Since its inception, over 120 years ago, coupons remained as essential to American lifestyle, as Coca-Cola-and just as addictive too. For over a century coupon has been around to help the consumers score discounts from few dimes to several dollars. Coupons have evolved drastically since its inception and have a blood stirring effect for obsessive consumers with their discounts and deals. Here is a wonderful Infographics depicting a brief history of coupons and their evolution in the future.
Once coupons went digital, the retailers started to use online coupons as a means of advertisement. Online coupons have gained a lot of popularity over the past couple of years because they can be printed in unlimited quantities. There has been an increase of 263 percent in the usage of online coupons from 2008 to 2009. Motivated by the mobile phones trend, coupons have also shifted to mobile phones. Smart phones like iPhones have popular apps that gather different coupons from across the internet based on your geographic location. This makes all the discount options, from sale at some clothing shop to free food in a restaurant, at consumers’ fingertips.
It would be really interesting to see how coupons will evolve further in the coming decades. Retailer may issue coupons to individuals redeemable only through DNA samples as a measure of fraudulent coupons.
Facebook is rolling out Sponsored Stories, a new ad format that turns your friends’ actions into promoted content.
Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout the News Feed,” Facebook Product Marketing Lead Jim Squires told Mashable. Companies can choose to take certain user actions — such as checkins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in the column on the right side of the News Feed.
For example, if you’re Whole Foods and you’re looking to increase your exposure on Facebook, you can pay to have a percentage of all checkins to Whole Foods featured in a Sponsored Stories slot in the right-side column. Your content wouldn’t be shown directly, but the actions of a user’s friends would appear. Users seeing their friends “liking” or checking in to Whole Foods will drive increased trust and increased traffic.
“The advertiser is not controlling the message; it’s about actions,” Squires said.
Here’s an example of an action that could potentially be sponsored:
And here’s what it might look like as a Sponsored Story:
Starting today, four specific types of user actions can be turned into featured stories: likes, checkins, actions within custom applications and Page posts. If a company has a custom app (e.g. Starbucks Card or even FarmVille), it can promote the actions users take within them. The same is true of users posting on the walls of their favorite brands.
Facebook’s roster of launch partners includes Coke, Levi’s, Anheuser Busch and Playfish. Also, the social network is partnering with a slew of nonprofits for Sponsored Stories, including Donors Choose, Girl Up!, Malaria No More, Amnesty International, Women for Women, Autism Speaks, (RED), Alzheimer’s Association and UNICEF. However, anybody will be able to bid on Sponsored Story slots (by a per-impression and/or a per-click basis) starting January 25.
We haven’t seen Facebook play with new ad formats for a while — most of its revenue comes from the targeted advertising that appears on most Facebook pages. It has been timid about new ad formats after the spectacular failure of Beacon. Sponsored Stories seems like a simple and logical way to introduce new forms of advertising into Facebook’s system, though.
Sponsored Stories has a lot of similarities to Twitter Promoted Tweets. Both are trying to use content from within their networks and turn them into advertising dollars. There is one key difference between Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets, though: The user defines the advertised content in Facebook’s format, not the advertiser.
It’s that one little difference Facebook hopes will turn into big bucks.
JetBlue has announced a new program with Facebook Places that lets customers earn rewards when they use the service to check in at airports.
Members of JetBlue’s TrueBlue rewards platform can register on the company’s Facebook Page. Registered users will then receive 25 TrueBlue points every time they check in to an official JetBlue airport location on Facebook Places. The first 100 customers to check in at Boston’s Logan International, Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Long Beach, New York’s John F. Kennedy International or Orlando International airports will receive 100 points. Those who accumulate 5,000 or more points can trade them in for free flights.
JetBlue is the latest to attach a rewards program to Facebook Places. Over the weekend, Sears Outlet, a unit of Sears, ran a promotion that awarded 10,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points to anyone who used Facebook Places to check in at one of its outlet stores and then made a purchase.
Though marketers have been running loyalty programs for ages, a gamification overlay adds another reason — aside from a desire to earn points — for consumers to actually use the programs. Given Facebook’s huge consumer base, the average shopper is more likely to have Facebook on his or her smartphone than a competing location-based service like Foursquare or Gowalla.
What do you think? Would you be more likely to participate in these loyalty programs now?
Millennial guest blogger Julie Walsh was pleasantly surprised when she sent a tweet out to no one in particular and received a bounty that not only got her though the day — it earned the gifting brand a loyal customer. Walsh is a media relations specialist for Walker Sands. You can join her conversation on Twitter and the Walker Sands blog.
Like any other Friday afternoon, I was tired and dragging a bit. I seriously needed a caffeine boost and took to Twitter to share that need. That tweet launched me into a unique one-to-one marketing experience.
My need for caffeine was not tweeted to anyone in particular, hashtagged or a reply to someone else’s tweet. However @popchipsChicago still found it. Within 30 minutes of posting my need, I received a reply from Popchips Chicago suggesting I put some “pop” in my afternoon by having some of their chips. Soon after seeing their reply, a huge gift basket was delivered to my desk filled with every variety of Popchips and a personal note from the Popchips Chicago team. Their timing was impeccable and an effective use of social media.
I’ve been following the Popchips Chicago twitter account for about two months and they consistently do a great job of interacting with their followers to build a strong brand relationship. In this instance, their key to success was listening; they didn’t wait for someone else to start the conversation, they took the initiative to start it themselves. By responding to one person at the right time, Popchips showed how engaging one-to-one marketing can be.
The interaction between Popchips Chicago and me was personal and relevant. It made a huge impact — I will now be a loyal Popchips customer for life. For those trying to market to Millennials such as myself, take note. We love this and it is an incredibly effective way to reach us. Especially since many millenials live and breathe all things social, chances are the experience with the brand will be shared, and re-shared (just as it is now).
The truth of the matter is everyone loves to feel like they are being heard — it’s not just common among the millenials. In general, people want to feel special and noticed and one-to-one marketing meets both of those needs for everyone making it meaningful when executed successfully.
In the past few years, businesses have increasingly dedicated resources to creating social media strategies in hopes of boosting site traffic, sales and brand engagement.
