CREATE.

We’ve been working with Raposa Consulting Limited for a few weeks now and are really pleased to announce the launch of the new website. Raposa Consulting Limited conduct Computer forensics and fraud investigation.

It’s been a very busy week for Create this week, what with the Queenie Festival 2009 as well as a branding and web design for a new business relocating on the island.

But here are 3 cool things that we really liked this week.

In reverse order:

Number 3

It is a bit of a late one and I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this when it happened! Extreme’s snow branding around London when it snowed back in Feb. Excuse the pun, but it’s very cool, love how people think on their feet and react to a situation.

Number 2

Pot Noodle launches doner kebab flavour ‘ultimate man food’. A great example of understanding your target market!

And……….

Number 1

And in number one spot it has to be this awesome Microsoft Sustainability advert that is just so thought provoking as to what the future might look like!

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I heard on the news yesterday that a guerilla marketing campaign by Monument PR had gone horribly wrong and it got me thinking if it really had gone wrong or not?

The stunt was due to take place in London on Friday the 13th as part of the launch for the new video game Resident Evil 5. For those of you not familiar with Resident Evil titles, they involve a huge amount of blood, gore, violence and hundreds of zombies.

The campaign involved a treasure hunt around a number of secret locations around the city where over 50 volunteers had to find various body parts ranging from arms, heads, legs and torsos! A little bit mad and not for the faint hearted! There was even a number of chicken livers, being passed of as human organs! It does sound to me that if was always going to be a bit of talking point and obviously part of the PR strategy.

In dark dreary hours of the morning, the parts were hidden in locations in places such as rubbish bins and on window ledges.

What happened next was either a highly orchestrated and clever peace of PR or a PR fluke turned good if you ask me.

Over the course of the night and early morning,  one head, two torsos, and six limbs remained unfound and several members of the public who stumbled across them phoned the police to complain. The result - a huge amount of people covering the story including the press and bloggers of the gaming community.  Now Monument PR has had to resort to posting notices on a number of websites, as well as contacting local radio stations to encourage anyone who finds body parts to return them. Not bad for a campaign gone wrong!

A Monument PR spokesperson has gone on the record to say that the missing of the body parts fiasco was not a publicity-seeking appendage to the campaign - like it and a really clever way of getting loads more coverage.

In summary, I think Monument got pretty lucky on this occasion, the high risk high reward strategy of doing soemthing shocking as leaving bloody limbs, heads and fake organs could have gone horribly wrong, but as the tactics failed to play out as planned the resulting additional coverage and word of mouth has not only given Resident Evil 5 a higher profile amongst its key target audience, but also widened its blanket as other audiences talked about and discussed the effectiveness of this clever marketing or risky fluke!

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Love it or hate it, you have to take your hat off to VCCP for their incredibly imaginative ‘Compare the Meerkat‘ campaign.

The campaign shows the power of combining all forms of communication in a fully intergrated marketing campaign including television, websites, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

At Create we even find ourselves singing and whistling the tagline ‘Compare the meerkat .com albeit badly at times and in a dodgy Russian accent (but enough said about that!)

The back bone of the campaign is the main character (meerkat) “Aleksandr Orlov” who starts to become annoyed when the public keep visiting his web site comparethemeerkat.com instead of insurance site comparethemarket.com (ringing any bells?)

Aleksandr has even started his own Facebook group and is also now on Twitter.

Now you may well be saying it all sounds like a lot of fun but how succesful has it really been?

Well, if you start to look at all these elements individually you will see that the campaign has had an incredible reach to a wide variety of audiences.

Take Twitter for example:

There are currently 5845 people following Aleksandr ( I am one of them!!) Doh!

On YouTube (see above videio) there are several different versions of the TV ads with the highest number of views so far from the main advert of over 60,000.

On Facebook Alexandr has a mere 222,288 fans! Not bad for a russian Meerkat!

If your into your webstats you can use the website Alexa to gauge the reach and poularity of the campaign. If you compare (excuse the pun!) comparethemeerkat.com with comparethemarket.com you really can see how popular this little meerkat is!

To try and gauge the overall success of the campaign I would guess that some people will say, ‘yeah but how many insurance policies did it sell?’ and that’s a valid question and something that I am not qualified to answer. What I will say is that using all of these various techniques you can at least measure somethings, and in my book somethings are better than nothings!

