TAG | social media
This week, we take a look at a few more cool social media case studies and the success certain brands have seen from their efforts. While in the past, social media campaigns were best used by marketing giants like Coca-Cola and Burberry, today social media is present in many industries, including healthcare, real estate and even credit card companies. Here are a few of our favorites unexpected uses of social media:
Mall of America: Lisa Grimm, digital public relations specialist for the Mall of America in Minnesota, recently shared the success of one of the Mall’s most triumphant campaigns. Since the most difficult time to park at the mall is during Christmas week, the Mall of America team decided to take advantage of this increase in activity to boost their social media following. The team decided to actually auction off parking spaces in the front row of the mall’s lot, but only to their social media followers. By using the parking event’s hashtag on Twitter, followers were entered into the auction. The campaign was a success: The Mall’s Twitter following increased by 11% and the campaign was covered by Forbes, among other news outlets. This campaign is just one example of the far-reaching grasp of social media.
Century 21 Real Estate: Century 21, a leader in real estate, recently revealed that QR codes will be available on Century 21 signs. These custom bar codes can be scanned on a smartphone and will direct you to specific information, such as a real estate listing.
American Express: American Express has been heavily targeting small business in the US for the past few months. One feature of their campaign is the American Express OPEN and Facebook collaboration called Big Break for Small Business. The national contest was designed to help transform the way small businesses use Facebook, and of course, to publicize American Express as the leader for small business use. Business owners could enter to win an all-expense paid trip to Facebook headquarters for a two-day “boot camp” and a US $20,000 cash prize by submitting responses to a short questionnaire. Over 10,000 businesses entered to win their “big break,” and on July 5th the five finalists will be subject to a public vote. Read an interview with Rosa Alfonso of of the American Express Open program here.
The No Kids Hungry Pledge: Share our Strength, a non-profit organization, is working through their Facebook page to help end childhood hunger. On their custom welcome page, they ask you to take a pledge and help end childhood hunger by 2015. Once you sign up by providing your email and zip code, you receive an email asking you to help spread the word by way of social status updates (templated Facebook and Twitter posts) or via email. Note, they don’t ask for money or for you to volunteer your time. In doing so, Share our Strength is building their email database while gaining trust from their new fans.
Have you seen any cool uses of social media in the past few months? Share with us in the comments section!
A successful Facebook promotion does more than get “liked” by fans. It is a powerful way to generate buzz, to engage existing fans and boost fan count, to spark the interest of potential clients; ultimately, it is a way to grow your brand.
The most triumphant Facebook contests/promotions have a few characteristics in common:
- Organization: In today’s social media- savvy world, just posting your contest on your Facebook wall and hoping for the best won’t get you very far. Approach your Facebook contest as you would a traditional media campaign. Have a plan of attack ready from the start: How many entries would you like, ideally? Or the flip side: If you get only five entries, will you be prepared to shut the contest down? In other words, what is your minimum and what is your maximum? If you spend $100 on a contest app and promotion, will you be happy with 20 new fans? 50? It takes work to maintain a Facebook contest; on the upside, you could gain hundreds of new fans and expand your company, but on the downside, you could seriously alienate your existing fans with poor response time and sloppy organization.
- Prize: The easiest way to figure out what to give away? Poll your existing audience and ask them what prize justifies contest entry. This is free, and you’ll get, if nothing else, inspiration. Ultimately, you’ll want to give away something that you’d be excited to receive yourself. Brainstorm with your team, with friends, with family, and ask: What prize would be worth what we are asking you to do? No one is going to submit a video or a post a picture in order to win an outdated electronic or a sub-par food product.
- Promotion: Since social media doesn’t usually rely on press releases, think of other ways to get the word out. Email bloggers, tweet about your contest, place a link on your actual website. Actively promoting your contest on a daily basis is necessary, but you have to think past garnering the attention of your current followers, because you want new ones. Approach large Facebook pages that are similar to yours to set up a sort of promotional exchange. Ask friends to contact their networks.
