Sorry Katie has been a bad updater but I had a really busy few weeks at my internship which is over now and also in the realm of most embarrassing thing ever. I forgot my password. *sigh*

So by now the KONY 2012 movement is old hat right? Not quite. Don’t forget the initial event was MEANT to take place on April 20, which hasn’t happened yet. BUT where has all the coverage of KONY gone?? As my background is International Politics I thought this was especially interesting on two levels. Interesting to see how social media built up and then tore down the movement and interesting to see the influence on some governments and other NFP’s responded to all the coverage.

RECAP:

• March 5 2012: KONY 2012 video is released by Invisible Children Inc.

• March 16 2012: Jason Russel director of KONY 2012 is arrested and put on a psychiatric hold after running naked through the streets of San Diego and reportedly being filmed masturbating in public, his wife blames pressure of the criticism of the movement

• March 21 2012: Statement out through US congress condemning Kony and supporting efforts to capture him

• March 23 2012: African Union announces intention to send 5000 troops to find Kony

• March 30 2012: over 86 million views on YouTube

• April 2012: KONY 2012 part 2 – beyond famous released to address critics

• April 30 2012: all those people who watched and shared the KONY message actually turn up to protests for cover the night??

• December 2012: Kony captured??

See now, this is why I find social media so fascinating! For 24 hours you couldn’t look at Facebook without having one of your friends sharing the YouTube link and writing nice things about stopping evil. After that it was all the television stations reporting on the movement and the day after that the newspapers wondered what was going on and finally decided to write a story.

But it’s also painfully obvious from this that as fast as social media can build something up it also has the potential to bring the movement crashing back to earth. Before Jason Russel had his breakdown Invisible Children Inc. came under the microscope for everything from how much money was spent producing the video to the accuracy of the statistics and claims being made in the video.

Like this the all-important message of a very evil man who has done a lot of harm to a lot of people. Not just those who he has killed but people whose lives are never going to be the same again – the children and families of the child soldiers, people who have been injured and maimed in the fighting. They have been largely forgotten in the barrage of criticism. One can also assume that the high levels of overnight fame and pressure that escalated from the video going viral was just too much for Jason Russel and I think he should have our sympathy.

When it was decided to make the video those in charge were obviously NOT thinking about the potential negative side effects of making the video, for example the intense scrutiny of their sources and the facts that they were putting forward. Several people have come forward claiming that KONY 2012 had an overly simplistic message that didn’t encourage people to learn more about the issue and made broad sweeping statements about the LRD and Kony. Having studied International Politics all I can say to that is…well duh! Not to complain overly about the lack of political education in this country but sometimes I wonder if my friends understand Australia’s political system let alone a complex historiographical and political history of obscure African nations. Backing me up the chief prosecutor of the ICC has called the criticism “stupid”.

What is not being considered is that getting 86 million people to watch a video ABOUT an obscure African nation is AMAZING because these are the numbers of people that inspires governments to take action. The idea that the United States would do anything even if it is only the symbolic gesture they have given thus far would NOT have happened without the video because everyone would have been sitting in their houses going Kony? Who is Kony? My country is in economic decline why do I care about Ugandan warlords????

Ok *Politics hat off* *PR hat on*

When was the last time you mentioned Kony on social media? Sometime last month I guess. What about saw it mentioned by a friend? About the same? Social media is a very powerful tool for public relations but it can be a whirlwind. The idea is that there will be a global movement on April 30, it’s only April 11. They set themselves a very long term goal for a very short term medium.

I wonder if many people WILL turn up to the cover the night events as they will have moved onto the next cause. In the face of negative criticism Invisible Children Inc. should have kept the pressure on the public and in the public mid to ensure that the movement is not forgotten. So PR and Kony.

A strong PR strategy would have helped to alleviate some of the pressure on Invisible Children Inc. A strong strategy would have made allowances for a negative perception especially as the group already knew that they were target of some criticism in the months BEFORE the release of the video. Being a NFP and having lofty goals of eliminating evil does not make you immune to criticism and a crisis management strategy that had been thought out should have been prepared before the launch to avoid the constant bad publicity and unfortunate break down of Jason Russel.

A prepared crisis management plan could have been implemented quickly to answer criticism immediately as they arose and stop it being picked up and repeated until the initial message was lost. Obviously it was not realised how quickly the video would spread. Invisible Children Inc. have had a hard time keeping up the momentum of the initial few days and I will be interested to see how much coverage and participation there is on April 30. So tell me, are you going to cover the night? Or has social media hype claimed a victim?

Kate

I liked this campaign so much. I was so taken in by it, I didn’t apply I was at university and my major academic nerd side didn’t want to defer, possibly because I am a crazy person. But still I thought it was so clever and it was one of the first things that made me think, “I wish I could come up with an idea like that” so thanks Tourism Queensland its partially your fault I’m here.

