That’s the idea anyway. Coca-Cola is set to launch the UK version of its successful Happiness Machine viral, hoping to replicate their success in the US.

The gist of it is a vending machine giving out an assortment of items to surprised students in a university campus. Along the same lines, the UK version will see the addition of UK-specific items such as strawberries and cream or the board game Monopoly.

Quite a big deal really as the US version is now Coca-Cola’s most successful viral campaign and achieved over 2.5m views on YouTube.

From this, the drinks giant is obviously hopeful of repeating the same level of attention in the UK but it still remains to be seen of the actual added value of using virals in the first place. Can you really link it back to sales or should it be viewed as more an investment in building positive feelings towards the brand and spreading the message? In Coca-Cola’s case “happiness to all.” Cough.

For them, they can toss up the value of this investment in comparison to say, TV ads, and consider how many people viewed it to give them a cost per minute of engagement, which can then compare to other activities.

In this way, virals can be of use to companies and can be further supported by blogger outreach and traditional PR, not just digital PR, whilst viewers can be encouraged to add comments on the video and share through social media channels.

It sure does. In fact, a recent survey found that 60% of global journalists believe that their content has actually improved with the rise of digital media. This can be attributed to a number of factors but 48% surveyed explained that their publication offered journalist authored blogs on their site, along with 40% using Twitter channels to disseminate content.

So the journo’s have got it right. You’ve got to put things out there for the taking. By “there” I mean the online environment, from social media sites to platforms and forums. And by “things” I mean well constructed, beneficial information that will engage and entice readers and followers to interact with your brand offering.

There is apsolutely no point in congratulating yourself over regular digital content updates if they don’t actually attract and speak to the people that matter. Understand where and what they would be interested in reading and that will send you down the right path.

In a significant cultural move, the Royal family has opened a Flickr account to share rare pictures of the Royal family on the internet after Buckingham Palace joined the photo sharing site.

The images include recent royal events alongside archive pictures of the Queen, Prince of Wales and other members of the Monarchy. More than 600 photographs have been added and new additions will be uploaded as new engagements and events take place.

The developments follows the launch of the updated royal website, British Monarchy Twitter account last year and the Royal channel on YouTube in 2007.

This savvy tech move is timed to coincide with the summer opening of Buckingham Palace, as it displays photographs commissioned for the exhibition The Queen’s Years, opeing at the London Palace next Tuesday.

So there you have. Do you really want to be left behind? Cautious as ever, the Royal family have waited until the time was right and have committed further to a digital Britain. They are aware of the outreach and engagement possibilities of these digital platforms and see no reason why they can’t be part of it. But are you aware of it?

Companies who continue to lag behind in this respect are only failing themselves. Embrace the digital world and find out how it can best support your brand (just like the Royal brand) and engage with your potential audience through some perceptive digital pr support.

With Facebook users totalling a whopping 500 million users recently its little wonder that thousands of companies are now vying for a little slice of the Facebook ecommerce pie. But just who is cashing in?

One of the ideas adopted by a particular brand marketer uses Facebook to create buzz for its clients, which range from solo bloggers to megabrands like Coca-Cola. The aim is to win “fans” who, with one click, opt into further interaction with the advertiser.

Wildfire, who launched in summer 2008 and who won a grant from the Facebook Fund, has another little trick to hand by building marketing campaigns that include contests, coupons, quizzes and virtual gifts. The ultimate achievement for them is to get a campaign going viral, spreading brand recognition like, well, wildfire, says co-founder Victoria Ransom.

Companies can really benefit from viral channels but perhaps not all of them have the expertise to do this well. The key is not to be rash, take time to consider a strategic digital pr plan.

Engagement, connection, whatever you want to call it, get to know your customers to build and enhance your following by extending conversations into something meaningful.

There are many theories that circulate in industry circle over consumer behaviour but of particular interest is one of recent which suggests that people are more likely to buy brands their friends like. And from this, is tracking their social interactions the most effective way to target them accurately?

Let’s face it, if you need it it’s probably out there. The web has become so profoundly social and consumers share increasing amounts of information across various websites, that you can forgive marketers salivating at the power that’s possible.

