They’re also giving away some great free stuff like seasonal phone messages, Santa Hats and self-adhesive vehicle graphics in the design of Christmas trees or Santa Hats.

The free phone messages are a great idea.

Read the list here

Interesting article at Wired Magazine called Organized Chaos: Viral Marketing, Meet Social Media.

Image from Wikipedia

From Marketing Magazine, 26th October 2009:

“Cheryl Cole’s debut album goes on sale tomorrow. In a bid to get fans to splash out on the CD or download, Fascination Records which is part of Universal, has launched a marketing campaign featuring signed copies and personalised calendar give-aways.

Fascination Records has sent 200 signed albums to Amazon, while Play.com is offering fans a shopping trip offer. HMV.com is giving away personalised calenders with albums and even Orange is offering signed lyrics.”

Read the full article

Literally! Well, almost.

Charmin, the toilet paper company, has come up with a social media campaign that lacks ingenuity. They’ll be paying five bloggers $10,000 each to spend five weeks working as Charmin brand ambassadors at a pop-up bathroom in New York’s Times Square (does that mean it’s a real bathroom with real toilets?)

The brand ambassadors will be expected to keep social media and Charmin blogs updated with content and to interact “with hundreds of thousands of bathroom guests”.

The campaign slogan is “Enjoy The Go”. Fantastic!

Original story at Business Courier of Cincinnati, found via CNet News.

“Having a website will no longer be enough for driving schools to survive in a highly competitive market and must embrace the opportunity to grow their business using the internet. Whilst many driving instructors don’t even have a Facebook account, those that are well acquainted with the user interfaces on social networking sites have the advantage over their competitors.”

Read more

A Simon Says Profile is an in-depth article about your company; its history, what it does and who its key clients are.

In a competitive marketplace a business profile can be used to differentiate your firm from the competition.

The profile also provides valuable backlinks to your site using your target keywords

The newest business detailed on Simon Says Profiles is Eastcote Sign and Display, a sign-writing company in London that created some of the banners for the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985.

If there’s a nasty rumour going around about you or your company, it certainly can’t hurt to get ahead of the wave and publicly debunk it.

This is in contrast to trying to silence a story using the law to gag publication, an effort which can backfire as it had done recently for Barclays. The bank experienced the full force of the Streisand Effect.

Many Ebay sellers will be affected if the strike goes ahead. Demand is said to be high for alternative courier services and especially for guaranteed Royal Mail services like Special Delivery.

Small businesses must face the fact that they will be impacted by the postal strike and those that depend on the Royal Mail must communicate with their customers in advance to ensure that espectations are realistic.

Most customers will be entirely reasonable so long as they are not led to believe something which could never happen, i.e. a prompt delivery of documents, cheques or goods.

With a little planning, the postal strike could be a marketing success, or if events are left to take their natural course then some companies may face serious problems when their mail doesn’t arrive.