Sandrine Plasseraud

Link of the day: connected mums & social media

Here is a link for a blog post I wrote yesterday about the "connected mums" or "digital mums" phenomenon, on the We Are Social blog:

In English: Connected mums & social media

In French: "Connected mums", un phénomène à suivre de près

Hasbro target adulescents with some cool videos

You've already heard about the term "adulescence" ? A world where childhood and adulthood are somewhat mixed. Think about grown ups playing video games, reading comic books and watching cartoons tiredlessly. Well, to be honest, most of my friends fall under this category of "adulescents" (and yes, they're all about 30 or more) - must be a Generation Y thing!

One of the best illustration of adulescence for me can be seen in the British TV Comedy Spaced, where the main character Tim Bisley and his best mate Mike Watt spend their time playing video games and paintball. If you haven't checked out this TV series by Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, hurry up and get the DVDs of season 1 & 2!

To target these adulescents and older teenagers thriving for a bit of surrealism in their life, Hasbro has just launched a series of amazingly realised short movies featuring kids fighting Matrix-style with some NERF guns (don't worry, the bullets are foam darts and you can even plug them on your Wii).

Check out all of the videos on the NERF Dailymotion channel, they're really worth watching - they've been produced by Kourtrajme Productions (who also produced the Stress video clip for Justice).

Link of the day: 19% tweets mention brands

A link to a very interesting blog post from my colleague Violette about one of the first academic research on Twitter:

In English: 19% tweets mention brands

In French: 19% des conversations sur Twitter concernent des marques

#ukhols Map by Vodafone - now what?

You might remember a post I wrote back in June this year about the Vodafone #ukhols Twitter Mashup? As part of their summer campaign where they abolished roaming charges in over 35 countries, from June to the 31st of August, Vodafone came up with this idea of a map which would show where UK Twitter users are spending time throughout the summer.

If you read my post, you'd know that I thought the idea was very clever and very interesting because for once a brand wasn't going into social media just for the sake of it but had actually found an idea that was intrinsically linked to its campaign.

But now what? Ok, we now where the majority of UK Tweeter users holidayed throughout the summer (Tokyo & New York apparently) and we also know (well, I know for a fact anyway) that Vodafone users travelling to one of the 35 roaming-free countries throughout the summer were delighted at the idea of not having to pay any roaming charges...

I personally got used to going back and forth between Paris & London via the Eurostar & not caring the slightest about the roaming charges for 3 months!

And as a marketer (or ex-marketer should I say now) I simply assumed that for Vodafone it'd be an easy sell up to offer to their customers in September: "you've enjoyed not paying roaming charges throughout the summer?", how about you pay an extra £20 per month to benefit from free roaming charges in the country of your choice?! I would have signed up for this!

So I guess I was kind of disappointed when Vodafone called me this week to find out if I was happy about my contract. When I ask about potential "roaming packages" I was told me they couldn't upgrade my contract to a package which would allow me free unlimited phone calls to/from France :(

Their answer? With Vodafone Passport, you only pay 75p per minute... Yeah right... That's £20 for 26 minutes... So I guess I'll just have to be patient and wait until July 2010 for the new European rule on roaming & decreased costs...

Fancy a trip to Paris?

As I'm writing this, I'm wondering where the summer has gone and why it's gone so fast?! To be fair, with my colleagues Sarah (@SocialWhisper) and Camille (@CamilleJ), we've been busy working on a social media campaign for Eurostar throughout the summer. We'll give you more details soon on the We Are Social blog but we've basically been travelling to Paris, Lille & Brussels over the last 2 months, with some influential UK bloggers: Paris & the fashion scene, Brussels & the art scene, Lille & its gastronomy and more recently Paris again for the Rock en Seine festival (check out the video below - yes, we witnessed the end of Oasis!).

If you too fancy your own little break to Paris, the great news is we're about to take 50 lucky singletons to the French capital on Saturday, 10th of October, for a day of fun, which will no doubt include some kind of speed dating ;-D

All you have to do to be one of the lucky ones is to leave us a comment telling us either a) the most romantic thing you’ve done for someone b) Your worst date ever or c) complete this sentence ‘You know its love when…’ on the Little Break Big Difference blog, before the 25th of September.

Good luck!

Facebook notifications on your desktop

In the same way you've been able to receive Twitter notifications on your desktop (Tweetdeck notifier for example - see grey box in the image below), you can now receive Facebook notifications on your desktop via the brand new Facebook app:

Ben Stiller @RedHourBen trying to get more followers

As I was reading the new Twitter Terms of service on the Twitter blog, I came accross this short movie featuring Ben Stiller @RedHourBen trying to get more Twitter followers ;-D