Video above: A common reaction to Two Girls One Cup.

I’m pretty sure the most basic rule of marketing for a global brand is to not use any references to the most disgusting pornographic video ever made in the history of mankind.

Apparently agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine skipped class that day and in their recent Facebook campaign for Dr Pepper they went all out.

Here’s the outline

“The agency’s latest campaign for Dr. Pepper was an app on the social network that gave consumers the chance to win £1,000 if they allowed the brand to take control of their status updates. Starting in May, Dr. Pepper fans allowed their status updates to be filled with such gems as:

“Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?”

The messages were randomly generated and ranged in degrees of embarrassment. One of the more offensive updates ended up on the profile of a 14-year-old girl. The message read:

“I watched 2 girls one cup and felt hungry afterwards.”

Amazing! A Coca-Cola brand soft drink mentioning a poop-eating porno! The only time you should ever mention that porno is if you want to induce vomiting from your audience, I doubt that was in the brief.

I would love to have seen the look on faces when word got to head office.

So a Coca-Cola spokesperson tells The Guardian:

“We apologise for any offence caused. As soon as we became aware of this we took immediate action and removed the status update from the application.

We have also taken the decision to end the promotion. We were unaware of the meaning of this line when the promotion was approved and have launched an investigation into why it was included.”

If you’ve never heard of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’, rather than be responsible for your instant dismissal at work for trying to find it, I have a YouTube work friendly clip that will sum it up for you:

Nike gave its Facebook fans first glimpse of the advert before a wider introduction, a great incentive to follow a brand rather than the usual unimaginative newsletter style spam you tend to get from companies on Facebook and Twitter these days.

News of the adverts availability prompted 107,000 fans to sign up to watch the commercial which was released 6 hours ago. You can check out the fan page here.

Fans will be able to edit the spot to create their own Facebook soccer campaign, the best creators will be sent to Nike Academy soccer camp.

They’ve topped the Next Level ads by a mile, Rooney defo gets the best skit out of all the players I reckon. This is going to be b.i.g.

Check out the nod to Facebook ‘Likes’ and YouTube!

Adding this to the 17 greatest football ads!

Spot on.

Reminds me of slide 8 of my 2010 predictions.

Here are some of my thoughts for the next 12 months.

Enjoy and discuss.

It’s filled with stats (sources included), metrics and fanastic findings about consumers behaviour and marketing in the social media revolution. This is one of the most interesting presentations I’ve read in a long time, definitely recommend you read it.

A condensed and full version below:

Condensed Report – Key Findings

Full Report

Head over to the Razorfish blog to keep up to speed.

Sometimes it’s a fine line between appearing innovative and just plain pissing people off..

A couple of weeks ago, Ikea managed to get tons of praise for their latest Facebook campaign which allowed users to win furniture by tagging their name onto the desired item. Westfield Australia however have done just the opposite, they’ve managed to annoy users enough to push them into creating their hate groups related to the promotion. That’s pretty special.

Westfield created a Facebook application to promote its $10,000 gift card prize draw. The application updates the user’s status with a Westfield branded message “All I Want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift Card“, with some extra copy thrown in stating the user has now gone into the prize draw to win the card. This was a viral hit straight away.

Over 369,000 Facebook users have installed the application and updated their status in just 5 days, great news right? Yes of course, just 10k to get 369,000 people engaging with your brand sounds like a steal…but the promotion has attracted a large amount of backlash from other users.

As you can imagine 369,000+ people updating their status in a country with 6.5 million users is bound to spam quite a few news feeds. What is the natural course of action for all these angry people? Yep, create and join a Facebook group.

There are now a total of 25+ anti-Westfield Gift Card groups, which is amazing considering the length of time this has been running. The largest group called  ”If All You Want For Christmas Is A Westfield Gift Card, I Don’t Want To Know” now has over 4000 members but not all group names are that lovely, here are my favourites…

If you’re wondering why you’ve never seen anything like this on Facebook before it’s because it blatantly breaks the Facebook terms and conditions which state:

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.

Which explains why the application has just been taken down:

This is a big deal because the application is the competition component of the campaign which launched on November 1st. It is being supported by radio, letterbox drops and in-centre point of sale.

So not only do they have no competition mechanic and basically no campaign, they are now left with 25+ Westfield hate groups and hundreds of negative comments in the aftermath! Those will be around for a looong time too.

Is this another case of When Social Media Attacks? I think so. Lots to be learnt here.

The agencies behind this badboy were M&C Saatchi and Ikon Communications.

[Via Mumbrella & Digital Media]

It’s not often you see a bank being innovative, that’s why this initiative from First Direct (http://www.live.firstdirect.com) caught my eye.

First Direct is part of the banking giant HSBC and offers online and telephone services in the UK with no actual branches. Their strapline is ‘banking’s better in black and white’ with the idea that First Direct is “honest, open and transparent” which ties in nicely with this campaign.

