TAG | word-of-mouth
This weekend, Black Friday shoppers spent an average of $365.34, up from last year’s average of $343.31 per customer. Total spending for Black Friday 2010: An estimated $45 billion. http://bit.ly/f5OWYe
In this age of the internet, however, retailers are expecting even more financial success on Cyber Monday, a more recent phenomenon. Since 2005, the Monday after Black Friday has been called the “Biggest Online Shopping Day of the Year,” with many consumers making their purchases from home or (more likely) from office computers.
The most trending topic on the web on Thanksgiving Day was “Black Friday Ads.” Not surprisingly, this year, retailers are taking advantage of social media to increase their sales. If you “like” certain retailers’ Facebook pages, you’ll have access to special deals.
If you like the Sears’ Facebook page, for example, you’ll also “have the power to unlock great deals.”
When you check into Sports Authority using Foursquare, you can win a $500 gift certificate.
Many small retailers have also been using Cyber Monday as a chance to connect with consumers using personalized tweets, moving past the assumption in earlier years that this online shopping day is for big businesses only.
In fact, this Cyber Monday is looking to be the perfect time for many under-the-radar businesses to launch themselves into a bigger market by using their social media savvy. Here, some tips for businesses on how to incorporate social media into their Black Monday advertising: http://www.fruitzoom.com/2010/11/cyber-monday-37-tips-to-leverage-social-media-zoom-monday-sales/ By leveraging social media and internet marketing for both online and offline traffic, businesses can up profits and internet presence.
This week, Best Buy has used Twitter to inform shoppers of bargains, but in a more resourceful use of social media, they are also using Twitter as an instant customer service solution. The company has their Twitter accounts staffed and ready to answer questions about problem purchases … all in 140 characters or less.
Check out the best deals, from electronics to sporting goods and apparel to gardening supplies, on http://www.cybermonday.com/
SAMMY 2010 Best Social Content / Entertainment: Initiative+ for Hyundai Tuscon
Posted by Erick B on October 15, 2010
Media Needle is proud to have participated in Hyundai’s recent award-winning social media campaign led by the global agency Initiative. As part of the marketing campaign to align Hyundai’s 2010 Tucson launch with the 2010 Movie Award Season, Media Needle creatively executed social media / word-of-mouth tactics.
From the announcement:
Media Needle reached out to mom bloggers, offering them incentives for posting the movie award recipe widget on their own personal blogs, thereby amplifying the Hyundai Oscar sponsorship and increasing engagement.
Here’s the widget:
The results of the campaign were impressive. Once again, from the post:
By the end of the few week long campaign, the widget resulted in an average of 9,500 page views between Bakerella and Serious Eats, with an average of 15 comments per post. Bakerella’s wrap-up post, “Fun with Films,” also created the added value of 13,069 page views and 3,192 comments. The widget set new industry benchmarks for interaction and engagement by surpassing the Average CTR of conversationalist units of 0.06% and average Overall Interaction Rate of 0.07%. The shareable widget delivered 4,192,522 page impressions with a CTR of .12% and an overall interaction rate of .17%, which is more than double the industry averages.
Media Needle is excited to continue our work with Initiative and Hyundai, finding more creative ways to interact and engage.
Not only has Twitter become the place to record one’s every move and thought, it has also become a place that can extend the reach of a company’s marketing efforts — and not just in the traditional sense of a business tweeting about its in-store promotions to followers. Nowadays, Twitter is often the centerpiece of a company’s entire marketing plan, one that all of its other efforts revolve around.
For instance, in Los Angeles (where Media Needle is headquartered), we have a mobile food truck craze well underway, with various trucks serving various delicacies to an on-the-go crowd. The craze began last year with the Kogi BBQ truck, whose food fuses Korean barbecue with Mexican tacos to create a taste that busy LA denizens don’t mind waiting hours in line to try. The traveling truck used Twitter to tweet about the locations where it would be stationed, sometimes only hours before its arrival. Other trucks quickly followed suit, making Twitter the cornerstone of their marketing plans in a way that rendered all other traditional modes of advertising irrelevant. Brick-and-mortar stores also joined the movement, offering such promotions as Twitter Tuesdays that give customers who mention Twitter 10% off their purchases. In addition, stores have begun giving their followers early access to new products and special promotions, an advantage that increases sales as much as it does subscribers.
So why does it work? With its 140 character count, Twitter is the perfect vehicle to publicize promotions quickly to a distracted crowd, as Web-savvy audiences have already learned how to tune out Flash graphics and banner promotions on a website. Twitter subscribers, on the other hand, make the active choice to follow a brand and read the tweets, creating a captive audience interested in hearing what a company has to say — and sell. Twitter campaigns are also far cheaper to execute, as they don’t incur the costs of printing mailers or hiring graphic designers. With this in mind, we expect Twitter and other social media outlets to continue their slow but steady take over of marketing campaigns until traditional advertising becomes as obsolete as the VCR.
* Image courtesy of http://www.allposters.com