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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

It’s not just me - no, really, I mean it, it isn’t just me! Friday, March 13th, 2009

Once you start getting involved in the digital or social media business, you tend to lose perspective. You can see all these cool things happening out there, and you’re linking up with all sorts of interesting people via Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, and you get this feeling that, for once in your life, you’re riding the crest of a wave (forgive me if my surfing analogy is a bit skewiff, but I grew up in the land-locked American Midwest) and involved in something with enormous social and business potential.

Meanwhile, your family and friends shake their head when you tell them what you do all day and wonder what on earth is the point of linking up with people you don’t know from a bar of soap and exchanging 140-character missives on Twitter that are largely on the topic of Twitter. It’s a good reality check to engage with the ‘real’ people in your life and see that, just maybe, you’re overestimating the effect and potential, and  that most people couldn’t care less about digital communication.

Well, a new report just published by NetPop Research shows that YOU SEE, I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG - DIGITAL SOCIAL MEDIA IS EXPLODING! Yes, it’s a US report and Australia is further behind this curve, but get a load of these numbers:

  • More than 100 million Americans are regularly posting material to social media sites - that’s one-third of the population
  • Use of social media has doubled in the past two years alone
  • 7 million people, known as ‘power users’, interact with about 250 people a week via digital social networking (yes, that’s more than 30 people a day)

See Mum, I didn’t waste that college tuition by spending my days surfing the Internet!


Twitter buzz in pictures Monday, March 9th, 2009

Aden Hepburn from Ideaworks has just published a couple of charts on the Digital Buzz blog showing how interest in Twitter has mushroomed in the past few weeks - but also keeping it in perspective comparing actual site traffic to the Facebook behemoth:

As Aden writes, “Just in the last 2 weeks (in Aus particularly) it feels like everyone is talking about Twitter like never before - and here is the proof. This chart shows the relative change in daily attention a website receives and you can actually see that it’s even out performing Facebook at almost 2:1, yet unfortunately it doesn’t hide the downward spiral of MySpace! But just to keep everyone in their chairs… the relative comparison on unique visits to show you Twitter doesn’t rule the universe, well, not just yet anyway…!”


Skittles aftermath: nothing to see here, mosey along now Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Following on from yesterday’s post on the Skittles.com saga, the interest in this story in social media circles has been phenomenal, but now that Skittles has yanked the #skittles Twitter Search page from its home page (you can still find it if you go looking deeper on the site) like a spam Twitter account, the post-mortem has begun in earnest. It’s a bit like a digital version of the finger-pointing that goes on after disasters such as the recent Victorian bushfires.

Catherine Taylor writes today in Social Media Insider: “Now, it’s time to drown in social media clichés, like the following: The mere fact I’m writing about this means the campaign achieved some success. Awareness of Skittles on the Web probably hasn’t been this high, ever. The underpinning for the strategy for this campaign is in itself a social media cliché: The consumers own the brand.

“But I’d also like to offer that, in obsessing about this campaign, social media watchers are becoming their own cliché. What stood out to me in looking at the tweets about Skittles this morning wasn’t the naughty stuff, which seems to have run its course, but the whole meta phenomenon where people aren’t talking about Skittles per se, but what the Skittles campaign means for social media. Then there’s all the hand-wringing about the fact that some people said naughty things about Skittles and how that somehow mars the campaign (no pun intended, though Skittles is made by Mars). C’mon. Do you really think the agency and client were so naïve as to not know that would be part of it?

“It’s time to move on to something truly important. Kudos to Skittles and Agency.com for embracing the idea that it’s not the brand home page that defines the brand. That’s a good thing. But we knew that already.”

To quote from a couple of the comments on Catherine’s blog post:

“We have to be very careful about what strong thinkers we are and make sure not to over-intellectualize these new age approaches as marketing professionals. This wasn’t about us. This campaign or experiment thereof was about where we’re going. It wasn’t rocket science, but I’m sure it worked. Skittles displayed a direct interest in finding their consumers where they are likely to be found and used their consumers to communicate the brand however the consumer chose to in their very own language…and the consumers did just that!”

