Daily reading 03/31/2008

Social Media Case Study: Blatantly Advertising … And Getting Away With It

tags: daily_reading

H&R Block has figured out a way to openly market itself using social media and to make it work. Its strategy combines an absurd but funny pitchman with videos that poke fun at the stress of tax time.

10 Downing Street is Twittering

tags: daily_reading

The Prime Minister of Great Britain is now on Twitter. He could be the first head of state to embrace the service. Or maybe not. We believe that Stuart Bruce first reported this, but it may have been Dave Briggs. Oh, what the hell. Give them both links. Sometimes blogger courtesy gets confusing.

20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider

tags: daily_reading

Here are some great ideas for leveraging WordPress's "page" function to create static blog pages that aggregate, promote, redirect and solicit.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/29/2008

Ewww…What’s That Smell? It’s MyStarbucksIdea.com

tags: daily_reading

• Starbucks is positioning its new MyStarbucksIdea.com site as a social network, but critics say it's nothing more than a fancy online suggestion box. A real community, they argue, would encourage interaction between members. This one simply helps Starbucks to run its business better. That's not bad, but it isn't a community.
   - post by pgillin

Just An Online Minute » Blog Archive » Just An Online Minute… Video Action = Candidate Traction?

tags: daily_reading

The political candidates (Hillary Clinton in particular) are discovering that their campaign-trail statements are subject to scrutiny by skeptics and foes who are digging up old TV news clips and using them to counter claims made by the candidates.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/28/2008

Got a beef? Your blog can make a company tremble

tags: social_media_useful

The Haimlton Spectator has a nice writeup of my presentation to a group of local businesses earlier this week.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/26/2008

How del.icio.us is changing academic research

tags: social_media_useful

A Ph.D. student and political activist talks about how she uses social bookmarking services to easily organize her voluminous clip files and to engage in conversations with other people with similar academic interests.

Sears lets Facebook members share dress designs

tags: social_media_useful

Sears may have hit on a good idea for marketing on Facebook: post popular prom dress designs online so girls can solicit feedback from the friends before making a purchase. What I like about this idea is that it leverages the personal relationships that are so important to social networks, adds value to an important decision that members are about to make and doesn't get the marketer in the middle of a personal conversation.

Reference Pages: How You Can Use Them to Attract Links and Traffic

tags: social_media_useful

DoshDosh has advice on how to reuse content by creating reference pages targeted a specific groups and then promoting those as you would promote new original material. On the Web, remember, publishing is just the beginning. The real fun is mashing up and repackaging what you've published to create opportunities for additional promotion.

The WOMMA Word

tags: social_media_useful

This is the single best resource I've seen on what's going on in the world of social media marketing. I get WOMMA's daily newsletter, and there are always at least two or three items that I want to read in-depth, include the two articles I referenced today. Highly recommended.

Tips on effective blogging

tags: social_media_useful

This New York Times piece addresses some of the most frequently asked questions about blogging, including how to choose a topic, how often to post and how to promote a blog. Concise, sensible advice.

Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners - New York Times

tags: social_media_useful

Toyota will let owners of its Scion cars choose and design their own window sticker logos, based on a palette created by a graffiti artist. I guess this means graffiti has gone mainstream. It's certainly an innovative use of social networks.

Good quote from the executive creative director of the agency that dreamed up the idea: The 'wrong way' to engage in social marketing is to “create an artificial social network and try to draw people to it. You have to walk into the conversation, and if they’re talking about Britney Spears, you can’t say, ‘By the way, do you want to hear about my new car?’ ”

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  How StumbleUpon Makes Sharing Easy and Fun

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe by filling in the box to the right.

According to my e-mail service provider's reports, a lot of subscribers to my newsletter skip my opening essay each week and going directly to a little item called "Just for Fun" that I include in every newsletter. Just For Fun is a link to a funny, offbeat or just plain bizarre item that I find on the Web.

