Being the “Tail End Charlie” or the rear gunner in a second world war bomber was a lonely and exposed position.

Strapped into a glass bubble at the back of the plane, you had to deal with whatever got thrown at you.

And “whatever” usually took the form of faster moving, better equipped people with hostile intent.

Can you see where this is going?

Working at the sharp end of social media for a brand or organisation can be just like that.

Exposed in a glass bubble, having to deal with whatever gets thrown at you.

And it all happens fast, in very real time.

And just ask Nestle and BP about hostile intent.

Indeed, I bet the social media and PR people at BP feel like a right bunch of tail end charlies right now.

An official social media presence for an organisation isn’t an experiment or a toe in the water. It’s an invitation and an obligation.

You’re inviting dialogue and you’re obliged to respond.

That obligation to respond can be discharged well or badly.

Doing it well is partly about the aptitude of your social media people.

But it’s also about infrastructure and integration.

Your Tail End Charlies might be exposed in their glass bubble, but they shouldn’t be isolated.

If people are going to ask for T-shirts, you should have (cool) T-shirts ready to go. And you should have a well-oiled process for getting them out quickly.

If people are going to ask where to find your product in Falkirk or Frankfurt you need to have the answer at your fingertips, and/or the direct line number of the person who can tell you.

If your organisation’s customers can find you in social spaces, it’s odds on that they’re going to complain to you in social spaces.

That should have been anticipated and there should be a procedure in place to deal with it.

Done well, every social media obligation turns into an earned media opportunity.

Done badly…

Domino’s Pizza has been running a promotion with Foursquare whereby anyone who elevates themselves to “mayor” of each outlet can claim a free pizza.

This is one of many such branded offers on this location based social network which some are people are billing as “this year’s Twitter”.

(Aside : If, at the end of 2010, Foursquare is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook, has a significant proportion of dormant profiles, and a minority of super-users who post most of the content, then it will indeed be this year’s Twitter.)

Here’s how the Domino’s promotion worked in practice for a friend of a friend of a colleague when he tried to fulfil the promotion in a Domino’s outlet in Shepherd’s Bush.

“Hi, I’ve just become mayor of this shop. Can I have my free pizza please?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Come back later when the manager is in.”

The Tail End Charlies of social media aren’t just the people posting tweets and Facebook content, it’s anyone who has a role to play in keeping social promises or responding to social requests.

Don’t just think fans, followers and free advertising. Think infrastructure, integration and fulfilment.

IRN-BRU’s Bruzil campaign went live today to coincide with a press launch event in Glasgow.

It represents a cunning plan to catapult the Scottish football team from non-qualification for a certain major football tournament in 2010 to winning the thing in 2034.

What if the Scots were to make babies with the Brazilians and breed a Samba McFootball team of world beaters for 24 years time?

Well the results might be something like the series of films that will be released on the IRN-BRU site over the coming days.

The films were produced by our friends at The Leith Agency and the first one, released today, features “big” Bobby Carlos.

The site also includes a couple of applications, the first of which allows you to take a spoof DNA test to assess your suitability as a prospective Bruzilian parent. The other is a simple but funny Bruzilian name generator that gives you an idea of what it would be like to play alongside Rabaldinho, McKaka and the other stars of 2034.

A cunning plan.

And.

It.

Might.

Just.

Work.

When I were a lad in advertising, topical ads were all t’rage.

Responding quickly to take advantage of an opportunity presented by something in the news was a win, win, win situation.

It made the agency look proactive, engaged, interested in the eyes of the client.

It made the brand team look good in the eyes of their business.

It made the brand look good in the eyes of consumers.

I remember a couple of days after the 1987 hurricane, Volvo ran a black and white press ad featuring a press photograph of one of their cars that had been hit by a falling tree. The occupants had emerged unscathed, reinforcing the brand’s reputation for safety.

Brands such as Heineken and Durex clearly had contingency budgets ringfenced to allow for this kind of activity.

More recently the same topical principle has been applied to this bus-back execution…

That’s the ‘traditional’ approach to topicality.

But what does topical advertising look like in 2010? Maybe a little like this?

