Posted to Chinese social media site Weibo in mid-August, the photos quickly sparked conspiracy theories, ranging from UFOs to secret military operations. The original posting of the photos has now been forwarded over 46,500 times.

• Three days later, the formations had already been picked up on by international UFO groups, one of which posted this video:

• By the 22nd of August China’s official news agency, Xinhua, published an article about the “abnormal desert rings,” going so far as to mention aliens.

• By the 26th of August however BMW had come clean through China’s massive news website sina.BMW explained the crop circle viral by saying it aimed to highlight the “UN1QUE” characteristics of both the BMW 1 series model and its prospective driver. Also, UFO is short for “UN1QUE For One.” Hmm…wonder if it makes more sense in China?

Have a look at the advert in full and see what you think:

While the stunt itself was a clear success, it begs the question: was it successful as a brand-building act? The viral created a lot of web buzz, but a great deal of that was from UFO-watchers and conspiracy theorists; is that BMW’s target demographic? And if so, is mocking them the best approach?

BMW is however having a successful year in China, with sales up from 2010. As the nation’s car market contracts, BMW is repositioning to appeal to a different consumer group. The BMW 1 Series is a Chinese made offering: less luxury, more middle class, targeting the sporty, urban, youthful Chinese consumer.

What do you think? Is it clever advertising or are they alienating (sorry) Chinese customers?

Have a great weekend folks!

The most recent visual assistance product to hit the app store is VizWiz. As well as giving you automated image recognition from intelligent software, it throws your questions open to a small band of volunteers standing-by on the internet – a human cloud, willing to donate ten seconds of their time here and there to describe photos which come in.

“The most popular type of question is a product that they have which has text written on it, a label with instructions. People want to know what it says, how to cook it or when it expires,” said Professor Jeff Bigham, the man behind the service.

In a perhaps unexpected technological development, blind people are now finding they need to learn the basics of photography in order to take advantage of these text and image recognition services on smart phones.How do you hold the camera up? And how close do you put it to the object you want to know more about? Angles, perspective, distance and light, are concepts that we take completely for granted but that don’t come naturally to people who have never been able to see.

The oMoby app is capable of recognising products from a photograph, and it it can’t automatically work out an image by comparing it to an image search engine, it sends out the request to a network of humans who answer in a similar way to the VizWiz app.

Steve Nutt from Hertfordshire who has been blind since birth explained how it took him two weeks to master how to frame a shot which he does in a very functional way, quite different to how sighted people would do it.

Jeff Bigham’s team sees the results of the camerawork coming from users like Steve. Not everyone gets it right with their first shot as it’s not always easy to frame the photos. Sometimes the centre is out of the photo. if they’re asking what is on a can of soup label, we generally tell them that ‘we can’t tell what this is, the label is likely on the other side of the can’.

These smartphone apps are a fantastic example of the difference to peoples lives that such technology can have. Makes angry birds seem a little frivolous!

The interns were challenged to make something famous while changing public perception and The Social Tattoo Project was their solution. The project’s premise is to sponsor unique tattoos based around major world issues that are then tattooed onto volunteers. To implement this, their social strategy involved asking Twitter and Facebook followers each week to vote between four trending twitter topics and, at the end of the week, the winning topic is chosen.

This innovative positive action demonstrates that sustainable and credible communication is key to captivating ongoing interest and empathy in the message and ultimately maintain the momentum of a campaign long term.

“Someone’s empathy can expire,” says Jenn Huang, co creator of The Social Tattoo Project. “If you ask someone now what’s happening in Haiti they probably couldn’t tell you, so we came up
with a social experiment where we make empathy permanent by tattooing volunteers.”

Head over to their Youtube page to see what causes they’ve inked up so far, from #poverty to #Norway, and show your support by following the campaign on their Twitter and Facebook. To continue, as the project’s budget decrease, more volunteers willing to cover the cost of ink are needed, so the feeling behind the issue quite rightly doesn’t disappear and remains in the public eye.

The site works by allowing you to select a topic of your choice and then search for related news articles, Tweets, Facebook posts, Flickr photos and then prompts you to drag and drop them into a multimedia story which can then be embedded into any website.

“We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Storify founder Burt Herman told the New York Times. “So the idea of Storify is to pick out the most important pieces, amplify them and give them context.”
The site is becoming increasingly popular in the USA with over 5,000 sites and blogs including The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR (National Public Radio) using Storify to create and share ‘stories’. With more than 13 million views accumulated over the past 4 months it seems that Storify really is the next big thing.

Fancy giving it a go? You can sign in with your twitter account and get started right away! We’d love to hear your thoughts!

