Enjoy!

I was think of the various housing authorities we have as clients and thought that this site’s navigation was different – engaging and well executed.

This site takes a different approach to surfing, by integrating with your Facebook, Flickr and YouTube profiles to create a very personalised experience. A nice variation on a theme.

For our healthcare clients I came across this – a fun game, useful for whiling away the hours whilst you wait for an appointment. I’m not sure about the merits of the brand experience or how long you would engage with it, but I lasted 10 minutes before I got bored

Can’t remember why I liked this. Perhaps it was the music? Or the navigation? Or the who experience. Whatever, it’s worth spending some time exploring…

Lastly, this is just a harmless bit of fun

The guys at Ogilvy London have just released this new making-of video, showing the behind the scenes trickery involved in their latest viral campaign for BP Ultimate. Aside from the notion of watching an advert being created (Sony adopted this approach with the Bravia ‘exploding paint’ ads), it got me thinking about how it could be a nice way to demonstrate the collective power of different roles in an organisation working together to achieve a result that couldn’t normally be achieved by an individual on their own. Halifax does this in their advertising (or did, in any case) but mostly to market products, rather than recruit people. In fact, I rarely see TVCs used in Recruitment Marketing, but this approach (releasing the teaser, plus the TVC, plus the making-of video) seems to becoming the norm.

http://lm.chinwag.com/t/4856178/5930239/456662/0/

For those of you who haven’t been involved in TVC production, it is a real eye-opener to get an insight in to how exactly they did manage to shoot a group of people carrying a car across a city (Cape Town to be specific). And the reason that they shoot in South Africa, rather than anywhere else, is that it is significantly cheaper. Apparently.

Ok. Russ has set me a challenge to see if I can get a William Shatner video into a Friday mail. Easy. This week’s theme is about the use of YouTube as a channel for communicating with key audiences. In a testament to films I thought we would feature the good, the bad and the ugly.

Enjoy

The good

BarackObamadotcom as a URL. Need I say more?

Intelligent use of multiple channels in a clever and more importantly, integrated way. 170,958 subscribers. 24,813 friends. Compare this to Gordon Brown’s efforts (see below)

He just oooozes cool.

And more than that, hope.

The bad

Star Trek originally only ran for 3 series, but in that time managed to address and debate a range of contentious issues in a way that have had a hugely beneficial impact. The use of human beings interacting with alien species allowed Star Trek to cover and debate homosexuality, interracial relations, authoritarianism, racism, economics, human rights, feminism and the role of technology. Needless to say, it made William Shatner (the actor who played James Tiberius Kirk, the captain of the USS Enterprise) a global legend.

And his legendary status remains to this day, with YouTube full of ridiculous short clips and excerpts of him doing everyday things. Like this one. I mean, who want to see a man showing off his new BBQ smoker? I mean, really? But boy, he sure can eat a lot of pork…(Russ wanted me to mention something about the resultant Klingons, but I thought that was going too far…)

The ugly

Gordon Brown has had a torrid time of late, so in an attempt to leverage the goodwill that Barack Obama has generated through his uber-modern use of social media, he has taken to the use of YouTube in a less formal way to air contentious issues. Unfortunately his gawky, awkward and uncomfortable excerpts have resulted in him being parodied and ridiculed by both the opposition and his own party. This wasn’t helped when he created an ‘Ask The PM’ tool which allowed users to submit a question and users to vote on which one they thought was the best, which he would then answer.

Unsurprisingly “why don’t you resign” was the standout winner…

…even more unsurprisingly, the PM removed this question and refused to answer it

It will be interesting to see how many tune in on Saturday and whether the Cowell Media Machine turns Britain’s talent into Frankenstein’s monster…

The person in question had been given a brief by their EMEA Board to investigate how organisations were using Social Media, in an effort to develop an organisation-wide strategic approach. With more than a touch of cynicism about the value of such an exercise, (reinforced by a fruitless afternoon’s trawling search engines for an answer), the Director had started searching LinkedIn Answers for inspiration. They came across a response I had posted to a similar question and as Bernard Hodes Group had an existing supplier relationship with the company (albeit with a different department), she contacted the head of that department to get my contact details. The irony wasn’t lost on me…

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we regularly trawl the ether for examples of good/best practice (as well as poor/worst practice). We try to encourage our clients to benchmark themselves not only against other competitors in the HR industry, but against a broader competitive set. In one such recent ‘expedition’, we came across a useful blog that provided a list of social media marketing examples.

There were two specific questions that the consultant was looking for: how were organisations using Second Life and whether YouTube could be used for commercial purposes. I’m not going to delve into the response we provided (conversations are still ongoing), but the list of URLs below is worthwhile exploring. The first is a list of some companies using Second Life, the second, a list of some companies that are using YouTube. Neither list is exhaustive, but it should start to give you a good feel for the pros and cons of each option.

Second Life

·         ArcelorMittal:  Second Life presence

·         Coca-Cola: Virtual Thirst contest in Second Life to design a vending machine

·         Dell: Second Life island

·         IBM: IBM Business Center and Rational Software Conference/Hipihi in Second Life

YouTube channels

·         Alltop: Alltop tutorial on YouTube.

·         AT&T:  Share AT&T channel on YouTube

·         DaimlerAG: Daimler-Blog YouTube channel

·         EMC2:  YouTube channel

·         Forrester: YouTube channel

·         Johnson & Johnson: J&J health channel on YouTube.

·         Kodak: YouTube channel

·         Quicken: YouTube account.

·         Sun Microsystems: YouTube account.

·         UK Government: Number10 channel on YouTube

·         Wells Fargo: YouTube channel