Cool, fun stuff can drive traffic to your website. Two examples from today:

1. This morning I was with one of my clients, Michael Cotton, from Eastcote Sign and Display. I was looking through Michael’s photos of recent jobs to see what we could post on his website.

I found one of his recent holiday photos from his trip to Rome last month with his wife, Lin, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to start a caption competition.

With Michael’s approval, we posted the pic and caption competition info this morning on the company website, Facebook page and on Twitter. The writer of the best caption wins themselves a canvas print of whatever image they supply.

This has driven a load of traffic to Michael’s website. At last check, over 1,600 people had visited just that page today because of the competition. Admittedly the traffic spiked substantially when Michael’s daughter, Fearne Cotton, tweeted about the competition to her 800,000+ Twitter followers. The surge of traffic even temporarily caused some web-server issues which were soon resolved. (It helps to keep an eye on things if you’re expecting traffic; people will understand things going wrong if they’re fixed quickly.)

2. The other example which is bound to generate traffic is this video of artist David Kassan using the Brushes app on his Apple iPad to draw a live model. The 3 hour sitting has been condensed into an 8 minute video. My attention was drawn to this video by Stephen Fry’s tweet and I’m sure that of the 15,000+ views on YouTube, many of them will have resulted in hits to David’s website. Hopefully he’ll get some work out of it too.

So if you’re looking to drive some traffic to your website, think about what you could do that would be slightly different and would take just a little more effort than what you would normally do.

Simon Says Media can help you drive traffic to your site like we’ve done today with Eastcote Sign & Display.

Call us today to find out how we can help you on 020 3358 3321.

The London Eye celebrated its 10th anniversary on Tuesday 19th January. To mark the occasion, they offered the chance to win 10 pairs of tickets if you tweeted @TheLondonEye #LondonEye10 between 9.50 and 10.00 am on the day. I was one of the lucky people who won a pair of tickets.

Considering that Twitter is an instantaneous medium, I was pretty surprised that it took until 3.40 pm for the folks in the press office at the Eye to announce who had won. Surely it needn’t have taken so long to pick 10 winners. The competition was a pretty swift affair with a 10 minute window, yet it took them nearly six hours to figure out and notify who would be the lucky recipients of a pair of London Eye tickets. In the Twitterverse, that’s a lifetime!

As requested, I emailed over my name and address, along with my Twitter name and waited for a response. And waited.

On Thursday I emailed them to enquire whether they’d received my email, prompting a response on Friday to say that they had and that the tickets were in the post. In fact they arrived later that day in the lovely card you see above. I’m delighted with my free tickets and waiting for some great weather to use them.

I asked by return whether they were going to make any further PR hay with the giveaway and, again, I didn’t receive a response.

Being the proactive chap that I am, earlier today I called the lady in the press office at the London Eye who sent my tickets over. To save her dignity, I’ll call her Marjorie.

It seems that the folks over at the London Eye Press Office don’t really understand Twitter.

Here’s a transcript:

Marjorie: Hello London Eye Press Office, Marjorie Speaking.

Simon: Hello Marjorie, Simon Aronowitz speaking, one of the lucky 10 people on your 10th anniversary.

Marjorie: [downbeat] Hiya.

Simon: Hi! [Pause] Happy Anniversary!

Marjorie: Oh thank you.

Simon: I was wondering what you were going to do about the ten people who won, whether you were going to use that as a PR opportunity, whenever people turn up with their tickets.

Marjorie: Erm, I don’t think we are because we’ve got a lot of planned activity happening in March. So that was more of a message to let people know that the Eye was re-opening after its maintenance work and it is our anniversary year. I don’t think we’ve actually got any planned activity as such planned for them.

Simon: I think you’re missing an opportunity. You’ve got 10 happy people there who are going to turn up and be absolutely delighted that they got free tickets and you’re going to do nothing about it.

Marjorie: Well I think it was just more of us just saying thanks and getting the message out though, as opposed to…

Simon: Oh yeah, but leverage it! Leverage it! Social media, it’s all free!

Marjorie: Yeah, of course I know but like I said I think we’ve got a lot of activity at the moment, so I think we’re just concentrating on that.

Simon: Sure, although that’s March. I mean, I might turn up in April – you might have a quiet month in April, it would give you something to talk about.

Marjorie: Er, yeah, maybe. I can suggest it, but I’m not sure obviously how far that would go. The story is more about us celebrating our anniversary and giving out complimentary tickets because obviously we do it with quite a lot of charities and whatnot.

Simon: Sure, but as I say, if it’s just a tweet, if you’ve got a picture of happy me in May with my guest cos we’re enjoying our free tickets, you’ve got one more tweet of someone happy where, you know, you tweet that and it’s about me, or a two-line blurb on your website and you tweet about it, I’ll re-tweet it and I’ll tell everybody else all over again about the London Eye. I mean, that’s what social media is all about.

Marjorie: Yeah, okay. Erm, well thank you for the suggestion. Like I said, it’s noted. Obviously we’ll see. We have all you guys’ contact details so if we do anything, obviously we’ll be in contact. Okay?

Simon: Although, I think you probably want to invite the nine other people as well as myself to let you know when we’re going to be down there because I would never miss a trick if it was my organisation.

Marjorie: But we’re not using it for media purposes, as I said. It’s more of a thank you and just a treat. We obviously wouldn’t exploit them for media purposes.

Simon: But even then, you see Twitter is all about narcicism and egotism, so if you say “Please let us know when you’re coming down, then you can tweet and say “@supportlounge came down to redeem their free tickets”. That’s all about Twitter. It’s a two-way conversation, it’s feeding into it.

Marjorie: Okay, well like I said, thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely feed back to my team and see what they think about it.

Simon: Okay, you’ve got my details.

Marjorie: Yes we have, thank you, bye.

Am I being harsh, or are The London Eye missing a trick?

Last week I interviewed Erik Qualman, the author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms The Way We Live And Do Business.

We discussed how the internet has moved beyond search and how businesses are using the latest technologies in social media to keep in touch with exisiting and prospective customers.

If your business hasn’t started to explore how it can use social media to its advantage then you really need to listen to this interview

Erik Qualman on Socialnomics

To get a copy of Erik’s book, go to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Erik’s Website

Earlier today I interviewed Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms The Way We Live And Do Business. You can find his website at Socialnomics.com

If your business hasn’t started to explore how it can use social media to its advantage then you really need to listen to this interview. We discussed the value that social media can bring to businesses both large and small, how every business can use the principles of Socialnomics and how easy it can be to get started.

I have to edit the recording down slightly and will be posting it online in the next couple of days.

To be notified when the interview is posted online, fill in the form below and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.