The campaign’s message ‘Can You Solve This?’ has a double meaning. The first element is for people to “solve” the code’s meaning by scanning it. The second part asks people around the world to join together to fix the problem of educational inequality in Iran. Ruha Reyhani, an organizer from Berlin explained that:
“Normally with human rights campaigns people are overdosed with information, but because this appears like a riddle, we hope that people will feel inticed to participate.”

The campaign was created to raise awareness of the Iranian regime which discriminates against many students, including those who follow Baha’i Faith. (A monotheistic religion founded by Bahá’u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. There are an estimated five to six million Bahá followers around the world.) Students of this faith find that they can’t register for classes, take exams or are not accepted at universities. The Baha’i Higher Education Institute, an online school set up by Baha’i officials for excluded students, was closed in May. The Iranian regime also arrested dozens of the institute’s staff, media reports said.

The site tells users to scan the code, watch a video, send a letter, and forward information about the campaign to social media friends.

“In Iran, the denial of education is a reality that many young people are being forced to accept as they are directly being denied access to universities and institutions of higher learning,” the Can You Solve This website explains. “This is not because the institutions of learning are not available, but rather, because these young people have different political views, social affiliations or religious convictions.” Student political activists, feminists human rights activists and young girls in general are amongst those most affected.

The below video explains the campaign in full:

What do you think of QR codes being used as an innovative way to engage people in campaigns? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Amidst these acts of mindless violence, there have been numerous heart-warming examples of community spirit. The #riotcleanup movement is a fantastic example of such community service. In the early hours of the third night’s rioting the hashtag #riotcleanup started trending, and by 5.30am of the 9th August the website was up and running. The platform was used to organise people who wanted to help clean up, and hundreds of people turned up to various locations in affected areas the very day. The site is now serving as a portal for information, listing where you can donate to people who have lost possessions and other useful contacts.

Another story we stumbled upon when reading about those affected by the riots was that of Aaron Biber, an 89 year old barber who has lived and worked in Tottenham for over 40 years. When Aaron arrived at his shop on the morning of Sunday the 7th August after the previous night’s disturbances he found the place smashed up, with windows broken and everything of taken by looters.
Aaron said at the time – “I will probably have to close because I haven’t got insurance and I can’t afford the repairs.”

Two interns who are currently part of Ad agency BBH London’s intern programme BBH Barn realised that with the riots came alot of negativity towards todays youth and the use of social media technology to mobilise people.
They wanted to show that youth and technology could also be a force for good, so they came up with an idea that enabled them to use social media to help someone that was neither young nor technology savvy.

They started a campaign called ‘Keep Aaron Cutting’, a blog that has used the power of social media to spread the news and encourage people to make donations online. They asked each of BBH’s twitter followers to donate just £1 to the cause.

The campaign has raised an incredible £35,000 not only for Aaron, but for the surrounding North London community. An open letter on the blog from Aaron’s Nephew says that “…the knowledge that the shop will be secured and repaired, has given him the strength and heart to continuing cutting hair for many years to come. He really is at a loss for words of gratitude and has told me he thanks everyone from the bottom of his heart, who has made a donation”.

News of the campaign has spread to the local Tottenham FC, and star striker Peter Crouch paid Aaron a lifelong Tottenham fan a visit earlier this week to show his support (and to grab a free haircut), joking with him that the only thing that hadn’t been looted was a signed picture of Crouch himself!

After the predictable backlash against social networking from politicians blaming it for spreading the riots in the first place – it’s valuable to remind ourselves how it can also unite people for the better. The emotive action has demonstrated the massive influence that effective use of the internet and social media communication can have in digital campaigns.

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.

But here’s the latest and an update for those of you who have yet to discover the wonder. Groupon, the Chicago based start-up that launched two years ago, works with local businesses to offer steep discounts on services and products such as beauty treatments and meals, if enough users pledge to buy them.

Last year, it was dubbed by Forbes Magazine as “the fastest-growing company ever”, having expanded from the US to 35 countries. It claims to have grown its subscribers by 2,500%, from two million to more than 50 million over the past year, including moi.

