So this week, NSDesign Social Media Training has a case study to help you pinpoint what makes a successful social media campaign. It’s from a surprising source – traditional brand Marmite, first established in 1902, and now leading the way in social media marketing.

Marmite has always revelled in its ‘controversial’ status and has run several traditional advertising campaigns around the love/ hate aspect of the product. To capitalise on the 2010 general election they conceived a social media equivalent, setting up ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ Facebook groups. Within four weeks they had 350,000 fans across the two groups, the result of a massive multi-media marketing push.

Why were they so successful? Marmite created a debate, which required people to actively think and engage with their brand; this created an online discussion between consumers and the brand, which created an excellent source of rich and original content, helping to boost the product’s online footprint.

They also used various mediums to draw attention and focus it on their social media. The main social media thrust was supported by traditional mediums such as TV and newer avenues like online forums, all of which drove traffic to the Facebook hubs. They even offered hard copy ‘electioneering’ packs to the most energetic fans.

Marmite has a lot of resources behind it, but the lessons can be applied to companies of all sizes, so that your social media campaign becomes all about the ‘Love’.

As are you…  and whatever that opinion may be, I’d welcome your thoughts added to the “Design Week” website where they first reported the DBA’s response to our bit of Christmas fun!!

Focusing on Education, the event gathered together a wide number of relevant parties including educators, policy makers, business owners and (most importantly!) young people.  Panel members included among others, Sunday Herald business editor - Colin Donald, Raymond O’Hare (Regional Director of Microsoft Scotland), Kirk Ramsay (Chief Executive of the Science Centre), Joe Wilson (SQA Business Manager) and David Kelly (one of our web hosting clients!)..

In summary, the event generated a lot of good discussion, including debate on the “graduate skills gap” topic that I recently blogged on, with a representative from University of the West of Scotland claiming to be fully aware of the “relevancy” issues surrounding the teaching of ICT and Technology within Education Institutions, and confirming their plans to change it with some rather radical (and greatly welcomed) different approaches to traditional teaching.  Colin Donaldson introduced the sessions with the question “Does business do enough to help education produce people with the required skills?”  I’d argue that the issue is the inverse…  Having knocked on a few educational doors over the years to see how we (as a small company operating on the “front line”) can help guide coursework etc, it’s clear that many in the traditional eductional world want to go it alone.

With regard technology in schools (primary and secondary), it was generally believed that even today, it’s the kids that are teaching the teachers, but there was some disagreement on whether online tools such as blogs, wikis, facebook and bebo, instant messaging etc were appropriate for the classroom.  Personally I welcome them – the kids are already using them outside school, and as Joe Wilson pointed out, by using a combination of all these online apps they are effectively building their own “personal learning environments”, in which the potential to “learn” is often far greater than in the traditional classroom environment.

All in all – it was actually quite positive, with the future of education and it’s digital input looking promising, but as with all of these focus groups and debates, we now need to act rather than keep talking a good game-plan.

Firstly – I’m genuinely sorry I didn’t attend myself – I was invited but other commitments meant I couldn’t attend.  That said – it does sound like much of the discussions centred around some “not so new” ideas.

To summarise (you can read the whole article here), the debate focussed on 3 themes – Infrastructure, Innovation and Education.  The main Infrastructure discussion appears to have been the issue of getting the country’s broadband improved above the current 8 megabits per second maximum, with much condemning of the former Scottish Executive for not investing in a lightning fast fibre-optic network at the start of 2007.  BT’s role was under under examination, with their “8mb is fast enough for what we need now” attitude generally slated for the lack of future vision, and understanding of the potential that a truely high-speed bandwidth infrastructure might provide (the next Google or YouTube based in Scotland?).  From a web-hosting perspective, the days of “unlimited hosting” and “all you can eat bandwidth” might actually become reality (don’t get me started on the webhosts that currently offer this!!) if such a network became available.  Like everything – from an enduser point of view, it’ll come down to cost.

Innovation was an interesting one… with points such as “can every schoolkid get a laptop” and the notion of creating “digital tsars” charged with promoting and championing the nation to embrace hi-tech.  The later is an idea that personally I think has great potential.  There’s a few good initiatives currently happenning in Scottish Schools to help promote science and technology, the focus (quite rightly) being on demonstrating the actual practical implementations of learning the various curricular subjects, and seeing what they mean to the “real world”.  One example of this is the “Technology Challenge” that NSDesign hope to be involved with this year.

 This leads into the final topic of Education, where the best quote of the day must surely have come from Steve Leach (bigmouthmedia)-

“Typical entrepreneurs are people with high drive and low compliance. That makes them difficult to live with, but it also makes them top-quality business people, and the schools we have today are looking for the complete opposite,” he said. “They look for high conformance and low drive, and this is creating a nation of robots who walk in, do what they’re told and move on. I think we need to address that as a fundamental issue and look at ways in which we can reclassify classroom troublemakers as the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.”

This concept again ties in with some really great work already being done in Scotland, looking at education from a different angle, focussing on a skills-based learning system and equipping the people of Scotland with the capabilities to face the challenges of 21st century life.  The Urban Learning Space (which I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with) is one such initiative that I hope continues to pioneer in this area.

So – once we sort out Infrastructure, Innovation and Education – then Scotland will be in a position to become a world-leading hi-tech country where no one can stop us!!  If only it was that easy.  All good and valid points were brought up, but nothing (I fear) truely new, and as one “commenter” has already posted on the Sunday Herald website – “quite frankly, I hear this in EVERY country I visit”.  Don’t get me wrong – there is a clearly a need for such forums, and gatherings of the “people that matter” – it’s apparent that anything which can help this country adopt a more “joined-up thinking” approach is vital – but perhaps it’s now a time for less thinking, and for just getting on with the “doing”.