In summary, we think its a lot of fun (and in the current climate that goes along way), we think its got huge viral and buzz about it, with a huge following online with direct results in terms of traffic increase since the campaign.It will be talked about for a long time, and who knows, when the time comes to renew your insurance policy I could at least bet that compare the meerkat or market will appear in that grey matter of yours as a possible choice?

I would have loved to have seen the pitch!

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We just got back from SES London and wow what a great Search Engine Strategy conference that was! The quality of speakers was awesome!

Are heads are full with amazing ideas and things that we can do online to drive business, improve sales and build your brand!

But in the meantime, we have 3 copies of Andrew Goodman’s ‘Winning Results with Google Adwords‘ book, one copy of which he has kindly signed for us!

How to enter?

You can enter this competition by blogging about it. Simply write a blog post about the competition and leave a comment on this post to let us know about your post. If you have a few blogs you can enter multiple times (up to 3 times).

Really easy!! The closing date is Thursday the 5th March 2009 at 5pm. The contest winner will be picked at random on the same day at 5.15pm. The first person randomly chosen will receive the signed copy and the next two names will receive one of the other two copies. We will notify the winners by email so we can arrange to post out your book.

If you one of the unlucky ones and you don’t win you can always go to amazon and pick up a copy!

Good luck everyone!

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The Isle of Man Queenie Festival is always great fun to work on and this year we’re having even more fun by adding a bit of social media in to the mix. To compliment the new website, we’ve launched a Flickr and a Facebook channel for Manxies and potential Island visitor’s get involved in the Festival and all the activities from now.

Check out the Isle of Man Queenie Festival photos on flickr! If you’re already on Flickr, link up to the Queenie Festival or share your Manx Queenie or Isle of Man Marine themed photos with us.

Or become a fan of the Isle of Man Queenie Festival on Facebook. We’d love to hear what you think and which events you’ll be attending so become a Queenie Festival friend and join in the celebration from now!

Queenie Festival Website

We’ve been working over the last couple of weeks on the redesigned Isle of Man Queenie Festival website. The new site aims to make it easier for visitor’s to navigate around the site and find out information on Manx Queenies, this year’s festival and marine life around the Isle of Man.

There are already plenty of marine, Isle of Man and Festival images on the site and we will be keeping this site constantly up-dated with fresh content including delicious Manx Queenie recipes for you to try.

It’s really easy to keep up-to-date with Isle of Man Queenie Festival developments and latest news too through RSS Feeds and the Email Newsletter which can be subscribed to from the site’s homepage. We have already had a look at the proposed 2009 Queenie Festival schedule and this is certainly not going to be one to miss!

The 2009 Queenie Festival dates have been announced and they are 29th June until 5th July so make sure you mark it in your diary!!

1. Twitter numbers treble! - Hitwise Robin Goad talks about the recent Twitter surge and what might be some of the causes.

2.Half a million reasons to be proud - Owen and his friend have been developing a new widget called Tweetroll that has now been downloaded 500,000 times! Wicked stuff Owen.

3. Branding yourself - interesting post by Mashable’s Dan Schwabel on Personal branding - loads of great tips and ideas using traditional techniques combined with web 2.0!

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Cool!

An online news service is up and running providing news across the web for Isle of Man and Channel Island business’s organisations and clubs.

The news site is called www.isle-news.com offers all the benefits of online PR such as reaching  to a wider audience and driving traffic to your site, as well as getting listed in key news sites such as Google News and Yahoo News. Online PR also helps to increase your organic search ranking by building new links to your site!

Why not give it a go and reap the rewards!

And its free… even better!

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Firstly I think an apology is in order for the lack of posts this year! Poor show really and it will be addressed! Thing is we have been absolutley flat out with lots of great projects. The most exciting one being the Isle of Man Queenie Festival 2009 amongst them.

This year the organising committee has worked incredibly hard in putting together a great week long festival that will no doubt be a hit to locals and visitors of all ages.

As for event promotion and marketing, we are gonna go social with this with a new Facebook group and also work on some viral stuff as well, plus some local radio campaigns nearer the time to give up to date event information - you kind of need this with the good old Manx weather and many events planned to take place outdoors. There is lots of other exciting things on the cards, its just they are under wraps for now, but I am sure we will share them all very soon!

In the meantime I am gonna grab some Queenie Spring Rolls from Tim at Island Seafare - mmm lush!

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