Hill & Knowlton

Each year Hill & Knowlton staff donate their time to a worthy cause – not to write press releases and make media calls but to get our hands dirty. For instance last year we supported London Play and helped clean, paint and repair playgrounds around the Capital for a day.

This year we are donated 200-odd staff to children’s charity Kids Co.

In London there are over 650,000 children living in poverty (Evening Standard, 2010). For a city like London this is an absolute disgrace and charities like Kids Co. are looking to support those children by engaging them in activities across London such as sports days, art and cookery workshops, and skills and education classes.

We couldn’t think of a more worthy cause so on the 30th April H&K London will down tools and check in at the many Kids Co. events taking place and offer our help and support.

Obviously PR-power can only go so far and therefore to further support the activities on the day we needed to raise money to host the events.

So the challenge was set and £9,000 was the target.

The H&K Charity team sat down to come up with a way of raising the money. First port of call, Tony Stimpson (H&K London’s CFO) – “we’ll match anything you can raise” he says. Tony writes out one of those jumbo cheques you only see on TV (he actually uses them) and straight away our target is cut in half.

After much head scratching the words, “run”, “marathon”, “Soho” are uttered and before anyone can say “the only running I do is to Eat Cafe at lunchtime”, the event is set – we will run a marathon around Soho Square. Not 26.2 miles is no small order and with the time we had to pull it off the sensible decision was made to run the marathon in relay – we’d all take turns running the square and tag the next person in who would continue the run. The combined distance would need to beat the marathon standard which equated to about 200 laps.

At some point during this conversation someone managed to sneak wigs into the minutes so true to our word the Charity Team braved the balmy weather of Soho on Thursday 18th March in our finest leggings, shorts, t-shirts and wigs to undertake the Soho Square Marathon.

It was tough. The first few laps were a breeze but after a good hour the heavy concrete underfoot and ginger afros started taking their toll. Backs were aching, feet were blistering and sweat was dripping but we persevered – “do it for the kids” was the cry as we jogged on well into the second hour.

As we ran, H&Kers would come down to the square to shout their support. Even CEO Richard Millar took time out from his busy schedule to don a ginger wig join in the fun.

In between the running he held money tins out for any passers-by to donate to the cause and if anyone doubts the generosity of Londoners then I would invite you down to Soho Square. People were giving us £5 notes, all the pound coins they had on them, and more. It really was great to see so many people get behind the cause.

As we past the 2nd hour, the finishing line was in sight. Eight or so runners all gathered for the final lap – it was a slow lap but the motivation from staff and strangers was enough to get us round. 200 laps. Done!

The team were elated but the question remained, how much money had we raised with the run.

Well will staff and client donations, plus the on-the-ground fundraising we managed to raise a massive £8,385.93, shattering our target of £4,500 and making sure the 2010 Charity Day will be one to remember for the hundreds of children we will be helping on the 30th April.

A big thank you has to go out to everyone who supported the run with their donations and time. If you would still like to show you support and make a small donation you still can by visiting http://www.justgiving.com/hillandknowltonuk.

For more information about Kids Co. please visit their website at http://www.kidsco.org.uk.

I was thinking about how brands act online and some still get it horribly wrong, many get it beautifully right. But, what have a learnt from their endeavours – here are five points on how brands need to act to get it right in the social media space:

1. 1. Give it away: Whatever you are creating, building or designing, give it away for free. If the community has been involved it’s as much theirs as it is yours.
2. 2. Relinquish control: You have limited control over the space anyway and the community thrives on freedom. Don’t be dictatorial or the community will turn its back on you.
3. 3. Sack the lawyers: Unless your lawyers can act at the speed of conversation then don’t get them involved. Guess what, Twitter doesn’t work when every tweet has to be approved. By the time you get to post anything the topic is old news and the community has moved on.
4. 4. Be flexible: Things change – social media changes all the time, constantly incredibly quickly. You need to change with it and you won’t be able to if your campaign path is set in stone.
5. 5. Get out of the way: The community is there to have fun and engage with one another – if you’re not going to facilitate that then get out of the way. If you don’t, you’ll be run over.

Why should brands care about social media? Be sold in 2 minutes…

YouTube videos can be so much more than wedding dances and Susan Boyle. Here are six examples of how people are being creative with online videos:

ThruYOU: An online video music project launched in 2009 by Israeli, Ophir Kutiel. He takes random YouTube videos, edits and combines them to create original songs.His first creation, “Mother of All Funk Chords” has attracted nearly 1 million views to date

The Subs’ Videocast: Belgian band, The Subs, have taken a novel approach to using annotations in their videos. Viewers are encourage to check out other YouTube videos throughout their videocast – if you don’t fancy clicking, just keep watching.

In Bb 2.0: A collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls. Users can play select videos and adjust the volume to create original tracks.

BooneOakley.com: Well known but still worth a mention. The advertising agency turned the concept of having a website on its head and decided their home should be a YouTube video.

