Big Red is going all web 2.0 on our asses with the launch of their Mobile World Congress blog. This is very encouraging. The media relations team appear to be getting more and more comfortable with the medium of blogging.
Here’s the announcement from Vodafone:
For the first time Vodafone will be running a dedicated Congress blog. Led by the Vodafone Group Media Relations team, the blog will contain running commentary, interviews with senior Vodafone executives and videos of key events at Congress. The URL for the Congress blog is www.vodafone.com/barcelonablog
This is excellent, excellent work. They’re even using a Nokia N95 to do some mobile video interviews.
I only have one criticism: Individuality.
The chap who’s introducing and presenting the videos does a brilliant job of coming across friendly, adept, experienced and enthusiastic. Here he is:
Alas, I never caught his name. Not once. And the post was published by the phenomenally anonymous ‘Vodafone Team’.
I recognise that in this kind of medium, the PR and marketing professionals go absolutely nuts with worry — because they’re used to producing anonymous (dare I say, bland?) ‘media’ — posters, adverts, flyers… but when it comes to blogging, I think it’s nigh on impossible to do well, as a ‘company’. You need personality. You need ownership. I want to write to the guy and say well done, and tell him that I’m looking forward to his next post or video. But I can’t. I’ll post a comment instead!
So, top work Vodafone! Leading the way, especially when Hutchison (3UK) shut down their X-Series blog the other week because they couldn’t be arsed. Kudos to the Big Red. We’ll be following.
Oh, and one other tiny criticism for the Media Relations team: I’d have posted the videos here, if you’d allowed me to. That’d have widened the audience by about 200,000. How about an embed link? I could obviously cut and paste the source code but you never know how a multi billion pound company will react to you doing that when it’s not explicit and especially when it’s all copyrighted. Screenshots are covered by the fair use provisions but I don’t know about videos…
