Military Media is pleased to announce that Hereford based retailer and distributor, Trekitt Ltd will be extending their current campaign into Autumn 2013. Director Paul Trepte stated:

It has been hugely beneficial for us to work with (Military Media) who have been extremely helpful and professional in all our dealings. The campaign to promote the launch of the new AKU Pilgrim boot on the Army Rumour Service and KitReviews.com has been so successful that we have now almost sold out!

We have lots going on in the future and are very much looking forward to running similar campaigns with the Military Media portfolio of websites.

We were pleased to be invited to visit BP’s Online and Informal Learning Team, to present The Army Rumour Service as a social media case study.  Under the leadership of Nick Shackleton-Jones,  the team is implementing e-learning systems for BP and intend to include peer-to-peer and community features such as forums and video sharing.

There’s no doubt that the team face some challenges, of which building the momentum necessary to make an online community busy and therefore an interesting to spend time is not the least. Some of the key attractions of an informal community website such as the Army Rumour Service are simply not possible in a corporate environment.   Much of our success derives from anonymity, relaxed content rules that allow a high degree of free speech, and the feel of a slightly rebellious online club.  The Army’s own little-used ArmyNet forums are an example of a corporate community that has suffered through the absence of one or all of these, and that has not found a way to overcome this.

Fortunately BP are not trying to create an equivalent to ArmyNet, nor a corporate version of an independent forum like ours, but rather a social e-learning system.  They have a clear aim, learning, and a large amount of interesting content to draw users in, regardless of the social aspect of the system.  They also have other advantages over anyone starting an online community project from scratch – Nick mentioned 80,000 potential users, and of course up to date contact details are available for all of these allowing instant and powerful marketing.   BP also has a strong identity, and goes to great lengths to make sure that this is a positive and attractive one for its employees.  Once again this is not the case for many independent community websites.  In our case the common identity of our users is an interest in the military, but otherwise they are a surprisingly disparate group.

There are areas of our own sites that could benefit from a more question-and-answer based knowledge system, for example military recruiting.  We’ll therefore be very interested to see what I’m sure will be a truly cutting-edge community e-learning system, and particularly the shape and success of the peer-to-peer community element. Thanks to Nick and the team at BP for hosting us.

Nick Shackleton-Jones regularly blogs on e-learning matters on aconventional.

Military Media is pleased to announce that the Forces Pension Society will be extending their current campaign to cover the middle of 2013.  A spokesman, Malcolm Summerfield, said:

I thought you would like to know that the investment we make with Military Media continues to justify its place on our schedule and has contributed to the enrolment of record numbers of new members over the past three years.

As you’re aware, the work we do for the Society is monitored and evaluated in terms of the response received and return on investment. Although we don’t have the same opportunity as we do in press media to include key numbers, we have sufficient data through our web analytics to show that Military Media websites are very successful in driving visitors to our website. And we have a close correlation between web visitors and the numbers of new members who join FPS.

The fact that we also have the opportunity of contributing to comments on the Forum helps us correct factual inaccuracies in perceptions of what Armed Forces Pensions (and changes in policy) deliver, and means we are able to inform as well as recruit.

We were recently invited to the press screening of the new BBC Three comedy series, Bluestone 42.  Based around a six man bomb disposal team operating in Afghanistan it has been written by the team behind the BBC smash hit Miranda.

As part of the BBC’s efforts to ensure that it was likely to be acceptable to members of the Armed Forces we were shown three episodes and asked for our opinion.  This was then quoted by James Rampton in the Independent on 5 March 2013

Military personnel say Bluestone 42 feels authentic. A spokesman for the ARRSE (Army Rumour Service) website, a former major who served in Afghanistan, but does not wish to be identified, said Bluestone 42 was a convincing evocation of Army life. “The most important thing is that it is actually funny. It treats a serious subject with an appropriate degree of humour. The characters are all people that soldiers will recognise. They will say, ‘yes, I know him,’ or ‘I’ve worked with that person’. It’s also absolutely spot-on about how you do banter in the military.

“The people with the best sense of humour are the military. Humour is institutionalised in the Armed Forces. It’s vital that people take the piss out of each other. Soldiers understand that risk is part of the job. If you get injured, you deal with it with black humour. That’s an essential part of the human coping mechanism.”

For our full thoughts on the series then please read our review.

As part of the BBC Radio 4 coverage of the Armed Forces Tranche 3 redundancy announcement on 22 Jan 12, the Army Rumour Service was interviewed by Eddie Mair for the lead story on the PM programme.

Our part of the coverage can be heard below.

Olive Net is pleased to announce that we can now place display advertising directly in to our Military Media iOS and Android mobile forum applications through our standard ad server.  This can be part of a larger website campaign with us, or as a mobile-only campaign.  The combined mobile website and mobile application inventory is in excess of one million ad impressions per month.

The two largest Military Media communities, the Army Rumour Service and Navy Net, have mobile optimised websites and both iOS and Android apps, available for download from iTunes and Google Play respectively.  The apps allow fully featured, fast and user friendly access to the most important areas of our sites, and have proved very popular with our users.

Our mobile inventory includes two industry standard mobile banner sizes; 320x50px for mobile phones and Android tablets, and 728x90px for iPads.  Larger format inventory for Android tablets will also be offered shortly.

Much of the Military Media display advertising inventory is now available at reduced rates via BuyAds.com.   BuyAds allows the creation of instant ‘DiY’ campaigns, with instant inventory purchase, upload of creatives and accurate, independent monitoring of campaigns.

BuyAds allows Olive Net to accept smaller and more simple advertising campaigns and is most suitable for use by smaller companies and those experimenting with display advertising.  BuyAds links directly with our adserver, Google Doubleclick, so advertisers are ensured of accurate campaign delivery and monitoring.

Click here to download a BuyAds specific media pack which includes some pointers and information for those new to the world of internet advertising.

It is a pleasure to start another advertising campaign with Jaguar and Mindshare.   Jaguar will sponsor four Army Rumour Service newsletters this autumn, promoting their military and diplomatic discounts.

The bi-monthly Army Rumour Service newsletter has over 40,000 subscribers and has high open and click-through rates.  The newsletter suits text ‘teasers’ for articles on the Military Media sites of elsewhere or banners as used by Jaguar.

Digital Marketing consultancy Can-did and Olive Net have joined forces to launch the Military Media brand, and develop the marketing strategy of the Olive Net community websites. Can-Did bring over 25 years of digital commercial experience to Olive Net’s online publishing portfolio.

• Can-did
• Olive Net

The Forces Pension Society, the organisation dedicated to “Fighting for the forces and their families” has once again launched a campaign on the Military Media community websites.

Forces Pension Society ran two campaigns with Military Media in 2011, making use of MPU and Leaderboard creatives as well as text content in the bi-monthly Army Rumour Service newsletter. The 2011 campaigns attracted over 3000 visits through the creatives and thousands more from community discussions, making the Army Rumour Service FPS’ top source of referrals for the year.

The Forces Pension Society have chosen to run with a mixture of Leaderboard and MPU creatives for their 2012 campaign