Interesting
Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on March 09th, 2010
In a random act of humour, Conan O’Brien decided to follow one of the 600,000 people that follow him on Twitter. The Chicago Tribune outlines the story very well.
Turns out, the person Conan chose to follow is Sarah Killen (@LovelyButton). She is in her late teens and is from Michigan. And about 15,000 of Conan’s followers began to follow Sarah. Sarah turned this opportunity into something very positive.
She tweeted about an upcoming breast cancer awareness walk, the Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure, sending her new followers to a site where they could donate money to sponsor her upcoming walk. According…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 24th, 2010
I had a discussion with a client yesterday about the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. She is based in L.A. and the only coverage they get of the games is from NBC. NBC, for some reason, has chosen not to provide live coverage of the games. My client is in the same time zone as the games, she has a television in her office, she would have the competitions on if she could—but they aren’t live.
This is a conversation that we have had quite often recently in the AHA Creative Strategies office. AHA partner Paul Holman is a sports fan and…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on February 12th, 2010
I recently read an article in drovers.com that I found very interesting. It seems that Yellow Tail wine, based in Australia, was set to support the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). However, according to this article, many U.S. wine drinkers and food producers were unhappy with this decision.
At first glance, I wondered why…isn’t helping animals a good thing? It turns out that there are reports that very little of the money that runs through HSUS actually goes to the care and help of animals. The groups that were against Yellow Tail supporting HSUS used social media as a part…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 21st, 2010
There is an interesting article in AdAge.com about the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s decision to continue to make a scheduled stop at a private resort in Labadee, Haiti. It’s a pretty strong article with a great deal of criticism from PR pros. As I was reading it, I was wondering where the other side was…there are no quotes from PR pros saying that they “get” why Royal Caribbean made the decision to continue to make stops in Labadee.
As I read the piece, I was thinking that I must not be reading this article right because I would have advised this cruise…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 21st, 2010
There is an ongoing myth that social media is free. This comes up reasonably often and when we explain the costs associated with developing a social media campaign, quite often the person is shocked.
Danny Brown outlined an extreme budget for social media on his blog post – and even if it is a little dramatic, it is worth a read.
Setting up a Twitter account or Facebook page is free. You can also get a blog set up at no cost. What does cost is the strategy, an audit, ongoing engagement, content creation and measurement. It’s much less than some traditional media…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on January 14th, 2010
Webworkerdaily.com has a good post focusing on whether it is possible to be personal and professional in social media. It is a topic that we, at AHA, discuss on a regular basis.
We are a boutique agency by choice. We started that way and it works for us. Now, we happen to believe that you can be small and still deliver the results of a much larger agency. Small doesn’t mean less to us, it means lean, focused and it gives us the opportunity to be a real team. It also allows us to make choices about the clients that we take…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on December 15th, 2009
The Bad Pitch Blog has an excellent post on holiday tie-ins and what does and doesn’t work. In this post, they showcase examples of the good, the bad and the ugly. One that stands out as great is PNC, a financial services group. For the past 26 years they provided the PNC Christmas Price Index. Using the classic song The 12 Days of Christmas, in a fun and lively way, they showcase the how prices have increased or fallen over the past year.
They “own” this area of Christmas and this year’s website is great. It is an educational tool. It was…
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on December 01st, 2009
The New York Times has an interesting article on how Twitter will be used by retailers during the holiday season. It is worth a read, even if you aren’t a retailer. There are some key points in here that can help any organization put Twitter into context, in how they might use the microblogging tool.
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on September 21st, 2009
Have you ever been in a meeting and had a client, colleague or consultant confuse “strategic” and “tactical.” I think it happens more than we realize (or perhaps like to admit) and it’s not always junior staff that don’t understand the difference.
Our friends at Beaupre have, what I think is, the best explanation of the two on their blog. It’s worth a read. (I’ve sent this link out to dozens of people).
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Posted by Ruth Atherley of AHA Creative Strategies on September 15th, 2009
There has been much talk (online and off) about how Kayne West created a scene at the Video Music Awards recently. Apparently, Kayne stormed the stage when Taylor Swift was accepting her award for video of the year, grabbed the microphone and announced that he thought Beyonce should have won the award. You can read more about the incident on Rolling Stone.
Then, ABC news reporter Terry Moran tweeted that, during an interview with his network, President Obama called Kayne a “jackass” for his outburst. Turns out, the part where (allegedly) Obama called Kayne a “jackass” was off the record. ABC…
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