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Using Social Media To Re-brand A City

Posted by Sam Schuurman on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 View Comments

Maybe you’ve heard that Dunedin (NZ) is rebranding, perhaps you were part of the #NewDunedinSlogan hype on Twitter, or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about it. Regardless of whether you’re in the know or not, this is a campaign you should be following – it’s city re-branding with a difference.

Firstly, there’s no search for a gimmicky tag line.

Many cities re-branding efforts only go as far as creating taglines like…

Hamilton: City of the Future   or Timaru: Feel the Heartbeat

You’ll see no such tagline in Dunedin. Like all good things in social media, it starts with getting the concept right. Prior to embarking on their quest to re-position the city the DCC (Dunedin City Council) sought out wisdom from branding experts from all over the country.

The advice was simple, the brand is “Dunedin” – not the tagline underneath. This is quite a big step for city branding. Especially as Dunedin was the first NZ city to introduce a tagline – now it’ll be the first city (in NZ) to remove it.

But the big difference in this campaign is the community engagement…

The Insiders Dunedin Community site was launched just under a month ago…

The concept is simple, share your Dunedin stories and go in the draw to win a whole swag of great prizes. Continue Reading »

This post was written by Sam Schuurman (aka SocialSammy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.

The Application Game

Posted by Andy Moore on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 View Comments

Love em or hate em, social apps are big business. How big? Check this out.

The popularity of these seemingly pointless time wasters is undeniable… According to Digital Buzz, 70% of Facebook users engage with applications. Considering there is anywhere between 400 and 500 million registered users (depending on who you ask), that’s a whole bunch of people using apps. So what ones have been cleaning up on Facebook?

And how they look now…

Continue Reading »

This post was written by Andy Moore (aka @MooreOfAndy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.

Help Us Socialise The TEDxDunedin Website

Posted by Sam Schuurman on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 View Comments

I’m currently in the midst of redesigning the TEDxDunedin website. The current one was built in a hectic 24 hour period within the 6 weeks that we put first the event together – so needless to say it’s not the best and in need of a refresh.

I love slideshare, it’s great for inspiration and for seeing what some of the best speakers in the world are talking about. In my search for inspiration for the TEDxDunedin site refresh I came across this great slide deck by Jeremiah Owyang.

This post was written by Sam Schuurman (aka SocialSammy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.

Foursquare and the Place Race

Posted by Andy Moore on Friday, August 20th, 2010 View Comments

So Facebook Places has been launched… Well at least in the U.S anyway. So what does this mean for Foursquare and other location based services such as Gowalla and Loopt ?

Well it potentially means a lot. Essentially the Facebook giant now does the same thing as these “niche” services. Can they compete? Yes they can but it has made things tricky for sure. How do they compete? Simple really – by being cooler.

How Wicked is Foursquare?

I’m going to go on the record and say I love Foursquare. It’s quick, simple, cool, and potentially leads to tangible rewards for those who check-in to businesses actively using it for promotions. It appeals to my competitive nature (can you be the mayor of the universe?) and there is an element of social cred to be gained from checking into certain places (without blatantly updating your status) “Andy just checked-in @ the Playboy Mansion” – no biggy.

Continue Reading »

This post was written by Andy Moore (aka @MooreOfAndy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.

If I Were A Financial Institution I Would Use Social Media To….

Posted by Sam Schuurman on Monday, August 16th, 2010 View Comments

I used to work for a financial planning company, so this is kind of a list of things that I would do if I had my time over…

Firstly, I would start by viewing what I do as an important service in peoples lives. With that in mind I would seek out ways to further enhance their lives and market my services accordingly.  Then I would get straight into social media by….

• Listening to social networks to find out what people think of my company’s service.
• Figure out what I want to achieve with social media.
• Using social media (blog commenting etc) to ask people what they think of these goals.
• Re-assess whether my goals are what my customers want from me
• Then I’d jump in head-first!

Listening:

You could set up Google Searches, and use some of the social media monitoring tools that are available (there’s an iThnk post on these tools).There are also a number of Social Networking & News Sites for Finance & Investing Nerds (view a post on the top 10 of these sites).

Continue Reading »

This post was written by Sam Schuurman (aka SocialSammy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.

The Hidden Issues With Running A Facebook Competition

Posted by Sam Schuurman on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 View Comments

Zuckerburg – oh how you pain me!

Recently we’ve been working with one of our clients to get a facebook competition up and running…

Here’s the skinny of what we’ve come up against:

Firstly, finding info on what you can and cannot do is insanely hard. There is this resource but it’s not anywhere near detailed enough about competitions.

This is what it doesn’t tell you…

You cannot, I repeat cannot run any sort of competition in an FBML tab…unless you have a monthly add spend of 15k (or around 5k if you partner with Wildfire). This makes it completely unrealistic for the small or medium sized business.

What’s more you need your competition to be approved by a Facebook client rep – easier said than done. Continue Reading »

This post was written by Sam Schuurman (aka SocialSammy). You can connect with him on both Twitter and Linkedin.