The Federal Trade Commission (USA) has announced a series of new guidelines about blogging. Any blogger who receives any money, gifts or any kind of endorsement for writing a post/review should notify the FTC.

The FTC is trying to help the customer to identify authentic product reviews. It is a nice idea but once again it would be difficult for the FTC to apply this law. Most of the bloggers get gifts and no money which makes it more difficult to trace.

Also, most of the time, the bloggers are independent to write whatever they want about a product even when they have been given a gift/money for it…

I can understand the initiative of the FTC but the negative effect of it would be that it would be harder for the customer to find independent reviews online – although most of them are truly autonomous and not managed by the company.

This guideline will also penalise the smallest review blog which get free products, under this law they will be not able to buy all the products that they want to review.

Let see what happens to some blogs, the USA based ones at least.

Online Marketing 1 Comment October 6th, 2009

Last tuesday the Vatican launched its new website Pope2you.net for the 43rd World Communications Day. This new website offers the user a bunch of Social media applications such as iPhone and Facebook applications, video and blog.

 

 

 

 

 

The idea from the Catholic Church is to reach young people and change the image of the Church. Pope2You is more a portal for the different online applications.

 

Unfortunately the Facebook application wasn’t found by Facebook when I tried it… not a very good sign.

 

WikiCath (probably Wikipedia Catholic? ) is more or less a blog (or at least this is what I understand of it). In the business world it would be the company blog. It is a good idea and makes it easier to follow the news from the Vatican.

 

 

 

 

The iPhone application is a nice application which allows you to receive news, pictures and video from the Pope (Vatican). There is not much to say about it, except that this application does the job!

 

 

 

 

And finally the YouTube Channel which is pretty well customised with links to the different Vatican websites. Once again nothing new here but nothing is missing as well.

 

 

 

 

 

This new campaign updates the Vatican’s online presence. At the end of the day the Vatican was not trying to be original or revolutionise the web but they have done a lot better job at it than most of the companies online…

 

Anyway, all these applications definitely facilitate communications with the Catholic Church and this is a pretty good idea for the 43rd World Communications Day

Online Marketing No Comments May 24th, 2009

Eight months ago, Ford started a social media campaign called ‘This is Now’ for the launch of the Ford Fiesta. The principal is pretty simple, upload a picture, video or song representing the concept ‘This is Now’. Ford uses the famous Flickr which is an image and video hosting website. This campaign is managed by We are Social which is a social media agency in London.

 

 

The ‘This is Now’ Flickr group is composed of various metaphoric pictures which represent the theme ‘This is Now’. As you can imagine there are a wide ranging number of representations of this motto, some of them very impressive.

 

To promote the Flickr group, they have set up a blog, a Facebook group and a Twitter profile! They have also contacted an impressive number of blogs, starting with the main marketing blogs and after fashion, art and photo blogs. The goal was to involve people who are not familiar with the automobile industry.
 

 

‘This is now’ is a very interactive campaign with the usual elements such as photo posting, a blog (which allows guest writers to promote the events and pictures), Facebook and Twitter conversation.

 

After only eight months, the campaign is a ‘success’ according to Sandrine Plasseraud who is in charge of the Ford campaign for We are Social. With more than 40,000 pictures and reaching over one million people across Europe this campaign is definitely well managed.

 

Most of the online campaigns which include involvement/engagement of the public are normally the most successful and cost efficient. The blog, Facebook and Twitter were also an excellent choice of social media support to the main activity (uploading pictures on Flickr).

 

Ford has done an excellent job so far, let see what they will add (if any) over the next few months…

Online Marketing 1 Comment May 20th, 2009

Bo is the newest furriest member of the Obama family. The new pup is a black and white Portuguese Water Dog. He may be only 6 months old but already has a huge online presence!

 

The number of online searches over the last few days for ‘Bo Obama’ has exploded. Google Trends show that in a few days the number of searches and the number of pages relevant to the subject will continue to increase considerably.

 

 

There is a Wikipedia entry where we can find all the information about him.

 

 

 The White House has also set up a doggy-blog for the best friend of Sasha,
 

 

as well as a video page on Vimeo where we can watch the first family playing with dog in the White House.

 

 

 

It is the first time that the American government has started an online campaign for an animal. The weird part of it is that based on Google information and the ranking of the news (from Yahoo US) people really care about this little dog.

 

Strange times people…one day, dogs will have Facebook and Twitter

Online Marketing No Comments April 17th, 2009

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