The #jeeppuzzle Twitter Campaign

From Digital Buzz Blog:

Leo Burnett Iberia recently launched this cool little campaign on twitter for Jeep. Called #jeeppuzzle, the idea was that users would follow the jeeppuzzle profile, and inside that profile, jeep would be following a total of 12 other profiles. Now, in each of those profiles, they would be following a further 36 profiles, with each holding part of a puzzle. Hmmmm, feels like Inception!!

The actual competition here was to solve the puzzle picture by following each of the 36 sub profiles to compile the picture in the correct order. If you cracked it, all you had to do was send a tweet @ the puzzle name and include the #jeeppuzzle hash tag. Pretty cool huh?

So, for all it’s coolness, there were a few major issues I had with the campaign. Firstly, surely the puzzles should have been Jeep car images (and named them too!) to leverage the interaction of the competition process? And secondly, shouldn’t they have run this from the brands main Twitter page, instead of building followers on a profile they may never use again? Great idea, but probably needed a better integrated social comms strategy to make the most of the campaign, as I see the @jeeppuzzle only managed 730 odd followers, and is now a redundant profile…

New iPhone App Locates Products in Aisles at Stores

From Mashable:

aisle411 is today launching its iPhone application for locating products in specific aisles and sections at retails stores. The application works at more than 600 stores in the U.S. and is meant to serve as a faster, more convenient way for shoppers to search and find items at stores.

Application users can type in product search queries or use the voice recognition technology, powered by Nuance, to search at participating stores. For each supported store, aisle411 also includes a comprehensive store map and store info, and UPC barcode scanning to pull up user-generated product reviews.

Generic product searches — double sided tape, for instance — will return search results that specify available types and brands. App users can then glance the section and aisle number for each result, select to map a product for navigational assistance or choose to add it to a shopping list.

Participating stores may also opt to include coupons and offers. The application surfaces Coupons.com offers available at stores, and highlights them in the offers portion of the app.

The service even includes a now ubiquitous checkin feature, so users can check in to stores, share their location with friends via Twitter and Facebook and earn badges and titles for their behaviors — think becoming the “Captain” of a particular store. These features seem a bit tired and unnecessary; if there’s a voice search or barcode scan, then there should be sufficient information for the service to automatically recognize that you’re at a particular venue.

aisle411 currently works at locations such as Home Depot, Schnucks Market drug stores and at Shop’n Save’s grocery chain. Obviously, the application is limited by the fact that its application only works at participating retailers.

The idea certainly has traction, apart from the copycat checkin features. We’ve already seen applications and services tackle location-based rewards and in-store barcode scans (Shopkick and Checkpoints come to mind), but solving the problem of locating products in stores feels fresh and will certainly be useful to lost shoppers.

aisle411 was founded in 2008. The company works with partner retailers to provide the in-store product search and offer experience; more retailers are said to be signing on with the startup on a daily basis. The aisle411 app is currently for iPhone only, but similar applications for Android and BlackBerry will be released in 2011.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Gavin St. Ours

Foursquare Partnership Seeks to Reinvent Grocery Store Loyalty Program

From Mashable:

Safeway and Pepsi are teaming up with Foursquare to reinvent the way grocery store shoppers think about location-based rewards and checkins. As part of the deal, Safeway has integrated Foursquare into its VonsClub loyalty program for a three-month pilot program that kicks off today.

The crux of the program is that VonsClub members can now link their Foursquare accounts to unlock Pepsi rewards every time they shop.

Shoppers who link their accounts will earn instant Foursquare rewards on Pepsi products — in the form of coupons printed at the register — at the time of sale. Rewards are also personalized to the user and tied to the types of badges a Foursquare user has already unlocked.

The program is being tested at roughly 300 Vons grocery stores in southern California, as first reported by Fast Company.

Foursquare and Vons Club members can optionally select to have the system automatically check them in at the time of purchase, via VonsClub card swipe, and send out a shout on Foursquare when they unlock a reward.