It may look like I spend hours each week looking for source material, but my real secret is StumbleUpon, which is a popular example of the new breed of social bookmarking sites.
Social bookmarking is one of the hottest group activities on the Internet, and it's capable of driving enormous amounts of traffic if your site is lucky enough to be selected. Over the next couple of issues of my newsletter, I'll look at some of the more popular bookmarking sites and explain how they work. Although I caution against relying on raw traffic stats as an indicator of success, I recommend you make social bookmarking a staple of your promotion efforts.

Bookmarks have been around since the early stays of the Internet, having been included in the earliest browsers. Bookmarks are an easy way to keep track of information you've seen and want to return to, but as a standalone tool, they're not very interesting.

Where they do get interesting is when you share your bookmarks with others. As I pointed out in an earlier newsletter, social bookmarking is kind of a human-powered search engine. As more and more people bookmark and comment upon the same content, a richer description of the content emerges. Also, web pages with a lot of votes can rise up the popularity stack, making them more prominent and more useful to interested people. Social bookmarking sites aren't nearly as exhaustive as search engine indexes, but every single entry has been vetted by a person.

StumbleUpon is one of my favorite examples of this genre. Once you become a member, you can install the StumbleUpon toolbar and immediately begin flagging interesting sites. Your selections and descriptions go into a common area where others can see what you chose and why. As others vote for the same sites, those selections rise in the StumbleUpon hierarchy.As a user, you can subscribe to stumbled sites by category. When you click the "Stumble!" button in the toolbar, you automatically go to a random site that has been selected by other members. Sites that have been favorably reviewed more often are more likely to turn up in your random "stumblings."

It's perfectly OK to stumble upon your own site. This isn't gaming the system, because your selection only becomes important if other people vote for you as well. If nobody else finds your page interesting, nothing much will happen, but if you attract enough interest you can draw an astonishing amount of traffic.

I found this out myself recently when I stumbled upon an entry in a blog I maintain called Newspaper Death Watch. Apparently some other people liked my selection. That blog, which normally gets about 100 visitors a day, received more than 1,200 visitors in one day, nearly all of them from StumbleUpon.

Not surprisingly, most of those visitors came and left in just a few seconds. But a few of them did stick around and the site's average traffic levels increased about 20% after that one incident. This was hardly a make-or-break event, but it's one indication of how social bookmarking can quickly generate a lot of visibility for your website.

Labels: socialbookmarking

  ¶ 7:16 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/24/2008

Dove Onslaught Exposed

tags: social_media_useful

This video, which is cited in John Conroy's iMediaConnection piece, shows the risks of viral video campaign. The producer points out that the same company that brought you the Dove Evolution campaign promoting girls' self-esteem also produces the sexist campaign for Axe deodorant. You just can't get away with being a giant corporate conglomerate these days!

Online social networks | Everywhere and nowhere

tags: social_media_useful

The Economist looks at the user-hostile limitations of today's social networks and concludes that they can't survive in this form. Having to log on to each service separately and being unable to communicate across them is an unnatural act. The article draws a parallel between Facebook/MySpace/Twitter and Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL. Ultimately, the "walled garden" model fails.

Keep viral video from coming back to haunt you

tags: social_media_useful

Viral campaigns can blow up in unexpected ways. In this example-packed opinion piece, John Conroy talks about how easy it is for companies to become vulnerabile to charges of insincerity and hypocrisy if they don't consider all dimensions of their public perception before embarking on a viral campaign.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/23/2008

Shot heard 'round the auto world

tags: advertising, social_media_useful

General Motors will shift half its $3 billion annual advertising budget to digital and one-to-one channels during the next three years. That's a huge jump from the $197 million it spent online last year. Other auto makers are likely to follow. Hyundai has said it plans to double its online spending. More ominous for traditional media is that a GM executive recently told Ad Age that told Ad Age that the company will try to persuade its regional dealer ad groups to shift their dollars to digital advertising and away from spot TV.

