A strategic approach to marketing and communications is vital to the success of any brand. But sometimes a little instinct can pay off.

This weekend, Derby County take on Nottingham Forest at Pride Park.

Exactly six years ago, a few minutes before half-time during a typical blood-and-guts encounter between the bitter local rivals on a blustery Derby day, the Forest keeper was preparing to hack the ball up the field when a Kenco coffee cup blew on to the pitch and landed in its path, spinning the ball in the air…

The bamboozled Forest keeper mis-kicked it straight into the path of Derby striker Paul Peschisolido (Pesch), who pounced and scored – sending Derby on the way to a famous victory.

As Derby’s head of communications, I was watching events from the dugout area. Sensing a PR opportunity, as the half-time whistle blew I ran on to the pitch and collected the cup. After the match I collared Pesch in the players’ tunnel, asked him to sign the cup and took a photograph of him clutching it.

That night we launched a competition on our website for fans to devise a slogan for a t-shirt featuring the image of the player holding his trophy. Forty-eight hours later, the garments – sporting the words ‘This cup beat 11 mugs’ – were on sale online and in the club shop. Mugs and posters followed, with the strapline ‘Vend it like Pesch’. A DVD of the match, called Forest: Gone With The Wind, flew off the shelves. National media coverage of the stunt also drove sales.

Tacky? Perhaps. But we managed to turn coffee into coffers during some dark financial days for the club.

Forest were near the top of the table then – the Rams were fighting relegation. Derby are the bigger club these days, at least on paper.

Then again, paper teams win paper cups and I hope that, this weekend, we won’t be forced to wake up and smell the coffee.

Whether it be family members and friends traipsing around their living rooms in full costume while reciting the lines or stop-motion animation using cardboard cut-outs or toys, each scene is meticulously recreated with 15-second bits made by fans that are stitched together to match the 1977 original.

In 2010 it won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media.

Christmas decorations full of gelatin, carrots, balloons, cans of pop, you name it this boy shoots it. I’d love to see a video of this stuff. More of his work on here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8763834@N02/sets/72157622985983435/

Introducing the world’s cheapest tablet that’s opening up the digital world to internet users in India. It’s called AAkash – translated as Sky – and it’s being targeted at the ‘next billion’ users in a country where 800 million people have a mobile phone, but only 10 percent have internet access.

It’s priced at £22, runs Android 2.2 and has a seven-inch touchscreen, 256MB of RAM and two USB ports. Click on the image for a video about Aakash and share your thoughts: a cheap gimmick or a digital revolution with the potential to empower the masses?

“It is a weapon of the revolution.”

Che Guevera’s quote about football can now be applied to social media, during the year in which Twitter and Facebook played their parts in the uprising that would become known as the Arab Spring.

(At this point, we’ll gloss over the role social media also played in rallying the troops during the UK summer riots.)

Now an Egyptian couple have named their first-born daughter Facebook, in tribute to the networking site’s role in co-ordinating and enabling the Middle East uprising.

It’s a powerful, if somewhat extreme demonstration of how social media has become a force for change in the move from dictatorship to democracy.

Closer to home, it’s also revolutionising the way we nurture business contacts and build networks, as I’ve been explaining to my daughter Lin (short for LinkedIn).

Following on from Emma’s recent shop window blog…

My boyfriend has been sent to Italy this week with work. He found these beautiful fluid elephants in Louis Vuitton’s window in Milan.

A new Christmas handbag, surely?