In 2009 tourism Queensland and Brisbane advertising agency CumminsNitro started a campaign to increase the number of people coming to the Great Barrier Reef. Numbers of tourists were down and the government wanted to increase number of tourists from 8 different regions. Therefore the started a viral campaign of getting people to apply for the “best job in the world.”

What did you get?

The premise was that people could apply to the best job in the world and the winner would get to be the caretaker of the islands on the Great Barrier Reef for six months, living at Hamilton Island and being paid $150,000 for the privilege.

I think that was an amazing premise, who wouldn’t want that job! I still want that job! and on top of that it was such a unique concept, actually involving people in the promotion of the state would cause people to think so much more about why they want to come to Queensland and what it is they want to see when they are there. It would increase the engagement of the audience so much farther beyond what they would normally do when they are watching television ads or listening to the radio.

There were multiple Medias involved in order to get the maximum amount of exposure to their target audiences. Using YouTube, banner ads, Facebook, MySpace, twitter, and job sites they were able to generate enough publicity to get the job ad free exposure to traditional media as it had gained enough momentum to be a new story of its own.

The original ad!

<iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/SI-rsong4xs” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

So who applied?

Everyone applied! Well not everyone, but 34,684 people did. From 196 countries. That blows my mind; I can’t believe that so many people felt compelled to actually make applications. Yes it is an unbelievable opportunity but there is always going to be a large number of people who see the campaign and register it in their minds but are for a variety of reasons not going to act upon the campaign message. Through media coverage it is estimated that about 3 billion people were exposed to the campaign and the job application website and nearly 8.5 million unique views and 55.5 million views all up.* That is a massive achievement for any campaign let alone a tourism campaign as people tend to already have an idea of places they want to visit and this was only indirectly aimed at getting people to come to Queensland.

Who won?

An Englishman called Ben Southall. He got to live on Hamilton Island and he kept islandreefjob.com with blogs about his experiences as well as videos and photo diaries to illustrate to people the beauty of the various islands and wildlife on the Great Barrier Reef. He is now Queensland Tourism ambassador and last year was on a kayaking expedition continuing his blog on islandreefjob.com.

*Stats from Tourism Queensland

Ok, this could be a short one as it only happened in the last few days and so I can’t comment too much on the long term handling of the situation but it was definitely an interesting afternoon watching what happened, so I will endeavour to go through it and analyse it.

As someone who doesn’t have a mortgage but plans to have one in hopefully the next two years. I am making an effort to understand all this interest rate business, especially as my Dad has been a banker all my life I feel the pressure to know what’s going on. However I’ll admit most of the time I fail miserably at it and can only discern what’s going on by reading the somewhat biased stories in the newspapers. Also, how exciting I get to write about something that actually happened today!

Since the GFC banks have undeniably been fighting an uphill battle with their PR. Worldwide banks have been blamed for causing the global financial downturn, so now how banks handle PR has become very interesting. Some of the banks are trying hard to make themselves seem much more personable than they used to be and get the public on side. Take the NAB, deciding to promise to keep the variable interest rate lower than the other big 4 banks. Good PR move, people like paying less for things.

Then there is what the ANZ have decided to do over the last few months. So, there have been a few interesting business decisions in the last few months that must make working in PR at the ANZ a veritable nightmare at the moment:

• Firstly, deciding to announce interest rate movements separately of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) in an effort to distance in the minds of the public between the official interest rate and the decisions of the ANZ
• Secondly, today they raised the interest rates again so that now, the variable home loan rate at ANZ is now 3.11% higher than the official cash rate set by the RBA, and that tends to annoy people, especially those who happen to HAVE home loans at the ANZ
• Thirdly, apparently fearing that the media would be ready to give the CEO a trial by fire, it was decided to completely avoid the conflict and not have a media conference

So that last point is the thing I wanted to talk about in this post and yes I apologise it took me a while to get here.

ANZ released to the media a pre-taped statement about why it was decided to go against the decision of the RBA, blaming competition which would have forced the bank to approve less new lending and stating that it would have negative economic impacts.

“While we recognise our decision may leave some people frustrated and even angry, we believe Australia needs safe, well-run commercial banks that aren’t a burden on taxpayers and that can continue to lend.” – Philip Chronican, head of ANZ Australian operations

Surely, if you are going to make a decision that is most definitely going to leave people “frustrated” and “angry” the one group you want to have on your team is the media. Media is a very powerful tool of public persuasion, everyman and his dog knows that. But what was clear was the decision of the ANZ to not hold a press conference made journalists feel cheated of the chance to question the decision.

