The Fun Theory

VW launched a new PR campaign dubbed "The Fun Theory." The tagline is "Fun can obviously change behaviour for the better." VW's street crew is taking over parts of Sweden to prove that if they make mundane things more fun, like recycling bins making fun noises.


The most recent viral video transforms a subway staircase into piano, ala the movie Big. Sorry, I was not able to embed the video. SPOILER It works, 66% more people took the stairs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw&feature=player_embedded

The project is a great combination of community relations and guerilla marketing. But it is hard to tell what they are promoting. The image of fun and Volkswagon do not seem to resonate, and there is little product promotion for a video that is supposed circle the web and create a buzz about a product. When I searched for the site, I had difficulty finding the blog. It was not indexing high on Google. Perhaps, Volskwagon should stake more on SEO in their social media campaign. Maybe because it is for another country? Not sure. The small logo placement at the end of the video is not blatantly promoting the product, but it is not doing much to get VW in the front of people's minds while watching. It is creating a positive, environmentally friendly image of the company.

Here is The Fun Theory Blog
I found this campaign from an article on Mashable

Twitter Updates

As a fairly active Twitter user (paigemichele), I did not have any problem tweeting for class. And to evaluate my past two weeks on Twitter, I decided to go about it from a third party stance. I found an article on Twitter etiquette by Fast Company, a magazine dedicated to entrepreneurs written by blogger/ PR agency CEO Norman Birnbach. There are tons of articles on Twitterquette but I felt Birnbach's really encompassed a wide variety of Twitter topics.

Read Birnbach's article here.

Where I dropped the ball was number 8.1 "Do not use 'I am.'"
I am finally reading the @mutribune and excited to see they printed Baucus' name... yes I am a nerd
I am wearing my favorite pashmina in hopes it will brighten my day
Tweets are supposed to answer the question "What are you doing," and Birnbach believes its a given that you are doing something, hence no need to say "I am." I understand where he is coming from, but out of normal conversational English, most people would start their sentences with this phrase.

I am happy to say that according to these 10 rules, I did excelled at 6. quality over quantity(A great team RT @MUSG: off-campus Senators are Bill Doerrer, Kate Gregory, Kevin Lefeber, Carly Nusser, & Holly Peterson) , 7. interesting links (Question would you pay a tax on pop? @adage American Beverage Association Launches Campaign Against Soda Tax: ttp://bit.ly/2mSDRR) and number 4. stream of consciousness tweets (most of the time).

I am closing in on my one year anniversary of my Twitter account and have passed my 1,000 tweet while sitting in Gee's class. It has been a long year and my motives for Twitter have changed from testing it out, to using it for news sources and finally using it to search for a job. I am a Twitteraholic, but I did not start that way. I have learned two things from Twitter that I would like to share.
1. It takes time to adjust your Twitter account to what you want to see come of it.
2. "Facebook is where I connect with people I know, Twitter is where connect with people I want to know." ( I stole this from different tweets)