The whole program is deeply integrated into Safeway’s point-of-sale system and existing loyalty program. It’s modeled around Tasti D-Lite’s avant garde loyalty program introduced earlier this year, we hear.

For Foursquare, this partnership is not about the kind of deals you can find from competing services such as Facebook Places, but instead is focused around actual customer loyalty.

“One powerful use of Foursquare is helping consumers socialize their loyalty, to offer experiences that go beyond a simple card and are truly tailored to them as individuals,” Tristan Walker, Foursquare’s head of business development tells Mashable. “If I earn the Gym Rat badge, that says something about me that a couple of stamps on a punch card or scan of a loyalty card cannot; we want to explore ways for consumers and retailers to both benefit from that. With nearly five million users, Foursquare is perfectly positioned to move this idea forward.”

Mashable has also learned that Catalina Marketing played a significant role in today’s announcement. The company powers the coupons that get printed out at registers at thousands of retailers across the nation.

Image courtesy of Fast Company

The How-To Guide For Facebook Advertising

From Social Media Explorer:

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Anthony Piwarun, an interactive strategist and search marketer from Milwaukee, WI.

In February 2004, Facebook launched itself as a unique and innovative way to help college students keep in-touch with their recently graduated counterparts across the country. Seven years later, and now no longer exclusively for college students, this burgeoning website with more than 500 million users has become a full-fledged social networking platform. As Facebook’s popularity, and reach, has grown, so has the likelihood that members from your target audience will be on Facebook.

Image via Wikipedia

This in itself has expanded the opportunities advertisers have to market their products or services efficiently and to the appropriate audiences. You have, literally at your fingertips, a whole new level of online marketing ability. On top of this, Facebook’s advertising platform is easy to use. The analytics dashboard will help you to better integrate this into your overall marketing strategy, allowing you to track and measure your investment. The following guide will help you to lay the foundation of a successful Facebook marketing strategy.

Identify Your Goals

In order to measure the success of return in Facebook advertising, you must fist establish your advertising objectives. Before you even create your ad, decide what your intended end-result for these efforts will be. This goal does not have to be complex; in fact, some of the goals I’ve seen in the past have included: generating revenue, increasing cost per sale, or simply promoting your brand by maximizing visibility. Setting a clear goal before undertaking the advertising action will allow you to accurately measure your return and decide if it has been worth the time and resources.

Design and Develop

Ad Copy and Creative - Once you have indentified your Facebook advertising objectives, it is now time to create the ad itself. Facebook advertisements appear in the far right hand column of the screen, after the user navigates away from the newsfeed.

Facebook ads are composed of a headline, brief copy and imagery to go with your theme. The imagery should be compelling and on-topic. It is strongly recommended to use imagery featuring a person’s headshot when advertising online. Headshots they tend to perform better than an object or lesser-known brand logos. In terms of copy, titles can be up to 25 characters in length and the body copy of the ad can be 135. Keep your copy short and to the point; hence the importance of the imagery.

Landing Page – After clicking on your advertisement, the user is taken to a landing page where they will decide whether or not they will buy your product. Facebook ads can link to either a Fan Page or an external website. Based on my experience in managing online ad campaigns for numerous clients, I have found that an external, campaign-specific landing page is more effective than linking to your brand’s Fan Page. In addition, it is essential to keep brand messaging consistent between the creative and the landing page. If your ad uses a logo or object as imagery, add it to your landing page so the user feels confident that they clicked on the right advertisement.

Target Your Audience

One of the many useful features of the Facebook advertising platform is the ability to target your advertising to specific segments. On Facebook, it’s possible to target:

Location Age Sex Keywords Education

Workplace Relationship Status Relationship Interests Languages

The ability to target your audience using this much detail can make advertising even more effective than PPC or traditional online display advertising. With a well thought out goal (think: step one) and proper targeting, you’ve already qualified traffic to your landing page.

