LBi London

Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle February 22nd, 2011

New Changes to Facebook Pages

Facebook is making some changes to the way branded pages operate, bringing them more in line with the new personal profiles. In an email last week to branded page admins, Facebook announced the following new features:

• Notifications when fans interact with your page or posts
• A place to showcase photos along the top of your page
• A news feed for your page
• The ability to Like and post on other pages as your page

All pages will be upgraded on the 10th of March, but brands can already preview the new page layout and have the option to upgrade early. While the ability to post on other pages as a branded page may be welcomed by many marketers, it has the potential to further increase levels of branded spam. Also, though it may be useful to get interaction notifications, users who are admins of multiple pages have been deluged with notification alerts until finally working out how to turn them off.

Integrated Video Likes

New film Chalet Girl is taking product placement to a whole new level: the trailer includes embedded like buttons within the video. If you “like” a member of the cast or a snowboarding brand, the story will show up in your newsfeed, promoting both the film and the brands. A bit gimmicky, but an interesting tactic.

Embedded Facebook Like

Branded Embedded Like

We Are The Future

PHD Worldwide have been getting a lot of flak for their new video ad We Are The Future: is it “a reflection on how the next generation will engage with brands” or some sort of terrifying, soul destroying buzzword bingo? You decide.

Regardless of the quality of the content, what has angered people most is PHD’s alleged deletion of negative comments on the YouTube channel, and their failure to respond constructively to criticism. UPDATE – @PHDWorldwide have now responded via an entry on Posterous. That said, it’s the only entry on a brand new blog. A blog they don’t link to from their website. Yet.

Caffè Nero Twitter-Jacked

Caffè Nero has been Twitter-jacked, if that’s a word. The @Cafe_Nero account is clearly not official (as the name is misspelled), but it’s close enough to confuse unwary consumers.

Fake @Cafe_Nero Twitter Account

Two possible official accounts, @Caffe_Nero and @caffenerouk, remain unused. (Thanks to David Law for spotting this.)

Help Unlock Elbow’s New Album

Unlock tracks from Elbow's new album by connecting with Twitter or Facebook

Elbow have taken an interesting approach to promoting their new album, “Build a rocket boys!” Just go to the microsite, connect your Facebook or Twitter account, and choose which song you want unlocked. When enough people have voted for a song, a preview clip is revealed, along with an animated video clip. A little disappointing that it doesn’t unlock the whole track, but still a nice idea. Also surprising to see that while the band’s Facebook page is actively taking part in the campaign, their official Twitter account has been dormant for over two years!

Tags: #BuildARocketBoys, @phdworldwide, Build a Rocket Boys, Caffè Nero, Chalet Girl, Elbow, embedded likes, facebook like, Facebook Pages, integrated likes, PHD Worldwide, product placement, Social Media, trailer, twitter, Twitter-Jacked, unlock, video, We Are The Future More stats

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Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle November 23rd, 2010

Boutiques.com

In the run up to Christmas, Google has launched Boutiques.com, an online retail site that mixes powerful visual search technology with the functionality of a fashion social network. Users create virtual boutiques based on their fashion preferences, and can follow celebrity boutiques to get style recommendations. Funded by an advertising-based business model, it’s not surprising Google wants to experiment with using retail interfaces more engaging than the existing Google Shopping search results. If the site takes off in the US, we may see a UK version sometime next year.

BrandYou on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is seeking to reinforce its position as the place to build your own personal brand. Take the BrandYou survey, answer a few quick questions, and see how you fit in amongst the world’s biggest brands. It’s a bit like your own professional horoscope.

Where Is Your Line?

A thought provoking interactive video campaign from The Havens, a specialist centre for victims of rape or sexual abuse in London. Where Is Your Line? explores the boundaries of acceptable behaviour by asking you to click when you feel the line has been crossed. Tied in with results from a recent survey of young people’s attitudes, the film shows how your answer compares with the rest of the respondents. Interesting use of video for educational purposes.

