Can you help to build a list of companies using social media to market themselves in the UK, replicating Peter Kim’s list of companies using social media to market themselves in the US?
Do you have a client or do you know a company using social media to market themselves in the UK? If you do, add the name of the company, its social media activity and a link to any post you have written about it as a comment at the end of the posting.
BAE Systems. Blog: Graduate blog. 4
British Airways. Online community: Metrotwin.1
BSkyB. Social network, photos sharing: Facebook, Flickr.2
BT. Blog: Insight blog. 2
Carnival Cruise Lines. Social networks: Carnival Connections community. 3
cruise.co.uk. User generated reviews and photos: cruise.co.uk.
FarAndRide. Social network, microblogging. Facebook group. Twitter. 11
First Direct. Social network. Little Black Book. 10
Fly.co.uk. Blog: Travelling Blog.5
Intercontinental Hotels and Resorts. Blog: Intercontental travelogue.
Lastminute.com. Blog: Twitter. 5
Mad Tribe Blog. User generated blogs and aggregator. Mad Tribe Blog. 9
McKay Flooring.Blog: McKay Flooring Blog.
Ogilvy. Blog, microblogging. Ogilvy Fellowship, Twitter. 12
Orange. Groups in social networks. Orange Film Club on Facebook and Bebo. 1
P&O Ferries. Blog. The P&O Ferries Blog.
Select World Travel. Blog. Cruise Essentials, Ski and Snowboard Essentials.
STA Travel. Blogroll: STA Travel Buzz. 5, 6, 7, 8
Tourism New South Wales. Social networking: MySpaceMySydney. 1
Tribewanted. Blog, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. 9
Credits: 1 Matt Rhodes, 2 RealFreshTV, 3 Peter Kim, 4 Chi-Chi Ekweozor, 5 Matt Parsons, 6 Caitlin, 7 Anna and Ben Colclough, 8 Darren Cronian , 9 Peter Moore, 10 Brand Republic, 11 Tom Anthony, 12 Nick Fell
Also, there is now a list of companies using social media to market themselves in Germany.
John Welsh's Blog 
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“I have no proof but it does seem to suggest that while social media boutiques were not keen to add their clients to the list, they were more than ready to take a peek.”
As someone compiling a study of social media usage amongst FTSE 100 companies, I have to agree that there seems to be a lot more ‘rubber necking’ than participation going on!
I think you ran into the reason why this is (pardon the pun) further on in your post: many of the people currently interested in this space are social media practitioners who are tasked with finding out best practice for future client campaigns.
Consequently, there is a lot more interest in finding out what has already been done and yours and Peter Kim’s list will grow to become very useful indeed.
I suggest you consider segmenting yours by industry. Might be easier to add to it this way…
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Hi John
Perhaps you can add Select World Travel to your list, especially having won TTG awards ( and some other trade Magazine that I forget the name of!) in the past for the innovation of our blog site . It never ceases to amaze me that having blogged since June 2005 (our original site on blogger was moved to a squarespace platform) that so many Travel Agents haven’t dabbled and produced a blog ! or that Tour Operators are not happy to produce or embrace that web 2.0 technology can only enhance relationships between agents and Operators. The aim of our blog was to use it more as a website that we could interact with clients and hopefully replicate what we do best in our Independent family owned Agency. I hope that more operators in future can offer us Overbranded or Whitelabelled Brochures and bookeable content so our clients have a One stop shop in future.
I wish I was more technology minded though, and able to design our site a little better. But at the moment it does it’s job and costs us less than $24 a month. The Squarespace format works extremely well and we get a lot of first page search results on Google, that we would never have got from our old generic website that we spent quite a lot of money on, years ago. So Long live Social media, and we look forward to embracing new ideas as they come along
Hi John,
A couple of interesting companies that I have spotted recently, trying to harness the potential of social media are these:
http://www.madtribe.com/
http://www.tribewanted.com/
Both young and exciting travel companies who are already understanding the benefit of social media marketing . With the economy stretched – small businesses are probably going to lean more towards SMM – as a more cost effective and flexible methods of increasing brand awareness and building communities.
Thanks for the post – very insightful.
We recently (a couple of weeks ago) started testing out social media as a way to promote ourselves, and have had a measure of success already.
Most important has been our Facebook page:
http://www.FarAndRide.com/facebook
Which we intend to keep working on to improve and update. We also joined Twitter:
Which seems to be something that will take longer to get going, but in the future we can certainly see it’s potential for giving frequent small updates to our customers.
We’ll see how it goes. 🙂
Hello.
Thanks for taking this on in the UK!
Ogilvy recruits new talent to its Fellowship scheme via a blog (www.ogilvyfellowship.co.uk) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/ogilvyfellows).
N
Hi I would like to say that we at the Macdonald Botley Park Hotel are useing Twitter for Special Offers and Updates.
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Perhaps a little bit late to the affray:
http://www.cruisedirect.co.uk
They’ve just embraced Social Media as a traffic spinner. They’re hooked into Facebook and Twitter for all manner of things.
A website just starting to generate real social media content and a strong facebook community is http://www.cruiseoffers.com
Their strategy is to focus on strong, personal touches and build a loyal following which, although small in number is huge in quality.
Better late than never! 🙂
Bolsover Cruise Club (www.bolsovercruiseclub.com) are now active in the Social Media world, using Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and are just entering into the world of Pinterest!