Some of the greatest Facebook promotions have taken all these steps and more:
Facebook giant Red Bull, with over 18 million fans, often features fun contests. In 2010, their “Create the Next Red Bull Commercial” Contest excited both techies and non-techies alike. Entries could be sent by story board, video clip, hand drawn illustrations or a conventional script.
Discovery Adventures, a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, is currently running a contest that is geared to increase its current 4,303 likes by…a lot. Fans can enter to win a trip to Italy for two, including airfare, sponsored by Pompeii the Exhibit. Clearly, Discovery has found a model that works for them and is sticking to it; their Italy contest mirrors their last contest, called Win a Trip to Egypt, featuring a 9 day Egyptian archeological adventure for two. Facebook contest rule #4394390- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Conan O’Brien’s Facebook Page currently features his F*Cards promotion. “Sometimes it’s hard to compose just the right status update or wall post for those uniquely Facebook moments,” the app explains. “So why not let Conan O’Brien do your Facetalkin’ for you with F-Cards? Huh? How? Watch this video and let Conan explain…” In under a minute, I’m intrigued and I’m amused. It’s fun and while there is no prize, this is promotion at its best: Conan is engaging his fans, who will most likely link to him on their own pages and give him free publicity.
While these big-brand Facebook contests & promotions have been wildly successful, when creating your own, make sure to read the fine print.
In the past few years, Facebook has changed the rules regarding contests quite a few times, mostly recently in November 2010. The most notable rule is this one: You MUST use an app to conduct a contest or risk facing the wrath of Facebook. Ultimately, while a Facebook contest or promotion requires hard work to succeed, the payoff of a well-executed campaign is well worth it.
This week, we continue our interview series by speaking to Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a marketing software company. Volpe leads the company’s lead generation and branding strategy through inbound marketing and under his leadership, HubSpot’s marketing has won more than 30 awards and been featured in over 20 marketing and business books. Volpe also co-hosts the weekly marketing podcast HubSpot TV, blogs frequently and is very active in social media and as a marketing speaker.
What are your thoughts about the ROI of social media? Two things: First, the ROI is huge. There has been a big transformation in what marketing is effective today. You used to be able to just tell people what to think of you in advertisements and sell to them with cold calls. Now consumers have all sorts of ways of blocking that outbound marketing. You need to attract people using inbound marketing, making it easy for them to find you in blogs, search engines and social media. So, as part of an inbound marketing strategy, social media can be a great and valuable tool.
Second, I am not sure why everyone is holding social media to such a precise and exactly measured ROI when marketers have done all sorts of things for decades that did not have a great measurable ROI. Sure, you can measure the ROI of social media pretty well, but why hold it to a higher standard than print ads or events?
Are marketers that promise ROI setting expectations that cannot be delivered solely by social measures? Maybe, but it is not because of ROI they promise. The reason that is a mistake is that social media is actually not all that helpful or effective on its own. Social media is just a technology like the phone or email. Using it alone is not useful or effective. You need to have something useful, valuable and interesting to talk about in social media and a way to convert those social media connections into leads and sales. So anyone that says they can use social media alone to deliver ROI might not have a great strategy and might be misguided.
Is there a difference between ROI or “impact”? If so, is one more important? No difference in my mind. The R in ROI is the impact that your activity had. Technically ROI also compares the impact to the cost or investment, so maybe there is a little difference, but the concept is the same.
Does a consultant or agency need an ROI mindset when they work with a client? If so, how do you find out? Yes. Marketing today is measurable, and all good marketers measure what they do. I think clients should demand ROI and reports from all of their vendors. It often makes sense for the client to use their own analytics to measure what their consultants or agencies are doing, so they have an unbiased view. Smart marketers and companies take an active role in their marketing, and if you do outsource some of it, you are the ones who manage it, set the goals, and measure it.
Read more about Mike Volpe at his website.