The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media - Knowledge@Wharton

tags: social_media_useful

What's the difference between user-generated and professional content? It's becoming harder and harder to tell as bloggers become more professional and some professional publishers put out amateurish bloggers. Experts agree that the business models that have long supported traditional media are decaying, but there is no consensus on what will replace them. In the meantimg, the user-generated content phenomenon is booming, putting more pressure than ever on readers to apply their own filters.

Companies Court Convenience-Food Blogs

tags: social_media_useful

Even though food bloggers don't get huge traffic, food makers are discovering that their influence can help make or break a new product. Many are reacing out to bloggers as a standard part of their new product evaluation programs.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  The Future Will Be Twittered

From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe by filling in the box to the right.

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Texas is a showcase for geeks and their new toys, but the event held earlier this month broke new ground in another way. Anyone who runs corporate events or works in a time-dependent business should be fascinated -- and maybe a little scared -- by what transpired there.

The highlight was the keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy. Evidently, a lot of people in the audience didn't much care for Lacy’s rather interruptive questioning style or her cozy familiarity with the subject. They were also put off by her failure to involve the audience more directly in the line of questioning.

So they started Twitteringabout it. And as the interview went on, the comments passed between attendees took on a life of their own. By the 50-minute mark, the emboldened audience was actively heckling the moderator. Lacy was a bit flustered, but she finished the interview. When she walked out of the auditorium a short time later, bloggers armed with a video cameras were there to record her reaction to the audience's behavior. Here’s a video of the entire interview, annotated with audience tweets.

Sarah Lacy is a professional, and she will be just fine. She posted a response on her BusinessWeek blog and noted that the incident was actually good for pre-sales of her forthcoming book. What struck me about this incident is how it portends change in the speed of customer feedback.

The Feedback Conundrum
Veteran conference organizers know that getting audience feedback is like pulling teeth. They're lucky if 20% of the attendees at an event even fill out evaluation forms, and it can take months to tabulate those results. Events are intimidating to audience members; they don't control the microphone and they can't communicate with each other very well. Services like Twitter change that equation.

The reason events at SXSW unfolded as they did is because audience members were able to communicate with each other. That's the scary part. No speaker likes to think of a scenario in which his or her performance is judged in real-time, although I can certainly think of times when I wished I could pull a speaker off the stage.

The potential upside of this trend, however, is enormous. Imagine if you could stage an event -- whether a conference, media campaign, product demo or something else -- and get real-time feedback from the people watching. Or what if you could tie promotions to timely responses: "Text this number now in order to receive a 20% discount." The technology to enable this interaction is here right now. I'm sure I’m only scratching the surface of the possibilities. Twittervision, Tweet Scan to tap into these conversations or to initiate new conversations themselves. All it takes is familiarity and imagination. An excellent list of third-party Twitter applications is available at the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Labels: events, sxsw, twitter

  ¶ 8:36 AM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 03/20/2008

Eric Schmidt Thinks Microhoo Could "Break the Internet"

tags: social_media_useful

In this Conde Nast interview, The Google CEO also explains why it's unlikely Google would buy The New York Times, how it manages to hire 100 people a week and why he's concerned about the mobile market.

Online Advertisers To Spend Through Turbulence

tags: social_media_useful

As bad as the dot-com bust was, the industry that emerged from it was a more potent advertising force. The same effect could happen in this recession. EMarketer sees online ad spending continuing to grow as the economy slows, with online video leading the way.

The Social Shopping Craze

tags: social_media_useful, social_shopping

One of the hottest new categories of social media is social shopping, a peer-to-peer experience in which buyers exchange information about their favorite products and brands. This piece looks at why social shopping is so popular and what the big sites are doing to monetize their traffic.

Social Network Users Becoming More Affluent  Annotated

tags: social_media_useful

The rate of affluent US Internet user participation in online social networks increased dramatically to 60% in January 2008, from 27% in January 2007, according to The Luxury Institute's latest WealthSurvey "The Wealthy and Web 2.0."

