H&R Block used social media marketing to boost their profile and raise awareness of their digital accounting product, reports Ad Age. The lady responsible was Amy Worley (Photo: Jonathan Fickies). They used YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Second life. As AdAge comments, this kind of marketing in social media is “about stacking up many small ideas to create a big total impact”.

Key stats:

H&R Block boosted overall brand awareness by 52%.

They spent 0.5% of their ad budget in doing so.
…

Yes, 0.5%`

[UPDATE] More details on the H & R Block campaign including an interview with Paula Drum, VP of Marketing on Podtech’s Marketing Voices talking about how the campaign played on YouTube and SecondLife. Here is their social media site Digits.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has started a YouTube channel. It’s pretty simple, but effective, with a simple navigation. There is an even a French-language version of his congratulations for Nicolas Sarkozy, nicely-written too.

A good piece by Andrew Gumbel in the Independent shows how the US mid-term elections have highlighted how scrutinised politicians are.  The scrutiny is no longer the job of the media pundits on TV, but of bloggers and commenators pointing at clips on YouTube.

Clients sometimes ask us who are the folks that hang out online and contribute to social media. There are demographic studies. But here is a charming film giving a more emotional explanation, a compilation by Mick B. of clips of the people - young and old - who make video blogs on YouTube.

MySpace’s black carpet area - a forum for movie companies to offer free screenings to MySpace members was launched a month ago. It has proved its value already in the buzz it has created around the Borat movie premieres. This is not the first attempt to use social media for marketing - we have highlighted the ad hoc use of Flickr by Sony Bravia and of YouTube by Gillette, but it is the most systematic so far. This will be the first of man raids by marketeers on high-value online communities.

By buying YouTube Google have created the groundwork for a content economy in video. They have an integrated micro-payments system, developed for adwords, which is perfectly adapted to incentivizing content providers large and small in posting their material on the website.

Content owners have had three concerns about the web:

a) how do I preserve my brand experience?

b) how do I stop piracy?

c) how do I get paid?

The brand experience question is still an open question in the era of social media. Shrewd brands realise that the pass has been sold on “controlling the brand experience”. In the age of search, the brand experience will be mediated, like it or not. Brands have to amplify and express their brand via their stakeholder groups (consumers and channel partners).

But b) and c) have been, or will be answered by the Google/YouTube alliance. The streaming format precludes piracy and the payments back-end offers a business model for nervous rights owners.

After a few informal trials, the UK Conservative party leader David Cameron has - according to the Guardian - started blogging - video blogging - about what the Conservatives are doing. Since the link they point at is down, and giving a Bad Request, invalid hostname error, it is hard to judge their efforts. Webcameron.org.uk seems to be valid, so it must be a screw-up. Perfect Day of 14-15 D’Arblay Street, London, W1F 8DZ are the registrants. Googling them gives you this flash-heavy Pilates site.

Technical boo-boos aside, you have to applaud the initiative. I was particularly struck by Cameron in the Guardian’s account describing what they are doing as “shaky and wobbly”. It certainly is. It is hard to communicate in a new medium and Cameron is right to massage expectations downwards. He will get attacked for doing it, but the people who attack him for it will be exactly the right kinds of enemies to make … crusty old hacks from the mainstream media. It is a good plan to go direct to the public, if you can. And thanks to the web, now you can.

Speaking at AD:tech this week I was struck by how much the currency of this new world is indeed the currency of politicians - opinions, polls, samples. The big brands now have to behave like political brands, which is what they are. They have to test opinion, engage in dialogue and build consensus around what they are doing.

[Update]  The site is now live and the url working.  And it is pretty good - not too long waiting for the videos to cue.  The open blog feature seems popular.

A couple of days back, the Guardian reported that Youtube had outstripped Myspace as the number one social site, mentioning that since May its reach has surpassed the big Daddy of TV websites the BBC*.

Today the Business 2.0 blogs reports that Youtube has outstripped Cnn.com and links to this Alexa graph.

and in case you think that Alexa’s rankings are not to be trusted, try Hitwise’s.

Youtube is now in pole position not merely to dominate the social site space but to grow out of it to become the premiere global TV distribution platform. Social networks work.

*Full disclosure: I co-founded www.bbc.co.uk in 1997 as commissioning editor.

Two recent U.S. marketing campaigns have used social media to connect with a mass audience. First came Philips Norelco Bodygroom with their shaveeverywhere.com campaign. This jokey video as well as being hosted on its own domain was posted at youtube.com and at heavy.com and has allegedly been downloaded one billion times.

Now Gillette have launched a campaign, which parodies an online grassroots campaign in format. According to Advertising Age: “The Noscruf campaign includes paid search ads on Google and other search engines, promotional placement on Heavy.com and a posting on YouTube.com for two viral videos from a fictional advocacy group - National Organization of Social Crusaders Repulsed by Unshaven Faces - and its Web site, Noscruf.org.”

In this case the campaigners are women who want their menfolk to shave and have created the noscruf website as part of their campaign. The site (above) is being visited 60m times a day, say Ad Age, citing Alexa. It is the work of Digitas, a Boston-based agency.

What is intriguing about both of these campaigns is that:

1) they are online in inspiration and execution; 2) the off-line element is limited to PR - the Bodygroom campaign benefited from a plug on Howard Stern’s syndicated radio show; 3) they make use of existing places of debate and traffic - youtube.com and heavy.com and have not depended solely on destination urls.

Imaginative pieces of buzz marketing, both.

Answering the point I raised in the post below about how marketers engage with social media, Steve Rubel suggests that marketeers approach social media stars like YouTube’s Nornna directly and sponsor them or look for endorsement.

Break-up, a 75 second video clip by “Bowiechick” has had 210,000 page views on youtube. In the video a 17 year old girl is talking about breaking up with her boyfriend. The video seems to be behind a run on Logitech’s Quickcam Pro on Amazon.com. Logitech had nothing to do with it. But they wish they had.

Ah, if you could bottle this. But gentlemen, you can. There is nothing to stop a company using tools like youtube (and indeed any social software) to engage with their customers.