I saw this last year and thought it was a fantastic idea by Heinz and their agency; its creative and a perfect way to engage with soup fans.  Hot soup is a perfect compliment whilst you’re feeling under the weather and are cocooned inside your duvet on the sofa….

The good news is it’s back and with more flavours. If you’ve not seen it before, fans of Heinz soup can head over to the Facebook page and order a personalised tin of soup for a poorly friend or relative. According to their agency, 1,000 cans have already been purchased this year.

Even if you don’t know anyone who is poorly, check out the campaign as it’s brilliant.

This is brilliant! Created by a couple of history teachers to inspire their students; it’s pretty catchy. A great example of thinking about your audience and how to engage them; I bet this makes history revision much more fun.

If you want to check out more of their history based music videos and find out about Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona they have a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan page.

Enjoy

Zeebox integrates TV listings, social media and conversations around the programmes that you like to watch. Zeebox bills itself as the ‘new way to watch television’ and you can download it as an app to use whilst you have your feet-up in front of the TV.

A while ago, I thought it would be a great idea to have an app that I could download and interact with as I watched television. When I read about Zeebox, I thought ‘fantastic, this is exactly what i’m looking for’ however, it’s not quite there for me.

Interactive television is certainly the way forward and any great conversation-starting programme usually ends up trending on Twitter or Facebook, so the idea of having a mash-up of your show and your chosen social channels seems perfect.

I like the app and I think it’s a great way to chat to people with similar interests to you but I want to see and use this on my TV, not on my ipad whilst watching TV.

Have you used this app? What do you think?

We’re all really excited to be holding an event next week at Victoria Station, London for our new clients Prokill.

Feel free to have a peek at the website and animation above; if you’re in the area next week come along to the main event!
The event takes place at Victoria Station on Wednesday 18 January.

“Looking to inspire more entrepreneurs in your region?”

One of our clients at Remarkable are Hampshire County Council, we’ve been lucky enough to work with them to support their Enspire EU initiative.

Recently we’ve been working with them to revamp the website design and created a video to explain what Enspire EU is all about and how to get involved.

So far the video and website has received positive feedback from the partners; countries involved in the project are:

• Slovenia
• Hungary
• Sweden
• England
• Cyprus
• Poland
• Romania
• Spain
• Denmark
• France
• Denmark
• Czech Republic

You can find out more about the project on the website.

As this year draws to an end I thought it would be a nice idea to take stock of how I’ve seen the world of social media shape and develop.

Large organisations have now embraced these channels, their presence across popular social platforms is expected and consumers are engaging with them in ways that had previously been difficult without the development of technology. These large companies and brands are taking this stuff very seriously and a big change I’ve noticed are new jobs titles. Over the last 12 months there has been a huge increase in social media related roles – anything from executives to Head of Social Media within these large organisations.

Where does that leave the agency? I think in a very strong position. Now brands are switched on and understanding why social is so important, they are also fully aware that content is key to engaging. Many brands have agencies that are on board to help them cut through the noise online, getting them to find and build a profile in the right communities and making sense of all the data that they collect. This makes an agency the perfect partner to helping a company create some great content.

One area of growth I’m very happy with is the use of customer service and social media. For many companies this appears to be the preferred route for starting out and giving it a go. Some companies have really thought this through, reviewing their internal structure and doing their homework before launching into a Twitter help service. Others still work on a 9-5 basis, ignoring their customers remarks until they log back in on a Monday morning.

The gap between the companies that have got this right and those that are creating problems for themselves is widening and I hope that in 2012 we see some of those bad practice companies reviewing what they’re up too and getting some help.

Data and understanding is also important; I must sound like a broken record to my colleagues when barking on about listening and digesting the conversation out there but I’ll stick by what I say. There are a lot of great tools out there and we’ve started to see CRM and listening tools merging (think salesforce and radian6). If set up properly, this will give companies amazing insight about their customers and prospects. Knowledge is powerful stuff.

Most of this stuff isn’t new; product reviews, understanding your customers, Predicting sales trends, Market research. It’s what we’ve been doing for decades but technology has given us the tools and accessibility to do this en masse and in real time. I think ‘Social Media’ caused panic for a while and that’s why it’s taken companies a while to get on board, but now the magic has been explained and people can’t imagine life before these tools we’ll start to see some companies doing so really exciting things.

Have you got any great examples to share?

We launched the new Robinson Willey website this week at Remarkable. Part of the Glen Dimplex Group, they provide a variety of heating soultions.The website features a Help Me Choose section, Manuals and Guides download and full details of their products. The website was developed using a third party CMS , already used within the GDC group for their other website.

It’s been a great opportunity to develop another site for the GDC group and I look forward to the feedback from the new Robinson Willey website from their customers.

If you’re looking for web browser user stats, market share or version used statowl.com is a handy website.

This report displays information on web browser market share and usage. Also known as “browser wars”, the statistics below analyze the amount of market penetration attained by browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Google Chrome. We only list browsers that have amassed at least 0.1% of the market share during the selected time period.

Thanks to Dave for sharing this one. Very handy for writing proposals!

Just a quick post; Innocent have developed a Fruit Machine for the Facebook platform. I though it was quite a nice promotional tool and I got £1 off a smoothie by playing. If you’re reading this post months later, here are a few screenshots:

Spin the wheel, take the prize or send it to a friend and get another go. If you claim your prize, the app gives you a voucher to print out and use. Not to forget, the important terms and conditions.

So, How long does it take super-trader John Paulson to earn your annual income?