The Zombie Experiment in NYC: Zombies Go Viral and Take Over The World!
Could it be a sign of our times? Symptoms are sure known: the urge to escape reality, the irrepressible need for a more intense life, a deep fear of monsters fed from early childhood, a bad economy… Well, let’s not try and find any more excuses. Love them or hate them zombies are everywhere, online, offline, you won’t be able to escape!
In case you needed any proof that the walking dead are taking over the world, could the 7.3 million views of AMC’s latest viral campaign, the « Zombie Experiment in NYC » be a strong enough evidence of their growing power?
The Zombie Experiment in NYC
Some try and fight back, scheming with a mini-site, a YouTube channel Put Zombies Back, a Facebook game and an incredibly well-done viral ad (check below) to “put zombies back” where they belong. In this campaign from AMC, a US cable channel, New Yorkers are even transformed into zombies to prove that although scary those “monsters” do not exist. Not in real life at least.
The good thing is they are not for the total extermination of all zombies. They just want them back on their TV show, The Walking Dead. Phew! That was close.
Hats off to Thinkmodo, the viral marketing agency behind this successful campaign!
Needless to say, at Buzz Brothers we are definitely “Team Zombies”! What about you? Do you belong to our team or to the mighty anti-zombie gang?
T.C.
Marketers Are You Giving Up On #Twitter? 20 Tips For Better Engagement (part 2)
After reading last week’s article about Twitter’s drawbacks, you were probably impatient to know how to manage it effectively for your company and start seeing results. Why would you bother? Well, the answer is simple: you want to make it work, because you see the true potential, and heard annoyingly a lot about those who meet tremendous success with their strategy. We don’t pretend to be Twitter gurus but here goes a list of 20 tips for better engagement and R.O.I. that are not always implemented, even by household names:
The Basics
1. Biography Biographies are very important, no matter the size of your company. Many forget that this is your main ID on Twitter. With 140 characters you need to make sure your potential follower knows about 1. Your activity 2. Your Unique Selling Proposition 3. One or two of your star products. No need to mention your location or your website (it will be underneath your biography) Try and mention one of the following too: your Facebook and/or other Twitter accounts, your blog URL or any other information you deem relevant.
2. Visual Branding It is crucial that your official account represents your visual identity, either with a creative touch (better) or sticking to your classic graphic chart. Same goes for your profile picture. Make sure it is in good quality - not pixelated - and coherent with your background and theme.
3. Social Integration You’ve got a Twitter account, you spend time on it. It is therefore essential that you publicize it. Make it easy for your followers. Be it on Facebook, on your website, on your blog, let the world know about your Twitter account!
4. “Thank you message” for followers This is a must have. In addition to your bio, if space was missing for instance, you can add other information for potential leads: about your products, your blog, Facebook presence, etc. It can be automated but if you can, keep it customised
What’s in a Tweet?
Marketers, Are You Giving Up On #Twitter? (part 1)
Twitter remains a mystery for many brands. As a result, companies are kind of reluctant to invest time on this platform and build a coherent strategy.
There are certainly quite a few drawbacks to deal with, and the comparison with Facebook is not a fair one. The question is relevant though; in times where the social ROI is the next big thing, knowing how to spread your efforts on the different social media platforms is not a superfluous luxury.
We tried to list the main concerns raised by marketers about Twitter. Those could very well be your questions:
Engagement
- You never know what’s the right number of people to follow back. All? 50%? Only influencers?
- As a matter of fact you don’t know either the right number of people to reply to. All of them? Only negative comments?
- You feel like your tweet should be rewarded the best tweet of the year award; yet the engagement rate is not looking good. At all.
Mini-Site For Felix Baumegartner’s Red Bull Stratos Project
Today marks the launch of the multilingual mini-site for Felix BaumGartner’s incredible spatial challenge, the Red Bull Stratos project.
Wearing the all-new El Primero Stratos Flyback Striking 10th chronograph, the Austrian, ambassador for Zenith Watches, is taking the plunge in the summer of 2012 and will jump out of a capsule suspended from a balloon in the stratosphere at an altitude of over 120,000 feet / 36,5 kilometers, nearly four times higher than passenger planes typically fly.
The project will try to transcend human limits that have existed for more than 50 years and smash four world records:
- the highest manned balloon flight
- the highest freefall
- the longest freefall time
- and, for the first time in history, breaking the sound barrier with the human body
Pinterest: How 5 Top Brands Are Doing It Right
You surely have heard a lot about Pinterest these last few months. The visual booking platform created in 2008 has grown from a start-up to a $1.5 billion business. More than just a trend, Pinterest is the fastest growing website ever, with over 17 million users visiting every month, and now ranks as the 3rd biggest social media platform, behind Facebook and Twitter.
Needless to say all eyes are set on this hot social networking property based on users’ recommendations. Although many brands are logically keen to invest time to build up a relevant presence, some are really doing a fantastic job at being inventive and steering away from dull product marketing focused content.