First Direct Live measures feedback from customers across the web, as well as inviting them to comment directly on the site. The page features Flash widgets that show sentiments such as positive and negative words being used about First Direct on websites such as Review Centre, Dooyoo and Ciao. However it looks to me as these three sites could be the extent of it’s external web sourced comments as First Direct doesn’t list where the information comes from, which is utterly lame considering this is all about being ‘transparent’.

There’s even sharing options in case you want to show all your Facebook chums how well First Direct is doing with customer feedback!…

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The only way this could benefit anyone is if you wanted all your friends to flock to the ‘hide’ button next to your newsfeed updates so that they never see any more from you again.

According to this blog, “It works by taking everything that’s said about us online, from over 8 million forums, blogs and social media sites, and then feeding it, live onto our website for all to see”. However out of those 8 million sites (are there really that many?), I can only see Review Centre, Dooyoo and Ciao mentioned.

These sites aren’t really a good source for First Direct’s ‘sentiment tracking’ as they hardly have any updates. For example Ciao has 131 reviews for First Direct, and how many of those were made in 2009? Just two. How the hell can that be a good representation of ‘live’ brand sentiment? The same applies with the reviews on Dooyoo (5 this year) and Review Centre (13 this year). The majority of the reviews were made before First Direct launched this campaign.

First Direct are missing a trick by not using Twitter, you know… that real time micro-blogging website used by millions of people. They simply have to announce that the the hashtag ‘#firstdirect’ will be tracked. They already have 538 followers on their Twitter page, tell them, they will tell others and in the space of a few weeks you will have real up to date, uncensored feedback to track.

Facebook Fan pages also need to be utilised, tracking things such as positive and negative wall posts, likes on status updates etc . I would imagine a fair amount of customers for a online bank would be using both these services.

It was so bizarre that First Direct didn’t utilise Twitter or Facebook, especially with everyone was praising this as a social media campaign, so I decided to do some digging and found this interview with Lisa Wood, the head of marketing for the bank. Here’s the relevant bit:

Did you consider pulling comments straight from Twitter and showing them on the site, as Skittles does?

We did talk about Skittles when we discussed the campaign, and thought about the idea of a Twitter stream on the site, but we couldn’t do this for legal reasons. Having looked at the ins and outs of doing this, and the Twitter terms and conditions regarding intellectual property rights, we decided it wouldn’t be possible.

So First Direct want to own the IP for all reviews and comments? Well that means making a social media tracker is pretty pointless seeing as practically every one of these sites gives the user ownership of the content. And rightly so. Facebook T&Cs here and Twitter T&Cs here. It basically means you won’t see what’s being said about First Direct on more other sites where you can comment more spontaneously.

My hunch is that First Direct didn’t want to use a Twitter stream because they have less control about what’s being said about the brand. Maybe they didn’t want to have the same fate as HSBC when an unofficial site used Twitter to stream ‘raw’ reviews.

It’s not that I don’t love the idea of sentiment tracking, quite the opposite, I think it’s brilliant and I’d like to see other brands explore this sort of thing. The problem is that using the words ‘social media’ to describe this campaign makes you automatically assume it’s actually using the services that are defining the market like Twitter and Facebook, therefore making you want to drink it’s ‘Kool Aid’. Marketing Week clearly made that mistake thinking it uses Twitter, even though the statement from Lisa Wood says otherwise.

This campaign comes after the First Direct ‘Social Media Newsroom‘ launch, where you can share the bank’s press releases with your friends (why would anyone do this?), look at their Flickr feed with photos from staff parties (??) or watch their YouTube channel with adverts and more staff content (incredibly boring). I really don’t count adding a share button and a couple of feeds as ‘doing social media’. The newsroom was created in collaboration with the social media specialist (debatable) public relations consultancy Wolfstar.

Overall it’s a move in the right direction by First Direct, it’s good to see a bank experimenting. They already have a iPhone application which appears to be doing well. Now lets see some other banks have a go.

The agency behind this was Made By Pi

Security cameras caught the whole thing on tape and before you know it, the video has 1.7 million views on YouTube. Check out the video:

The driver leaves the scene not before smashing the crap out of one Blue Hyundai belonging to Todd Jamison. However after the video hit the net and started racking up views on Facebook, The DailyTelegraph and YouTube, Hyundai Canada decided to jump on the opportunity a week later and give Todd a brand new car!

Of course they then filmed the whole thing and put it on YouTube (132,000 views in a week):

A big win for Hyundai here, really used this scenario to their advantage and made a customer happy. For the cost of one car they have been getting bigged up across Twitter and tons of blogs for 1 week now. This makes a great case study.

Should they have given the other crushed car owner a Hyundai even though it was from another manufacturer? Do BMW get any props for the X5′s off-road capability?

[Via Mashable]

Definition of flash mob:

The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.

Check out the video below where 60 high school students rushed a grocery store. Pretty crazy scenes.

This is no where near as good as the flash mob decoy set up by a bank robber to fool a crowd of unsuspecting, identically-dressed, accomplices off Craigslist. Awesome.

History of flash mobs here.