This week, we begin our series of interviews with social media superstars. First up is author, certified Sommelier and brand strategist Rick Bakas, of Bakas Media in San Francisco. As the first Director of Social Media in the wine industry, Bakas has influenced new ideas and new concepts that connect wineries to new consumers through tweet-up tours and global online wine tastings. He specializes in translating personal and corporate brands to new media. This year, Bakas will be traveling the world educating businesses on how to build their brands online, stopping in cities including NY, London, Mexico, Sydney, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Munich and Napa, and speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
We asked him about social media ROI, impact and more:
What are your thoughts about the ROI of social media? In my opinion, “Return on Investment” is an outdated term based on the old way of doing things. New Media is just that—it’s new, which means we need to redefine what “return” looks like. The return we get in this new world takes on a new form we haven’t seen before.
I like to refer to it as ROA, or Return on Attention because the real magic happens when we’re able to get someone’s attention online and convert that attention into action. We’re increasingly overwhelmed with more technology and are bombarded daily with emails, text messages, tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook posts and all the other stuff in addition to the overstimulation from traditional media. We’re spending more time online than watching television so that’s where people’s attention is.
Going forward, savvy marketers will be able to nurture a healthy relationship online, so that at any given moment they can get someone’s attention no matter what channel they’re sending the message through. The true value is getting that mind share, even if for a moment and affecting a behavior such as a purchase. Where traditional media and new media share a commonality is Reach. In traditional media you pay for someone else’s reach for impressions. With new media you can create your own reach.
Are marketers that promise ROI setting expectations that cannot be delivered solely by social measures? Yes. In the previous answer I mentioned “return” taking on a new form we haven’t seen before. There’s a new factor in determining “return” called Time. Time is a multiplier now because digital content lives for a longer time. One single YouTube video could influence someone’s behavior in 2011 or 2016.
Marketers who promise anything related to social media are probably desperately trying to position themselves as experts out of a survival instinct, and are telling clients what they need to hear. No one can control digital content over time, nor can they guarantee how much attention they’ll be able to capture online.
Is there a difference between ROI or “impact”? If so, is one more important? Return on Investment, or as I call it Return on Attention, shares something in common with Impact. It comes down to Reach.
The number of impressions has a direct correlation to affecting someone’s behavior. In traditional media you rely on someone else’s reach like magazine readership or television viewers. In new media you can create your own reach. Either way you’re going for impact from impressions. The real magic happens when you leverage both at the same time.
Does a consultant or agency need an ROI mindset when they work with a client? If so, how do you find out? A consultant needs to have their client’s interest in mind. And because their client is most likely a business, then yes, working towards ROA should be the driving force.
When we work with client partners, we turn their sales funnel into an hourglass. We all know the sales funnel is about getting people to an action like a purchase, but the real beauty of new media adds a second half of the equation to the mix.
Ultimately, each client partner is going to have different objectives, so it’s good to start with their endgame and work backwards to build in the systems needed to accomplish the result.
For more information on Rick Bakas, head to his website.
Typewriter Robot by Jeremy Mayer
I’ve been asked to write a blog post.
A blog? Me? But I get PAID to write and to whip other people’s meandering brain-farts into glorious prose! Well, that is, I did until two weeks ago, when I was laid off from my job as editor at a book publisher. You know, moldy old books. Like, paper and ink and four-color printing and stuff.
I’ve been in print publishing for nearly 20 years, writing for and editing magazines and books on everything from international business news to music to architecture. Why should I stoop to a medium that’s attainable to any idiot with an iBook? I mean (to paraphrase the old joke about awards), blogs are like hemorrhoids: sooner or later, every asshole gets one.
The truth is, publishing now really is for everyone, from bloggers to tweeters to the right-place-at-the-right-time bystander who manages to capture breaking news with a cellphone camera.
This may be bad news for the professionals, that endlessly growing pool of talented, out-of-work journalists who are duking it out for the few available jobs at established publications. For everyone else, though, it means access to a wealth of opinions, points of view, and, yes, insane ramblings, which may inform, infuriate, call to act, or simply amuse.