Let’s have a detailed look at 5 brands that are doing it right on Pinterest:
1. Peugeot
Carmaker Peugeot uses Pinterest as a creative, beautiful and fun hub for its followers, making it compelling and engaging, most notably with its puzzle contest boards. Users have to find the missing pieces in a treasure hunt that leverages on other social media platforms like Facebook. First followers who find the bits can pin directly on the dedicated boards and win prizes.
2. Starbucks
The brand that always gets it spot-on with its social media strategy made no exception with Pinterest. Starbucks hit all the right notes: share what users like and want, make them your cherished brand ambassadors, engage in meaningful ways to foster conversations around your brand. In one short sentence: get into your fans’ heads. Our favourite board that illustrates very well this moto, is the “Coffee Moments Board”, where they pin images of recipes of various drinks based on coffee and most importantly of people enjoying their Starbucks coffee.
Google Play Test Ads: Simply. Brilliant. Advertising Marketing.
Simple. Effective. Original. Advertising marketing at its best. Google latest ad series for its cloud service Google Play had us very excited. Just like Apple in its finest iPod ads days, Google is becoming a serious ads creative player on its own, thanks to their advertising team at Google Studio G. The creative squad directed four very original ads, with a simple claim: “Because it’s all. Simply. Here.” And a mission statement: “All your favorite entertainment, available anywhere you go.” Promising!
Introducing Google Play
Unlike Apple’s ad for its cloud service, Google managed to get it all right: the nostalgic trend in tech, the “I’m so tired of all these cables around!” feeling, the “Can’t it just be simpler??” agony, bringing in a “low key anti-tech feel” as described by the blog the Vision Thing. In a world where commercial galactic flights are almost a reality, it should certainly not be a problem to definitely get rid of all those cables, right??
Each of the 4 Google Play Test Ads describe in a very unexpected way how all available services on Google Play (would possibly) work: Balloons: Books; Gears: Apps; Bananas: Movies; Liquid: Music. Funny and inventive, you would be missing out a great deal not watching the series below, for only 4 minutes worth of your valuable time!
Google Play Test #0923: Balloons – 14 July [Books]
“Suppose you downloaded a book from the Internet to your tablet. With Google Play, you can enjoy your books on all your devices anywhere, with no syncing.”
The Dark Knight Rises: How Social Media Brings the Buzz
Unless you have been living in another planet, you are probably aware that one of the biggest and most anticipated movie release of the last 3 years, The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR) will hit theaters worldwide on July 20th.
The film’s social media campaign orchestrated by Warner Bros and its numerous “Friends of Gotham City” (aka its “gold” marketing partners) has been key in creating all the hype surrounding the epic conclusion to filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. The Hunger Games and The Avengers, two of this year’s highest grossing movies adopted the same strategy: create and control the buzz with fragmented, misleading material, measure and adapt social media actions until and long after the movie’s out there. Since the first exciting trailer on December 19th that set the Internet on fire, we’ve been spoiled with three more, strategically disseminated across social media platforms.
Let’s take an entertaining tour of the creative moves on the social media world:
Facebook: the movie’s official Facebook account has almost reached the 1 million mark, thanks to a very active and clever promotion of all cross-media user generated content
Leap Second Bug. When One Minute Is No Longer 60 Seconds.
Y2K Millennium Bug
Let’s go back in time. Do you remember the gigantic chaos predicted for the new millennium, the Y2K bug or the Millennium bug? Damn, it failed to deliver. You can pick your side, but the total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K is estimated at a whooping $416 billion. Those who were against spending billions and billions argue that it would have been much more efficient and cost-effective to solve the problem on a “fix on failure” basis. Relieved, to say the least, we thought that the “end-of-the-world-cult” or “the hoax of the century”, as a journalist from The Wall Street Journal called it, was just a very bad memory for taxpayers, businesses and governments worldwide.
What Does An Extra Second Take?
Not so fast. Traveling in time, here we are in 2012. Past Saturday, on June 30, the so-called leap second glitch brought down several web operations. Reddit, Mozilla, Gawker, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon… the list goes on, and on, and on. What happened? Poor anticipation? Miscalculation?
Adidas Spot for Spain’s Football Team: The Past Doesn’t Count
“ Our motivation is to forget about the fact that we are European and World Champions, to forget that we are the team to beat. Everything starts from zero. A new jersey. A new challenge."
Augmented Reality Apps We Love
Augmented reality (AR) is one of the most exciting technologies around. As Wikipédia well defines it, “Augmented Reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.”
We selected a few augmented reality apps that we love:
1. Layar
One of the most remarkable augmented reality iPhone app ever designed, Layar captures the view from your iPhone camera using satellite data and GPS coordinates to display a virtual overlay of information about the places around you.
2. (T)ether
This AR app allows you to use your iPad without ever touching the screen. With a little help from an augmented reality glove, users can create virtual environments on the tablet with simple hand gestures
3. Google Goggles
A Google Labs project, Google Goggles is your personal and virtual encyclopaedic assistant. The app alloys you to pull up info on a number of different types of objects. Goggles can read barcodes to obtain product details, translate foreign language text, add contacts by scanning business cards… oh, and solve Sudoku puzzles too!
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