Word of Mouth on the street

Today I’ve been reading about the most popular iPhone app of the minute, and one of the most clever, innovative and provocative ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Tom Ewart of Publicis is right. The public *have* grown tired and bored of the shock tactics used by charities to jolt us into donating to the plethora of good causes out there, (and don’t even get me started on the clip board people that stalk me in the street and make me feel guilty as hell).

Publicis, working on behalf of Depaul, is the agency behind iHobo. Like the good old fashioned Tamagotchi, iHobo is your very own interactive homeless man, whose life you are responsible for for three whole days. Like Tamagotchis, this high maintenance iHobo needs you to provide food, clothes and small change at any time of the day of night or he could end up buying drugs or worse still, dying.

This 'game' with a message brings to light some of the key issues the charity wants its key demographic to think about, but in a creative way which really provides the user with a more tangible connection to the people it needs to help.

Depual, the largest UK based youth charity dedicated to preventing homelessness, needed a way to tap into young, affluent donors after discovering that their average donor is 65 or older. This has clearly influenced the decision to utilise powerful word of mouth techniques, social media, and a little bit of controversy.

Ultimately though, whilst this has brought the charity well and truly into the public eye, will the app make a significant difference to donations? I haven’t seen any stats on this as yet, but my guess is it will be a success. With the option to donate £1, £3 or £10 at the end of the three days, it seems almost guaranteed that anyone interested enough to download the app (210,000 as of last week) will be interested in donating at least £1 to this worthy cause.

Happy Birthday Pacman!

Procrastination has been taken to a whole new level today with the Google homepage being transformed into iconic arcade game Pacman, which for the record is 30 years old today.

I always enjoy a good topical Google logo, but this has to be my favourite so far; probably because it’s the first ever fully interactive playable doodle, and it’s had absolutely the desired effect. Everyone seems to be talking about it, playing it, losing at it and being distracted by our little yellow friend. Genius.

(Try inserting another coin to see Ms Pacman join the party. 2 can play using the WASD keys!)

Port in a social media storm

Once again I have found myself totally out of the social media loop recently, but there seem have been some interesting goings on in the ever merging worlds of PR and social media this week, which have given a newbie PR like me a lot to think about. Due to the nature of my new job, social media will form a large and important part of the strategic campaigns I will be working on. Where there seems to be a pretty standard process to traditional media relations with certain dos and don’ts, PR practitioners still don’t seem to have such a straightforward rule book for social media relations. It seems apparent that we are still learning.

If you’re not aware of the this week’s storm which saw one agency being heavily criticised for its handling of a client’s social media arm, I suggest you check out the blog posts below and interpret them as you see fit.

http://www.wolfstarconsultancy.com/2010/05/12/pr-doesnt-need-to-get-social-media-wrong-this-time-vodafone-again/

http://adamvincenzini.posterous.com/my-response-to-the-wolfstar-blog-post-pr-does

http://www.wolfstarconsultancy.com/2010/05/13/response-to-comments-on-vodafone-post/

I’m not really interested in taking sides on this issue (as interesting as that may be). I am however interested in the implications of this issue for PR and social media, and as Stuart Bruce said; “highlighting an industry problem, and working together to fix it.”

This matter really seems to stress the two sides of PR and social media. The public side, and the stuff that is, more often than not, kept out of the public domain. Stephen Davies, for one, has shrewdly suggested that one implication of this could be that social media is not actually *that* social. What he means by this, is that our identities on social networks are purely designed for social networks. They are not really a true representation. They are how we wish to be perceived in a particular domain or field. Whilst there is of course rivalry within the PR industry, it is not that common for agency bashing to appear in the public domain, it is more a behind closed doors kinda activity. But perhaps these discussions should be more ‘social’?

Budding PR and social media officers like myself should be keeping our eyes and ears open for incidents like this. Something we keep hearing about is ‘blogger engagement’, but clearly there are ways of engaging with bloggers that are more successful than others. I have always been wary of blanket style press releases, but I’m sure they have been shown to work in some cases with the right hook. It just seems that this takes the personal touch out of blogger engagement which for me is one of the main factors of its success.

V interesting stuff...