Tags: Boutique, Boutiques, Boutiques.com, BrandYou, ecommerce, fashion, Google, interactive, linkedin, retail, social networks, The Havens, video, Where Is Your Line

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LBi exhibits darkest imaginations of London’s top creative directors

Posted by Imogen Thacker July 12th, 2010

What happens when you ask 45 leading Creative gurus from the UK’s advertising and design industry the question ‘What is your ultimate fantasy portrait?’.  Yves de Contades photographer and Director of International Life Magazine did just that and captured the results on his Leica camera.  Then he asked leading psychologist Dr Cecilia d’Felice to comment on the portraits.  You are invited to see the results…

All 45 portraits come deep from the imaginations of London’s leading creative genius’s and are currently being displayed at LBi, 146 Brick Lane, E1 6RU.  You are welcome to look at these portraits from 9pm until 8:30pm Monday to Friday.

Interested? Imagine a leading creative shooting badgers in a tweed suit and holding a martini glass, the scene dripping in blood, think of a spaceman standing in the centre of Piccadilly circus all the traffic halted and someone else you will know who is as tall as Big Ben leaning against it reading the Times.

Creative Directors such as Linda Burrows from The Sunday Times, Tim Cole from Saatchi Design, Theo Williams at Habitat, Chris Clarke at Lost Boys International, Steve Vranakis at VCCP, Tom Hudson at Lowe Worldwide, David Hillman of David Hillman Studios created their ultimate fantasies.  Each creative was asked for a quote on their choice of portrait and creativity and this was evaluated and commented upon by the leading psychologist Dr Cecilia d’Felice and her words accompany each portrait and make for powerful reading.

So what did Chief Creative Officer Chris Clarke have to say…

“Yves has truly captured the diversity energy and indeed psychology of the London creative scene. He also knows how to handle a badger, which is always a plus in my book“.  Chris Clarke, Global Creative Director, Lost Boys International

All images were shot exclusively on the new Leica S-System.

Fantasy Portraits can be viewed 9 am till 9 pm Monday to Friday, from Thursday 1st July, at LBi, The Atlantis Building, Truman Brewery, 146 Brick Lane, E1 6RU.

Yves de Contades has commenced shooting series two of Fantasy Portraits; these will be showcased as a one night only exhibition at The Worx Studios towards the end of October. Watch this space.

The video of the exhibition

Thanks go to Leica Camera, Genesis Digital Imaging, The Worx Studios and Jennie Lam for their generous support of the project.

Tags: Chris Clarke, International Life Magazine, LBi, LBi Group, LBi London, LBi UK, video, Yves de Contades

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Video distribution

Posted by Ian Macfarlane June 3rd, 2010

Now that you know how to optimise your videos for search it’s time to distribute them across the web.

Following from last week’s post about video SEO, this week’s post covers how to distribute your videos across the web and track their performance.

Whilst you can host video files on your own site and submit them to video search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Blinkx etc.), YouTube is the 800 lb gorilla in the video space. The only way in which your video will be found by people searching on the YouTube website is if you upload the video to YouTube itself.

Using YouTube also has additional benefits – YouTube automatically creates Media RSS feeds, which you can use to submit the video to search engines, and it also makes hosting of videos effectively “free”. However, the Media RSS feeds that YouTube provides link back to the YouTube page, not to the page on your site.

Therefore, we recommend hosting your videos on your own site as well as on YouTube. You can then generate your own Media RSS feeds (linking back to your site) and submit these feeds, rather than the YouTube feeds, to the various video search engines. If hosting videos on your own site, it may also be useful to provide the video content in multiple formats – the more formats in which the video is available, the larger the potential audience (although more formats also means additional costs in both time and bandwidth, so there is a definite trade-off involved).

It may be worth uploading the video to other video hosting platforms, such as Dailymotion, MetaCafe or Vimeo, as well as to YouTube.

When uploading your video to video hosting sites like these (as opposed to submitting it to video search engines), we recommend watermarking the video with the brand name to prevent it from being re-used without attribution.

Most video hosting sites allow you to include a URL along with each video – each video that you upload to a third-party site should ideally link back to the page on your site on which the video is hosted.

It is also a good idea to embed the URL of the page on your site where the video file is included within the video itself. Short URLs are generally better, as users will have to manually type them in. URL shortening services which support tracking of users are particular useful here: they can allow you to track users who visit your site after watching one of your videos, and identify which of your videos and which video hosting sites are attracting the most visitors.

Tags: best practice, Google, search, SEO, video

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