So what do the media do in response? If you answered flay the ANZ alive then you win a cookie! Especially when the answer is that the ANZ didn’t think there was enough time for journalists to turn up to a press conference…The bank announces its interest rate movements every second Friday of the month I think there were probably journalists eagerly awaiting a press conference announcement. Oops

But then what’s worse! Wayne Swan criticising the bank in parliament and encouraging people to leave the bank and take their mortgages elsewhere! I guess I just think that you could probably see a negative reaction to this coming a mile away; surely there is a better way to handle such a sensitive issue than getting the media offside.

Kate X

Hey, I know I didn’t post anything yesterday, but I got good news! I got an internship yay me!  So yesterday I was a bit busy running around my house, jumping up and down and congratulating myself on my own brilliance to post anything. So, yes, I’m now a working girl, well for the next month at least, then job search starts all over again but at least I will get to feel like a productive member of society, for a little while…But I digress, back to Louie!

So in the last few weeks there has been a lot of advertising on TV encouraging Australians to get on board and “Save Louis.” It’s probably a pretty safe bet that all Australians know who Louis the fly is, the mobster-esque mascot of Mortein fly sprays since the 1950′s. The campaign had a pretty simple premise, that after 50 years they needed a change and so they were finally going to kill off Louis, presumably by finally having a Mortein product actually kill him.

I think it was really smart because it has always seemed to me that, well, Australians do not like change. Especially when it involves things that are considered quintessentially Australian, if you don’t believe me think back to the debacle of changing Vegemite a few years back! To make something of a sweeping assumption, Australians have a real attachment to some brands, Vegemite, TimTams, and for some reason this obnoxious cartoon fly.

Suddenly telling your audience that unless they all work together to “save Louis” a part of the background of Australian life for over 50 years is going to disappear is certainly one way to reignite an interest in a brand and an icon. A cursory glance of YouTube when I was looking to upload the original ad is testament to how seriously some people took the potential disappearance of poor Louis. There are videos of people sitting at their desks talking about Louis and even a video showing that the voting system could in fact be rigged to save Louis because voting on Facebook can be done multiple times.

The campaign then went into a second phase of telling Australians how many votes were needed to guarantee that Louis would live on. I think it is here that the campaign was perhaps not as well executed as it could have been. For a mere 250,000 votes the campaign would end, presumably with another ad showing Louis triumphantly showing the executive that he is still universally loved and flying off into the sunset. However, this number seemed to me to be fairly arbitrary and even worse began to seem like it was going to be impossible to meet, even  though the ads gave no indication of an end date to the campaign.

In my opinion this was the greatest problem with it. Even though I was actively following the campaign on Facebook, and yes I was one of those sad people who voted more than once, it seemed like it was just going to go on indefinitely until Mortein reached the required number of votes needed to save him. To me it began to seem obvious that there was no intention of killing off Louis at all, which is fair enough, he has been the identifying image of the brand for over 50 years, but do you really want to cheat the public like that?

Also the blanket TV coverage started to get, dare I say it, a bit annoying. From being totally taken in by the idea when it began I started to get irritated by the ads towards the end of the campaign. Maybe it should have been anticipated that it would take a while to get to 250,000 votes and more ads should have been prepared in order to keep the public interested.

Here is a link to the original TV ad, announcing to Australia that Mortein was planning to kill Louis. What do you think? Does it get annoying? Or has sitting around watching TV all day meant I’ve just seen it ten times more than the average person?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLfTtFWsCY8

On the other hand, aside from the TV ads the campaign made a good use of multiple mediums, Mortein had Louis travel around the East Coast visiting sites and trying to rally support. It was interesting to be able to track all the places that the Louis roadshow was going on the Facebook page and see a lot of genuine excitement in people at the idea of being able to meet Louis “in person”.

To be honest I was sad when the campaign came to an early end. I would loved to have seen where they were going to take it. How would it have been announced that Louis had been saved? How was Louis going to thank the Australian public? But the unfortunate thing about business it that they often think that they can ride a wave of good publicity and maybe hide some bad news in there and nobody will notice. So announcing that they were going to close the Australian factories and put people out of work in the middle of the Louis the Fly campaign may have seemed like an excellent idea at the time, but it backfired completely ending the campaign early and I suspect undoing a lot of the hard work that had been done on the campaign as now people are planning to boycott the brand in protest!

Oh well, at the end of the day I still thought it was an interesting and fun way to get people thinking about Mortein and Louis the Fly again, and most importantly, Australians can sleep easily knowing Louis is still safe and well to keep starring in Mortein ads for another 50 years.

Kate X

I’m not going to lie to you. I LOVE H&M! yes I love it so much I have to yell about it. When I was in London in January 2011 I bought so  many things in H&M that in order to get it all home I had to send 10 kilos of clothes home via the royal mail and I think it was totally worth it. However, as many of you probably know they have been in the middle of a public relations nightmare for the past few weeks.

