Case study: The Paul Smith Optimistic so...

A couple of months ago I worked on an incredible social media campaign for Paul Smith. Partnering with youth marketing agency Latimer Digital we created a Facebook page which attracted almost 5,000 Likes in six weeks, ran a competition with over 1,000 entries and culminated in a celebrity party at a cool London venue with 50 of the winners. Here’s how we did it. Fashion house Paul Smith was launching a new fragrance called Optimistic and wanted to appeal to the 18-30 demographic using social media. Facebook was perfect: Incentive > connect with the brand >...

Want to learn the secrets to getting tho...

With the aim of sharing some of our writing knowledge gained at places like the BBC, ITV, Yahoo!, AOL, Magic FM and Heat, my fellow editor Sue Keogh from Sookio and I gave a workshop as part of the Social Media Week London conference. Our session covered: how to write a killer headline crafting tweets to get them retweeted writing for Facebook and Twitter bringing it all together with an example from AOL and the Saturdays sharing our favourite dos and don’ts when writing for social media. Feedback included: ‘Informal but informative’ ‘Very...

Watch out for time bandits! How your sma...

As a small business owner, I find Twitter very useful for networking. A lot of my target clients are on there so it’s a good way to break the ice and start a conversation. I’ve helped set up social media channels for a Bauer Media brand and a few smaller companies, including an estate agent and wedding dress designer. The difference between communicating as a smaller company and a large one is a blog for another day; what I’m interested in exploring today is how a small-to-medium size business can use social media channels to best effect. A ‘social...

Live blog with Matt Eltringham from the ...

Matt Eltringham is here at Sheffield University to talk to the Web MAs about how the BBC use social media. He starts by telling the group about his role at the BBC. Only half the UGC hub was up and running on July 7th 2005. They received 10-15,000 emails from all over London telling the BBC what was happening. They didn’t have the capacity to deal with all the information, but looking back they had credible information about every single bomb that morning. Users spend on average: 1 minute/day on the BBC 11 minutes/day on Facebook Social media strategy social...

How do you break a national news story?...

For a journalist, breaking a national news story is the ultimate coup. For some it comes early in their career and others after many years of work. On election night 2010, one student at the Department of Journalism at the University of Sheffield discovered a story. Through a combination of speed, contacts and Twitter we made her story go national – and this is how we did it. Let me set the scene The journalism postgraduates at Sheffield University work together for one week in the second semester to produce news output of the highest standard possible. I help the...