The mobile marketing and multi platform competition, DS4 Seekers is essentially a massive game of hide and seek where players hide a virtual DS4s in the streets around them.

After registering on their Facebook page, players are given a virtual DS4 to hide across Google Mobile Maps and Streetview. Players are then rewarded points if they successfully hide it from competitors or if they find a rival’s virtual Citreon DS4s. The points gives the player one entry in the draw to win a brand new DS4, the more points won gives them more entries and more chances to win.

As tablet and smartphone sales set to eclipse laptop and computer sales this year, knowledge of how best to implement new technology combined with innovative digital campaigns like this is essential to companies wishing to stand out.

The Revolver PR team are back, our visas’ expired but far from weary. We’ve brought home a token to serve the memory of our most fondly remembered jaunts, can you guess where it is?

We’ve dotted little picture postcard clues below and on our twitter and facebook pages to help.

Piece them together and either tweet your entry followed by #RevolverPR or guess away on our facebook page or right here. The first to guess the location correctly wins our grand prize!

Here’s the first piece of the picture!

Good Luck!


(The blast of a triumphant trumpet) Well done Alec for guessing GoApe correctly!



Have a great weekend folks!

We’ve left little picture postcard clues down below , and on our twitter, and facebook pages.

Fame, glory and sun tans await…

Piece them together and either tweet your entry followed by #RevolverPR or guess away on our blog or facebook page. The first to guess the location correctly wins our grand prize!

Here’s the first piece of the picture!

Good Luck!

Once again you lot are far to well travelled for us ! You guessed ‘Bankies Bike’ in Clydebank correctly! (well done to @LadyKentmores and @ChrisCathcart).
Never to be defeated however, we’ve got another picture for you, and this one’s a real toughie!…can guess where we are this time?

As usual, find your next two clues on our twitter, and facebook pages.

Double Drum roll please…..this week’s have two iSpy winners!

The winning answer for the first location (‘Bankies Bike’ in Clydebank) came from….George Johnson from @LadyKentmores antiques. Well done George!

And (drum roll again please) our second iSpy location (Alton Towers) was correctly guessed by the eagle eyed @KevinGilmartin Congratulations Kevin!

Have a great weekend!

You may have heard the terrible news from Mumbai last week of three bomb blasts in congested areas during the evening rush hour which killed at least 21 people and injured more than 100 others.
Nitin Sagar was following news developments on twitter from his office in New Delhi. Noticing the amount of people tweeting to offer help to victims and their families, and aware of the power that twitter has to quickly reach an incredible amount of people Sagar created a Google docs spreadsheet to act as a collective hub of contact details from those offering assistance in the hope that they could help an injured person on the street or a relative desperately searching for a loved one.
He inserted the details of five people and posted a link to twitter inviting people to add to it before he left work at 8 p.m

Just half hour later, the spreadsheet had grown to include the names of hundreds of people who wanted to donate blood, provide shelter, help transport people or help in any way possible. By the end of the night, the spreadsheet had been viewed by thousands and re-tweeted by even more. Most importantly, it had been successfully used by people who needed help.

Anirubh Sharma, a technology worker from Bangalore, saw the link on Twitter. A friend of his was killed when the Taj Mahal Palace Tower hotel came under attack in 2008. Sharma offered an airline coupon for a free ticket to anyone who needed to travel in or out of Mumbai to reach an injured friend or family member.
His soon received a call from a man who was desperately trying to reach his injured daughter.
“It’s easy to make noise,” he said. “But instead of just ranting on Facebook and Twitter, why not do something good?”

Sagar took the spreadsheet down once the need for emergency help dissipated, but has said that he plans to keep working on establishing more databases, so that if and when the need arises again, there will already be a relief database in place.
Clearly not one to bask under the ‘Good Samaritan’ banner that has been put upon him, Sagar this week tweeted: “Dear new followers gained in the wake of a truly delusional momentary Twitter glory, good luck. I am genuinely annoying on most days.”

A fantastic story that highlights the massive reach of digital communications.

We’ve left little picture postcard clues down below , and on our twitter, and facebook pages.

Fame, glory and sun tans await…

Piece them together and either tweet your entry followed by #RevolverPR or guess away on our blog or facebook page. The first to guess the location correctly wins our grand prize!

Here’s the first piece of the picture!

Good luck everyone!

Drum roll please…..this week’s iSpy location was Belfast! Belfast City Hall to be precise!
The first winning answer came from…..Chris Mullan on our facebook page! Congratulations Chris!

And the prize Chris? A postcard all the way from the fair city of Belfast!

Have a great weekend everyone!