Joining social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, companies have struggled to create unique user experiences and provide value for followers, while also meeting management expectations and program goals.
The biggest social media challenge for businesses in 2011 will be to rethink their social media strategies to make them sustainable and scalable. We spoke to representatives at Dell, Intel and Constant Contact to discuss how building social media training programs has helped their companies do just that. Read on for their top tips.
1. Choose the Decision-Making Team
Before getting started, it is important to recruit a core team to plan, execute and maintain the social media training program.
While the composition of the team may vary from organization to organization, it should include at least one social media strategist, tasked with managing the company’s overall social media strategy, which includes the social media education program.
The social media strategist then works with the existing corporate training group within the organization to pull in the appropriate resources. “Social media training shouldn’t be separated from existing corporate education,” Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang told Mashable, stressing that all on-boarding and ongoing training should be tightly integrated and housed in one location.
Steve Pratt, director of employee training and development at Constant Contact, agrees that integration is key. New hires at Constant Contact typically complete three weeks of on-boarding training to learn about the company’s history, culture and systems. During that time, new hires also receive an overview of social media. Employees can then take more social media courses as they are offered.
Beyond the strategist and training group, other key team members could come from the following areas within a company:
Marketing: To keep company messaging consistent
Legal: To review social media policies and guidelines
Product: To integrate current company offerings into the training
Web Development: To create an online portal for training assets
While some organizations will find all the human capital they need to develop a program internally, others will find it necessary to pull external experts to help put the pieces together. In either case, it could be helpful to assemble a board of social media advisors who have previously set up education programs — their tips and best practices could save your organization a lot of time.
2. Ask Questions and Set Goals
Once a team is formed, begin setting program goals by first understanding the organization’s needs. For starters, here a few questions that should be answered:
What is our overall social media strategy, and where does the education program fit within it?
Where does social media training fit within our current education offerings?
How can we make this program scalable globally and across business units?
Which employees and business units should we focus on training?
Will courses be mandatory for some or all employees, or will all courses be optional to everyone?
Will we offer in-person or online courses, or both? And who will teach them?
How will we develop the curriculum? And what skills do we want employees to hone?
What types of materials should we develop for the program?
Where will the training assets be housed?
How will we build a collaborative community among social media trainees?
After assessing the company’s needs from social media, you’ll have a better understanding of the goals for the program.
Intel’s social media strategist, Ekaterina Walter, told Mashable that some of the company’s original goals for its Digital IQ training program were to raise awareness for its social media guidelines, help employees understand social media, ease management concerns about the possible risks of social media, and increase employee participation in the medium through empowerment. Furthermore, the company focuses on training its 5,000 customer-facing marketing and sales representatives, who complete a set of mandatory courses and also choose a number of electives to suit their interests. But with 80,000 total employees, Intel offers all of its courses to anyone who wants to participate in social media on behalf of Intel — in fact, training is mandatory for those who do.
3. Benchmark Employees
A sample question from Constant Contact’s assessment quiz
Some organizations distinguish between social media fluency levels, while others don’t. Whether you plan to offer a variety of course levels or just one track for everyone, figure out where your employees stand. Benchmarking employees enables companies to develop relevant courses that fit their employees’ needs.
At Intel, employees take a Digital IQ quiz that places them at one of four levels: 100, 200, 300 or 400, just like university course tracks. For highly trained social media practitioners, Intel also offers 500 level courses. As new employees become interested in social media, they take the quiz and are placed at the appropriate level.
Another strategy is to use a company-wide survey to determine the program’s curriculum. Constant Contact sent out a one-time quiz to all employees to determine what courses needed to be offered. Pratt explained Constant Contact’s needs assessment strategy:
“We met with managers and leaders from across the organization and tried to understand the unique needs of their teams — the people in engineering and product strategy may have different needs than our front-line employees in sales and support. On an individual basis, we sent out an online survey, or quiz, to get a benchmark before we did any training to see what people know about social media tools.”
4. Set the Curriculum and Refresh Often
A screenshot from Constant Contact’s introductory e-course on social media marketing
The curriculum of a social media education program depends on the goal-planning and benchmarking that take place early on in the development process, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
At Constant Contact, users take a 20-minute e-learning course prior to attending in-person courses. The e-learning course covers the basics of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and is meant to “give people a baseline of knowledge before they come into class,” explained Pratt. A sample screen of the course is pictured above. After taking the e-learning course, users attend instructor-led classes that last 90 minutes to two hours and include “demonstrations of some of the key tools and functionalities, hands-on activities where people get a chance to practice with the help of a facilitator, and customer case studies,” said Pratt.
Liz Bullock, who leads Dell’s Social Media and Communities (SMaC) University, explained Dell’s social media education program. “In the first class that we offer, we roll up our social media policy into five principles — that way, it’s very easy for employees to understand it and quickly grasp what they need to do, the rules, and the best items for engaging with customers,” said Bullock. After employees complete that course, they move onto strategy-based courses that focus on how to use specific social media platforms. In those classes, Dell subject matter experts share their best practices and tips for engaging with users on each platform; classes are highly scenario-based with lots of actual case studies that enable employees to think through how they would act in certain situations.
A screenshot of Intel’s Digital IQ training portal home screen
Intel’s program begins with an introductory course on why social media is important for the company and at large, and then spans a broad range of level-specific topics in more than 60 online courses. Depending on an employee’s level as determined by the Digital IQ quiz, they are assigned two to eight mandatory courses. Above and beyond those courses, they can choose electives that pertain to their interests. Walter noted that people often complete many more courses than are assigned to them out of pure enthusiasm to improve. To date, Intel has trained nearly 2,000 Social Media Practitioners (SMPs) and nearly 20,000 Digital IQ courses have been completed in total.
Social media platforms and best practices change daily — remember to update materials as functionalities and community standards evolve.
5. House Training Materials Centrally
Based on the curriculum, the next step is to create training materials that add value to the courses. Materials could include e-learning courses, PowerPoint presentations, handouts, quizzes, case studies, white papers, videos, transcripts, newsletters, playbooks and other supplemental resources.