“I’m not sure what you need to know to wake up and be MORE IN TOUCH with your audience. They got trashed on Twitter because Twitters are about REAL, organic, testimonials and truth in real time. Spending the time, and $$$ with an agency that didn’t understand nor grasp that from the get go, shows that someone at the top of this, should have done more homework, or solicited better advice about using Twitter. Every agency in the world wants to jump on the bandwagon and utilize Social Media. If you don’t understand how to properly “engage” consumers using Web 2.0 technology, you need to be careful, for it’ll blow up it you face.”

“The only important question is will this cause people to buy more Skittles? I look forward to learning the answer.”

“I think the real value is less about the execution and more about the philosophy that drove it. If it means anything at all, it’s that this campaign is a recognition of the importance of the role social media plays in brand-building. The game has changed. It’s not 1999 anymore.”

It will be interesting to see how the campaign is viewed in the fullness of time. Brilliant tactic or big mistake? What do you think?


Skittles, Twitter Search and Facebook: a recipe for good publicity Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Skittles has conjured up a storm of controversy over its new un-website. The lolly-maker turned its home page into a glorified Twitter Search page on the weekend, and the company has been praised and pilloried ever since.

David Berkowitz wrote in Mediapost: “Today, when contacting a company, the first place I’d likely turn is its Web site. I’m saying that tentatively, as Skittles makes me wonder if corporate Web sites will be around much longer. The company’s new site seems to herald the fact that the corporate site is nearing its expiration date.

“…. Here’s the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.”

He asks: “Why would anyone care about what Skittles has to say? What, pray tell, could Skittles ever say that was so important, unless we woke up one day to find out that eating Skittles is the world’s tastiest cancer cure, or alternatively that Skittles lower men’s sperm count. Then, perhaps, the world will listen.”

On the positive side, Marketing Daily spoke to a range of marketers who thought the move was a great idea, quoting the head of eConsultancy as saying that: “Skittles has essentially turned its site into ‘a massive social media experiment. It is possibly the bravest move I have yet seen, in terms of a global brand getting into bed with social media and social networks … it appears to be an extension of the old adage about there being no such thing as bad PR. Everybody is talking about it.’

Marketing Daily also reported that: “‘Some will question whether it’s wise to give up control on the Web - whether this is a good use of social media,’ says Charlene Li, author of business best-seller Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, consultant, speaker and blogger (altimeter.com). ‘But they are controlling content in the most important sense, which is that they’re getting people to talk about and engage with the brand. It’s hard to get people to engage with a candy, but this is generating incredible buzz and PR. This is a big brand pushing the envelope toward what a brand will be in the future.’”

MG Siegler on Venturebeat was bit more sanguine: “In what is either a sign of Twitter’s ongoing transition to the mainstream or of a candy company’s epic laziness, Skittles.com is now simply a Twitter Search result page for the candy.

“I’m a firm believer in the power of Twitter Search as perhaps the most compelling thing about the service, but the candy’s use of the feature just feels gimmicky. It would have been better as a part of the site, not as the homepage. My advice: I know times are tough, but hire a web designer.”

He presciently wrote: “Naturally, people are already spamming the hell out of this. One tweet being repeated over and over again unfortunately uses a racial slur. As such, I suspect this little experiment will end rather soon for Skittles.”

Meanwhile, Berkowitz suggested that Skittles should highlight its Facebook presence rather than Twitter Search, since its Facebook group has an astonishing 587,000 friends. And as of Tuesday US time, after a puerile Twitter campaign, that’s exactly what they did. The Twitter experiment ended, and the Twitter Search page was replaced by the Facebook page. But the debate goes on. Of course the big question is: what effect will it have on the brand and on sales? We’ll let you know.

Follow the story as it developed:

Skittles Converts its Home Page to Twitter Search

Marketers Praise Skittles Gutsy Site Move

Why Skittles Killed its Website

Skittles: tweet the rainbow (or racial slurs)

Skittles switches homepage from twitter to Facebook (what’s next?)