YouTube Street Fighter: Perhaps not the greatest game you’ll ever play but the novel approach to a fighting game has attracted nearly 7 million viewers / players.

The Mixable Dancer: Again using annotations, Henrik Leichsenring lets viewers mix beats and make a rabbit (?) throw some shapes on the dancefloor.

I would love to hear about any other examples out there. Leave a comment and let me know.

Have you ever observed a dinner table where everyone is talking over each other? It works for the individuals sat around the table but as each person tries to be heard the volume increases, and increases, and increases. If you’re not already involved in conversation, the table become nothing but a wall of noise.

It’s the same for brands on social platforms like Twitter and Facebook – if they shout too loudly, too frequently it becomes difficult for consumers not currently at the table to join in. Worse still, if you continue to dominate the chatter your guests will be silenced completely.

Brands should act like the perfect host – bring people together, spark lively conversation, stand back and smile.

Take from http://danleach.posterous.com

When was the last time you took a risk on that BIG idea? With budgets being squeezed and marketers under pressure it is all too easy to go with the safe option. But, nothing has ever been acheived through box-ticking mediocraty.

A big idea doesn’t mean a big budget.

Thanks to the nature of the social media, the costs associated with executing a “big idea” has dropped to such a level that the risk of failure should now be acceptable. Consider, arguably the biggest comms. campaign from 2009, “The Best Job in the World” – it started off with a small classified ad in local newspapers. It was only after the global community responded that real investment was made and boy did they get a return.

BJitW wasn’t the first marketing campaign Tourism Queensland deployed – there were probably hundreds before it, many probably failed. However, by thinking differently and being willing to fail they struck gold and created something that has become a benchmark in the industry the world over.

Accept failure into your brand and success will be easier to come by.

One of those artfully created videos that adds some perspective to our digital life…

On the train yesterday I was speaking to a colleague who was telling me how last year his Twitter account was hacked and he was the victim of some rather inappropriate messages being wrongly attributed to him. He is one of many who have suffered this fate but it’s not just personal tweeters who are at risk.

Brands and organisations are just as (if not more) susceptible to a hack which could seriously damage their reputation amongst a very vocal and influential audience.

And, a hack doesn’t necessarily have to be someone stealing your password, it could equally be a disgruntle member of staff or inexperienced worker who, given the responsibility of their company’s Twitter feed, can post “dodgy” messages.

Three recent and memorable examples of brands coming under fire for erroneous tweeting include Habitat for its poor judgement for mis-tagging their posts to trend against the Iran elections; Vodafone for the infamous “dirty homos” tweet; and the Labour Party after MP David Wright’s account was hacked and used to call Tories “scum-sucking pigs”.

All three of these examples of misuse have resulted in the affected companies putting in place more stringent rules and management over the use of their Twitter account. But I wonder how many other brands, who haven’t yet been the victim of a Twitter sting, still put the reputation of their brand (whether knowingly or not) into the wrong hands.

Here are 5 things brands can do to avoid getting “hacked” on Twitter:

1. Use a decent password: It’s pretty simple but I know many companies that use their brand’s tag line, office address or even the account name as their password to make it memorable. If it’s easy to remember, it’s easy to hack. Use a lengthy password consisting of a combination of letters and numbers that doesn’t have a direct association with your company.
2. Only use trusted applications: Twitter will never email you asking for your password. If a third party application or website does ask for your Twitter details then make sure they use OAuth, a system Twitter uses with authenticated applications such as TweetDeck.
3. Don’t give your entire company access to your account: Odds are there will be one person who will have a bad day and whether intentionally or not, post something they shouldn’t. Keep the Twitter team small and manageable.
4. Change the password: If one of your tweeters is about to leave (of their own accord or not) then change the password. 99 times out of 100 staff will leave respectably, but as Vodafone saw a couple of weeks ago there’s always that one person who will take any opportunity to extract revenge.
5. Put in place tweeting guidelines\strategy: This isn’t about restricting creativity or conversation. But agree on clear guidelines that outline what your company will proactively tweet about. Why do you not have a Twitter strategy as you would for every other channel of communications?

These aren’t 100% foolproof – there is little you can do if someone REALLY wants to go on the attack. But consider the importance and value of your brand and question whether you are protecting it enough on social media platforms such as Twitter.

I recently had the good fortune of meeting with Vikki Chowney, editor of Reputation Online, who kindly spared some time to answer 20 questions on the new venture, brand reputation and her trip to the Far East.

1.       What is Reputation Online? Reputation Online is an online publication from the new media age stable, designed to help brands and businesses manage their digital profiles.

2.        What is it doing differently? We bring editorial and user-generated insight together in one place, providing a hub for thought-leaders to discuss relevant issues but also a place for those with little experience to come and learn.