Define Cost Structure

Defining goals, developing effective creative, and targeting your audience is standard procedure when launching any new advertising campaign. Where advertising on Facebook — or anywhere online for that matter — differs from traditional media buying is in the cost structure. There are two ways to manage your ad spend when running media on Facebook:

• Cost Per Click - You pay every time a user clicks on your advertisement. It doesn’t matter whether your ad was served 100 times or 1 million times, you only pay for every click.
• Cost Per Impression - You pay for a set number of impressions, or, ad views. This is measured in multiples of 1,000 and is called a CPM or “cost per million” ad spend.

Choosing a price structure that’s right for you is critical to the success of your campaign. There are a few things to keep in mind: if your goal is to simply increase brand recognition, and you don’t have any commercially-tied reason to drive traffic to your landing page other than to promote your name, choosing a CPM model would be the most cost effective. If, however, your success is measured by the number of sales you get via the landing page, starting off with CPC and calculating return is your best bet. If you’re interested in learning more about the geeky metrics behind choosing a model, be sure to look at an article I wrote on choosing CPM or CPC for Facebook advertising.

Launch, Measure, and Repeat

After deciding which cost structure is best suited to your goal, it’s time to launch. Facebook allows you to regularly monitor your ad via their dashboard under the “Ads and Pages” tab. Here, you’ll get detailed information on metrics such as bid cost, the number of clicks, average cost-per-click, and more. Narrow down your dashboard by selecting monthly, weekly, or even daily statistics, and dig deeper by exporting reports into csv format and analyzing historical trends.

After running your ad for a few days, revisit your creative concept. Tweak your copy or swap the image, then run both the original and updated advertisements concurrently. This will allow you to determine which advertisement works best for your audience. Even after you find an advertisement that works for you, understand that this too will constantly need to be tweaked and updated. Doing so will help to ensure your audience does not become too used to your ads, keeping it fresh and noticeable.

As with any online marketing campaign, the key to success lies within careful observation and analysis. Monitoring impressions, click-through rate, and conversions is only half the battle. To make the most out of your Facebook advertising dollar, you need to act on your observations and tweak the campaign to limit cost and increase ROI.

Five Social Media Trends for 2011

From Social Media Explorer:

Where is social media headed? What is important to learn about now so that we feel like we’re “in the know” six months down the road? Although everyone and their uncle is doing or will be doing 2011 prognostication pieces, I’m jumping into the fray and offering my own predictions and a bit of analysis on where we’re headed as we close out the final six weeks of 2010.

Consumer Content Curation

“Are we in the stream?” That’s the #1 question that brand managers should be asking about their social media efforts going into 2011, because in the coming year people are going to be much more diligent about curating their own content into a more managable form. Consumers are realizing that following eleventy-hundred brands on Twitter and Facebook is getting them some good coupons and deals, but it’s also turning their walls into malls, which is getting overwhelming.

Therefore, what’s happening in Facebook is that consumers are turning off brands posting to their walls, using Friends lists to pay close attention only to their “real” friends, and commenting on or sharing only when something is really juicy. In Twitter, a company called Cadmus aims to change the way we view our streams by determining what content is most relevant to you based on your Twitter usage patterns. Other tools, such as Paper.li and Flipboard (for iPad), also curate Twitter, primarily based on content popularity, and make that content much more reader-friendly.

For brands, this means it’s not going to be enough to create content – you have to create content that gets curated into people’s streams. If your content is truly compelling and share-worthy, it’ll get noticed and Liked, it will generate Comments and Retweets, and you’ll be okay because it will have legitimately earned its way into people’s streams. If not – you’ll have to have a combination of search optimization savvy, fans in high places (influencers), and maybe some cash to Promote your content right under people’s Twitter noses.

