BeerBeary: Jaz Beer Viral Videos - Part 2

A couple of posts back, I posted some viral videos done by Jaz beer to promote beer drinking tips and tricks. Again, they did a very good job to promote the beer brand here where the main target audience is obviously male beer drinkers. It's very cleverly done as they don't over promote the product. All I can say is a hot girl and beer somehow always seem to go well together.

Episode 4: How to Freeze a Beer in 10 Seconds!

Episode 5: How to "Bottoms Up" a Bottle of Beer in 11 Seconds!

Episode 6: How to Brew Your Own Fresh Beer

Why Are Some Companies Not Keen In Social Media?

This is a problem I commonly face when dealing with some companies. Apart from additional budgets needed to maintain Facebook pages or corporate blogs, it all boils down to lack of resources and knowledge about the media channel. Recent stats by Meltwater Group shows that 38% of corporate companies lack resource and time to devote to social media.

With the rise of social media, it is up to media / PR agencies to take the lead and advise corporate clients the benefits of using social media as part of their marketing and branding strategies. One collective issue that I can gather from the chart above is that corporations lack the knowledge simply because they lack the monitoring tools for them to understand and to monitor as well. Unknown to many, there are a wide range of free buzz monitoring or social media monitoring tools available that can be used to keep tabs what is happening in the social media space.

Online tools such as Socialmention can monitor trends as well as positive or negative sentiments about a brand in the social space or using a tool by Momentus Media to conduct a Community Health Check to see if your Facebook page is "healthy". Both of these free tools are amongst the many available free tools that corporations can use to do surface level monitoring as well as keeping tabs on their competitors. Although these tools only give surface level numbers and information, there are of course more in depth analytical tools which are only often available to agencies who purchased them.

The role of a media / PR agency would be to then to come up with social strategies to support their business and marketing objectives. But before anything else, it is important that corporations need to be educated and understand how social media works plus the benefits that the monitoring tools can bring to their company/brand before anyone goes to pitch to them on a social media strategy.

BeerBeary: Jaz Beer Viral Videos

A colleague recently sent me some links about some local viral videos which I personally think has been really well executed. The videos feature a girl speaking in local Cantonese about beer. In the first episode, she talks about how many beers before one fails a breathalyzer test. I bet not many people know (not even myself!) that all it takes is 2 bottles of beer to exceed the local alcohol limit of 0.05%.

In the second episode, she teaches one how to cheat on a breathalyzer test during a roadblock after a night out. I really can relate to the fact that all the methods shown are commonly used by drinkers to make them think that they can cheat the breathalyzer test on their way back home. Key message at the end of this video is that no matter what method you try, you can't cheat on the breathalyzer test and is always better to call a cab, or ask a friend for a ride home if you have drank more than you should. A clever way to entice you watch the video to begin with.

In the third episode, she give tips on how to open a beer bottle without a bottle opener. I think that this is probably my favourite video because I find it useful and not to mention, you can show off to your friends as well.

In summary, I think these videos are brilliant because of:

1. Local content which people can appreciate and relate. The way the girl presents it makes it seem natural and unscripted to a certain extend.
2. Clever product placement and branding. Very minimal and not "in your face", but yet people notice the brand.
3. Content is surprisingly educational. Who would have thought you can educate the public about the dangers of drunk driving this way.
4. The hot girl...obviously

The Google Job Experiment

I always say self-branding is important as it portrays how one sells his or herself. In the case of Alec Brownstein, he needed a job so he did something out of the norm to get the attention of some of the world's top creative people such as David Droga, Tony Granger, Gerry Graf, Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone, all of which are well known figures in the creative and advertising industry.

He didn't do it by sending out resumés to them, but instead all it took Alec was $6 to run a Google Adwords campaign which feature their names to which the search result had a message that read something like: “Hey, David Droga, Gooogling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too.” which links back to his website to let them know how he can be contacted. This again displays the power and capabilities of Search Marketing, and how it can benefit someone or an organization.

Oh...and Alec landed a job at Y&R New York at the end of it. Simply brilliant!

Facebook Set To Revolutionize The Internet

The "Open Graph"

Facebook recently announced the launch of new “social plug-ins” at the f8 conference that will revolutionize the internet and how people are connected to it. Mark Zuckerberg talked about how Facebook intends to connect parts of the Web that other social sites are building, as part of what he described as the "Open Graph." People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about and through their experiences. Facebook has always been focused on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships. On the other hand, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so users can get relevant information about different types of things.

Imagine this: Yelp maps out the content based on businesses and services while Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other. Facebook now helps bring your friends from Facebook to share experiences on these sites or personalize them to you. So if say you liked a song you heard on Pandora, or say you liked a service that aided you on Yelp, you can now tell your friends on Facebook about it by simply clicking on the “like” button on the site and it will appear to your friends as part of your “News Feed”.

With the new social plug-ins, brands would now be able to gauge how well their products and services are doing in terms of public reaction to the number of “likes” or “recommends”. One sample implementation is on CNN.com, where you can see which of your friends “liked” which article from the site.

CNN.com now includes Facebook's Open Graph

Noticed the “Friend’s Activity” section highlighted? Those are actually people I know from my Facebook friend list who have “liked” certain articles within CNN.com. This serves as some sort of “recommender” to people on what to read or what to do, assuming it’s their first time to a particular website. Zuckerberg himself mentioned that the new changes announced constituted "the most transformative thing we've ever done for the web." …well how true indeed. 

For more information:
Mark Zuckerberg during f8 Live
Available Facebook “Social Plug-ins”