All training materials should be housed in one central location — in most cases, housing them on the company intranet is a great option. If employees are active on internal blogs and communities, a social media blog or community page is a great resource. For example, Intel fosters an internal “Social Media at Intel” community, in which employees can find all social media training resources and the latest social media news.
Likewise, Dell stores all of its social media training documents on its intranet and uses Salesforce’s collaboration tool, Chatter, to facilitate conversation in a “group” of employees who have taken the training. Employees visit the group to post social media stories, ask questions of the SMaC team and give feedback about the training.
6. Get the Word Out
Christopher Barger, head of social media at General Motors and unconference panelist, examines the crowd-sourced agenda board at Dell’s SMaC Unconference in Austin
Creating an education program is just the start — getting employees excited about and enrolled in social media training is the next step. Use the usual outlets, including e-mail announcements, quarterly updates and flyers for starters, to get the word out, but also consider other non-traditional options.
Dell is big on having unconferences to kick off regional social media efforts. Since founding its SMaC University program in July 2010, Dell has kicked off three unconferences in Austin, London and Xiamen, China, and has trained more than 5,000 employees through the university. For its unconferences, Dell invites outside experts to join its employees, who set the agenda at the start of the event, based on what they want to discuss and learn about social media.
Conclusion
Creating a social media education program involves many people with varying skills, a solid strategy and a lot of buy-in. While we didn’t discuss it in detail above, all of our sources agreed that one of the most important steps to getting started is to have all the necessary approvals from above. Focus on scalability, sustainability and attainable goals, and your training program should be well on its way.
If you’ve already begun building a social media education program at your company, let us know what tips you’d add on to this list in the comments below.
The day an advertising agency’s creatives (art directors and copywriters) truly “get” social media and how to communicate ideas through social channels, is the day said agency becomes a relevant player in the new marketing landscape. Trouble is, in my experiences, advertising creatives are often solitary, anti-social types, content to focus on their art and craft even at the expense of changing with it.
Certainly I don’t infer that all creatives are this way. Many have made the transition from “working on my book” to creating compelling communications. Many more have gravitated from nice print and outdoor pieces to providing creative direction for simpler methods of transmitting messages, like sales letters, Pay-Per-Click ad copy or even blog posts.
But the transition of the advertising creative to be able to include compelling social activations in their traditional communications concepts has not been an easy one for many. When you think about it, the media creatives typically deal with are known and, thus, uncomplicated. We understand that a billboard is stationary, can’t be too dynamic or distracting to the audience (lest it causes accidents) and must communicate a compelling, memorable message in art and copy that takes less than 10 seconds to comprehend.
Conversely, a piece of content you would provide to your audience on Facebook can be more complex in language, include dynamic or multi-media elements, but is also rather unpredictable in that the audience can respond to it. In fact, good creative execution on Facebook compels the audience to do so.
Now the creative concept must truly live outside a prescribed box of parameters. If the content is good enough, the audience will demand more and fast. Reactions or comments on the content may open new avenues to explore in conversation with your audience.
Facebook content potentially has a never-ending life of its own. A billboard gets taken down after a while because everyone who will see it, has.
The reason creative executions of social media campaigns work, like the Old Spice response commercials, is because the creative team took their thinking outside the confines of a set of parameters. The elements of size and duration are erased, even flipped to have the creative expectation ever-present and always changing.
In years past, an advertising campaign may evolve and have a life of its own, but there are typically weeks, even months in between the first set of commercials or placements and the next iteration that continues to tell the story.
In social media the time to press for phase two is often minutes.
Since first trying to communicate the importance and dynamics of the social web to the wonderful creative teams I worked with at Doe-Anderson to the custom training and education sessions I do with advertising agencies and PR firms today, I’ve been searching for that switch to flip and illustrate what can make a traditional creative understand how to approach social media marketing successfully. I haven’t found it yet and it will likely take collaborating with a creative to really nail something relevant.
But I’m understanding more and more that the roadblock has less to do with the personality of the art director or copywriter in question and more with the space and time differences in digital and social versus traditional executions.
Your ideas? How can we facilitate understanding and advancement within the traditional agency environment to help our creatives produce compelling communications that are persuasive, but also social? What are your agency creatives doing that compels you in this space? As a creative, what differences in approach do you find helpful in producing communications that work online?
Two brands not well-known for social media — Downy and Macy’s — are teaming up for a stunt in which comedian Mike Birbiglia will be living and sleeping in a window display at Macy’s for a week and recording his feelings on Facebook.
The program is promoting a “Clean Sheet Week” challenge for Ultra Downy April Fresh and Macy’s sheets, which are being marketed together. Birbiglia, who wrote a book called Sleepwalk with Me, which chronicles his rare sleep disorder, was chosen as the first person to take the Clean Sheet Week challenge. Starting Monday, Birbiglia will be living in the window at Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street in New York City.
Years ago, such a stunt would have been local in nature, but social media has greatly broadened its scope. Birbiglia will offer a “Daily Video Confessional” on Facebook where he’ll share his feelings about living in the Macy’s window and he’ll crowdsource questions.
Such real-time marketing is more of a draw if a well-known comedian is on hand. Downy’s and Macy’s program comes a week after HP launched a live comedy show on YouTube featuring comedian Rob Riggle and members of the Upright Citizens Brigade. That program was broadcast simultaneously on the brand’s Facebook page. For Procter & Gamble’s Downy, the effort helps address a common problem among packaged goods marketers: How do you get people to have social media conversations about soap? The answer is to attach the product to an issue or promise.
In this case, Downy’s Clean Sheet Week promises that Ultra Downy April Fresh will let you keep bedsheets smelling clean even after a week. The brand is underscoring the point with a new ad that shows a crew dropping a bed onto city streets and then asking people to sniff the sheets, which they’re then told were washed a week before.
Disney Interactive Studios has just shutdown Propaganda Games, its Vancouver-based console game development studio, employing around 70 people. The move is clearly in response to dismal performance of console based games in general and the ones being developed by Propaganda studio in particular. Propaganda’s latest project was Tron: Evolution, a console game that serves as a prequel to the movie “Tron: Legacy” and the graphic novel “Tron: Betrayal“. Tron failed to be a business success and its sales remained weak. According to NPD Group, Disney has sold only 190,755 copies.
