I heart Orange

Orange's new (or relatively new) Orange Rock Corps idea is true brand participation genius.  Compared to the heavy handedness of it's "I am" campaign, this ticks all the right boxes for me - mixing the idea of "community" (and real life connections - at the heart of any mobile operator's values) with a healthy dose of entertainment, fun and most importantly "social action" (the new rock n roll for today's middle classes).

Carling don't get it and it annoys me!

A mate of mine sent me a mail about the new iPint campaign from Carling.  If you haven't seen it, iPint is a v.cool iPhone app which basically pours you a virtual pint of Carling.  It's one of those great ideas that is naturally viral - with people naturally talking about it + mailing each other about it.  Congratulations Carling and Beattie McGuinness Bungay - the agency that created it.

Congratulations to a point.  Although the creative concept is great, Carling and BMB just don't seem to understand how to execute and manage viral campaigns.  Two main things annoy me about the execution of this campaign:

1) The content isn't as shareable as it should be: for example, the video demo of iPint is embeded in the Carling.com website without any easy way to share it, and embed it in blogs etc. as it uses an old school proprietary video player and not a video sharing platform like YouTube.

2) Carling are stopping users from sharing their content: I only know this as when I Googled "iPint" and it came up with a clip on YouTube with the following description: " iPint game for iPod touch showing the accelerometer to simulate a pint of beer!Keeps my daughter entertained!".  Of course I thought this was pure viral gold-dust for the brand, so immediately clicked the link to then only find out that it had been pulled down from YouTube by Carling for being copyrighted material.

It was at this point that my opinion of Carling and BMB turned from viral geniuses to viral dumbasses.  Why on earth would Carling want to stop brand advocates from sharing their branded viral content with friends on YouTube?

Carling and BMB got so close to creating viral nirvana, but seem to have shot themselves in the foot at the last hurdle.  So near, yet so far . . .
 

Social media made easy

I'm back from holiday.  Hurrah!
An even bigger hurrah is that I just found this video, and now don't have to make any more presentations about social media as it's already been done for me.

Isn't this social internet thing great . . .  people share ideas and stuff to make other people's lives easier and more fun.  My job's done so I'm off back on holiday . . .