Following on from yesterday’s post on a political social media campaign gone global, have a look at this tourism campaign featuring a competition to win ‘the best job in the world’.

Around 20,000 people from over 180 countries have so far applied! The Australian promotion has been going since last month but it is still so strong that this week the organiser’s reported that their website fell over due to the high number of visitors.

The winner of the competition gets to be ‘Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef’ and will be paid to live in a luxury villa for six months, and explore, swim, snorkel and also blog about their experiences.

Applicants’ 60-second video clip entries have been uploaded to the competition’s website, driving huge numbers of visitors to the site to check them out.  (By the way, the competition closes Monday!)

Once again, a brilliant example of social media well-executed and showing its power to reach and engage global audiences, and posted here to show social media’s potential for powerful PR.

A good new article details how U.S airline South West uses social media tools in its PR work: from employee-writen blogs to Twitter accounts, podcasts, video and a social networking site.

Each tool is overseen by a single team member and is geared to reach a slightly different audience.

South West recommends keeping social media channels distinct. It has used its employee-written blogs to look at issues, Twitter to break or tease news (South West also uses it to share photos, highlight competitions and job opportunities) and its Facebook account to highlight promotional events.

The article says that the airline’s Flickr group pool is for customers interested in posting or viewing photos of trips on the airline; the YouTube channel is for people wanting information about destinations or South West trivia; and South West’s Facebook fan site is for people wanting to know about airline-related events and news.

(Better read the article promptly! The guys at Ragan, who have published this article, only leave things up for a few days. You can register on their site, though, to read all their back copies. It’s well worth the effort to register.)

Don’t advertise, give people things! That seems to be the take-out of this U.S survey that found that promotional give-aways beat out all forms of TV, radio and print advertising as the most cost-effective advertising medium.

Give-aways had “a very low cost-per-impression, high recall among those who receive ad specialty items, and increased intent among recipients to make purchases from the advertiser,” the survey’s researchers said.

Key findings:

* 84% of people remember the advertiser on a product they receive.
* 42% have a more favourable impression of an advertiser after receiving an advertising specialty.
* Nearly one quarter indicate they are more likely to do business with an advertiser on items they receive.
* Writing instruments are the most commonly-owned advertising specialty, with 54% of respondents owning them, followed by shirts, caps and bags.
* The majority (81%) of promotional products were kept because they were considered useful.

More information on the survey is here (which, by the way, was undertaken by people who do promotional give-aways for a living, but interesting results none-the-less!)

You’d think big firms would have cottoned on to online etiquette in the 21st century.  Here’s a global clothing retailer that may have used a Kiwi designer’s online work without permission on their t-shirts (as covered on TVNZ’s Close-Up show). If that’s the case, shame on you, H&M!

The beauty of the internet is that it is easy to find great work online; and it’s just as easy to get in touch with the owner of the work and collaborate with them with beneficial results for everyone. Not in this case, it would appear.

As the article says: “It has no production values, no nudity and no laughs, and yet a three-minute silent video of a man opening a cardboard box has been watched online by almost half a million YouTube users.”

Unboxing is its name. Youtube videos of men doing nothing but unwrapping new consumer goods from their packaging. Attracting viewers in their tens and hundreds of thousands.

A ‘neuro-marketing’ expert says it taps into some strong primal desires. It’s been described as ‘geek porn’!

It’s cheap, it’s so simple, it taps into everyone’s desires.  It’s powerful PR for the companies whose products are unwrapped.

Yeah, but what’s my point ?! …  Great PR ideas can be done online for next to nothing and to great effect. Feel the power.

Some good thoughts here from Beth Harte on the links and separations between PR and marketing; and where social media fits into the mix; and why the term ‘social media marketing’ may be a bit of a tangle of concepts.

A couple of days ago we talked about an authentic and ‘human’ voice in your online communications. Here’s some more info in a knowledgeable and very readable presentation. (Click on the controls at the bottom of the presentation to view it.)

Video is being used more and more as an online communication tool of choice – including how-to instruction guides; vlogs (video blogs); promotional and marketing tools; and real world marketing activity being videoed and the video put online. The good thing is top-end production values are not always necessary. A strong idea well-constructed inexpensively and quickly can be just as successful, if you know how to find and engage your audience.

Here’s a blog piece that explains the concept and shows some useful case studies; another giving some tips on making and marketing online video; another explaining how to find an audience using YouTube; and here’s an article in the NZ Herald charting the rise of ‘webisodes’.

Righto, our first blog post and it’s a great little video that explains … what blogs are and what they’re good for, and consequently why we are going to be spending time here when maybe we should be getting out a bit more.