Niche Location

2010 may have been the year of location, but 2011 will be the year of Niche Location. While true that only 4% of the Internet population is using location based services (LBS), there’s no question that Foursquare and Gowalla were media darlings this year. I predict that in 2011 LBS will get more narrowly focused, which will make people more likely to use those services when they feel that there’s a) a specific value returned, and b) less of a feeling of “big brother” broadcasts to all.

Image via CrunchBase

Services like shopkick appeal to in-store shoppers who love bargains – and who only want their location to be known to the store they want to shop at. New platforms like Foodspotting appeal to the foodie niche; Xtify’s geo-location technology is going to allow a whole host of brands, such as Playboy, to unleash apps to target their exact demographic right where they are. So, tell me what’s in it for me and promise that my mom won’t know about it and I just might buy in.

Gamification and Social Gaming

I love this topic. Not just because I’ve recently become a FarmVille addict, but because it’s such a natural. After all, we’ve been buying the large McDonald’s Coke for decades just to get the Monopoly piece. 2010 was not only the year of location, it was the year of Zynga – when they formally aligned with Facebook, cozied up to Apple, and generally made a mess of people’s free time. So what’s do I predict will happen in Social Gaming in 2011? It’s going to the Super Bowl!

You heard it here first, folks: I believe that a big brand is already planning to gamify their Super Bowl marketing; we’ll see everyday Joes chasing after some special trophy collection on their packs of beer. That trophy will of course tie in to the social web, where the consumer will share their victory and the brand will collect all sorts of data on the trophy holders’ social spheres. (You brands who haven’t started planning yet and are now going to do this – you can send me the check, thanks.)

And beyond the gridiron: FarmVille, for one, has become a new testing ground for brand integration – it’s come a long way in the past couple of weeks, even, with new promotions for Farmer’s Insurance (duh), the Megamind movie and, yes, McDonald’s. In the coming year we’ll see more, and deeper, brand integrations with existing gaming platforms, as well as more brands creating their own gaming structures for consumer advancement into preferred status, coupons, or freebies.

Jason actually offered some great thoughts on gamification in this month’s Navigator, Social Media Explorer’s monthly newsletter. You should subscribe.

QR Codes

I may be too geeky for my own good, but I love QR codes. I even have one on my business card. I love how they add interactivity and trackability to traditionally un-trackable print and outdoor media, as well as a bit of whimsy and mystery to everyday objects and events (see my photo of a knitted QR code that I saw at Maker Faire – as a knitter I really geeked on this, even though I can’t seem to make my QR reader read it.)

Although QR codes seem to still be the provence of geeks like me, they are completely mainstream in Japan and they’re poised to grow expontentially here in the US, given that 51% of all Americans will be carrying smartphones in 2011. There are a number of great companies and apps currently experimenting with (or betting their business on) QR codes, and I predict that we’ll see a great deal more in QR territory in the coming year, including greater brand integration in print magazines, more consistent use in outdoor media, and even some clever mashups of QR codes, gamification and social commerce. So read on….

Social Commerce

I started out thinking about this trend as two trends: Group Buying and Facebook Commerce. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s all the same thing: new ways to leverage your social circle to help you shop or share your haul. In 2010, there were a couple of bold startups that wanted consumers to share their every purchase with their friends (is anyone really still talking about Blippy and Swipely?) – but it seems pretty clear that most people do not want to share each and every pharmacy item purchased with their former flame, their mom, and their neighbor.

However, when you add in a “what’s in it for me” component like with Groupon, or a “look at me I’m so cool” component as with Facebook Commerce, there are many more people willing to share their individual purchases (or purchase intent) through their existing social platforms.

Social Commerce also goes to the “fish where the fish are” concept that I’ve often invoked when talking about Facebook: if there are nearly 600 million potential customers in Facebook, why not try giving them something else to do with your brand besides grab a coupon? In 2010, savvy brands saw a solid rise in revenue from mobile commerce applications; I predict that next year will be the year of social commerce for brands which are bold enough to give it a go.

