From Advertising Age ( hope they don’t “expire” the article, I hate it when they do that, heaps of interesting stuff there).

What Accountants Can Teach You About Using Social Media

H&R Block Cast a Wide Net With a Campaign That Included Profiles, Videos, Twitter and Widgets

By Megan McIlroy and Abbey Klaassen

Published: May 14, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Tax software isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of marketing in social networks or on YouTube, spaces dominated by movie trailers and goofy viral videos. But H&R Block proved that it, too, can be successful in the space, but it’s about matching content to the social community and then making that content valuable to consumers, said Amy Worley, director of digital marketing for H&R Block.

Amy Worley

Photo Credit: Jonathan Fickies

Ms. Worley was speaking at the latest installment of Advertising Age’s Digital Bites breakfast series yesterday and shared successes and lessons learned from H&R Block’s most recent social-media campaign. The campaign cast a wide net in the social-media space, with MySpace and Facebook profiles, YouTube postings, a Twitter account, widgets and even a virtual tax office in Second Life.

Most companies, she noted, wouldn’t dive into all the tactics at once but her product is very seasonal and “anything we didn’t learn in one season, we would have to wait until next year [to try].”

The recent social-media blitz to market H&R Block’s digital tax solution produced a 171% lift in internet ad awareness among the targeted audience and an overall brand awareness lift of 52%. H&R Block devoted about 0.5%* of its total marketing budget to the effort. (more)

So I thought I would link here for you, cos the links weren’t on the original article:

• H&R Block Facebook
• H&R Block Twitter
• H&R Block MySpace (fake blog or flog – Truman Greene)
• H&R Block Lulu.tv

Awwww I’m lazy you can google the rest…
Funny comment on MySpace:

8 Apr 2008 09:22 AM

Great job impersonating a human & good luck with your goal of world domination!

By the way I put “I hate H&R Block” in Google search and only got 23 returns (including a review on epinions), Not bad. Is this how we we evaluate our brand value in the future – how few Google returns/results we get when we put in “XYZBrand sucks”? heh.