Further Evidence That Crime Really Does Pay

tags: social_media_useful

The owner of Georgi vodka said he is in talks to put the derriere of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's call girl on the backside of every bus in New York.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Draft Chapters of My New Book Now Available It wouldn't be fitting to attempt to write a book about social media without seeking feedback from readers, so I've started posting the draft chapters from my forthcoming book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, online for your review and comment. The introduction and first four chapters are available at www.ssmmbook.com and I would be pleased to have your input! The entire book - consisting of 10 to 11 chapters and about a half-dozen "vignettes," will be posted during the next three weeks.

I posted drafts of my first book as blog entries, but this time I've selected a wiki from Wetpaint.com. With the wiki approach, you can actually edit the text and make changes as you see fit. I'll consider all contributions for inclusion in the final manuscript, which is due to the publisher on May 1. If you care to make significant contributions, you'll be credited with a byline or credit line.

The blog approach worked wonders with New Influencers. While I didn't get a lot of changes, I got plenty of positive feedback that gave me encouragement to forge ahead. Please be brutally honest in your edits. This book will work best if it reflects the wisdom of all of you, which most certainly dwarfs my own.

Labels: book, research social_media

  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/18/2008

Why direct marketing and social media don't click

tags: social_media_useful

A post on Emerson Direct's blog suggests that direct marketers are too focused on short-term results to realize the true benefits of social media marketing, which are improved customer relationships. The article suggests that direct marketers should be looking to YouTube to accomplish virally what their direct mail campaigns attempt to accomplish. You can get quick response and a multiplier effect as interested people forward links to interesting content to their friends.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/17/2008

The Wall Street Journal signs the praises of blogging for small businesses

tags: social_media_useful

• There are several very good anecdotes here of small business-owners who have used blogs to gain an international audience and score impressive sales wins.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  The New Influencers is in The Wall Street Journal - Again! Last July, The Wall Street Journal published a positive review of my book, The New Influencers. That was good, but I didn't expect a second mention! Today, the Journal's small business section has an interview with Scott Monty, whose Social Media Marketing Blog is one of the livelier and more readable efforts of its kind. Scott recommends New Influencers in addition to a couple of other books and several excellent blogs.

Labels: NewInfluencers, reviews

  ¶ 7:28 AM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 03/15/2008

Is MySpace Good for Society?

A New York Times columnist asks six thought leaders a simple question: "Has social networking technology made us better or worse off as a society?" Their consensus: both.

The Inconvenient Truth About Social Media Marketing
Aaron wall offers a succinct and persuasive argument against link-baiting. We need more of this rational thinking. Link-baiting is a waste of time.

Corporate Blogging - How the Pros Do It
Scott Monty provides thorough coverage of an SXSW panel on corporate blogging. Includes some nice nuggets, such as Dell's customer relations philosophy: "they've empowered every employee to apologize."

Jeff Jarvis tells why you should reach out to the customers who say they hate you

What happens when 207 people freeze simultaneously for five minutes in Grand Central Station? Watch this...

Labels: blogging, social_media, socialbookmarking

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Take this survey to help understand online community value   ¶ 7:17 AM 0 Comments

  Social Network Wars are Over; Now the Fun Begins If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to pick winners in the social network race, you can stand up now. Hitwise data for 2007 shows that MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 88% of all visits to social network sites. The next closest competitor, Bebo , got a little more than 1% of the traffic.

There simply is no more competition in the general-purpose social network market. Other social media winners include LinkedIn (which wasn’t included in the Hitwise data), YouTube and Flickr. If you're a big brand pursuing a broad strategy, you can safely place your bets on these services. For the next year or two, the also-rans will be busy finding buyers and merger partners.

Now is when it really gets interesting, because now the action shifts to vertical market sites. For many marketers, this is where the more interesting opportunity lies. For example, in the area of health, there’s CarePages.com, Wellsphere, Patientslikeme, RevolutionHealth.com and iMedix. Seniors can choose from Elder Wisdom Circle, Grandparents.com, Eons, TeeBeeDee and Multiply. Mothers can sign up for Cafemom, MothersGroups.com, MomJunction and MothersClick, among others.