In December, Google was in talks to buy Groupon for $6bn, which would have been its largest investment to date. However, such talks fell through after Groupon rejected the bid.

Nevertheless, the social commerce site has announced it has completed a $950m (£610m) round of financing as it prepares to expand globally. The financing comes from a number of venture capital firms and late-stage investors, including Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which recently topped up its investment in Facebook, valuing the social networking site at $50bn.

DST, which also has stakes in online games company Zynga, led a $135m investment round in Groupon in April last year. On top of this, the Russian investor is also in talks to invest in Twitter, according to a report in The Sunday Times.

It would seem that online offerings are only to get stronger and in doing so can do wonders for small independent businesses to boost their digital pr, as well as boosting the contents of your purse. Afterall, shouldn’t everyone have a voice on the internet?

Today’s buzzword so it would seem and big brands are all too conscious of this, pervading many a campaign.

Thanks to this new approach, there is hardly any major brand not willing to attempt to involve their consumers in some “fun”.

Most brands do it right at the initial stage, when spotting the long-term advantages of building a hive of brand evangelists online through differign forms of digital pr, but the most common pitfall is at the selection of expected outcomes.

Are you expecting a direct monetary benefit (cash/profit) by creating your community? Alternatively, are you just expecting increased brand awareness, which later may (or may not) convert into a monetary outcome? Your choice between these two options remains very important, when you measure the success or failure of your online community.

Yet, most brand communities can be seen as not failing. Instead, they measure the success with the wrong metre stick. In the end, it boils down to a matter of “managing expectations”, rather than measuring the success or failure of the brand community. If you set expectations for one thing, and measure success with another thing; the answer would be crystal clear; you fail.

Nevertheless, and arguably more important, you must understand your audience. Who’s attention do you wish to captivate?

The Adidas Originals recent advertising campaign is a strong example, doing everything to ensure that the French feel ownership of the outcome.

1,500 people took part in a special one-off shoot, holding certain positions to finally create a dance choreography capture on film. The stop-motion technique captured on video for all newly bought Adidas shoes transformed into a fascinating and captivating online campaign.

The point being that people, your consumers, feel connected to the brand and work towards establishing a bond, which is exactly what Adidas have done for their French consumers and works to support the brand image and ethos projected on the original french Adidas website.

So the moral of the story, know your audience!

STAR Management is an International Celebrity Brokerage, sourcing Bands, DJ’s, Hosts/MC’s, Speakers and Celebrities for a wide variety of corporate and private events, advertising and marketing campaigns and personal appearances.

There’s no accounting for taste and nor should there be, the client can choose whoever they like and as long as they’ve got the budget, we’ll book’em! Love them or loathe them reality TV shows like ‘Big Brother’,  ‘Xfactor’, and ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ have given us the ability to utilise a more diverse range of personalities who are only in the public eye for the short term….granted sometimes that is for the best.

What inspires you?

Success! Getting the job done… most of our clients don’t know who they want to book when they pick up the phone, and this is where the real work begins. When the job’s done and it’s a huge success, it’s incredibly rewarding to watch the client beam from ear to ear…and take all the credit. Every job is different and every client is different, some jobs take a year to come to fruition, others you can pull off in 48hrs.

In your opinion what are the biggest issues that digital could be used to address?

For STAR Management digital media is a multi platform, marketing gift horse…these tools enable us to reach clients we’d never have got within earshot of, who are now on our desktop and conversing in social banter…lovely!

Who/ What is the next big thing?

www.skelptarse.com a platform for the common man to have a voice! Customer service can be way down the pecking order in this country but that doesn’t mean we have to let those faceless, feckless corporate giants get away with it when they don’t treat us with the respect we deserve. Its genius, and best of all, very liberating!

The best advice I was ever given ….

Have courage and dare to win! Raising your head above the parapet might mean you get shot at occasionally, but there are also huge rewards…normally of the financial kind.

In 5 years time …….

