Twitter users are invited to add themselves to the map by tweeting the #ukhols hash tag followed by their age, gender, post code and their holiday destination.

Using social media like this can be a great way to build a brand’s profile online and generate lots of quality coverage in both the traditional media and the blogosphere. Vodafone’s map has already gained coverage in the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and Brand Republic.

The mashup comes a month to the day since I launched my National Work From Home Day map, which was based on the #uksnow map developed by Ben Marsh, who is behind this map too!

And with that I’m off on my hols! See you in a week or two…

Blogs
Reading other blogs can be a great source of inspiration and has inspired a great many of my posts. Plus occasionally I get tagged in MeMe’s! Example.

Twitter
Links that have been shared by people I follow on Twitter have inspired a few of my blog posts and have even helped me at work. Example.

Newspapers / Magazines
Articles that attract my attention sometimes inspire my blog posts. They don’t even happen to be about social media or PR, often it’s just a case of commenting on an article from a PR point of view. Example.

Out of nowhere
I find that many of my best ideas come to me when I least expect them. A lot of my ideas have come to me when I’ve been lying in bed, trying to get to sleep and have had to get up to scrawl them down on a piece of paper. Example.

PR people
At least one of my posts has been inspired through creative blogger outreach. Example.

I tag Chris Norton, Richard Millington and Stephen Davies.

If every night was like Saturday night I very much doubt the club would be shutting down. So why is it shutting down? I put that down to mediocre marketing. Although the club has built up an impressive level of brand loyalty with its customers, by providing a good quality service, it hasn’t taken advantage of this. The club could have easily and cheaply used social media to interact with its customer base.

Here are a few ways that the club owners could have engaged more with their customers.

• Invite clubbers to get involved by voting for what music should be played or what drinks should be sold
• Provide an online space for customers to share their photographs and videos
• Issue a regular newsletter informing customers about changes to the night club
• Write a blog to provide information about bands that will soon be performing, recommend new artists to listen to and songs to download, and talk about changes being made to the club
• Invite the public to review music

The Underground did run a Facebook group that regularly issued messages about what bands were playing each week. But this can quickly be seen as spam and the message is lost. Nobody wants to be told the same thing each week. It’s boring and it could actually harm your brand.

Being quirky is a great way to stand out, but it’s not sustainable. TV commercials and moving billboards were once new, exciting and different ways to advertise, and so captured the public’s imagination. But now they’re just background noise, unless the actual advert is interesting.

The same is true in PR. There are plenty of ways to spice up press releases, but if the content is as dull as dishwater than there’s no point. Rather than focus all our attention on jazzing up the delivery with pretty designs and social media add-ons, we should ensure the we give the actual press release the same amount of attention. After all it’s the really creative adverts that we remember.

Check out this video of mobile adverts in Berlin by Mrneglect:

Setting up a poll on Facebook was incredibly simple, whereas coming up with the right question and answers was a little trickier.

Here are three ways to get the best out of facebook polls:

Pose an interesting question.
Facebook users don’t have to fill in your survey, so attracting their attention with an interesting question is a key factor in generating as many responses as possible.

Be concise.
Your question can be a maximum of 100 characters long, and your answers can only be half that length. So it’s crucial that you keep the word count down. Also, a lengthy question and answers could be offputting to some users.

Keep it simple.
Terms like Web 2.0 and mobile applications may make perfect sense to you but they could appear like gobbledygook to some users who might not know their RSS from their elbow.

Do you have any more tips for improving Facebook polls? Or have you conducted any interesting surveys recently? Please let me know!