Loving this Nandos ad. Thanks to Brother Mike for sharing on Facebook (and the entire internet). It’s nice to see a clever ad getting attention, gives me faith in the interwebs again…
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
An update…
So, unlike all the other bloggers in Australian Christendom, or whatever sector of the blogosphere I occupy… I’m not taking any time off blogging wise over Christmas. In fact. I suspect a lack of sleep will mean I’ll be blogging more. Because blogging is what I do when I sit in front of the TV…
There are some big things on the horizon though. For Clan Campbell. Changes are afoot. We’re having a baby – any time in the next couple of weeks (or up until Christmas, if he/she really doesn’t want to come out). We’re moving house (not sure where yet). We’re changing churches (and sadly ending our time working for Andrew and Simone). But we’re off to Creek Road. Which will be different. I’m planning to hand in my last couple of pieces of college assessment for the year this week. We’re having a little holiday with family on Stradbroke Island at some stage in the next fortnight. And umm. I’ll be watching lots of cricket. Playing some Assassins Creed: Revelations. And eating banana paddle-pops. Also, my sister and her man became engaged today. So that’s also cool and newsworthy.
I blogged some coffee stuff at thebeanstalker.com this week (and I’ll post this semester’s essays up there when they’re all done and dusted), and some study notes at Venn Theology. And you canorder some roasted coffee with a “Really Useful Gift” kicker through the St. Eutychus Coffee Roastery between now and Christmas…
All in all a pretty busy couple of months in the pipeline – especially if you throw in a little bit of PR consulting (you can check out nathancampbell.com.au too, if you want to sling some work my way/me to sling some PR work your way…).
The Internet needs more dogs…
I’ve never gone for the LOL cats thing. Cats aren’t funny. Cats are horrible soulless things with fur.
But dogs. Dogs doing funny stuff is something I can go for…
Exhibits A and B… there you go…
Shirt of the Day: Venn Animals…
It’s a platypus playing a keytar. In Venn Diagram form…
From Threadless, designed by Tenso Graphics.
The history of the English Language (in 10 minutes)
If you don’t want to read Bill Bryson’s excellent Mother Tongue… just watch this video.
Indian pain freaks: Don’t try this at home
Wow. Contains disturbing images of people eating lightbulbs and being hit with things… on purpose.
#QantasLuxury: How to manage the fallout
This morning around 220 media outlets have covered the #qantasluxury debacle. It’s also certainly given social media and PR bloggers something to write about. If you buy the “all publicity is good publicity” line – then the campaign was a success.
Image Credit: @Kellulz, via The Australian
But you shouldn’t buy that line… because it’s dumb. The good thing about media coverage in traditional media outlets is that they’ll typically be interested in objectivity – which for them means getting both sides of the story (though in many of the cases below, this hasn’t happened).
Which means talking to Qantas. Which means that all publicity represents an opportunity to promote your brand.
A better phrasing of the rule is that “All publicity is only as good as you make it,” or “Good publicity promotes your brand.”
And while its possible that Qantas has strategically immolated itself on Twitter so that it can get this opportunity, that seems a little unlikely. Every story opens by bagging out the campaign. It wasn’t a well thought out move on the airline’s part.
Here’s a sampling of responses…
The Age – Qantas makes a hash of tweet campaign
The Age – Qantas Luxury – not having to face flak
The Australian (Media Blog) – Qantas Twitter Fiasco Launches Spoofs
Courier Mail – Qantas in First Class Twitter Fail
Courier Mail – Miffed passengers take tweet revenge
Reuters – Epic Fail for Qantas Twitter Competition
NineMSN (who clearly don’t understand apostrophes and words ending with s) – Qantas’s Epic PR Fail
The Hindustan Times – Qantas does a PR self goal dive
The Hong Kong Standard – Qantas spirals into PR infamy
The Mirror – UK – Qantas twitter hashtag campaign backfires as unhappy customers hijack it
The Reuters story is especially important, because it feeds content to newsrooms all over the globe – and that was bad for Qantas, because they haven’t got any comments from the airline. PR disaster management 101 is getting your messages across to the newswires.
What these stories are reporting is the tongue in cheek quip that Qantas fired back in response to the flood of responses – and while the quip kind of worked on Twitter, when it runs in a news story it just makes you look dumb. There’s a PR rule about never saying anything on camera you don’t want taken out of context… it works on social media too.
“But Qantas put on a brave face, taking to Twitter again to quip on Tuesday, “at this rate our #QantasLuxury competition is going to take years to judge.”
Or
“Qantas tried to laugh off the Twitter backlash later in the day, tweeting that it would take some time to judge the competition as the responses flooded in at a rate of 20 a minute.”
That doesn’t look like a company that is taking this crisis seriously.
But they are handling the fallout as best they can. When they get to speak that is… This line isn’t bad:
“A large number of our customers were disrupted and inconvenienced by the recent industrial action and fleet grounding. However, services have returned to normal and our customers can book flights with absolute confidence that they will not be disrupted by industrial action.”
That’s great. If they get that message, for free, into hundreds of stories it’s at least a silver lining.
Sadly it came after a few lines defending the campaign, and the prize… these aren’t great lines, because they show just how much Qantas doesn’t really get the whole social media thing, and gives a bit of insight into why this was botched… and a few media outlines are just running these quotes, not the paragraph above.