Are you with me on these five social media trends for 2011 or am I completely off? What have I missed? The comments are yours.

The Fear Is Real

From Six Pixels of Separation:

Businesses small, medium and large still have one thing in common: they're scared of Social Media.

That's not entirely true. They're not scared of Social Media, they're scared of trying to cater, answer and amend every little customer service issue in public. They're scared of being held hostage by someone who has a cousin who has a significant following on Twitter. They scared that someone who is Blogging about their company (without any real credibility and knowledge of the company) is tarnishing their image and perpetuating myths or misconceptions.

For the most part, too many companies are missing the point.

Access to information has been disintermediated. Prior to Social Media, if you had a gripe with a company, it was a major effort to get your local news folks interested in the story. If they became interested, the brand in question would not interface with the individual, but (more likely than not), they would use the media channel to mediate the result. Those channels still exist, but they're not as powerful in a world where anyone can have an issue and then publish it (in text, images, audio and video) instantly and for free to the world to see. On top of that, there was/is a social contract between the media and brands. There is, to some extent, rules of engagement. Individuals, customers, consumers, don't know that language. They don't speak it and they're not interested in it.

If you don't have a community to back you up, you'll always look defensive.

The flaw in this thinking is not that it's hard to respond and make customers happy (it always is and always will be challenging to make everybody happy, all of the time). The flaw in this thinking happens because brands are being reactive without a community to help them spread an idea. Brands hop into Social Media with very little equity in the audience. They fail to realize that you don't get a community when you need it, you develop and nurture a community slowly over time, so that when you need something (anything) they are there for. If you're not spending your time in Social Media developing and nurturing that, you will always be in a reactive mode.

Pushing out into the real world.

The paradigm shift in culture within the brand and organization is where the root of success will happen. There has to be an appetite to:

• Share information in public.
• Open up.
• Speak in a human voice.
• Respond to an issue even if no one is asking about it in the Social Media channels.
• Use transparency when applicable and possible (sorry to say, that when it comes to companies, they can't always to do this).
• Adhere to the regulations of their industry while explaining to consumers why it is the way it is - in their language.
• Ensure that everyone within the organization understand what the company is doing and trying to accomplish with Social Media.
• Share the positive stuff too (it's not - and should never be - the place to only respond to issues).

But, more importantly...

Understand that the channels and platforms are agnostic. They are as accessible to the brand as they are to an individual. If a company feels slighted by the media, why not leverage Social Media to share and tell your side of the story? Why not let your followers on Twitter know that you don't agree with how a customer is reacting and explain your side? Why not become a media and/or publisher of content (much like your consumers are doing)? All of the concepts listed here mean nothing when the end-game is not about becoming more credible and relevant to your consumer.

All ships rise.

When brands use the channels like their consumers use the channels, something bigger than a halo effect takes place. Individuals begin to see, read and hear how the company truly thinks. Why they think this way and how to get resolution. Brands fear Social Media because they have never really been publishers of content. They have never really been able to use the people within the organization - those with authentic voices - to really speak about the brand. And while this fear is very real and still alive in most organizations, there are enough examples of brands who have used these platforms as an exchange of ideas and issues and an evolution - to the point where it is a healthy eco-system of self-regulation.

iPhone Virtual Treasure Hunt For A Mini Car

From Simply Zesty:

I love looking around the world for inspirational campaigns and I loved this one the second I saw it. Treasure hunts are common online (and we have even done a couple ourselves) but this one takes things a step further using an iPhone app, location based services, the chance to win a mini and a battle with your friends all across a Stockholm. Although the technology behind this is pretty impressive it’s the simplicity of the concept and the viral nature of this that gets me excited. Who wouldn’t want to battle their friends around the city for a brand new car? I would very rarely get involved in campaigns or competitions to try them myself but I think if this was happening in Dublin I’d actually go out there and try and see if I could win it! Brilliant concept, check it out…