Journalists have to play by the rules too

For my final post for the semester I'd like to discuss a recent article I read in The Australian newspaper about the rules surrounding social media use that media outlets around Australia are implementing for their journalists to adhere to. You can view the article here.

Essentially the article discusses the various approaches and policies different media outlets are taking in light of their increasing use of social media.

Recently Fairfax Media have released 'dedicated policies that seek to clarify the do's and don't's of social media'. News Limited was also reviewing their policy surrounding social media use.

Internationally the BBC has a 'second pair of eyes' review policy, where every post and tweet related to news reports by a journalist must be reviewed by an editor first.

Given Australian journalist Catherine Deveny's sacking last year following her tirade of negative and inappropriate tweets at last year's Logie awards, it's no wonder media outlets are taking this issue very seriously.

But is this all a big Big Brother-ish? In particular if opinion writers are tweeting or blogging, does this need to be censored too, given they are paid to give an opinion (and often a controversial, headline-grabbing one?) Or are media outlets just being sensible and covering their backs?

Would love to hear what you all think! (No censoring I promise!)

Mello Yello Brand Relaunch

Given our recent conversations about brands seeking out the owners of their facebook fan pages and working with them to create an official fan page, I wanted to find a good example that demonstrated this occurring. Enter Mello Yello

Mello Yello is a citrus soft drink first created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1979 to rival PepsiCo's Mountain Dew. As far as I'm aware it is not available in Australia, but has been launched in both New Zealand and Japan in recent years.

The brand relaunched in the US under the campaign 'They Call Me Mello Yello', which uses a remake of Donovan's 1966 hit song of the same name. After finding a consumer-created facebook page for the brand, the marketing agency in charge of the relaunch contacted them and worked with them to transform the page into an official brand page that was launched in August 2010.

The facebook page contains a 'Retro Smooth Photo Generator' (although annoyingly this appears to no longer be working), which transforms photos uploaded by consumers and turns the photo from something 'not so smooth' to 'smooth', in line with the brand's new image, with the help of a 'hiptser' photo filter:

 

You can also download a free copy of the 'Mello Yello remix' from the facebook page.
 
Given that their goal was to reach 10,000 fans by the end of 2010, and that the page currently has close to 100,000 fans indicates the success of this social media campaign. I love the funky new image they have created for themselves, whilst still throwing back to their original late-seventies image.

Does anyone have any other examples of brands using consumer-created fan pages on the web and working with the creators to relaunch the brand? What do you all think of this campaign?