“We receive positive feedback from customers via social media about the Qantas premium inflight products. Over the past 12 months we have conducted a number of competitions for customers, fans and followers on our Twitter feed (@qantasairways), giving away these products,” the spokeswoman said.
“We launched the #qantasluxury competition as part of our ongoing social media strategy. The competition is giving away Qantas First Class pyjamas and amenity kits and a number of people have legitimately entered the competition.”
There’s no humility there. No acknowledgment that they got this massively wrong. Saying “a number” is the most deliberately vague statement ever issued, and at this point the positive entries in the competition are doubtless from professional competition enterers, or the families of Qantas board members.
Perhaps the funniest thing is that this move comes just two days after Qantas hired four full time social media people to manage the online fallout following the lockout.
BeardQuest: One man tries to grow every beard known to man…
Movember is so passe. Mostly because, well, I am hirsutely challenged on my upper lip. A beard I can almost do… though it gets a little bit red… this guy is inspiring.
Anybody doing movember who wants to tell us all in the comments and appeal for sponsorship should do so…
Da Vinci’s Note Pad
This is cool – apparently Leonardo Da Vinci was a notepad kind of guy – and he’d jot down just about anything, and because the dude was a polymath these pages were quite sensational… here’s an English rendering of one of the pages from his random jottings.
Via npr.
Sleep in a vegetative state
So, apparently the US Congress might not have declared pizza to be a vegetable afterall – though that’s been the public perception of their move to identify pizza as a healthy lunch time snack for school children… that’s neither here nor there though. Because you’ll still totally want one of these pizza sleeping bags…
The same seller has this nifty bacon scarf which is complementary, rather than complimentary. Or whichever one isn’t free but goes well with the other…
#Qantasluxury how to botch a Twitter campaign
Wow. I don’t think any company has ever misread the public mood quite as badly as Qantas did today. Their social media people should probably have learned some sort of lesson from the Radike Samo fiasco back in August. That was a previous Twitter comp where they picked two white guys in blackface costumes as their winners – and the Twitterverse condemned them. Now, I have a little bit of sympathy there – because the white guys clearly weren’t racist – they simply loved a rugby player who happened to have a different coloured skin, so naturally, to dress up like him they painted their faces… anyway. It should have been a lesson to Qantas that Twitter campaigns need to be handled with care – or they can blow up, and create negative media attention.
The percentage of Australians who are active Twitter users, and who understand the medium, is quite small, compared to the percentage of Australians who still get their news via a mix of traditional media – ie the people who will read the stories about how badly Qantas screwed this campaign up. Apparently they’ve had more than 30,000 negative tweets in the last few weeks – this isn’t the way to fix it.
Seriously. What on earth were they thinking. Their brand is so incredibly unpopular right now, and the uncertainty about their strike stuff still hasn’t gone away, and they’re giving away luxury pyjamas?
The “offending item”… via @QantasAirways
That in itself is questionable. But to do it by asking for your company to trend on Twitter with a pretty spurious hash tag (let’s face it “luxury” isn’t going to be high on the list of Qantas word association game options right now) in the midst of one of the biggest brand meltdowns in Australian corporate history is playing with fire. And if you play with fire… well… you know…
This happens… and then the story becomes how badly you botched your marketing, as well as how badly you botch flying your planes.
When your CEO is being visually compared with Hitler, and thousands of people are laughing at you, and hundreds of thousands are reading about how bad your marketing is, your marketing campaign has failed.
Tumblrweed: The Pepper Spray Cop
The other day a nasty policeman followed orders, and government policy and sprayed a bunch of peacefully protesting university students, who were peacefully protesting on the campus of their university, in a peaceful protest approved by university faculty, in their peaceful little faces, with some not very peaceful pepper spray. There were cameras everywhere. The cop has since been identified. Because that’s how the Internet works these days.
This image is evoking exactly the kind of reaction you’d expect, potentially providing a new set of martyrs for the Occupy Movement – because students are the 99%.
The other way the Internet works these days is via memes – memes which add fuel to the fire. I give you the “casually pepper spray everything” meme. And the tumblr (there’s some artwork there, as in famous paintings, not just meme fodder, featuring some nudity – just a warning (and some language)).
Some meta-memes…
Tumblrweed: Magic Cards with Googly Eyes
I never got into the Magic card game… maybe if all the monsters came with standard issue googly eyes that would have changed.
That’s the purpose of this ‘ere tumblog.
Shirts that make headlines
Made in the Now is seriously cool. They turn around a T-Shirt design a day, based on current quirky news events from around the globe.
Here’s a few samples.
The other day scientists invented a new lighter than dandelion substance…
Here’s the shirt.
Here are a few more…
I like this one, which was released when Rebecca Black put our her second single (you know she’s got a third out now…)
This is the one about an Amish beard cutting rampage recently.
Each shirt is only available for 24 hours.
Sadly, they’re a little expensive (at $40 a pop).
Dear Christian, you need “game”…
Doug Giles wrote the book on raising tough daughters. No. Literally.
He seems to be confusing getting “game” with shooting and mounting animals on your wall… at least that’s the visual aid in this video on being a ballsy man of God. Where he says we need “cajones” to proclaim the gospel, or our nation is screwed. And by our nation he means his nation.
At least he doesn’t equate masculinity with cage fighting.