The story goes that an American artist, Tori LaConsay, painted a sign in Atlanta that said “You Look Nice Today <3″ (but with a proper love heart) the sign was there for over a year and pictures of it went quasi viral appearing on lots of flickr feeds etc. H&M then started selling home wares in the UK stores with the image printed on them without crediting the artist.

When she contacted them about the situation she baisically got the brush off from the company, the response to her friends email saying she wouldn’t shop there anymore unless Tori was credited was to say “sorry to hear you won’t be shopping with us anymore.”

So in this age of social media H&M managed to display a complete lack of knowledge about how powerful social media can be as well as demonstrate the worst way to moderate the fb page all in one go!

Whoever is in charge of the H&M fb page initially tried to just delete the comments being made by fans refrencing the theft but as the news went viral and more people began flooding the page and others realised they were simply having their comments deleted H&M backtracked and put a statement on the page stating:

“we apologies if anyone should think we have copied, which has never been our intention and also not allowed. We have merely been inspired after seeing many different varities with different text messages, to create something similar in a different font, with the use of big and small brackets and the placement of the shaped heart. We are truly sorry if we have led someone to believe that we should have intentionally copied someone else’s creation.”

Spelling mistake aside, H&M was obviously hoping that the issue would go away, possibly because H&M doesn’t understand the Internet. It obviously didn’t as when you look at the two side by side (Tori’s work and H&M products) they are unmistakably the same thing. Watching the fb page blow up with negative comments was fascinating, possibly because I am a massive nerd, but sitting there hitting refresh and watching dozens of comments appear every second saying how disgusted people all over the world are and watching people declare they were boycotting H&M until the debacle was resolved was an intriguing look at how careful companies have to be these days when they have a large online presence.

H&M put out another statement after the story started appearing in traditional media outlets in the US saying that they wre going to work with Tori to resolve the issue. Problem solved? nope. Sorry H&M after trying to put a social media gag on Tori before agreeing to work with her. According to Tori H&M initially seemed willing to apologise before someone, possibly the legal department, caused them to revise their position and say that they would accept a licensing agreement that would come into effect AFTER they have sold all the existing merchandise. They then handed her a prepared media statement saying she was happy with the outcome.

So here we go again a week after the whole debacle blew up there are still an increasing number of people on the H&M page saying they will never shop there again and H&M seems to have put their heads in the sand over the whole thing with no follow up statement since Tori spilled the beans on the proposed licencing agreement.

Hopefully other companies are going to learn something from this incident about the power of the Internet and social media in not just building up a company but tearing them down.

Kate X

read the original article on regretsy here: http://www.regretsy.com/2012/02/03/update-h-m-is-still-awesome/

Welcome to katevandermye.com.

Hi I’m Kate (obviously) and I’m a 22 year old, argh old!, girl who just finished a Master of Public Relations and Advertising at University of New South Wales. But my Bachelors is Art with Majors in History and Politics (International Relations). Yep those two things are pretty different but I think they are actually quite complimentary and I probably did better in my masters with the writing and researching skills I picked up from politics.

So, basically, I finished my degree in November and because I didn’t take a break between my Bachelor and Master degree I decided to be a bit of a lazy bum when it comes to things such as maybe applying for jobs or earning a steady income to pay off my, now rather large, HECS debt. But I did have a lot of fun in the last few months I have been away to Melbourne to catch up with my old school friends over the Melbourne Cup Carnival,  far north Queensland with my boyfriend and a group of my close friends to relax before Christmas and then off to KL and Singapore with my boyfriend and his mates to, well, act like a group of boys and drink a little too much at night before pulling yourself together to go do cultural stuff during the day.

However now I’m home, completely broke, and finally starting to look for a job! I think it will be pretty exciting seeing how much I LOVED my masters program. But in the meantime I developed a bit of an unhealthy obsession with PR campaigns during my time at university and making a successful campaign, so with very little to do aside from work 2 days a week in retail my boyfriend who works in IT said to me “blog about PR you love it and you say interesting things about it I’ll help you set one up” which may have been a secret plea to stop telling him over dinner about why companies he has never heard of are doing things I like/don’t like. Either way I’m taking him up on his offer and I’m going to blog about PR campaigns/crises current and a few from the last few months that have loved/loathed!

So hopefully tomorrow when it’s not 10.30pm at night and my poor bf is trying to get me to watch movies I will bring you all my first real post. I think I’ll start with the H&M PR disaster of the last few weeks…that one really has me intrigued especially as I once fancied that I would one day be an intellectual property lawyer. Until then.

Kate X