Tag Archive for 'Huffington Post'

Old Spice Guy raises the bar on Twitter marketing with personalized video replies.

Published on July 13, 2010 in Twitter, business, social media and video. View Comments

Okay, I like this, it’s good marketing. It’s the kind of marketing people actually like, which is uncommon to say the least.

Following the hugely popular and entertaining Old Spice 30 sec commercial (which really proves that to be viral or contagious it just has to be good), the Old Spice Guy is currently replying to well known people on Twitter with funny, personalized videos. The videos are getting a big kick-along with the addition of a paid Old Spice Promoted Trending Topic.

Old Spice Twitter Promoted Trending Topic

So far the video replies are mostly to influential and popular people and blogs, such as Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Perez Hilton, The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, Alyssa Milano, Jason Calacanis and many others, even to Twitter cofounder Biz Stone. Needless to say, tweets and links to videos are being passed around Twitter at an incredible rate. They are of course being embedded in many blogs too, including this one.

This is one of the best paid campaigns I’ve seen so far on Twitter (and YouTube). The copywriter(s) involved must be having a a lot of fun writing the quick response videos too!

Gulf oil spill social media response

Published on May 3, 2010 in Twitter, environment, politics, social media and video. View Comments

There seems no doubt that there’s going to be a large amount of social media content in relation to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If the impact of the ongoing spill turns out to be as bad as many are suggesting, there is sure to be a continuing deluge of images, video clips, blog posts and status updates hitting the social web.

The aftermath of the spill could go on for weeks or months and have a devastating impact on the Gulf Coast. In addition to mainstream media coverage, something tells me that as the oil spill reaches the coast, citizen journalism is going to go into overdrive. With all the clean-up volunteers and people living in the area, no doubt people will tell their own stories with cameras, blogs and via Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Unsurprisingly, right from the outset blogs often categorised as “green” such as Grist (a Technorati Top 100 blog) have been covering the spill. However, soon after it became a lead news story pretty much everywhere, I noticed “Gulf” trending on Twitter as people expressed themselves and passed around links to news updates, images and blog posts.

A couple of days ago NASA released the embedded satellite images of the spill, which very popular blogs such as Mashable and The Huffington Post helped to distribute far and wide on the web. The Huffington Post now has a page dedicated to ongoing coverage of the spill, with well over a thousand comments from readers.

Gulf Oil Spill 1

gulf_tmo_2010119_2

ReadWriteWeb reported that a multimedia website has now been set up by British Petroleum, Transocean, (the oil rig owners), the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Department. The site has a Social Media section which links to a Facebook Page, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

After the Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina relief effort, the White House seems keen to communicate via all media that it will do “whatever it takes for as long as it takes to address this crisis”.  Here are a couple of messages that have appeared on Twitter and YouTube in response to the crisis:

obama_oil_spill

This video posted on YouTube was linked from Obama’s Twitter account with the message “From day one, we have launched & coordinated a relentless response to the Gulf Crisis.”

Let’s hope the Obama administration and the companies involved follow through with on their promises to put maximum effort into the clean up. Whatever the case, this is not going to be good.