Bad Jokes Force Skittles to Retreat from Twitter Search to Facebook


Beautiful one day, perfect job the next Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

Tourism Queensland’s Island Reef Job campaign has struck a chord with economically battered people everywhere. Well-executed across a variety of social media, including Facebook, Twitter and the Web, the campaign, soliciting job applications for an Island Caretaker for the Great Barrier Reef, was expected to generate 400,000 website visits by the end of February. More than 200,000 people visited the first day of the campaign and as of last weekend more than 2.5 million visitors had checked out the site.

The campaign is one of the few Australian initiatives to garner extensive overseas media attention.

As the job description says, the six-month, A$150,000 gig is ”a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer. You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews. On offer is a unique opportunity to help promote the wondrous Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.”

You have until 22 February to apply, so start working on that application!


The social media list Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Are you on the social media ‘rich list’ (apologies to Channel 7 and Andrew O’Keefe)? Probably not, because as with so many things like this, Peter Kim’s Social Media Marketing Examples list is by a North American, for a North American audience. (Kudos to Telstra and the Sydney Writers Centre as apparently the only Australian organisations on the list. If someone has done a list like this for Australia, please let me know and I’ll be happy to promote it.) In the meantime, a look at this list of 324 companies that ‘get’ social media is interesting and constructive. For example:

  • Consulting giant Accenture has nine corporate blogs, five podcast channels and its own social network
  • Adobe has a directory of nearly 200(!) blogs by its employees
  • There are at least 135 Facebook pages, groups or applications mentioned on the list
  • 86 of the companies on the list are using Twitter accounts, many of them with multiple accounts
  • The renowned medical centre The Mayo Clinic has a YouTube channel (prepare to be grossed out at gruesome videos from the operating theatre)
  • Even the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile has its own Twitter account (so you can say franks for the memories!)

Not all the companies on the list are large multinationals - the message here (with a nod to Anthony Johnson, who brought this list to my attention) is that all types of companies need to start getting involved in social media, because that’s where their customers are hanging out. They’re already talking about you without your participation - or worse, they’re talking about your competitors instead of you and you need to get out there and mix it up.


‘Glimmer of hope’ for online ads in recession Monday, December 1st, 2008

Everyone agrees advertising overall is tanking as a result of the ‘GFC’ (global financial crisis), but how online advertising will be affected is a matter of intense debate. The online industry, naturally, is bullish on the prospects for online ad spend growth, but what do the battered finance and political media think? The Economist entered the debate last week, saying that although online ad spending in the US fell by 27% during the dotcom recession, ”the web has changed a lot since 2002. Back then, gaudy display “banners” on web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN were the preferred technology. These still exist, but they now account for less than 20% of online ad spending.”

As they pointed out, more than 50% of online ad spend now goes to search advertising, while in brand advertising, rich media ads are taking over from banners. Because these forms of advertising are easily tracked, spending on online advertising is now “much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts.”

This still leaves the problem of how advertising spend is transferred from traditional advertising to online. As the Economist points out, “At the beginning of the year Jeff Zucker, the boss of NBC Universal, a big television and film company, told an audience of TV executives that their biggest challenge was to ensure ‘that we do not end up trading analogue dollars for digital pennies’. He meant that audiences were moving online faster than advertisers, thus leaving media companies short-changed. Now, near the end of the year, the situation looks even worse, as the recession threatens to turn even the analogue dollars into pennies.”

The Economist points out that online traffic is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective - such as user-generated content havens like YouTube and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook - “and is therefore cheap. This, says Mary Meeker (an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley), presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.”


Social networking a plus for business Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

I had to check the date - was it April Fools Day? Nope, Melbourne Cup Day. So it must be true - a just-published study has recommended that bosses allow their employees to use their Facebook and MySpace accounts at work because it helps them build relationships with customers and colleagues.

According to Reuters, the study’s author said that, “while companies were using specific systems to share information, online social networking sites could also play a role, helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.”

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional ‘command and control’ techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity,” he said.

“Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counterintuitive, but it appears to create business more capable of maintaining stability.”

Robert Ainger, Corporate Director of Orange Business which co-produced the report, said it would be wrong of businesses to ignore the importance of networking in the current economic climate.

“The report points out that the value of networking within an economic downturn is perhaps more important than ever and I believe it could mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalizing on the tricky conditions,” he said.