It seems that Disney has now realized that the future of gaming is in the social arena. Robert A. Iger, Disney Chief Executive, also admitted the fact that there is an ongoing shift within his company from consoles towards social and mobile games.
To position itself for to exploit the new trend, Disney acquired online social gaming company Playdom and with this acquisition John Pleasants (chief executive of Playdom) was brought in and made head of Disney’s game group. In this capacity Pleasants oversees all of Disney’s video game business, including console titles, mobile and online games, and Web-based virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and World of Cars.
To Disney it is clear that unless they do something and soon about their current strategy, they would be eaten up alive by the like of Zynga.
Ad spending on social networks in US will reach $3.08 billion mark by the end of 2011, according to revised estimates by eMarketer. This years estimated spending would be 55% ($1.99 billion) higher than what advertisers spent on social networking sites in 2010. eMarketer further expects that the ad spendings on social networks would rise by another 27.7% to reach $4 billion in 2012.
Due to the dramatic increase in ad spending on social networks, the social media sites now command a whopping 10.8% of the total ad spent online in the US. The increase in ad spending worldwide would be 71.6% (to $5.97 billion) this year, of which the share of social media sites would be 8.7%.
The renewed estimates for US ad spending on social networks has been $1 billion higher than the previous figures reported by eMarketer in August 2010. The primary reason for the change in projections has been Facebook’s stellar performance in attracting large sums of ad dollars.
According to Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer’s principal analyst and author of upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook:
2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of onlineadvertising. In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.
eMarketer expects Facebook to rake in $2.19 billion in ads from US and $4.05 billion worldwide in 2011. However, even these figures are not writings in stone, and the tally could be even higher if Facebook keeps up with its remarkable performance, says Williamson.
CafeMom is one of the most active online communities for mothers that I’ve seen. When I posted a question (I used the same question on all sites), I received six reasonably helpful responses in the first ten minutes.
The site gets several features right. First, the focus is on conversation, not necessarily just parenting advice. There are forum sections and groups for a number of interests like politics and techie topics in addition to parenting topics. Moms also have an opportunity to write journal entries and blog posts, the most popular of which are highlighted. Other entertainment options on the site like polls, videos, contests, and games make it a destination even when moms don’t have pressing parenting questions.
CafeMom’s creators have also invoked game mechanics. You get points for asking a question (as long as its not anonymous) and answering questions. When people respond to your inquiries, you can award the authors of the best responses more points — which encourages helpful responses. These points increase your “level” on the site and help earn badges.
Another boon is that it’s easy to find and keep up with mothers who have similar interests. You can search for other mothers to introduce yourself to based on your location, interests, children’s ages, or a combination of the three. When you sign up for groups, there’s an option to get an e-mail digest of daily responses.
Like most social networks that have sprouted in the last five years, MothersClick borrows a few facets from Facebook. Moms can create profiles that include wall posts, friends, private messages, photos and status settings. Groups form around subjects like “moms who rock” and “moms who blog,” and it’s possible to post questions to either your groups or to everybody.
One thing I like is that you can keep track of the conversations that you are involved in and the questions you’ve asked through a simple news feed instead of constantly checking for a response. A search bar at the top of the site is also a great feature that most often gives you the answer to your question before you’ve even asked it.
This isn’t the most active site, however, and the newest posts under some topics are more than a year old. The network does, however, helpfully take the liberty of suggesting other moms with your interests and in your area who you might add as friends.
The most unique feature of mamapedia is that it sorts discussion topics based on a timeline of your child’s development. You can see the issues that other parents have already started conversations around based on the common age of your children.
Beyond this, the platform is intuitive and effective. A large search bar lets you forget about navigating and find the information that you need quickly. You can follow questions that you have answered or asked through separate tabs as well as questions asked by moms in your area. Highlighted blog posts are also often specific to your location.
The community is fairly active, and I received five responses to my inquiry in the first ten minutes. The local aspects are also appreciated, opening up the opportunity for more relevant, and possibly even in-person, discussions.
The site supports itself by offering “sweet deals” and “member perks” from your local sponsors. Most of these are relatively appealing, but if you don’t want to look at them they stay tucked in their own tab.
4. Minti
Dads, here it is: a social network for patents that doesn’t have “mom” in its title. Minti has a robust arsenal of archived advice written by parents. The site, which is mostly organized in a forum style, has Q&A format sections but also encourages each member to write advice blog posts.
The amount of information on Minti is truly useful and can accessed by search. Interaction, however, seems less of a focus than on some of the other sites. It’s easy to get lost in the forums and recent questions, which, while given their own tabs, aren’t highlighted. Nobody responded to my question until the next day.
Rewards for participating do exist, however. The site has its own virtual currency that can be exchanged for real currency (at a rate of about 500 to 1) that users earn by doing things like writing blog posts and inviting friends.
Momslikeme.com has built communities around more than 60 locations. When you register, you’re automatically placed in a group with your zip code and directed to your local site. The zip code groups generally don’t have much activity, but it is helpful to have your homepage organized to highlight what other parents in your area are talking about.
Polls feature prominently on the page and often stray away from parenting advice topics. For instance, today’s featured NYC poll is “Should the health care reform bill be repealed?”
As with other sites, you can add friends, send private messages, and join groups. The site’s bread and butter is a coupon section that mostly offers discounts for grocery items.
6. BabyCenter Community
The community section of online parenting publication BabyCenter follows a similar format as many others by giving parents an opportunity to add friends, post journal entries, and share photos.
The most active portion of the site is probably its “birth clubs.” You enter the club that matches the month and year of your child’s birth or anticipated birth. Since all the group member’s children are going through the same stages at the same time, it’s easy to find relevant discussions. It’s also easier to build relationships because there’s no need to jump forums or groups as your child ages.
Is a post-TV future becoming easier to imagine, because of the Internet? That's one question raised by the news that SpongeBob SquarePants, the undersea mega-star of stage and screen, will premier his newest show first to his 16 million fans on Facebook and then only later on the old-fashioned boob-tube.
