Sandrine Plasseraud

Orangina street marketing campaign

As I was walking on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, on Saturday, I saw a few people gathering around what turned out to be a huge ice cube and wondering why there was an ice cube in the middle of the street. Shame about the weather which meant it would probably take a few hours for the ice to melt and for people to grab the Orangina goodies in the cube...

It seems that Orangina was experiencing with various street marketing tactics this past weekend in Paris as another blog is reporting about Orangina's street wall created for the campaign (in French / in English).

World Music Day 2009

For the last 27 years, the 21st of June has been a synonym of "la fête de la musique" in France: amateurs and professional musicians alike gather in the streets of French cities to play music. All concerts that day are free and open to everyone. World Music Day is now happening in many countries in the world - such a shame it hasn't really picked up in the UK still...

This year I had totally forgotten about it otherwise I would have stayed another day in Paris (I was there yesterday) - would have loved to go to the Chateau de Vincennes for the FNAC concert: Paolo Nutini, Anais, to mention a couple of them...

Nevermind, thanks to our friend Fred2Baro & his MMS competition, we can all experience la fête de la musique virtually. It's simple: those of you attending la fête de la musique can take a picture of the event, gig, etc and send it via your mobile at mms@blugture.net. Those of you -like me- who can't be there can check out the atmosphere ;-) The best pictures/videos will be picked up by a jury (which I'm part of), and the prizes include some goodies from LaFraise, Flickr, etc.

Interestingly, this year, there is an official Twitter account for la fête de la musique: @fetemusique, in addition to the existing Facebook page and the Flickr page.
 

#ukhols Map by Vodafone

Throughout the summer, Vodafone is abolishing roaming charges in Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand: customers -like me- can talk, text and send picture messages back home or within the country they're’re visiting, and only pay standard UK rates.

To support the campaign, they've come up with a very interesting Twitter Mashup #ukhols which maps out the most popular UK's  holiday destinations. Nice to see something so intrinsically linked to a campaign.

All you have to do is to use the hashtag #ukhols, your age, sex, the first half of your postcode and where you are going this year.

Great idea!

Pepsi uses Twitter to launch Pepsi Raw

Well I guess if you read me quite regularly, you'd know I'm a total Diet Coke addict, so getting me to try another cola of some sort would be very difficult, and even more so if it wasn't a diet cola - so you'll be quite amazed to find out that Pepsi has succeeded in getting me to sample their new (non diet) "Pepsi Raw" today!

How come? When I came back to my desk at 1pm, there was a tiny can of this "natural born cola" on my desk - turns out that they were giving them away on Tottenham Court Road and Bertrand picked up one for me.

Why did I sample it? Because the can read "Tell us what you think @twitter.com/pepsiraw" and I was keen to engage in a conversation, to check out how many people where commenting and see the results.

Photo: @CamilleJ

The results? Right now they only have over 100 Twitter followers but it's too early to say - let's check out how blog posts will have been written about it in a few days and how many followers they'll have. It's a nice PR initiative I think - one that will get online marketers to write about the brand's attempt at using Twitter to launch a new product so kudos to them!

At least they'd have managed to turn a diet coke addict into a possible convert. I tried the drink just because of the Twitter thing, then realised it was a natural cola, which is quite nice for someone like me who drink 1 litre or so per day. Shame there is no diet version of it because I quite like the taste of it.

ps: if you haven't seen the cool Coca-Cola limited edition bottle that was made to celebrate Selfridges' 100th birthday, check out the one that @_vio_ bought for me here.

X has subscribed to your FriendFeed

Like most social media folks, I tend to sign up to most of the new networks, so I can try them out. I've been on FriendFeed for over a year now and although I like the fact that the service aggregates most of your lifestream (Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Seesmic, YouTube and many more - see below -), my issue with FriendFeed is that it's yet another service and that realistically I can't use of all them...

Let's say I was to follow 1,000 people on FriendFeed, like I do on Twitter. Not only will I see the Twitter feeds of those 1,000 people but also potentially their pictures on Flickr, the videos they've uploaded on Dailymotion, YouTube or Vimeo, their latest blogposts, the events they're attending to via Upcoming, and potentially the presentation they've uploaded onto Slideshare. All sounds great: a service aggregating your lifestream in one place. But potentially the content of each of my follower will be enough to fill in my whole screen, which makes it impossible to follow everyone...

The reason I'm bringing the subject is that as I'm sure you know, FriendFeed latest improvements make it easy to import all of your contacts from Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail into FriendFeed, which means that as I'm sure you've noticed as well, there is a growing number of people subscribing to one's FriendFeed's.

Don't get me wrong, this is a very clever thing FriendFeed is doing to relaunch the usage of their service. I'm not sure how I should use it yet / whether I should use it but I will try and get back to it, check out the functions and see it this works for me, and who knows, I come back to you in a month and say this is the best thing ever... (so don't be surprised if I subscribe to your FriendFeed in the next few days!)

How about you? How do you use FriendFeed? Have you created groups/friend lists? See what would make it really appealing to me would be to have a Tweetdeck equivalent for FriendFeed. That would ease things for me!

Twitter & "The Desperate Housewives effect"

About a month ago, Oprah Winfrey posted her first Tweet during her show and straight away, people starting talking about the "Oprah effect" ie the impact Oprah had on the number of people signing up to Twitter. Very quickly the "Here beefore Oprah" website was launched so you could Tweet about the fact you were cool ie that you were  on Twitter before the Oprah show, as opposed to being there after as Twitter going mainstream was highlighted to many as the end of Twitter being "cool"...

So, now Twitter is being featured in Desperate Housewives with Tom whining to Lynette that he failed his interview because he had not idea was Twitter was all about ;-) Let's wait and see the effect this will have over the next few months as this episode is aired throughout the world... In the meantime, check out the Tom/Lynetter Twitter conversation below - very very funny to watch!

And judging by the level of Tweets, the story is clearly amusing a lot of Twitter users... To be honest, the great news is that my friends might finally understand what is Twitter when I talk about it!