Terrace Tweets measures the support of football fans on Twitter. Mention your team or the FA cup in your tweets and watch your team’s support during the match.Nice idea / design / execution. Campaign on a page with a bit of product at the bottom.Have a look:
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The Apple Tree
via the99percent.com
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The Van diagram
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Good ideas for 2010 by PSFK
Worth your time and money.
via youtube.com
That’s the message I got when I didn’t want to join groups and fan pages for all of my stated interests to go with their new “Liking” policy. I simply wanted them to remain listed as words on the page, just as they had always been. But that was no longer an option. And that was when I decided it was time to seriously consider ditching my Facebook account. (I haven’t yet, but it’s getting closer every day.)
Up until now, I have been a supporter of brands using Facebook to connect with people. Now, I’m not so sure. Especially as I come across things like:
The infographics showing the evolution of Facebook’s privacy changes.
What Zynga is saying and what is happening to them due to Facebook’s policy changes.
What Jason Calacanis’ thoughts are on them, along with several others.
The fact that their mission has changed nearly every year.
The list could go on and on.
They used to be about connecting people. That was it. Plain and simple.
Now they’re about giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected?
If they were really about giving people power, then why do they keep doing things to take away people’s power to control their own data and profiles?
Facebook is no longer truly about something bigger than themselves. They are not giving people something to believe in. They pay it lip service in their public mission statement, but their actions show that they are solely about Facebook.
It all has me thinking that Facebook has lost their way, if they ever really had a direction in the first place.
It also has me thinking they’re on their way to becoming the MSN to MySpace’s Yahoo! and a new Google is lurking somewhere out there, ready to take over. (Maybe here?)
What they really seem to be on a mission to do is become their own version of the web. And since they’re so good at stealing from others, their line is already written – What you put in Facebook, stays in Facebook.
Overall, I don’t have a good feeling for the direction Facebook is heading. They seem to be focused on what’s best for their revenue stream over what’s best for the community of users they’ve built—the people who make that very revenue stream possible.
When you’ve got people sharing very personal things about themselves with their friends through your platform, that doesn’t sit well with me. And I know I’m not alone.
I’ll quit now. Mostly wanted to dump these loosely collected thoughts that have been bouncing around for the past few weeks out of my head.
Would love to know what some of you think…
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Why digital isn’t about digital
When JetBlue wanted to celebrate its 10th anniversary, it decided to sell a limited number of tickets for $10. That’s a tall order, so for help with the difficult task of convincing consumers to buy $10 airline tickets, it turned to TBG, a London-based digital agency that specializes in Facebook marketing.
The result: JetBlue saw a “massive” response from TBG’s Facebook ad buy, revealing the secret of social media success.
That secret: giving away stuff for free or at a significant discount is a great way to ‘engage‘ consumers on social networks.
I apologize in advance for the sarcasm here, but it increasingly seems that a growing number of marketers have decided that the fastest way to achieve ‘social media success‘ is to:
- Give away or significantly discount product.
- Promote the free or significantly discounted product on sites like Facebook or Twitter.
- Publicize the warm consumer response while acting surprised that consumers were interested in said product.
If this social media marketing ‘strategy‘ seems absurd to you, that’s because it is. Unfortunately, it seems to be a growing trend amongst marketers.
Just the other day, I wrote about several of the marketers that were early adopters of Twitter’s new ad platform, Promoted Tweets. Like JetBlue and TBG, they promoted dubious successes. Virgin Airlines, for instance, touted that it was able to sell 500 airline tickets at a 50% discount. Something, of course, that it almost certainly could have done using just about any advertising platform. It also touted the ‘media value‘ of being associated with the Promoted Tweets launch, something that also seems to be in vogue for marketers looking to justify their social media campaigns.
The big problem with the giveaway-discount model is, of course, that it’s not sustainable. Obviously, JetBlue isn’t going to maintain a profitable business selling airline tickets for $10, yet according to TBG CEO Simon Mansell, his agency’s “main goal is to develop Facebook into an effective sales channel for JetBlue.” Needless to say, running a once-in-a-JetBlue-moon $10 ticketing promotion is hardly the foundation for building an effective sales channel on Facebook.
This is not to say that giveaway-discount promotions don’t have a place in a marketer’s toolkit. They absolutely do. But use that is excessive or not strategic can defeat the purpose. At the very worst, such use can devalue a company’s products or services. And because giveaway-discount promotions are one of the most effective ways to reward your best existing customers, using them haphazardly with non-customers can be problematic. After all, if promotions for non-customers are often the best you can muster up, it makes it harder to run attractive promotions that target existing customers. For this reason, companies should think carefully about who they’re rewarding with promotions, and why. In many cases, I think they’d find their promotions target the wrong people.
