Posts Tagged Marketing

Free Mentos!

25 Jun 2010

I opened Facebook this morning and as 10,000 others did in the last hour, saw and clicked on the talking mint. I was kicked over to a “Like us” landing page and clicked the like button.

I then agreed to install the mentos coupon app (and let it have access to my friends and profile information). After that, I was sent out of Facebook to SmartSource coupons which for security and fraud prevention wanted to run / install a java apple, promising coupons afterward.

Coupons may or may not print. Around this point I began to remember the portion of behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s ‘Predictably Irrational‘ that dealt with the lengths people are willing to go to for “Free.” “Free” is like a bug zapper for consumers. You may know better, but it’s not likely you’ll be able to stop yourself. These free Mentos…

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Does the Privacy Conversation Exist In a Bubble?

08 Jun 2010

I got pretty excited about watching some liveblogging of the Facebook privacy announcement a few weeks back (I watched via Read Write Web’s use of a cool new tool called Unawave). I told a friend about this over lunch last week, and she laughed at me. I get this often, as I’m always trying to discuss the intricacies of social networks and online human interaction. My friends humor me, briefly, then make it clear that it’s time to move on.
Perhaps We Are The Others
Key takeaway here? They don’t care. I have a lot of friends in education, consulting, finance and various non-profit work and, thus, I have very few friends who interact with social media for business purposes. What I’ve found is that, while these people may have updated their privacy settings in the last few months (as have the majority of users), they are largely unconcerned. While they may check…

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Who Should Own Social Media?

25 Mar 2010

It’s a frequent question I hear: “Who Should Own Social Media?”

Three Common Reasons for Social Media
In our experience at Room 214 we typically see three major reasons organizations dive into social media:
1. Product Development/Feedback
2. Sales/Marketing/Brand
3. Customer Service
Each one of those “reasons” requires its own cast of characters to “own” the process. In addition – each carries unique key performance indicators to measure the health and success of the project. Because function-specific business goals, community value and KPI’s are all different – it’s critical for anyone heading social media efforts in a particular channel to have a clear understanding of the impact measures.

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Social Media Integration: Baby Steps to Updating Traditional Advertising

22 Mar 2010

I often encounter this issue: Brands have a multi-million dollar campaign running across multiple platforms (print, T.V., web) and a Facebook page that was started then abandoned months ago. Just today I stumbled across some numbers from Emarketer on social media integration in ad campaigns, and it got me thinking about this issue. As you can see, the numbers are so-so, with just 41% of campaigns integrating third party social networking sites. Compare that with the fact that 55.6 million adults in the U.S. visit social networking sites monthly, and you realize there is a serious disconnect going on here.

Fear of the Social

We constantly hear from people who think that getting into the world of social media is a terrifying leap from the traditional media they are used to.

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