On Thursday January 27th, SpongeBob (or his people) will post a five episode anthology of episodes to his Facebook page, facebook.com/spongebob. The content will be simulcast on Nickelodeon's mobile platform. Facebook is the perfect place to broadcast new content to a large audience, considering its combination of market penetration, dizzying time-on-site, the newsfeed subscription model and the social notifications upon each subscription.
It may, however, be premature to see friending SpongeBob as a blow against the old media TV world of the past. Another part of the launch campaign is a series of six online games, where players navigate Bob and his friends through a series of adventures in search of clues that will allow them to proceed from one to the next. To access the sixth and final game, players must enter a code available only on-air during an hour-long TV special January 28th. That, and the differences in content to be posted online vs TV, indicate that for all its bluster, the online efforts are still really about promoting TV viewership.
That is, after all, where the advertising money is still found - despite (or perhaps because of?) the rich demographic information that would show exactly who is watching SpongeBob on Facebook.
More likely than post-TV, the short term future seems to be one in which the Internet can breath new life into TV. An even better example may the show Glee, which is not only hotly discussed on Twitter durring broadcast but even includes characters Tweeting from inside the show itself. We wrote earlier this week that such trans-media efforts could help save TV, and its advertisers, from the time-shifting and ad-skipping they have grown so worried about.
Numbers-savvy readers will note that Bob is now less than 1 million fans behind singing starlet Katy Perry, who visited Facebook headquarters for a photo-op and some biz dev yesterday. May the Facebook staff be so lucky as to get a visit from SpongeBob soon, too. If Facebook got a Katy Perry visit this week and Twitter got a visit from Snoop Dogg, perhaps it will be MySpace that gets the SpongeBob visit. I think that would be my preference if I could choose one of these people to meet.
Seems like everyone is on Twitter or Facebook. TV commercials asking to go to Facebook pages, stores asking for you to check-in.
Within a world of GroupOn deals, online gaming, and content galore it seems unimaginable that any company would fight against an online presence, yet surprisingly for the bigger picture all the content and user feedback that is being exchanged online is not being used and falls on deaf ears.
A recent study from MarketTools showed that most companies are still using traditional channels for grabbing information. In the study 92% of respondents thought that satisfied customers were important but less than 43% actively seek customer feedback and close to 22% only solicited feedback once a year (or not at all).
94% of Companies Do Not Use Social Media for Customer Feedback
Of executives taking part in MarketTools study, 14% answered they don’t solicit customer feedback at all while 16% of customers in general have tweeted or reached out via a social media channel, negatively.
56% of Companies Surveyed Do Not Have Formal Programs for Feedback
Even while acknowledging the important of customer satisfaction and feedback and knowing that a company did not currently have a social media strategy in place, 46% of executives surveyed still placed their company in the top 10% of their industry for customer satisfaction.
All Talk?
Seems like, while companies hide from social media their ignorance is inflated. They aren’t on social media platforms, aren’t actively seeking feedback online, yet think their service still ranks superior.
Even with evolution of media, accordingly to MarketTools the most common ways to gather customer feedback still are:
What’s really interesting is if companies are fiscally minded, they can quickly find that social media interaction can be faster and cheaper to get good feedback.
Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks is taking its mobile payments plan nationwide. The company started testing mobile payments in September 2009 and now it is expanding the program to 6,800 stores across the country and soon onto other devices.
According to The Seattle Times, one in five transactions is now made with store cards and Starbucks vice president of card and brand loyalty says that mobile payments "will extend the way our customers experience and use their Starbucks Card."
Making payments with your smartphone at Starbucks is simple enough. Simply download the app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or Blackberry device and when you make a purchase, hold it out for the cashier to scan. The app deducts the purchase from your Starbucks account, which can be reloaded with credit cards or PayPal.
According to the Times, Starbucks Cards took off at Starbucks in 2010, with customers loading more than $1.5 billion onto the cards, a 21% increase over 2009.
With any mobile payments system, the first question many ask is "will the people trust it?" After a year long trial, we're figuring that Starbuck's nationwide launch indicates that people indeed trust the service enough to use it. Will users be as trusting later this year when we start to see more and more mobile payments apps launch using Near Field Communications chips instead of bar codes? We'll see.
The company says that an Android app is in the works.
If you own a Facebook page, you’ll appreciate the work that goes into building up (and keeping) the Likes on your page. But as Niall highlighted last week, once you have a Like, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s there to stay. You’re not always guaranteed to continue reaching the community you’ve built up, but there are ways that you can help ensure you do. Social media company Social Fresh has helped with this by reproducing an interesting guide into the best times of day to update your Facebook page, to increase your chances of reaching the biggest audience. The findings are based on date from Virtue, a social publishing tool, who analysed the level of status updates throughout the day. As Facebook pages grow in popularity and continually advance, we’re finding the right (and wrong ways) to manage them. But is there a science to how to run them optimally, with the answer lying in the huge wealth of Facebook data available to analyse?
The best times to update your page
The data shows that the increase in conversation peaks at around 3pm :
The difference in conversation level throughout the day shows just how crucial it is to consider the time that you post. It’s interesting to note that this occurs towards the latter part of the working day, so can also read as a graph of peak procrastination levels! Indeed, the survey also found that Saturday and Sunday were the quietest days for posting. This is hugely valuable information for Facebook page owners. Though the work may have been done in attracting people to your page, your update could just go out at the wrong time which means it’s missed from their newsfeed. Something as simple as this has a huge impact on your page.
However, given that there is also a peak in activity at around 8pm, enforces the fact that for those who work in social media, or run social media profiles for businesses, your working hours are moving further and further away from the 9-5. The truth is that social media is still going strong outside of office hours and you can’t afford to ignore what’s happening just because you’ve left the office. This could be one of the single biggest changes to organisations and shows the need to have a fluid business structure.