During the extended cold snap of January this year, we noticed a few people on Twitter talking about the fact that cans of IRN-BRU left in the car overnight had frozen solid.

So we created WillMyIRNBRUFreezeInTheCar.com, a simple, single-function, topical microsite that answers its own question.

The site was conceived and built in an afternoon. It cost less than £x (where x < you think), including purchase of the domain.

The user simply selects the predicted overnight temperature in their location using a slider device and the site tells them whether their IRN-BRU is at risk via a series of randomised, amusing responses.

We then waited (not very long) for the next cold snap and promoted the link via IRN-BRU’s Twitter account.

In next 36 hours or so we generated just under 750 unique visits, and some very favourable qualitative response.

No doubt we’ll have a few more opportunities to further promote the site before the end of winter, next time hopefully with an offline PR ‘booster rocket’.

Expect to see more of this down-and-dirty, low-cost, do-and-learn style of topical/tactical digital activity over the coming months.

Social channels thrive (nay depend) on social content or social objects as they’re commonly referred to.

And clever, brand-relevant, topical content is as good a route to generating social objects as any.

Nice piece in The Sun highlighting celebrity involvement in the IRN-BRU Can Clan. As detailed in the earlier post on this subject, Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s inimitable, fun take on this year’s Homecoming celebrations – a free music event on Glasgow Green on 13th September, including a cancan world record attempt, and the world’s largest online cancan.

We have recently launched the IRN-BRU Can Clan site.

Can Clan is IRN-BRU’s take on the 2009 Homecoming celebrations. The Can Clan will gather at Glasgow Green on September 13th to make an attempt on the Guinness World Record for the highest numer of people simultaneously performing the cancan – Can Clan / cancan geddit? There will also be a free mini music festival with a couple of exciting acts that will be announced later this month.

The role of the microsite is to support and promote the Can Clan event, and it features the world’s largest virtual cancan. Anyone can join this virtual cancan by creating their own “BRUZER” – as nearly 400 people have done at the time of writing.

The site is fully wired for social media showing and telling via all the usual channels and mechanics, and you can create your own group or mini-clan. The BRUZERS are fully portable as avatars and widgets.

It’s good to see the brand creating something original and of value to its drinkers as part of Homecoming rather than just jumping on the bandwagon like certain other soft drinks brands we could mention…

Partick Thistle are riding high at the top of the first division Score With IRN-BRU league table.

Details of the promotion are all in this previous post.

Here at Blonde we’re speculating that Partick’s table-topping performance and the fact that the club has one of our Score widgets embedded prominently in its homepage may not be entirely coincidental…

With just over three weeks to go, they’re currently looking good for the £7,000 prize for youth development at the club.

As part of its ongoing sponsorship of the Scottish Football League (SFL), IRN-BRU has just launched a new £70,000 fund to help with youth development at the 30 SFL clubs, and a promotion mechanic that will allow the fans to determine how that fund is allocated.

The promotion is called Score With IRN-BRU. It is an SMS text based promotion that is being prominently featured on a number of pack variants. Participants text “Score” plus the division and first 4 letters of their club to the promotion number.

You can win for yourself, in that all participants (over the age of 16) are entered into a draw for one of five home cinema systems.

And you can win for your club, in that all texts feed into a series of league tables hosted on the Phenomenal Footy website. The higher the position of your club when the competition closes on 28th May, the more money it will get for youth development.

To allow ardent fans the opportunity to keep a close eye on league table movements, we’ve developed widgets for desktop and social media. These give real time updates on the progress of your team. These will no doubt become increasingly useful as the competition progresses to its climax at the end of May. The promotion is only a few days old but there is already a healthy level of activity. If this competition is anything like the Real WAGS competition we ran last year, then things will hot up in the final furlongs. Over 47,000 Real WAG votes were cast in the last 15 days of that competition.

The Score With IRN-BRU promotion is another example of the brand’s “Real Football” approach to its sponsorship of the SFL. This marries the strong grass-roots community presence of the brand with the strong, grass-roots community passion that characterises the support for SFL teams.