Trains & online marketing

I know it might sound like a naive comment, but it’s so nice to see more and more extremely traditional businesses, such as postal and train services embracing online marketing.
Yesterday I talked about The Royal Mail in the UK and TPG Post in The Netherlands, today I will point you to what Eurostar is doing in UK and SNFC is doing in France.
Eurostar has just launched blog, “Voice of a city” in which it provides insider’s views of Paris, sharing tips on how to get the most out of La Villa Lumière. Actually the blog, created by Proximity London, has been online since September last year, but I only found it out today reading NMA. Anyway, it’s good to see that after six? seven? month, they still keep it very much updated- In a way this initiative reminds me of Virgin Atlantic’s travel guides delivered as podcasts.

On the other side of the Channel, SNFC (the national railway service) has started a new viral marketing effort to promote its fidelity card. The mini site is called “Gagner à voyager” (travel and win) and features a sort of advergame which gives away a lot of prizes in exchange of email addresses. Basically it applies the concept of “spam as many friends as you can and win a prize”, but it does it with a nice website, very artistic and rather ironic. Watch out the game closes from 11 pm to 6 am.
Basically what you have to do is create your own train with your own passengers, inviting 20 friends in order to get the chance to win a prize. Again, the concept is very similar to what KLM already did a few years ago, where you had to gather friends and create your own crew to win a flight.