How to stop people leaving your page
Research has also been done into the top reasons people unsubscribe from a brand on Facebook – with frequency of updates, losing interest in the brand and uninteresting updates coming out on top :
So can this data actually be used to run a good page, or do you risk being obsessed with the numbers and the stats and forget the content and community at the heart of a page? Being armed with this knowledge can only help brands and though it obviously doesn’t all come down to the science behind good updates, this tells us more than perhaps we’ve ever known before about what makes good marketing and what people are actually responding to. There has never been such a telling indicator of someone falling out of love with your brand than actually ‘unliking’ you and the good news is that you’re able to see this through the insights Facebook provides. The huge amount of data that we have available through Facebook is phenomenal and the impacts for businesses are huge, providing this is used correctly of course. Running a Facebook page may not come down completely to the ‘science’ but smart marketers will be using the information available to help shape the strategy and find out what it is their fans actually want.
If there are two subjects that get people (especially girls) excited it has to be chocolate and love and Greek chocolate brand Lacta have tapped in to them both to create this amazing Facebook campaign which created huge engagement and boosted their likes by 300%. Users were asked to tag themselves in an app that reproduced a virtual chocolate bar with the name of their loved one on it. The messages were shared to the wall with the photo as well as appearing in their photo albums with the person’s name tagged. The impressive thing about this campaign was not just the fact that it increased likes and had huge user participation but also the fact that the photos live on forever as virtual adverts in user’s photo albums as well as many users adding them to their profile pictures. Stick with the video for the boring first 30 seconds to get to the good Facebook stuff….
Although social media has advanced rapidly in the last couple of years and is starting to be embraced by everybody from small businesses to large international brands it is still an industry that is finding it’s feet. There has however been some excellent research carried out and I put a bit of time in to finding some of the best reports, pieces of research and generally useful information to help compile this list. I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed and if you have compiled some research yourself feel free to leave a link in the comments. Here are 50 of the top social media reports that I could find…
Proctor and Gamble tampon case study where they show that even a subject as hard to talk about online as tampons can be adressed correctly and ultimately increase sales.
This video looks at some of the ways in which you can use social media to sell expensive items like aircraft and that even at this level there is a good chance of ROI if done correctly.
You would have had to be living under a rock to miss this campaign from old spice and despite much debate at the time this video sums up what the campaign achieved…
The funny thing about this video is that the campaign actually breaks pretty much every Facebook guideline in the book but it’s fun and well thought out and they did it before Facebook really started clamping down on the rules anyway!
Community platform BlogFrog is relaunching today as a network of mom blogs — reported by the company to be the largest in the United States, connecting over 50,000 mom bloggers with over 5.5 million women online.
The company also announced a Series A round of funding and a refreshed website designed to help bloggers create communities that engage their readers to increase loyalty and revenue.
Started as a blogging community geared toward all bloggers but, striking a chord with women, BlogFrog chose to focus totally moms and women online.
BlogFrog serves mom bloggers by letting them add a community to their blog or website, enabling readers to participate in discussions. BlogFrog hosts and connects thousands of these communities on growing topics such as parenting, relationships, military wives, cancers survivors, eco-living, infertility, frugality and others.
The new website will offer several enhancements, such as the ability for bloggers to embed communities right in their blogs (not redirect to a BlogFrog page). Bloggers will also be greeted with revenue opportunities to connect with brands:
Advertising Media — banner advertisements across the top women blogs.
Sponsored Conversations — interactive discussions to drive brand awareness. Debuting today, this feature allow brands to dispatch a question or discussion to multiple communities and aggregate those answers on a branded hub page that can be used to create conversational ads.
Brand Communities — custom-built branded communities led by the most influential women and mom bloggers on the Internet.
“While offering the creative platform for women to chronicle motherhood, blogs lack the capability to be networked and social,” said Rustin Banks, CEO of BlogFrog who founded the platform in 2009. “This is where BlogFrog jumps in. BlogFrog gives bloggers a way to bring their readers together in a community that is centered around and integrated into their blog. It’s the glue that connects women online with topics they are passionate about.”
The platform supports both blogger and brand-centric communities. Blogging communities are organic and are influenced by readers and fans. While branded communities have similar aesthetics to blogger communities, they are sponsored by brand advertisers and are led by paid, influential mom bloggers who drive conversations.
BlogFrog cites research that shows that, despite their purchasing power, women still feel deeply misunderstood by brands and advertisers. BlogFrog’s vision, the company states, is to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem where brands and bloggers both benefit from lasting, loyal, trusted communities. The platform has attracted brand names such as International Delight, Hallmark and LivingSocial.
“Our social features really resonate with mom bloggers because we are inherently community and service oriented. Women and moms tend to be more social online than men and tend to form stronger digital relationships,” said Holly Hamann, VP of Marketing and Co-Founder of BlogFrog. “Our mission is to enable all women online to discover, join or create communities that help make those digital relationships meaningful.”
Whether you believe in QR codes or not (which reminds me I really need to change that poll!) this report from PSFK on The Future Of Mobile Tagging takes you down the technology path that links the real world with the virtual, helping to unlock the true potential of mobile in a consumers life.
It’s a pretty long presentation at 95 pages, but does a great job at breaking down the content into bite size chunks; Awareness, Information Gathering, Action/Purchase and Post Purchase. It covers everything from instant wins, mobile arcades, product reviews, content sampling, content unlocking and scan triggering… right through to unlock-able rewards, scan to pay functionality, feed back loops and event the benefits of mobile “how to” guides… Make sure you click Menu > Full Screen on the bottom left before you start clicking through. Enjoy! (thanks Mark)
After a successful campaign last summer, Levi’s is once again turning to Facebook to find the next online face and voice of Levi’s womenswear, a.k.a “Levi’s Girl.”
This time, the search has been extended to the UK as well as the U.S. Interested individuals are asked to submit a short video detailing why they should be chosen for the role, which involves engaging with Levi’s fan base on Facebook and Twitter on a day-to-day basis. To qualify, videos must be submitted via the retailer’s Facebook Page by February 2.
From the video submissions, Levi’s will select five candidates for a public voting round between February 16 and 23, which will test each candidate’s ability to mobilize her personal network on her behalf. It’s a clever strategy that is sure to win Levi’s many more Facebook “Likes”, whilst giving existing fans a hand in the selection process.