Now, it would seem, a new sort of US companies have emerged who feel they have finally found a method of tapping into this wealth of data through a process of licensing data from third parties, largely social media sites, and tracing consumers’ social connections in order to target ads towards those most powerfully connected to brand fans (as touched upon in the last blog update).

It’s pretty easy to work out what they can then do. Marketers have begun to let the data tell them who to target, as opposed to past methods of them telling the the data who to target. They have apparently proven that by understanding who’s purchasing and who’s a fan of the brand, people strongly connected to it socially are highly likely to share the same interests, to purchase those same products and have the same gender, income etc. It appears that the social connection could be a very powerful predictor indeed.

However, unlike current ad platforms offered on the likes of Facebook, where companies target individuals based on their profile, social targeting focuses on targeting people based on their friends, not their interests.

Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of skepticism that surrounds this. There are those who feel that 99.9% of what we browse on the web does not fit into any commercial or behavioural category, meaning attempts to scale that inevitably include a load of irrelevant information.

Irrespective of either of these standpoints, what nobody can deny is the fact that online engagement can be extremely beneficial and enlightening for companies who wish to develop or maintain a strong brand culture. Don’t shy away from an online presence, understand and engage with it by developing a well-thought out digital pr strategy for the future.

You can’t ignore it, it’s mentioned virtually everywhere. So why do companies continue to overlook its importance and not grasp its importance? Well frankly, they just don’t get it.

To understand social media means you can use it to your best advantage so become part of the culture. Increasingly, what’s becoming clear is that brands which are having success in social media have always been in touch with culture.

Popular culture, it’s inclusive and representative of people’s changing interests and quite simply another channel within which popular culture expresses itself. And so, brands that have achieved cultural legacy have been woven into people’s online conversations without having to work hard at it. People appreciate transparency and can see the difference between brands that are forced on them and those that have organically become part of our culture. 

The people are of course as much a part of the cultural legacy as the company itself, as they fuel the brand. Companies aware of this have welcomed this not faught it. Allowing fans to become influencers in the future of the brand through content creation for example, companies can help stimulate this cultural community.

And so, before investing time and money in building your social media strategy through measured digital pr, first ask what your brand cultural legacy is that people connect to and want to be part of? Also, what are the behaviours and motivations of your fans that you can harness through social media?

Apparently not so much. In fact, they continue to decline in the UK and Europe despite interaction rates continuing to perform well, according to the latest DoubleClick online advertising benchmark report.

But is this such a huge issue? Not really. Whilst this change in users’ behaviour might encourage advertisers to devise new methods of assessing the effectiveness of their campaigns, interaction time among UK web users is above the European average.

This just means that click-through rates (CTRs) are becoming a less relevant measurement tool for the industry. Where once they were a benchmark for measuring success, a rise of Flash and rich media interaction could be deemed as fast becoming an alternative method of engagement.

With a huge growth in such rich and exciting media, it gives the audience a new choice of options in how they interact with companies. Industry insiders explain that a rich media unit can inspire a range of responses from users and therefore not every click in this environment produces a click-through. When a viewer clicks on a rich media unit, a number of outcomes are possible, including exapnding the unit or watching a video.

Some have found that for brand campaigns, click-through rates is often not the key metric, yet it is still important for performance campaigns. So what we’re finding is that a vast amount of time should not be spent stressing about the decreasing rate of click-throughs but instead spent on considering the rich media methods out there that could intice audiences further. Work out what form of digital pr would be best suited to your company and then get to work.

No longer focusing on the more traditional forms of customer communication, Ben & Jerry’s will become one of the first of many big brands to abandon regular email marketing and instead opt for a focus on social media.

Setting a good example, the ice-cream brand fully listened to the feedback it received from customers suggesting the majority of whom would prefer to be contacted on social media sites rather than through emailed monthly newsletters.

Whilst email marketing has long been established as one of the most successful digital marketing channels and remains a standard marketing outlet for most brands, Ben & Jerry’s have made a conscious decision to move away from the established practice.

This savvy move means that with only one email update to customers each year, Facebook and Twitter profiles will make up the main channels used to engaged with customers on a constant basis, both in-house and through its digital PR team.