3.        Who is the site aimed at? Anyone responsible for online reputation. Naturally, PR and comms. professionals make up a large part of our audience, but more and more we’re finding that HR or customer service bods are interested as the notion of integrated responsibility for everything online becomes the norm.

4.       Why did you get involved with the site? It’s a challenge to build something from scratch, but I’ve got the credibility of a well-established B2B publisher in the form of Centaur behind me. That’s pretty exciting.

5.       Who else is working with you? Reputation Online has the same publisher and editor in chief (Mike Nutley) as NMA, as well as a shared sales team. There’s also lot of crossover in terms of content between the two publications, so I write a weekly column for them and the editorial team writes content for me when relevant.

6.        What are your main sources for information and stories? At the moment, it’s a 50/50 mixture of proactive and reactive story-generation. I use Google reader to track industry publications, as well dip in and out of Twitter. I also use Response Source for specific stories, and get a lot of proactive outreach from personal contacts.

7.       How can the site help brands and those working within the comms. industry? We try to make the digital world less scary and more accessible. A lot of this is learning by example, so we work with in-house contacts to find out how brands themselves deal with the online space, as well as talk to agencies outside of the tech world. You learn a far richer lesson when you look at how other people are doing things, instead of those within your own bubble.

8.       How has the online space changed the way we consider brand reputation? That’s a big question! There are a multitude of factors, but one of the main changes is transparency. An issue that once upon a time may have been swept under the carpet or forgotten is now laid bare on a person’s blog for everyone to read and comment on. New technologies mean that the speed at which one complaint can spread is near instantaneous. This scares some brands, as they’ve gotten away with being lazy – but a focus on great customer service is now at core of most great strategies for maintaining a good brand reputation.

9.       How does offline and online brand reputation differ? In my eyes, it doesn’t. Online reputation just has a more measurable and obvious reach. You can see how many people have commented on a blog post to complain about something, but you can’t tell how broad the net goes when someone starts talking about the same issue in a pub.

10.   What single thing can brands do to improve their online reputation? Look at what people are already saying about your brand online. Are your customers happily chatting about the great service you’ve provided? Maybe you could use that as the starting point for an evangelist programme. Or are they complaining? If so, why aren’t you responding? If you don’t, your competitors certainly will.

11.   Which industries do you think need to seriously consider their online reputation? Any brand that sells a product or service is an easy target, however all industries are risk. I haven’t seen a company yet that doesn’t have customers or users talking about them somewhere online.

12.   In the past 12 months, what’s the best example you have seen of a brand improving or utilising their reputation online? I always point to Domino’s as a great case study. The infamous ‘nose picking’ video really didn’t go down very well. It was reported to have had no effect on UK sales, yet arguably contributed to the $11million stock devaluation last year. The brand woke up, and via a baptism by fire, got to grips with online crisis. Not only were Domino’s extremely open at the time of dealing with it, its latest campaign called Pizza Turnaround is a stroke of genius in terms of making what is essentially a new product launch appear to be a personalised response to so many ongoing complaints. Nice work.

13.    And the worst example? Possibly because it’s front of mind, but I’m disappointed with Paperchase. After being accused of plagiarism in a private email from a designer, the brand chose to leave the situation until it was blogged and became a Twitterstorm of the highest proportions.

14.   What should they have done differently? Applied some basic rules of customer service and dealt with the complaint as it happened, rather than ignore it. Once they were found out, it washed its hands of the situation, blaming an external consultant and then preaching of the ‘dangers of Twitter’. It’s sad to see, especially when it’s a situation that could have been fixed in five minutes.

15.    Is brand reputation confined to the corporate space or should we consider our personal identities online as a brand? I don’t think you could call every individual conversing online a ‘brand’ per se. My Mum just wants to talk to me, and read some of the news. I advise her to be careful and simply employ some common sense. For a student, the same rules apply, but possibly more so as employers turn to the likes of Facebook to research a potential candidates suitability.

16.   What’s the one thing brand managers should consider in 2010 with regards to reputation? Immediacy. Mobile, gaming and location are becoming ever present in terms of brand offerings. These things put a company’s actions under even more of a spotlight as consumer want things faster, on their own terms, and with no interruptions.

17.   How would you describe the future of online brand reputation? It’s been said time and time again, but just remembering that the online space can provide brands with a personality, and that employees need to reflect that humanity in the way they talk to customers.

18.   What single brand do you most admire and why? Cadbury is doing a great job of integrating online and offline engagement at the moment. I love the way that it’s using experiences in the offline world to drive people online for more information, using social media as the hub of free content and a way to keep customers loyal to its brands. I hope Kraft doesn’t crush that creative spirit.

19.    If you were to recommend one book to read with regards to reputation, what would it be? Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li

20.    What are you most looking forward to in 2010? Tokyo. I’ve wanted to go since I was a little girl, and we’re finally making the trip in November. It’s all I can think about!

Taken from http://danleach.posterous.com/