Not really a fashion or luxury related story but LBi have created a cutting edge social media movement for the British Red Cross which, to my mind’ looks to be the most effective use of the medium so far.

Created for the British Red Cross, individuals are asked to pledge their support to refugees, during Refugee Week by ‘changing their online status’ across all social networks, instant messenger and email.

This campaign has been created to highlight the fact that refugees are generally labelled as one group when entering the UK; they are not seen as individuals. To highlight this the British Red Cross are asking the public to sacrifice their online identity by changing their status to just “label”.

To help this movement LBi have created an innovative social media toolkit, making it effortless to share this message and easy, compulsive and fun when changing profiles with the most amount of impact.
The social media toolkit includes a range of ways to change your status tailored to a specific social network and communication platform. The platforms and networks include: profile pictures, instant messenger avatars, Twitter hashtag set ups, a bebo skin, icons, blog badges and email signatures. Individuals can respond via Facebook, twitter, MSN, Yahoo!, bebo, blogs, email and share the message with everyone across all social networks and video sharing sites.

We feel here that this campaign offers a true social media strategy, an emotive topic that creates debate will always resonate within a social situation, so using social media as the corner stone for this campaign is spot on. By providing the assets for users to tailor their profile and messages, leverages the millions of social actions that occur daily providing unrivalled exposure for the cause through advocacy, this should be a runaway success.

LBi

A study by Ad-ology Research has shown that 25% of small businesses have forecast that they will increase their spending on social networks for 2009, a higher percentage than any other marketing format.

A third of small businesses have said that they will keep spending on social networks, whereas only 5% have said that they will drop their spend from ‘08. This predicted growth could be explained due to the ability to target by registration data. With social networks offering truly granular levels of targeting, justification for spend is easier, especially with marketing budgets in 2009 being scrutinised tightly.

It will be interesting to see which formats make up this 25% increase, standard display advertising or integrated solutions? Research has shown that user’s behaviour within a social network is not endemic of that which will react to display advertising. So will we see the share of display budgets increase on social networks due to ease of justification?