The winner will be announced on March 7 and receive a six-month paid position at Levi’s San Francisco headquarters to work alongside the more permanently situated “Levi’s Guy.”
So, here’s the deal: AXE isn’t quite done with the “Clean Your Balls” Campaign, so don’t get comfortable yet. This time we’re asking you to put your creative minds to use in a very visual way. Every day, for 5 days, AXE is going to link to a new suggestive picture, and it’s your job to add a nice, significant caption to it (remember, not too dirty, AXE has an image of cleanliness to uphold). The pictures will appear on different blogs every day. Check out the photos from the past 2 days and some of the tweets over at The Campus Socialite. All you need to do in order to win is follow @AXE and reply with the hashtag #AXEPIX, and win an AXE Holiday Gift Pack!
SCVNGR is linking its location-based gaming platform to the game of basketball in a new deal with restaurant chain Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar.
The chain, which has more than 700 locations in the U.S., is working with SCVNGR for a promotion — running now through March — that lets customers complete challenges on their smartphones and win prizes, like Buffalo Wild Wings and Coca-Cola, which are redeemable on the spot. Such challenges, like snapping a photo with a fan of an opposing team, earn fans points that go toward winning the grand prize of a trip to see the NBA finals with Scottie Pippen, formerly of the Chicago Bulls.
The promo is the latest for SCVNGR, which earlier this month launched a multi-city promotion for the Nissan Juke and before that, executed a New Year’s Eve program with American Eagle and a Black Friday-themed promotion with Coca-Cola.
The second generation of Intel’s new ‘i’ series processors are out, and to build some hype they have just launched a neat video on YouTube called “The Chase”. It’s a short action/adventure film that is shown through a variety of windows, animations, code, Facebook pages, websites, Google maps and games, among other things! It went live this week and has over 120,000 views in those few days, so it will be interesting to see if the content catches on and pushes upto that 500,000+ mark that seems to be the “pass” for viral video content offered by big brands right now.
In an example that showcases the downside of crowd sourcing, PepsiCo encouraged fans to make a Super Bowl ad and wound up offending some Catholics.
The company got some flak for an ad that appeared on its website that some thought endorsed replacing communion wafers and wine with Pepsi Max and Doritos. The maker of the ad, a Philadelphia firm called Media Wave Productions, however, says that interpretation is way off base.
The ad, which has been taken off Pepsi’s website and YouTube, features a pastor who is losing his flock, so he prays and hears the sound of crunching and soda pouring. “Got it,” he answers. The next shot shows dozens of people of various denominations at the church lined up to get Doritos and Pepsi Max.
After Media Wave submitted the ad in early November, a number of Catholic groups, including one called America Needs Fatima, took issue with the ad, which the group believed mocks the Holy Eucharist. That group started an online petition to ask Pepsi to reject the ad.
Pepsi eventually did. When the 10 finalists for the contest were chosen on January 3, the ad, called “Feed Your Flock,” was not among them. Pepsi rep Lindsay Anthony apologizes to anyone who had taken offense. “The video was not created by Doritos or Pepsi MAX and was one of over 5,600 entries we received,” says Anthony. “With such a significant number of submissions, you get a pretty wide range of concepts. We apologize to anyone that was upset or offended by this consumer submission.”
Dave Williams, president of MediaWave, says he pulled the ad from Pepsi’s site and from YouTube. “We felt bad,” he says. “Our intention was to win, not to offend.”
The Pepsi contest, now in its fifth year, dangles $1 million if one of the ads tops USA Today’s AdMeter, $600,000 for the number-two spot and $400,000 for the third spot. If the Pepsi Max and Doritos ads take the top three positions on that poll, the company will award another $1 million to each, for a total of $5 million.
PepsiCo will choose six winners among the final 10 and run the six ads during the game. The top 10 spots can be viewed here.
With more than 1.3 million nominations and votes, we’re pleased to announce the 2010 Mashable Awards winners.
The Mashable Awards, our annual contest highlighting the very best of tech and the web, received a record number of votes this year. After entering the final round, we narrowed the list to the top five nominees in each category based on your votes. The winners received the most votes from readers like you, and we want to thank each of you for participating.
The winners were announced Thursday at the Mashable Awards Gala, which was hosted by comedian Baratunde Thurston, The Onion’s director of digital, at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity theater at the New York New York Hotel. The gala featured a special Cirque du Soleil Zumanity performance, appearances from guests like Antoine Dodson, as well as the DJ/VJ stylings of remix masters Eclectic Method. Stay tuned for more highlights from the Mashable Awards show, but in the meantime we’d love for you to join us in celebrating this year’s winners.
HootSuite is an advanced social networking dashboard aimed mainly at professionals who need to leverage sites such as Twitter and Facebook for their business needs. HootSuite relies on a freemium business model. Its free version allows you to add five networks and supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFm and WordPress.
HootSuite is best for actively managed accounts because its design focuses on streams, which are housed in customizable tabs. You have the flexibility to organize tabs by account, network or content, making it easier to monitor a specific type of feed more closely.
In an effort to “set the records straight” about inaccurate media portrayals, World Wrestling Entertainment launched the Stand Up For WWE campaign, using social media and video to gather support from its fans. It also posted a list lesser known facts about WWE and inaccuracies and corrections to media portrayals from across the web with facts accompanying the claims. The campaign included videos with its superstars as well as the likes of President Barack Obama.
Eurail.com is an e-commerce site for Eurail train passes for travelers from all around the world. Eurail offers rail passes to non-European residents wanting to explore Europe.
Its social media presence is focused on customer service and the company regularly updates and replies to its customers on its Twitter account, Facebook Page and more.
Fizy is an international music site based out of Turkey that was designed with the goal of being simple and easy to use. It’s simple. It enables you to listen to music track-by-track, create playlists and play songs from your homescreen that you may have never heard of. Just a simple search and it plays the tracks you’re looking for. If the track has a video available, it will show you that as well. It has a database of more than 75 million mp3s. The site supports 26 languages.