The Web, with its accessibility and immediacy, lends itself intrinsically to writing of an egocentric nature. My own writings have never been personal; my professional duties have always been as a reporter or as an editor of other people’s work. I find it incredibly embarrassing to talk about myself; can’t we discuss that fascinating individual over there?
But clearly I need to get with the program. My profession has changed; hell, even the language we use to discuss it has changed. While I won’t stop looking for a job at a “legitimate” media outlet, in the meantime, I will begrudgingly learn to write snappy, snarky, first-person Web-speak, and to embrace the blogs and Twitters and Diggs and Wikis, and, yeah, I still don’t know what Foursquare is.
So, here’s my blog entry. Maybe some people will happen upon it. But for now, until I get used to the idea, one thing you can count on is that I won’t be posting a link for all of my friends on Facebook. Just give me a few weeks.
Social Media moves quickly. While the time lag between communications produced by more traditional media, like newspapers and television, can be long, taking anywhere from days to weeks to months, social media is virtually instantaneous. In fact, social media users can dissect and comment on an event as it is taking place.
Social Media makes the news just as quickly as it reports on it. On a week-to-week basis, the industry can rapidly shift gears, with new developments, mergers and innovation that define it.
Here’s what’s new this week:
YouTube now offers live video: Welcome to YouTube Live, which integrates live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time. Users can search for the most compelling live events happening on YouTube and add these events to their personalized calendars, and customized homepages will notify customers of upcoming live streams. As of April 8, YouTube started gradually rolling out the live streaming beta platform, which allowed certain YouTube partners with “accounts in good standing” to stream live content on YouTube.
Walmart ventures into social media: Walmart announced this week that it is buying Mountain View-based Kosmix, a social media technology provider that has built a platform that “enables users to filter and organize content in social networks, in order to connect people with information that matters to them, in realtime.” The platform powers TweetBeat, a social media filter for live events. Walmart expects Kosmix, whose founders and team will now operate as @WalmartLabs, to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support its multi-channel strategy. Interesting fact: Kosmix’ founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman also created crowdsourcing Internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk.
A tech boom is on the way: Seattle-based real estate mapper Zillow has become the latest Internet company to put an IPO into the pipeline. (An initial public offering, or IPO, is when a company issues common stock or shares to the public for the first time.) Zillow filed a statement with the SEC that will let it sell more than $50 million of stock. The company follows in the footsteps of Demand Media, LinkedIn and Pandora, all of which filed for an IPO within the last year. Facebook and Groupon are also expected to join the public market soon. With insiders debating the proximity of the next tech bubble, these IPOs could signify that we should expect it soon.
Twitter in talks to buy TweetDeck: Twitter is in talks to purchase TweetDeck Inc. for $50 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. TweetDeck is a hot commodity, as earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that UberMedia was in talks to purchase TweetDeck for $30 million. As one of the most popular third-party Twitter clients, TweetDeck displays your Twitter news feed, direct messages, etc. along with your Facebook feeds — all on the same screen, updating in real time.
Got any interesting social media news to share with us from the past few days? Please let us know in the comments!
Local mobile marketing can be associated with a plethora of words: Opportunity, innovation, growth, gainfulness – the list goes on.
Whether you own a small business or a large corporation, your purchasing decisions will have a distinctly local bend to them, marking the true importance of the local aspect of local mobile marketing. Ultimately, no matter the size of your business, you should be concentrating on local as it applies to you.
Appropriately, Adam Horwitz and Tim Donovan bring you Local Mobile Monopoly. The duo originally teamed up for Mobile Monopoly, released in December 2010, which revealed how to make money using mobile phone marketing strategies.
Their new product, Local Mobile Monopoly, was released in March and comes in a training video, software and text messaging services format. The video trains marketers on how to best use local mobile marketing, and guarantees profits through the use of mobile phones. The all-in-one mobile marketing tool is geared to benefit a variety of businesses and is ideal for new users and experienced marketers alike. Ultimately, the service claims to empower marketers’ local efforts with guaranteed success, mainly because it is founded on the idea that the local market is a gold mine.