A strategic move to focus on building relationships with customers, this approach is seen as being best achieved through social media. Developing friendships and relationships is key for them and thus far feedback has been largely positive. As it stands, Ben & Jerry’s UK has a Facebook fan base of over 76,000. So it would seem some are interested in the digital move.

Nevertheless, there are still those who feel that whilst there are persuasive arguments for focusing on social platforms but perhaps mainly for young people who do not use email in the same way as older people do. And so, to cut off a channel that is still used by large numbers seems impulsive and might need further development.

There seems to be a growing trend of brand savvy customers becoming more wary than ever of insincere corporate apologies issued by emotionless committees, perhaps most recently publicised in the BP crisis, and thanks to social media they’re more able than ever to make your first strike count against you.

Yet, if you simply apply a little humility, making a mistake can actually lead to a better long-term relationship with your customers. 

Of course technical hi-cups occur and many on a daily basis, whether it be a minor hold-up or a colossal setback. And whilst Murphy’s law was a major difficulty in the past for PR teams, industry insiders reveal that a new wave of acceptance may be washing over the public and producing an entirely new way of building a good relationship with your customers , by failing them.

That’s not to say treat them mean keep them keen, far from it. Whilst customers in recent times do have a more evolved sensibility, and thanks to greater general knowledge regarding the nature of branding, slightly more realistic expectations, they nevertheless will not put up with bad service. Ruin their day through arrogance and lies and they will hunt you down on their nearest social network and and bury you under a ton of tweets.

But to own-up and admit you’re at fault is a different story, and one which could be your salvation. People aren’t stupid so don’t treat them that way. If handled in the correct way your mistakes can actually strengthen the relationship you have with your customers.

It does require something which most take for granted, but maybe not so much business: Honesty. Transparency is it, and with it customers will put up with mistakes providing you share with them some key pieces of information.

• You’re doing your best to fix this – constantly explain the progress through email, website, blog, and announce on Twitter. Just don’t wait until it has been resolved.
• Let them know you’ve learned your lesson - explain what went wrong, and what steps have been taken to safeguard against a repeat performance.

So there we have it. To slip up is human and if you respond in a candid manner and work hard to resolve the problem then customers will excuse this blunder, and may even feel more positively about you afterwards.

Of course mistakes happen but to prove you are an open and honest comapny and listen to customer complaints goes a long way. Just make sure you fully appreciate the influential standing of social media spaces through strategic digital pr and how they can be utilised to work in favour of your company when the ‘things’ hit the fan.

Coca-Cola has launched a new social media policy, or “social media principles” as they like to call them. Three pages of twenty “down and dirty” principles broken down into three categories.

The first has five principles of what Coca-Cola as a company commit to doing in the social media space; transparency, disclosure, safeguarding their consumers information etc.

The second category surrounds the guidelines and principles for official media spokespeople, and those who wish to be an official media spokeperson have to go through a social media certification class, this time covering then principles, again including such issues as transparency, disclosure and so on.

The third category contains a further five principles for those who are not official spokespeople but general associates of the company, which amount to over 1million. This is when these individuals are not acting on behalf of the company but come across a Facebook post or a Tweet or something in the social media space that either concerns or excites them, and how they should best interact with these conversations.

They say it’s about empowering their ambassadors and associates to be able to communicate but at the same time not giving them a bit too much rope that something goes tragically wrong.

I guess you could see this as rather encouraging to see such a major multinational conglomorate open its eyes and give power to the people but something inside is twinging at me to think otherwise.

Part of me questions whether they are merely playing the system and turning ’social media’ into just another form of ‘corporate media’. The best line may be where it says “always remember who we are (a marketing company)”, not a soft drinks company.  

Perhaps just my cynical side. Maybe I should be truly congratulating Coca-Cola to take this step when other major companies continue to ban Facebook and Twitter in the office. A large corporate organisation integrating social media into their existing principles of communication. Social media is certainly not a new concept or seperate ’thing’ its an evolution of digitally connected communication that all companies at some point will need to address.

It could be said that many will learn by the early adopters and their success or failures but they will gain ground on competitors by taking the lead! Nevertheless it’s never too late to get your foot on the ladder and do this by developing a strategic digital pr.