Monthly Archives: November 2010

Charity marketing using social media

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Charities often lead the way with marketing innovation. They cannot just hit the ‘spend’ button like some businesses appear to. This has led to charity fund raising leading the way with huge public engagement successes like Race For Life (> £38m raised) and Walk The Walk (> £8m).

Social media ticks the boxes for charities as well. This is low cost stuff that builds on engagement. Add to this a layer of celebrity involvement and success is in the making.

The latest low cost, social media innovation for charity is a wonderful campaign: celebrities leave Facebook and Twitter until their fans donate enough money to get them back. In one or two instances this could be an excellent opportunity for us to wave goodbye to irritating celebrities, but as the cause is World Aids Day and the celebs are the likes of Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake and Usher … I anticipate success.

Free replacements for Microsoft

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Where did it start? Bye bye BlackBerry and hello HTC Desire, an Android phone. This led on to the following, liberating changes:

Google Chrome replacing Internet Explorer.
Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts replacing Outlook.
Open Office replacing Microsoft Office.
Open Office Writer replacing Microsoft Word.
Open Office Calc replacing Microsoft Excel.
Open Office Impress replacing Microsoft PowerPoint.
GIMP replacing Adobe Photoshop.
GNU replacing Dreamweaver/Frontpage.

The above are all viable alternatives to the software I was using and now my computer is running like greased lightning.

Barclaycard Freedom goes to the loo

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Barclaycard Freedom Rewards 150x150 Barclaycard Freedom goes to the loo

Barclaycard Freedom Rewards

Barclaycard Freedom is a reward programme like no other. Well that’s what the website says. And I have to say it does look good.

With the trend away from credit cards and towards debit cards in the UK I guess this is exactly the type of promotional activity that credit card brands need to be getting involved with.

My question is: how does it look for the Barclaycard brand when the POS is left on the basins, in water, of the gents loo in PizzaExpress? Not very aspirational was my first thought.

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  • BARCLAYCARD FREEDOM card

But BT, you know who I am!

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BT Infinity 150x150 But BT, you know who I am!

BT Infinity

BT’s current strapline is “bringing it all together”. Good idea…so why don’t they do it ?

In this mornings post was a piece of direct mail from BT addressed to “The Householder”. Fabulous, but they know who we are; we’ve got two landlines and we’ve been customers at this address for over 10 years. In fact I’ve been a non-stop BT customer for 30 years.

Surely the company that is delivering the “fastest, most powerful broadband ever” can merge data for a mailshot? Perhaps the personal approach doesn’t pay dividends/deliver the ROI.

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  • bt infinity news letter

Those Welch are very civil

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Virgin Media Those Welch are very civilNow that’s what you want, your contractors staff being polite and civil advocates for your brand.

This morning, at Loddon Primary School, there was a big hole in the ground. There were four workmen digging a trench to lay green pipes to carry data cables. As you can imagine this gathered a crowd of 8 and 9 year old boys that found this all much more fascinating than going into school.

One of the boys asked the men what they were doing. Back came the reply, “We are laying data cables for Virgin Media so that you can get faster internet in school.” Wow!

Many people know I’m not a Virgin Media fan (largely because in my opinion they are NTL in disguise) but what great advocacy for your brand. And then one of the boys went off and repeated the message to a friend…that’ll be word of mouth as well.

So, plaudits where they are due. The contractor working on the site was Welch Civils. Well done to you and Virgin Media.

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  • welch civils ltd

Name and shame the door drop marketers

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love christmas love bracknell 150x150 Name and shame the door drop marketersIt’s about time I started fighting back! What is the point of having a ‘no junk mail, commercial leaflets or flyers please’ sticker on our front door if it is ignored? So, to make me feel happier about the junk mail I’ve decided to name and shame.

Today’s lucky entrant is Bracknell. Yes, Bracknell, that not so new town in Berkshire. An over-produced, 10pp full colour A5 gate-fold piece of junk mail was just shoved through my letterbox. The purpose of this campaign is to get me to travel ten miles to Bracknell to do my Christmas shopping when I live just one mile from Reading…I don’t think so.

I presume all retailers in Bracknell have paid for this, directly or indirectly. I do hope they think it is good value.

Extra reasons I won’t bother going there are nicely delivered in the leaflet: it is from the Bracknell Regeneration Partnership (I’ll bowl along when you’ve finished); Jamie Archer (who is he?) will be turning the lights on.

City Slacker slick marketing

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Michael Mueller, a friend of mine, has a film titled ‘City Slacker‘ in pre-production. I’m sure it will do well as the the team involved are good and the story line is on the money.

The reason for mentioning it here is that I was intrigued by some of the early marketing for the production. There is the obligatory Facebook page and a standalone website introducing the cast, creatives and the theme. The fun element is that you can bid to have a name of your choice used for certain characters and you can have family photos featured in the film. This is not product placement, it’s fan placement.

With Fiona Gillies and Robert Bathurst in the cast it’s set to be great, but will you feature in the film as well?