Qwitter uses Twitter’s API to notify you when any of your Twitter followers stop following you. Simply give the system your Twitter name, an e-mail address to contact you, and you’ll receive a summary e-mail at least once a day telling you the users who have stopped following you. It’s that simple, and yet highly useful.
Best Social Media Service for Small Business: ReachCast
ReachCast is a social media and web presence management tool for small businesses that specializes in search discovery, social media marketing and conversation and reputation management through a distributed presence and custom tools to reach local consumers.
Currently in beta, the service offers content publishing, reports, tracking and social media integration.
Doug Walker is one of the creators behind That Guy With the Glasses website, which showcases content for movie buffs and video gamers.
The site was launched in 2008 and is home to episodic series including Walker and other contributors. Walker is best known for his series 5 Second Movies, The Nostalgia Critic and Ask That Guy with the Glasses. Before the website, Walker was a video personality on YouTube, where he created satirical video reviews of movies.
PSGive.org is a site focused on increasing awareness and funding of non-profits by enabling users to participate in online events. Users buy tokens to participate in events that give you a chance to win cool prizes, like the iPad, while benefiting a charity of your choice. In some ways it is like an online charity auction.
To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) is a non-profit focused on advocating for hope and help for people struggling with depression, self-injury, addiction and suicide. It leverages various social sites to inform, inspire and invest in treatment and recovery for people who need help. Since 2006, the organization has responded to more than 150,000 messages from people in 40 different countries and has worked to spread the message of hope to universities, concerts, festivals and churches.
Foursquare, the mobile location-based service, had a year of tremendous growth that paved the way for other location-based services, including Facebook Places. The service recently surpassed 5 million users, increasing its user base by a factor of 10 in just nine months. At SXSW 2010, the company announced it had more than half a million users. It also recently opened an office in the bay area.
Farmerama is a free online game similar to FarmVille that focuses on tasks around tending a virtual farm by completing farming jobs like tilling the land, planting trees, sowing seeds, raising animals and more. The game has more than 20 million registered users. It also enables you to invite your friends to help you with growing your farm. You also compete against other farmers online and can barter and trade with them as well. The challenges largely revolve around the goal of raising the most cattle. The game of course includes plenty of social activities that enables you to communicate and converse with other players online.
Gaia Online is an anime-themed social networking site. Founded in 2003, the social and forums-based site originally began as an anime community and moved toward social gaming and forums with some 1 million posts made daily with 23 million registered users. The site includes virtual currency known as Gaia Gold, which is distributed regularly to users as a reward for activity and participation, and Gaia Cash, which can be purchased with real money and is used to buy virtual gifts. The site includes various mini games, which can be played to earn gold and virtual items. The site also includes virtual worlds, such as Gaia Towns in which users can interact with one another’s avatars.
Twitter rolled out a new version of its web interface in September. The new Twitter homepage redesign was robust, transforming the site to be more like a stand-alone application, offering support for multimedia, keyboard shortcuts, and easy access to various types of content. The new design also has different dimensions (originally based on the golden ratio).
Jay Park is a Korean-American actor, singer and dancer who has leveraged video to entertain his fans. The American-born personality initially became famous after getting the lead role for Korean pop boy band 2PM. At the end of 2009, he left the band to focus on a solo career in the U.S. In 2010, he posted a cover of B.o.B.’s “Nothin’ On You” on YouTube, which received 1.5 million views in the first 24 hours. It prompted Warner Music Korea to release the track, which went to number one on Korean music charts.
AllKPop is one of the top destinations for the latest Korean pop culture news and gossip. Launched in 2007, the site has leveraged social media to reach more than 3 million monthly readers and is the most trafficked English language Korean pop blog in the world.
This year, Apple released its latest version of the iPhone, selling 1.5 million on the first day. Despite a reception issue that angered its users and poor reviews, Apple still sold millions of iPhone 4 devices and even quickly sold out internationally in countries like China.
Angry Birds is a simple yet very addicting mobile game that has received more than 50 million downloads with 80% of users keeping the mobile app installed on their devices. According to Peter Verterbacka from Rovio, the makers of the game, there are 200 million minutes a day spent playing the game. The game is also making its way to the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3.
DriveSafe.ly is a mobile application that reads text and e-mail messages aloud in real-time and responds to the messages automatically without the driver having to touch or look at the phone. It helps you, well, drive safely. The application, available for BlackBerry and Android devices, will soon be coming to the iPhone and Windows Mobile. According to its website, it has prevented more than 380 million texting-while-driving incidents. The app features include Bluetooth and radio transmitter compatibility, easy activity, hands free use, reading shorthand in messages and an optional customizable automatic responder.
Android is Google’s mobile operating system, which it bought in 2005. This year, however, the operating system became the top-selling smartphone OS. Android-powered devices also outsold the iPhone this year and the future looks even better as Android grows in popularity among users and app developers.
eBuddy is a mobile and web messaging company that created the first independent browser-based IM service with e-Messenger in 2003. Its technology enables users who use various chats like AOL, Google Talk, MSN, Facebook, etc. to chat on one aggregate interface from their mobile device. Its mobile messenger is available through mobile web browsers or through iPhone and Android apps.
Twitchange is an innovative charity auction that enables you to bid on the famous for a chance to have them Twit-talk to you. It bills itself as the “first-ever celebrity Twitter auction,” and offers up a hefty list of celebrities, from Simon Pegg to Pete Wentz. Users donate money for the chance to have these celebrities follow you, retweet you or mention you in a tweet and all the money raised goes to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will then be able to finish rebuilding the Miriam Center, a home for children with cerebral palsy, severe autism and other disabilities.
Most Influential Social Good Champion sponsored by Yahoo!: John Cena
John Cena is a WWE personality and actor who leverages his social media presence and influence for good. He’s been heavily involved with the Make-A-Wish Foundation since 2004, granting the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. He’s earned the foundation’s highest honor, the Chris Greicius Award and was later named Wish Ambassador by the organization. He uses his online presence to encourage his fans to take part in the foundation’s mission to grant wishes, and most recently he is encouraging the donation of Delta frequent flyer miles, which he’s already contributed 3 million matching miles for.