Let’s break down the details: According to the CTIA, The Wireless Association’s semiannual wireless industry survey, 91 percent of Americans own a mobile phone. About 20 percent of these users (50 million people) own “smart phones,” mobile phones with Internet browsing and emailing capabilities.
Since smart phones bring online search capabilities to mobile users, businesses should include mobile search strategies in their overall marketing plans. In one of the most common applications of mobile search, customers rely on map apps to locate local businesses while on the move. Platforms like Yelp, for example, have built-in search functionality coupled with ratings contributed by members. Through Yelp, people can access coupons and discounts posted by businesses and accessible through “check-ins” on smart phones. This benefits both the business and the customers, who can also notify friends of their location, giving the whole process a “game” feel as well.
As local marketing dollars rapidly shift from traditional to online channels, the benefits of mobile marketing for businesses become clearer. The ability to enter the mobile version of a web site, garner email access, conduct map searches, access social media for referrals and use text messages for offers, coupons, etc. is invaluable.
By 2015, almost 25% of local marketing spent will be in the online space. Local Mobile Monopoly is just one of the many new services that will materialize as this arena continues to grow.
*This is the second of a two-part series on social media platforms.
Last week, we discussed social media platforms that are used on a personal level, like Facebook and Digg. This week, we continue our conversation by highlighting some social media platforms in the business division.
Check out platforms like Buddy Media, a Facebook management system based on a scalable platform and simple tools. The Buddy Media Platform gives brands the opportunity to make the best use of the power of Facebook’s social connections. It allows global marketers to combine all of their Facebook assets into a single unified presence, across multiple countries and languages, in any language Facebook supports.
Also take a look at Wildfire. This brand marketer uses Facebook to build buzz for its clients, ranging from bloggers to corporations like Coca-Cola. The goal is to win “fans” who can choose to further interact with the advertiser. It also builds marketing campaigns that include contests, coupons, virtual gifts, etc.
Are you looking to customize your Facebook fan page? A “normal” fan page doesn’t cut it anymore, especially not when companies are running contests and posting interactive photo albums on their pages, at the least. Involver allows you to make your fan page stand out through easy-to-use applications. Simply choose which applications you want, click the Install button and enter your settings. The RSS tools found in the Facebook Application directory pale in comparison. The platform has three levels of membership: Free, Pro, and Premium and powers 250,000 applications.
Do you want to track fast-moving data? Try Meteor Solutions, which tracks data like email or video as it gets passed along. The platform allows advertisers and publishers to track the spread of their messages/content and gives them the option of advertising as well. As the tracked content spreads, Meteor Tracker creates a sharing graph that identifies each node and captures every single visit to a site that is generated by a user who sees the tracked content. Born out of a merger between Reach Machines and Fyreball, the platform’s analytics are available through a monthly subscription fee.
Ultimately, there are loads of business-oriented platforms out there; choose wisely and network frequently!
*This is the first of a two-part series on social media platforms.
The key to navigating the ever-growing world of social media is to divide and conquer. With three main types of social media platforms- those that help you network, the ones that help you promote, and those that help you share- ease of navigation is a necessity.
A platform that allows you to network, like Facebook or LinkedIn, is the most commonly used. Whether you’re interested in getting back in touch with an old flame or making new contacts in the business world, using a social networking site is the easiest way to do so.
Promoting platforms, like YouTube or personal blogs, allow you to do just that: promote. Oftentimes, it isn’t even clear what someone is promoting; personal-style blogs, for example, seem to be promoting nothing more than daily outfits. Upon closer look, however, many of these blogs feature the latest fashions, both in clothing form and through ads, and bloggers can be compensated, whether with money or gifts of clothing, etc.
Lastly, we have platforms that allow you to share, like Digg and Delicious. These platforms operate through closely-knit communities that are not easy to infiltrate. Try to get voted up on Digg and you’ll realize instantly that it takes months of interaction with other users to build up the trust needed to share within the community
If you’re a networker and you like sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, check out Quora. This platform is a sort of best-of the Q&A platform format; a combination of LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo Answers with the look, feel and simplicity of Twitter.
