Fear ad loathing in Cape Town (from a tweet to the Beeb)

An example of how Twitter has become a powerful PR tool leapt out at the woodwork at us this Friday when messages on the kulula’s Twitter profile (which we run) started being quoted on the front page of SA newspapers. This came about following kulula’s tongue-in-cheek advert poking fun at FIFA’s draconian use of trade marks. Earlier in the week kulula received an unamused lawyer’s letter which we mentioned on Twitter: “oh dear letter from FIFA’s lawyers says we broke their trademark of the use of “South Africa” and think our non-WC ad was about soccer…”

This was the only external mention of FIFA’s blocking of the ad. It took a few days, and conversations on Twitter with various bloggers and other well-connected types, for this message to worm its way into the hands of the media. Resulting in a snowball of coverage – peaking with calls to our office (sister agency Atmosphere handles PR) from the Financial Times (UK) and BBC.

Online there was literally hundreds of messages of support for kulula from South African’s annoyed with the trademarking of the words “South Africa” amongst other things. Facebook and Twitter were used to answer questions and clarify information (which has a habit of getting distorted as it passes around the twittersphere).

A great example of what we knew already: Twitter is a great way to have public conversations on behalf of a brand without having to go through the more corporate and formal press release route (and much quicker obviously). It also really helped that we had the people crafting the ad/s, the PR people and social media all in one place and feeding information into each other.

Keep an eye out for more on this in the next week or two. Plans are afoot.

You can follow kulula on Twitter @kulula and their Facebook fan page.