Tweet Santa – He Will Respond You

Britain has a special sense of Christmas. Article via Adage.

Santa has gone digital and is now settled happily in a virtual grotto, tweeting with good girls and boys, and posting personalized messages on his very own YouTube channel.

To facilitate communication with the new era Father Christmas, Telefonica’s 02 has created the hashtag #02santa. Followers can tweet him a message that they’d like read out, and Santa will create personal video clips in response. Twitter users can then alert their friends, followers and family to the existence of the personal message by tweeting or emailing a link to it on Santa’s YouTube channel.

The campaign, created by pr agency Hope & Glory, is running for a week, and wireless provider 02 promises that any messages received by Dec. 15 will be delivered in time for Christmas.

Alex Pearmain, head of social media at 02, said in a statement, “We felt that we should create something fun as an integrated aspect of our Christmas digital campaigning — something that gets consumers involved with us and allows 02 to deliver a bit of entertainment during the festive period. Our social-media channels seemed the ideal platform to do this on, and we hope this campaign will help to cut through some of the current consumer gloom and spread some festive cheer.”

Santa’s introductory message on YouTube explains how the process works: “I am broadcasting live from the North Pole…I’ve decided to take a break from making and wrapping presents to take to Twitter and YouTube this year. Oh-ho yes, social media has come to us all…so if you would like me to send a little message to your family, friends or followers, just tweet the message you’d like me to read out. My elves will spot your message and pass it on to me.”

Many of the messages so far are from adults, but aimed at children. @katiehayward sent a typical tweet, “Please wish Edie a very Merry Christmas, she’ll leave a mince pie for you to help you on your Christmas Eve journey.” Others are from grown-up believers, asking fr messages for colleagues and loved ones. @Eva4Eva tweeted, “Can you give my boyfriend Mario a big nudge about my present and you may as well wish him a happy Christmas whilst you are at it ;)”

On day two of the campaign, Santa had already created 400 personal messages in response to thousands of tweets received. He has had to brush up on his linguistic skills, after getting requests from non-English speaking tweeters. Jo Carr, a founder and managing partner of Hope & Glory, said, “It’s less about the metrics and more about the surprise and delight. We’ve had lots of lovely comments by parents who’ve made films. This is ticking the box of being relevant to our key customers.”

I’m gonna tweet Santa now just to thank him for the magic Christmas he gave me.

Better tomorrow,

PR Pret-a-Porter.

Hashtags and business

Are you Twitter friendly ?

A hashtag, according to Twitter, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.

We use hashtags during our trips for the same reasons that you should consider using them for your business. Think about using hashtags for your company. Here are some reasons to backup your efforts.

1. Track conversations

A hashtag is an amazingly simple way to search through all the posts that have been generated using a particular hashtag. We like to hashtag our posts, check-ins, and pictures that we’ve posted while traveling to retrace our steps and places visited. It’s a great way for an organization to stay tuned in to what people are saying about you, as long as their using the hashtag you’re tracking.

2. Archive posts

The last few trips we’ve taken I’ve used either Twapper Keeper or Storify to save all the posts for future reference. If your diligent with your hashtag you can consistently go back to one of these sites to save your conversations. Helpful for those of you who are monitoring what people are saying about your brand and not using a paid service to do so.

3. Host a chat around a hashtag

Yes, you can host Twitter chats using a hashtag. It’s simple really.

Post your questions and conversations as you normally would, but include your hashtag in all those posts. Encourage your followers to save the hashtag search in their Twitter client. This will allow them to easily follow along and engage. Jumping into a Twitter chat is a great way to find and follow people who are talking about similar interests. As you engage and interact in these chats, you’ll also find that your follower count will begin to increase.

4. Simple Searching

A hashtag was created to categorize Tweets. To categorize something is to group it. You can find items when they’re grouped together. See how that works? Your brand, your product, your church series or even your event should be hashtagged. It allows others to search what people are saying about you, it allows you to track, and others to jump in the conversation. It all comes back full circle with the hashtag!

5. For the Fun of it

Some might say the hashtag is being abused by people hashtagging random thoughts or full sentences. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it.

The #sarcasm hashtag gets used quite a bit, even when it doesn’t need to be. The #IJustUsedAHashtagBecauseItsARandomThought Hashtag gets used quite a bit as well. It’s ok. Use them up, I don’t think those hashtags are going to be used for true searches anyway. Social media should be about the fun, so if you enjoy a  128 character hashtag’s, go for it. Just don’t expect us to try and read it!

To own a hashtag is to own a conversation, to follow that conversation, engage in that conversation, and to keep that conversation. When you own and monitor a conversation, the discoveries you can make about your community are priceless.

Source: Social Fresh

Better tomorrow,

PR Pret-a-Porter.