies to ensure their brand has resonance amongst a fickle teen market, hungry for interesting content online.

Besides, according to recent research from ChildWise, many children spend an average of 2.7 hours online each day.  How many brands will teenagers come across in that time?  And how do you ensure your brand is noticed?

It’s all about the way you engage with your audience and for me, that’s the beauty of digital media.  The web is a vehicle for creating communities which interact and get involved and the key is to generate content which will appeal to these communities.  The Skins website has done a fantastic job of developing its own community through forums, social networking groups and exclusive content online, and in the future I’m sure we’ll see all brands following suit.

Posted by Jessica Davenport

I really must say hats off to the creative team behind Aleksandr (sic) the meerkat, which I’m sure you’ll all know by now as comparethemarket.com’s fabulous new marketing concept. And of course congratulations to the in house marketing chiefs who stuck their necks out to sign it off.

You can imagine them all scratching their heads saying, ‘we love it, but will everyone else?’ And of course we do! He is just one of those characters we can’t help but love.
Not only is the ad a stoke of genius, but they have followed it through in a really impressive way.

If you haven’t yet compared meerkats, I suggest you do here . They could have so easily gone for just a holding page to link the two sites, but allowing people to create ‘scubakat’ from Rio and comparing it with ‘rollerkat’ from Miami Beach gives their integrated campaign credibility and creates the longevity which will help people remember who was behind it all. Given they have reported the site crashed recently due to traffic overload, it seems a resounding success.

Twinkling on Twitter

Such a lovable character as Aleksandr works fantastically with social networking sites, and his Facebook page is clearly helping him establish a cult fan base, with 111,215 signed up to date. But it’s Twitter where Aleksandr really shines.

His regular updates about his solid gold golf clubs and his fur coat from Minsk keep him firmly in mind. Posting photos of his meerkat mum and dad encourage his Twitter fans to interact with him, and after a fortnight where the world appears to have gone Tweeting crazy, I’m sure his fanbase there of just under 3,000 is set to grow.

It’s great to see the campaign also uses PPC to generate maximum awareness - shown here -who would have thought ‘meerkat’ would be a desirable key word?

You might think that while Aleksandr is fun, and is an entertaining friend on have online, he won’t actually bring home the bacon. I think you’ll be wrong. Wrapping up his concept so closely with the name of comparethemarket.com means we will remember not only him, but why he existed. I for one have been impressed enough to mentally commit to making them the first place I look when I need to renew my car insurance.

Even the son of a mongoose would agree. Simples!

(For more info see)

Posted by Charlotte Hancock

This week marks the official launch of OnVisible, and I’m excited. Very excited as it goes. I’ve been doing online PR here at Brahm for some time now, and as our expertise continues to grow, it feels great to get the chance to shout louder about it.

What makes a good online PR person?
So what does it take to be an online communicator? Go back a few years and digital whizzes and PRs were a million miles apart, in fact they pretty much lived on different planets. (You remember? When people stockpiled water and candles because of the forthcoming millennium meltdown!).

As I’m sure you know, things are very different now. As companies begin to wrestle the beast that is online reputation management, you need creatures which embrace the principles of PR and mix it with a deep technical understanding of the workings of the web.

I, and indeed the rest of the Brahm PR team, am lucky enough to work alongside the Swamp at Brahm team – over 40 digital experts who work for the likes of Umbro, Heinz and GlaxoSmithKline. Over the last couple of years we’ve begun to work closer and closer together, until we speak each other’s language and the OnVisible team could be born.

Knowing your page rank from your link juice
So now I know my raw link juice from my cloaking, and my meta tag from my canonicalisation (OK, I’m just showing off now). And my colleagues who are techies at heart understand the subtleties of messaging and how we use our unending determination to reach the information gatekeepers.

In fact we’ve even created an animation to show how we’ve fused these two types of communicators together, which we will be showing you soon.

Stronger together
So as we launch our OnVisible team as a harmonious group of unique and wise beasts, I hope you will visit us often, to join us on our journey.
Posted by Charlotte Hancock

From PR to digital marketing and all that’s in-between – I would like to introduce myself to the online world as a newly converted technophile. The ever-changing dynamic of the ‘www’ never ceases to surprise and intrigue me – the ‘what’s next’ factor is definitely keeping me on the edge of my swivel chair. And that’s exactly what I love about it.

I’ve recently noted that incomprehensible dots and shapes are bizarrely the latest marketing tool advocated by not just key players in the retail sphere from where it originated – Japan (such as Puma Japan), but by music artists (e.g. the Pet Shop Boys), and the film industry on an international scale. It was recently used to promote the DVD release of 28 Weeks Later in London, and the latest James Bond: Quantum of Solace in Australia.

The dots and shapes I’m referring to are barcodes. The barcode concept has been jolted into the 21st Century as they are no longer being used to merely differentiate products and prices at the supermarket check-out – but to also store information on a brand, promotion, person – you name it! Once the barcode (‘2-D’ or ‘QR’ code, DataMatrix and Microsoft Tag) has been ‘snapped’ on a software-enabled camera phone, it links to digital content that can be viewed via a mobile phone’s internet browser – genius!

Umbro did a world-first early last year by placing a QR (Quick Response) code on the care label of their new England away kit. Once ‘snapped’, this led over 50,000 England fans to an exclusively accessible, mobile site - created by our very own digital division, Swamp @ Brahm.

It’s this new technology coupled with an increased demand from people to be informed and entertained that has led to many brands in the UK jumping on the band wagon.

For the first time, Pepsi will see a big PR push of the QR technology into Britain after recently unveiling its plans to print over 400 million barcodes on its products. The barcode will hyperlink consumers to websites, games, competitions etc. in an attempt to interact with target audiences. Since the announcement, the Times Online recognised that City AM (free financial newspaper) and Yell (Yellow pages) are also set to entice British consumers in such a way.

This trend cements the notion that mobile phones are being viewed as an integral platform to view information and content by consumers about, well, anything.

It’s common knowledge that third-party generated content is seen to be more credible than that generated by the brand itself as it’s deemed more objective – however, self-published content still has an integral role to play especially when it comes to informing consumers.  But, it goes without saying that perceptions held – particularly in today’s ‘search and share’ society that no matter how positive or negative they may be, they can be helped or hindered by what third-parties are saying.

Although it seems that the purpose of companies embracing this new technology is for brands to interact and engage with its consumers in a new and exciting way, as a PR it raises the question – is there an opportunity for me to use this communication method by way of reputation management? This is something I’m currently exploring for a couple of clients – watch this space!

Posted by Charlotte Brophy