Sunning myself outside my beach ‘hut’ somewhere in the Caribbean…I am getting on a bit you know….

www.starmanagement.co.uk

Emma Thompson hit the headlines yesterday with her remarks about slang . It must have been a  slow news day for this to make headlines but as I’m interested in communication let’s look in to the comments of a well spoken lady. Emma was quoted as saying “young people make themselves sound stupid by speaking slang outside of school”. Is this true or is she too harsh?

On and offline language should be adapted to fit the audience. We all dot our i’s and cross our t’s when addressing someone in authority, we use simpler words when talking to toddlers and we are selective in our language when trying to influence or make an impression. It’s about appealing to your audience and understanding the boundaries; abbreviations are acceptable on Twitter and in texts but are out of place in emails to the bank manager or in job applications. Formality is respectful but can appear cold and create barriers. Similarly swearing is another use of language that offends some and not others.

Emma’s dig was aimed at teenagers but surely young adults are adopting a language that helps them identify with their peers and create their own identity? Brands such as Vodaphone, Topshop and Rimmel London spend a fortune on glossy campaigns to attract and engage this sector, to sell the epitome of cool, or whatever the current word is for gallus.

New words are created daily and we use brand names to describe  items such as “hoover” and “ sellotape”. Is slang just a code adopted by individuals to build a community? Within a community of like-minds that is straightforward, the problem arises when you take a strong accent and a slang dialect to another community, who speak in a different fashion.

Confusing? Stick with the programme and the message is clear, life is more fun with a bit of variety. Perhaps it’s a case of a place for everything, and everything in its place. Innit?
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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.

Whether it be news, entertainment, work, lifestyle, a large percentage of people’s lives now incorporate aspects of the digital world and really can’t be without it.

With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that Facebook is now the top mobile service on smartphones.

Facebook is the app most popular with American smartphone owners, according to a report by Nielson. In fact, Facebook is the most popular app even for BlackBerry users who are typically seen as more business-focused.

Nielson’s mobile application report found that Facebook was the most used app on iPhone and iPod Touch, BlackBerry and across all other smartphones, other than devices running on the Android platform.

More than 4,200 people were surveyed who had all downloaded an application in the last 30 days, with 58% who own an iPhones and iPod Touch, use the Facebook app on their device. This was closely followed by Google Maps, which 47% of iPhone OS users use the most after the Facebook app, and then the Weather Channel – a forecasting app.

The report also found that the average number of installed apps on a BlackBerry device was 10, while this nearly quadrupled when it came to iPhone’s average of 37, and doubled when comparing to Android’s average of 22.

21% of American wireless subscribers now own a smartphone – which is up from 19% on the previous quarter. 14% of mobile subscribers have downloaded an app in the last 30 days.

Overall, social networking, maps, weather and music were the most popular app genres across all platforms. Thus, also highlighting the ever expanding areas of opportunity for companies to reach out to consumers, especially through successful forms of digital PR.

With the Digital Economy Bill passing through the House of Lords, a survey has warned that legal online music providers have not promoted their brands sufficiently to the public.

This week the final details are being made to the UK’s Digital Economy Bill in the Lords, which will aim to drive consumers away from online copyright infringement  and towards legal services.

Yet it seems these legal services are not so well-known, with a recent survey from Consumer Focus revealing that the public has a extremely low awareness of these legal alternatives and more is required to communicate their services to the public. With their focus so heavily falling on online music distribution, you’d think the natural partner would be digitally-enabled public relations, which would work to target their desired consumers.

Of the 2,000 or more adults aged 15 and above, 85% of those aware of such services could only name iTunes and Amazon, despite there being more than 20 services in the market.

Jill Johnstone, International director, Consumer Focus, said: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal legal online music services. If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort into promoting the legal alternatives? Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”

Its all about online and not to be left out, Sony Music have now announced their phasing out of the mailing of physical stock and switch to a digital e-card systemfor the distribution of promotional music.

Chairman of Sony Music, Ged Doherty, explained that “digital promo is set to become an industry standard as other major and independent music companies also make the switch. Physical stock is expensive, difficult to store and environmentally unfriendly.”