Through the Line: Cadbury takes their latest ‘Glass and a Half Production’ and uses it to launch the biggest Dance Off ever on YouTube, the next part of their Spots v Stripes campaign

Want to make the most out of the new Facebook Page layouts? Follow Jerry’s golden ratio.

Following in the footsteps of the user profile redesign, the new look Facebook Pages (which will be standard by March 1st) bring with them both frustrations (where have my tabs gone!) and opportunities (what are these 5 images at the top for?).

First up, pages who don’t usually post pictures will want to find and upload some quickly, otherwise they’ll be left with awkward blanks or a random selection of images uploaded 3 years ago.

Now how to make the most of them - well, they appear in a random order so rule out some of the traditional user techniques but they are still key screen estate right at the top of your page which, unlike the profile image itself, click straight through to an image light box with a space for copy and links.

I spent a few minutes looking at the ‘golden ratio’ for which part of your standard images Facebook chooses to pull through to the thumbnails (you can alter this slightly by tagging your page in different parts of the image but the funcionality is hard to use precicesly) and came up with the above paramaters, which in turn allowed a designer to create 5 special images and for the Cadbury Spots page to have 5 cute click through menu items along the top for the new Race Season campaign launching this week.

How will you use your 5 images?

Social Brands Quick to Switch to new Facebook Page Design

Rolling out across Facebook today, the long anticipated redesign brings Pages back in line with Profiles by moving navigation to the side and putting 5 recent photos along the top - it’s only a matter of time before we see some really creative uses of this space.

Has your favourite brand switched over?

Merging online & offline for an Olympic-size Dodgeball game

Cadbury’s Spots v Stripes London 2012 sponsorship activation is a license to get the UK & Ireland to rediscover their youth and play more games. With the world’s largest game of Catch behind them the team looked next to bring Dodgeball to the masses this February.

Starting at their roots with an on-pack chocolate promotion, Cadbury gave fans the opportunity to virtually challenge 1 of 4 Olympians at a simple online game. Those who successfully defeated their digital opponents were entered into a draw for the chance to do so again in real life. Continuing the online/offline crossover Cadbury also ran mini competitions to give the most engaged users from their hub website, Facebook pages and Twitter streams a chance to join in the tournament as well.

Finally to truly open the tournament to virtual fans they ran a series of games in the week leading up to the match (including Spot the Difference challenges on Facebook, and a #SpottyBall v #StripeyBall Twitter game of #Dodge which saw over 10,000 tweets of the ball) each of which won the winning side small advantages in the final tournament.

Of course they also Tweeted (Spots v Stripes) & Facebooked (Spots v Stripes) live from the event, encouraged players to do so and maximised the influence of their athletes by virtually engaging them too (Rebecca Adlington, Kriss Akabussi, Phillips Idowu and Amy Williams).

The end result? Chocolate all round and 2,000 virtual points for the winning Striking Stripes team.

My role as Community Manager at Cadbury in no way influences this post ;) - Jerry

Cadbury rolls Creme Egg into Spots v Stripes Olympic campaign (New Media Age article)

#CadburyTrickOrTweet - A hauntingly good UK social media story

Our American readers may not get a sense for how relatively little the UK tends to focus on Halloween - sure people use it as an excuse to dress up and to show reruns of old horror movies but few people would go out of their way to celebrate the season. Many people in fact still view Trick or Treating as a somewhat unsociable, and dare we say it American, custom.

Yet things are definitely changing, as the fully stocked Halloween aisles in supermarkets, and even the special X Factor themed episode, this year demonstrate. Whilst own brand decorations and treats tend to do the leg work for the season there’s no denying the appeal of branded ranges from confectionary giants such as Haribo and Cadbury.

The latter company has clearly identified the opportunity of the Halloween season and really stood out as a case study of social media activity this past week. Cadbury has launched two seasonal lines (Cadbury Dead Heads and Cadbury Screme Egg) but chose to focus its social efforts on two more ongoing properties, their Spots v Stripes Olympic Campaign (which we are involved with) and the Dairy Milk brand.

Spots v Stripes, which sees the nation divided into two teams to play more games, devoted the entire week to Halloween stories, images and games and has really brought consumers out of their shells this weekend by encouraging them to upload their fancy dress pictures as part of a Halloween-A-Thon competition. On Thursday this week the brand used its regular #Spots v #Stripes Tweetoff to push the term #CadburyTrickOrTweet into Twitter’s trending topics and in doing so helped build a much wider association with the season as people began to discuss the trend.

At the same time the Cadbury Dairy Milk team continued the success of their recent live events (which have cleverly linked real world happenings with Facebook polls, discussions and conversations) by allowing fans to feed into the develpoment of a spooky story all week. The final tale, professionally read and filmed as a ‘Glass and a Half’ production, was revealed as part of a live ‘story time’ event on their Facebook Page at 9pm tonight - an event which seemingly got many families to gather round their computers and enjoy a true slice of classic Halloween together.

With the importance of Halloween as a season only set to grow in the future it’ll be interesting to see how other UK brands include it in their campaigns next year, and how social media will support the now inevitable push towards Christmas.

(Source: spotsvstripes.com)