Your Country Your Call and Ballygowan Pink: 360 integrated marketing programmes and blogger outreach in Ireland

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: February 19th, 2010 | 23 Comments | Posted in: Business blogging, Digital Marketing, Ireland, Social Media Ireland

This last week there have been a a couple of notable business projects reaching out to connect with bloggers and using new media as part of an integrated campaign of 360 marketing that have caught my attention.

REVIEW OF YOUR COUNTRY YOUR CALL

‘Your Country Your Call’ is a new project and is a countrywide competition to identify and reward two proposals that, when implemented, they can help to secure job creation and a prosperous future for Ireland. There will be two competition winners and the winning proposers will each receive a cash prize of €100,000. Both winning proposals will then be implemented with the support of an independent working group and with a development fund of up to €500,000 for each project.

President Mary McAleese launched the programme on 17 February 2010 – opening up the Irish Times yesterday you would have seen an article and a full page spread to help build awareness of the programme.

From a social media perspective, the organising team reached out to a number of people who are active in the area of social media including  Darragh Doyle, Brendan Hughes, Pat Phelan and myself for input ahead of the launch to share ideas and assist in gaining online visibility of the project – now that is forward thinking and I know that those of us invited to comment welcomed the opportunity to share ideas for the programme which has the potential to truly impact the future prosperity of Ireland.

Take a look at their website and you will find there is a link to a Facebook page, a Twitter Profile, a YouTube channel, a LinkedIn group and a Flickr channel. There is also a facility to share the content to social networks and to book mark content.

You will see on the YouTube channel a short video about the blogger outreach event that they held on the 15 February (unfortunately I was not able to attend).

The project team have allocated resources to supporting the social media channels and it is great to see that there is a real commitment to this channel for communications.

My three recommendations for the project in terms of helping their online visibility of their content online at the moment would be:

1. to have a more complete profile and more effective descriptions, titles and tags on their YouTube channel videos

2. adding a full profile, titles, descriptions and tags on their Flickr channel and allow some of the photo’s to be available to use under Creative Commons licence. That way bloggers who were not at their launch event can add images to their blog posts

3. adding a full description and a URL to their Twitter channel so people can find their web page about the programme easily.

You can read Brendan’s blog post about his experience of attending the blogger event for Your Country Your Call here.

BALLYGOWAN BOTTLES GO PINK

I have to disclose that Ballygowan sparkling water is my bottled water of choice! On Sunday 14 February I was made aware that Ballygowan had changed it’s dress – it had gone pink.

In a 360 marketing campaign which I first came across on TV, Ballygowan announced that it had launched a new campaign to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer in association with the Marie Keating Foundation in the Republic of Ireland and Action Cancer in Northern Ireland.

Every bottle sold will raise funds for breast cancer awareness and contribute towards cancer support projects.

Ballygowan Pink has a microsite and a Facebook page which already has almost 4000 fans.

The campaign which was managed by McConnells Integrated encompasses TV and Radio, an is in consumer and trade press and on outdoor posters. My one observation on the TV launch was that as a consumer it did come across to me as being a bit too repetitive – I think every ad break I saw on Sunday featured Ballygowan Pink.

From a PR perspective I was thrilled and surprised to find that a case of Ballygowan Pink bottles had been delivered to me – this being organised by the PR team of WHPR. I have had to confiscate the bottles from my three daughters or they would have all gone by now.

You see what I thought I would do is take bottles of Ballygowan Pink with me to events and locations that I know I am meeting female colleagues or clients. Yes my household could drink the bottles of water ourselves – but instead as a blogger who also lives in the real world, what better way to spread the word than sharing a bottle with a friend! You see I want my friends to ‘be part of it’.

In fact the campaign has had such an impact on me in terms of getting into my subconscious that when I attended a women’s networking event last night I found myself wondering why I could not see Ballygowan Pink bottles being served!

What I did do is take a couple of bottles with me – one to pass to my friend and colleague Emma, and one to drink myself.

So there we have it – one established brand and one new campaign both embracing 360 marketing here in Ireland.

Both also engaging bloggers to help them share their message with the world.

What other 360 marketing campaigns of note have caught your attention this month?