Umpf / Blog / Friday Social: #montythepenguin, Victoria’s Secret’s Perfect Body & Facebook Against Ebola

Friday Social: #montythepenguin, Victoria’s Secret’s Perfect Body & Facebook Against Ebola

  • Social Media

Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf

1. #montythepenguin

John Lewis launched its much-awaited Christmas ad this Thursday, which introduced Monty the Penguin as a cute companion to a little boy, just searching for a girlfriend.

Social media engagement for #montythepenguin was high. In the first three hours following the ad, analytics company Hotwire measured 49,562 tweets about Monty, with a sentiment ranking of 97.7 per cent positive. This made #montythepenguin the top trending Twitter subject in the UK within 90 minutes of the ad’s launch.

John Lewis also launched a Twitter account for Monty to coincide with the launch, which racked up an impressive 3,500 followers within just a few hours, and is now on 14,844 followers.

See a round-up of the best and funniest Twitter reactions to #montythepenguin

Let’s, however, also spare a thought for John Lewis at his worst time of year. Otherwise known as the most patient and polite person on Twitter.

2. Victoria’s Secret rethinks after Twitter backlash

Victoria’s Secret was forced to respond to a social media backlash after the launch of its controversial ‘The Perfect Body’ campaign, which was slammed by consumers for marketing an unreasonable level of beauty.

A petition on Change.org stated “Victoria’s Secret’s new advertisements play on women’s insecurities, and send out a damaging message by positioning the words ‘The Perfect Body’ across models who have exactly the same, very slim body type.”

The lingerie company listened and renamed the campaign ‘A Body For Every Body’. However, the ad still starred the firm’s original ‘perfect’ body models.

This left room for other lingerie brands to respond…

 

 

3. Facebook against Ebola

Facebook has added a ‘Donate’ button to the News Feed to help raise funds for Ebola relief efforts. From this week, Facebook users will be able to contribute to any of three nonprofits – The International Medical Corps, The American Red Cross and Save The Children – by pledging through Facebook.

Announced via a Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg, the initiative was met with critique, slammed as just a marketing tool for the brand. However, Zuckerberg was quick to respond and shut down the complaints:

4. YouTube tipped off youth brand top spot

Amazon has taken over from YouTube as the UK’s top youth brand, in Voxburner’s Youth 100 for 2014. YouTube has held the top spot for the past two years, but is now down to second place.

Google, Cadbury and Ben & Jerry’s make up the top five of the list, which was decided by 3,000 youths between the ages of 18 and 24. Microsoft and Boots were among new entries in the top ten.

Interesting data emerged from the report, as stated by founder of Voxburner, Simon Eder “[we’ve] seen that to be a successful youth brand, you must be able to do at least one of three things: make young people’s life easier, more fun or save them money.”

Surprisingly, Snapchat did not do well on the list, coming in at second place behind Whatsapp in the apps category and 76th place overall.

5. Whatsapp read receipts

The new update to Whatsapp, rolled out this week, now allows users to see if their messages have been read. The app will now light up its double-tick marks blue when a message has been read. But if this doesn’t seem new to you, you’re not alone. Many users have understood the previous double-tick mark to mean the message has been read, whereas it has previously only indicated that a message has been delivered to the recipient.