Have you ever noticed that a large number of Hollywood movie posters have blue and orange as their two main colours? Blue for tranquility and orange for action and energy.

It’s the best combination of colours to lure people into the cinema, they reckon. Think that sounds far fetched, check this page out!

I’ll never be able to look at another movie poster again … but it does shows the power of colour in communication.

You might also be interested to read an article on an NZ Trade and Enterprise website that looks at how businesses can use colours to guide customers to action, especially on websites.

Today, a celebration of super skill, dedication, exuberance and flair:

(… and all to the mighty backing of Band of Horses)

Offering a journalist a ride in a fancy vehicle  of some sort is an age-old way to get them to come to an event. Here’s a great set of videos (from 2006) showing a reporter taking a speed-of-sound ride with the US airforce Blue Angels team in an F/A-18 fighter jet.

We see him pass out three times as the G forces become too great for him and still he presented a positive report!

Online video is fast becoming a popular and powerful communications device. And they’re pretty cheap and easy to put together.

With a bit of planning and writing you can have a highly effective educational or persuasive tool to put on your site.

Here’s some good tips from the Open Forum about making DIY videos.

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.)

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.

Last month, we looked at how video could be the new media release. Here’s a good example from Ford showing the power of a simple video compared with a traditional media release and a social media release.

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’.