In short, instead of attempting to build scalable, sustainable and creative social media marketing campaigns that are strategic in nature, it appears that many marketers are far more comfortable going the giveaway-discount route and proclaiming success because (gasp) they were able to move product for free or at a hefty discount. That, in my opinion, is unfortunate. Despite the fact that social media ROI is still often a tricky subject, social media has the potential to do more than this. Marketers can, and should, set the bar higher than giving away the farm.
Photo credit: Amanda Govaert via Flickr.
via econsultancy.com
via nytimes.com
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Best Mashable post title ever.
Post here.
And allegedly the term 'Sausage' is now trending on Twitter. God damn I love Mashable 🙂Read the full article at blogs.forrester.com
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Web 3.0, The Movie
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The iPod Revolution
1. Don’t Be a Showoff
Give Twitter users your features and benefits. Let them know about special deals. Don’t post links to your latest press release, promote articles written by your CEO or make extravagant claims. A good rule of thumb to determine whether a tweet is user-friendly or brand vanity is to ask yourself, “If I didn’t work here, would I care about this?” If you’re not sure, ask a brutally honest friend who doesn’t work at your company.
2. Don’t Use Poor Grammar or Spelling
If your replying 2 a user make sure ur social media intern doesnt do it like this LOL!
Seriously, grammar Nazis abound on the web. Write words out in their entirety, don’t use confusing abbreviations or too many of them, make sure punctuation is pristine and try to keep “lolspeak” and emoticons to a minimum.
3. Don’t Get Too Personal
You might be a real person hiding behind your brand’s Twitter account, but depending on the size and nature of the company, this isn’t likely the best place to share your favorite band’s latest track, or compliment a user’s hairdo. Keep your conversations warm but professional; it’s what users expect from a brand ambassador, and anything else comes off as creepy.
4. Don’t Auto-Tweet
It’s OK to set up tweets to roll out while you’re away from your desk, but think long and hard before you automate an entire feed to stream into your Twitter account. Users can smell a bot from miles away, and the point of Twitter is to be personally engaging more than blatantly promotional. Also, this might go without saying for the tech-savvy marketers among us, but don’t automatically DM new followers; it’s seen as spam. And never DM someone your account doesn’t also follow.
5. Don’t Leave Air in the Conversation
If you’re carrying on a series of @replies, don’t wait a day or two between messages. This isn’t the Pony Express; users will want a reply within a few hours. If you wait longer, they may have already forgotten what you were talking about. And be sure to use standard reply mechanisms so the Twitter web interface and other applications will thread the conversation, in case either party needs to reference a previous comment.
6. Don’t Overtweet
If you’re using Twitter as a 24/7, one-way broadcast system, you’re not having a conversation — you might be just “shouting” at your followers. While some brands have successfully maintained one-way, broadcast-only, no-@reply accounts, many opt to engage directly with their followers. Whichever method you choose, make sure you’re not tweeting too often and flooding your followers’ timelines.
7. Do Shout Out to Users Who Mention You
Especially if that mention is favorable, don’t be shy about tweeting thanks, tips or promotions to someone who’s shown your brand some Twitter love. Most of the time, users are surprised and delighted to find a name brand in their stream of replies. Exercise caution, however, when engaging with users who’ve made negative comments. Those conversations can go very well, or they can backfire. Always remain empathetic but professional.
8. Do Monitor Keywords and Competitors
If someone expresses issues with a competitor or poses a general question about your vertical, you should be all over it within a few hours. It’s a great opportunity to win new fans, convert seekers into customers and develop a reputation as a knowledgeable and responsive resource in your industry. Just make sure you keep off-brand replies to a non-creepy modicum.
9. Do Make an Informative Profile
Use your company or brand logo as your avatar, and state the purpose of the account clearly in your description. Your profile’s main link should direct Twitter followers to the most informative, engaging and user-friendly part of your website.
10. Do Fish Where the Fish Are
Let’s be honest: Not every brand needs to be on Twitter. Every brand should be monitoring Twitter — and we’ve written a lot about social media monitoring tools for brands on Mashable— but not every company’s customers are going to be on this site or be open to being contacted this way. If your brand has an older demographic, or if your product is of a more sensitive nature, you might want to be a silent observer of this ecosystem rather than an active participant.
via mashable.com