This is a guest post by Jeremy Bramwell, Client Services Director at IAS B2B Marketing.
The biggest and most bizarre news story of the year so far has got to be the Icelandic Volcano (I won’t even attempt to spell it, let alone get you to pronounce it), its accompanying ash cloud and consequential lockdown of Northern Europe’s airspace for 6 days.
I heard about this the first morning via @skynewsbreak in my Twitter feed and immediately started to think about using Twitter to map the movement of the ash cloud over the UK. Mistakenly, I thought that we’d actually be able to see the ash cloud and so I asked my Twitter followers to @ reply me their postcode if the ash was overhead (of course, I got no replies).
I got the idea from @benmarsh who developed a very neat application to map the affects of the snow in real time last winter. That of course is too clever for me and my intention was to create a cardboard map of the UK, give it a dusting of ash from an instant BBQ, take a picture and post it on Twitter for a bit of fun (see original tweet).
This I did and the ‘UK Ash Map’ took off getting 1,700+ views on Twitpic over the next 2 days. I quickly realised that the story was going to run and also tweeted the UK ash map from the @iasb2bmarketing Twitter account with the line ‘Mum’s not going to Iceland’.
I also toyed with other ideas of how we could as an agency have a bit of fun, and help people stuck in other parts of Europe, I even considered ‘re-naming’ IAS as ‘Icelandic Ash Services’ for the week and using our network of agencies across Europe to assist stranded B2B marketing professionals get home but the logistics were too complicated so that had to be shelved.
I learnt a valuable lesson in on-line to off-line PR from my very first UK Snow Map back in January, which was even more successful getting over 10,000 views on Twitpic, so set our PR team to work in producing an IAS press release on the UK Ash Map which has already gained good coverage in our key trade publications. Our agency is very creative, fun and irreverent and the ‘cardboard maps’ I create fit our brand perfectly, we may even put together a 2011 ‘Cardboard Map’ calendar I just need a few more biblical events to stimulate my imagination.
So in the interests of ‘new media art’ we are giving away a framed print of the UK Ash Map at IAS’ Digital PR forum in Manchester today, if you’re lucky enough to win it, you’ll have a small piece of Twitter history to put on your wall.
