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Top 5 inspirational Social Media Campaigns

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the Stratford Business Forum Professionals group. They were keen to find out more about using Social Media in business. The best way to show the power of social media is to look at real case studies.

Here are my top 5 inspirational social media campaigns:

  1. Interflora
    The simple but heartwarming Interflora Twitter campaign always come to mind when I’m asked to about successful Twitter campaigns. Interflora launched a campaign to cheer up glum Twitter followers by sending them a bunch of flowers.
  2. marmarati.org
    the ‘Marmarati’ are a group of individuals recruited by Marmite. The site is based on enthusiast blogs and online competitions, where entrants had to describe why they loved the brand. They were entrusted to trial a new, stronger marmite spread. As well as connecting personally with their biggest fans, the story gained national coverage and its latest edition, Marmite XO, was launched
  3. Save BBC6 Music
    A supported launched a protest song on YouTube and more than 100,000 people signed up in support of saving the station. The Save 6 Music Facebook group attracted more than 88,000 members, and another online petition signed up almost 25,000 

    Campaigners used Twitter and added a ribbon to their profile picture .

  4. Asda: Averting A Social Media Crisis
    Asda reacted quickly using social media to protect it’s brand after a damaging video was uploaded to YouTube showing a former member of staff damaging products and licking raw chicken. Asda posted a video on YouTube which included interviews with shocked staff. They were able to respond quickly using a Flip camera
  5. Guinness
    The newest campaign to make it onto my list makes me smile! Guinness is using Facebook and YouTube to launch 2 online ad campaigns educating men about how to prepare for St Patrick’s Day. You have to watch the ‘man hug’ advert to see if you agree with me.
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What is Twitter?

If you are new to Twitter then take a look at this very clear article, titled ‘Guide and tips for using Twitter‘, by BBC Click reporter LJ Rich.

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Microsoft releases IE8 today

Microsoft have released the full version of their latest IE browser today. They claim it to be more standards compliant than previous versions. I’ve had a bit of a play with it this afternoon and it seems like a reasonable upgrade, though I won’t be swapping from Firefox. You can read more about IE8 on the Microsoft website.

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House & Carriage Move Forward

Earlier this week we launched a new website for Oxfordshire based business, House & Carriage. The website has received fantastic feedback . . .

“Your site looks great, just the ticket! V.simple, easy to follow and well executed.”

houseandcarriage.com

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Additions to the Top 10 WordPress Plugins post

After reading Blueprint Design Studio’s blog post Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins I started to ponder what other plugins I would add to their list. At Oxeye Daisy we have used WordPress as a content management system for a few clients. Nothing comes close to it’s ease of use and simplicity to install and maintain. We’ve looked at ‘proper’ CMSs but they are generally over the top for our customers needs.

So, here are our additions:

Role Manager

Useful for hiding all the more complicated admin options. We tend to use it for preventing page deletions of top level site pages, things that may make the site unusable if allowed.

Flexible Upload

The biggest problem we generally encounter with WordPress is how it handles images. This plugin removes the reliance on customers learning to resize images themselves. We tend to use a modified version of this plugin which prevents anyone but the admin user from being able to change the image size settings. Image size is generally part of the site design and not generally something to be changed willy-nilly.

wpSEO

An invaluable plugin for optimising page titles which helps with search engines. This separates what appears in the browser title bar on a page from what is used as its button name in the navigation. Also allows for adding of keywords.

Dashboard Editor

Used for tidying the WordPress Dashboard. We remove the WordPress Planet feeds and put in a simple menu to direct customers to the admin pages they will most like use, like page editing or updating their profile. Removing the feeds also makes the admin load a lot faster.

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Christmas at A Little Square

We have been busy helping A Little Square prepare for the Christmas rush. We have recently added new tabbed menu buttons making navigation of the site much easier for customers. We’ve updated the home page and added lots of new product ranges such as dressing up costumes and fun luggage tags in the shape of farmyard animals, aquatic characters and wacky shoes.

Visit A Little Square .

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Splashup online image editor

Whilst catching up on my blog feeds this morning I found a link to a web based image editor called Splashup. It needs your browser to have the Flash plugin installed but most do these days so that shouldn’t be a problem. A really nice feature is its integration with Facebook, and both Flickr and Picasa online photo galleries, you can resize or crop your pictures and save them directly to your account.

There are quite a few tools to play about with including text editing, filters, different brushes and layers. Even if you have an image editor installed on your computer its worth bookmarking as something like this is useful to have as a backup.

Take a look at Splashup.

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AddThis – the social bookmarking widget

AddThis is a little set of unobtrusive buttons that you add to your website or blog to enable your visitors to easily bookmark your content. They offer both subscribe and bookmark buttons. When the visitor clicks on these they will see links to several of the well known online RSS readers or social bookmark sites respectively. Using AddThis means you no longer have to second guess which services your visitors are using or leave them drowning in a sea of links. To see AddThis is action visit the Your Tomorrow blog.

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del.icio.us bookmarking

del.icio.us is a free social online bookmark manager that replaces your browsers favourites menu. It features tagging to help organise your bookmarks.

The advantage of using a service like del.icio.us is all of your favourites are available to you from any computer you happen to be surfing on. Simply sign up to the site and install the del.icio.us browser buttons in your browser and you’re all set. If you want to you can even import all of your browsers favourites by using the Import/upload feature found at settings > import/upload.

Now the only favourites bookmark you’ll need is the one to your del.icio.us account.

Have a look at our Oxeye Daisy del.icio.us bookmarks.

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Pershore Open Day

On Saturday we supported Pershore Open Day, exhibiting with other local businesses in the auditorium at Number 8. The open day was arranged by Wychavon District Council and Pershore Chamber of Trade to help promote the town and support local businesses recovering after the floods.

We enjoyed meeting other local businesses and the few visitors who managed to find us. Unfortunately the day wasn’t a great success for us as the trade stands were tucked away at the back of building and the signs were minimal to say the least!

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