Also check out Color. The platform uses location-based services like GPS to allow users to share the photos on their handsets with people—both strangers and friends—nearby (within a 150-foot radius of a user). Users can also create albums and social groups for photos from a specific event, and can also comment on photos and shoot video.
If you like YouTube and WordPress, try Instagram. This is heaven for tech-junkies and social networking addicts. Snap a photo with your iPhone and then edit the photo as you like, choosing a filter to transform the look and feel. Then, send to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr – it’s photo sharing, reinvented.
If you like sites like Delicious because you enjoy the thrill of sharing sites with like-minded web users, try a social shopping experience in 2011. Sites like Svpply and Polyvore allow users to create inspiration boards, generate user feedback, and ultimately, mimic a real-time shopping experience, minus the long lines and annoying interactions.
Next week, we’ll discuss some more business-oriented social platforms, like Wildfire and Buddy Media.
In our last blog, we discussed social media success stories and what it takes to run a successful social media campaign. For every great social media campaign, however, there are multiple failures. Whether this is due to poor use of assets, a marketing screw up, misuse of celebrity or a lack of fan interaction, we can learn as much from these disappointments as we can from the well-executed promotions.
This year’s Academy Awards made well documented use of social media; specifically, host James Franco joined Twitter in early February and was a pro-tweeter by the time the show went live. He live-tweeted behind-the-scenes moments that let viewers feel like celebrities, and he took a video while walking out on stage and then streamed it to his fans. Twitter peaked just after the Oscars’ open with approximately 10,000 tweets/minute— 1.8 million overall. This was social media at its best.
At its worst? This is 2011, and the only way the actual awards show integrated social media was through James Franco. Most of the effort was made by him, and while his tweets and backstage glimpses were fun and successful, imagine the difference that would have been made if this had been incorporated by the Academy itself.
Another social media flop: Fashion brand Cheap Monday has a plethora of social media assets, but only a few of them appear to be functioning. Tip: If you’re going to offer your fans social media outlets to explore, make sure they work. No one wants to check out pre-written tweets that consist of only a URL, or blindly search for a Facebook page that is named something different than your brand (in this case, the brand is “Cheap Monday” and the page is under “Cheap Mondays.” This difference may seem negligible, but under a Facebook search, this could be detrimental).
Although dated, Ad Age described a classic social media fail: The Chevy Tahoe campaign of 2006, run by GM. The campaign was meant to tie in to the television show The Apprentice, and it allowed regular folks at home to create their own Chevy Tahoe ads. The higher-ups at the company failed to anticipate the negative reaction they’d receive to their gas-guzzling car at a time of climbing oil prices and the war in Iraq. They were met with harsh language and unbridled anger, and while GM denied their social media fail, the company went into bankruptcy a few years later.
Among some of last year’s losing social media moves were: Starbucks’ social media nightmare in Hungary, Dr. Pepper’s status-takeover campaign on Facebook , Kenneth Cole’s off-color remarks about Egypt , and CVS_Cares’ locked twitter account More snafus here.
In the world of social media, especially since internet users are more savvy and aware than ever before, every move is noticed and scrutinized. Here are some ways to avoid making some of these gaffes:
- Adapt to your social media environment: Take Twitter for example. Don’t over-intellectualize; you have 140 characters, so get to the point with short words and great content.
- Understand ROI: The more you pay, the better the…payoff will be. Yes, you will have to pay for marketing even in social media; get rid of the mindset that all social media marketing is free marketing.
- Engage with your audience: These are the people who will make your campaign a success or a failure, and you have the chance to interact with them, to answer their questions, to ask them for feedback. Make use of that.
- Get Formal: Social media is less formal than traditional media in some aspects, but that does not mean this isn’t still business. Treat your social media assets professionally.
- Get Exciting: Bland social media is the worst; you will depress your audience and lose them. Plan ahead, hire a dynamic community manager and make an effort.
More moves to avoid here. And remember, without failure, success wouldn’t shine so brightly.