And the action isn’t limited to consumer markets. Sermo is a social network for physicians, which now boasts more than 50,000 members. Doctors exchange information about serious medical issues and review cases in real time. Pairup connects business travelers for peer advice, networking and assistance. There’s a list of more than 350 social networks here.

Don’t let small membership numbers fool you. Many of these sites may be attractive marketing venues. Scan the groups, discussion topics and participants and look for content profiles that match your market. Prices are generally lower than those of the big social networks and the audience is far more targeted.

Marketing to vertical communities is very different from mass marketing, of course. If you're interested in building a campaign on Facebook, have a look at what Southwest Airlines and Victoria’s Secret are doing, or the group started by Starbucks fans that has over 60,000 members. There's nothing particularly high tech about their presence. They mainly provide a place where customers can keep in touch with the brand and have access to special offers and downloads.

When marketing to vertical communities, you need to dig deeply into the expertise in your organization. Members of a health-oriented network, for example, want to speak to people who have lots of expertise in nutrition and treatment. Discounts and promotions won’t work nearly as well in narrow markets as they do in broad ones. If you have articulate, interesting domain experts in your organization, now's the time to pull them out of the shadows and engage them with knowledgeable communities. Live chats, webcasts and Q&A forums are particularly effective.

Much of the media attention in the last year has focused on the battle for social network supremacy. With that competition now over, the market will subdivide itself in interesting ways. This process will continue for years, presenting an ever-shifting landscape of new marketing opportunities.

Labels: facebook, linkedin, myspace, social_networks, vertical

  ¶ 1:09 PM 1 Comments

  Bloggers Get Social April 4-6 Now here's a classic Web 2.0-style event! Come and meet other marketing bloggers in NYC for a weekend of fun and socializing April 4-6. In the organizers' words: "Neither summit nor seminar, Blogger Social is "a first-ever, one-of-a-kind event held by the online marketing community for the marketing community, completely funded and coordinated by community members. Neither summit nor seminar, nowhere near a trade show or conference, the intent is a social event...[It's] founded upon the idea of time together to better get to know one another." And no blogging all weekend, they say. You do enough of that, for goodness sake!

It's co-organized by Christina Kerley, an early social media marketing adopter who gets it as well as any marketer I've met. I have to be on the west coast at that time and can't attend, but for $350 (this is New York City, remember!) it looks well worth the cost.

Labels: bloggersocial, blogging, marketing

  ¶ 7:09 PM 0 Comments

  Don't Let Tools Distract You I was presenting a social media seminar to a public-relations agency recently when the talk turned to uses of blogs. The people in the room were excited about blogging's potential and were eager to apply the technology to new tasks.

I cautioned them that they were asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t what tool to use, but what problem to solve. Tool selection is secondary.

There's nothing unusual about their attitude. People often start by choosing tools and work backwards to solve problems. Maybe management has just issued an order to start blogging, or the tool is seen as a tactic to improve search performance or it just seems like the thing to do.

But that’s like starting with a hammer and then figuring out what to build with it. If your objective is to make a house, then you’re off to a pretty good start. But if you want to craft a pearl necklace, you've got the wrong tool for the job.

I recently consulted with a client who wanted to build a social network for a defined customer group. It was an ambitious idea, but as we talked through it, we both realized that the process of getting it through internal and regulatory approvals could take a year or more. We finally settled on a more modest idea: Launch a relevant blog, try to build customer interest quickly and then take the results to management in hopes of getting fast-track approval for the social network.

Choose tools wisely
The building blocks of social media are simply tools and they're not well-suited for every task. For example, if your objective is to alert visitors to a new category of products and provide detailed information on the specifics, a catalog page would be more effective than any interactive tool.

But it’s human nature for people to use the technologies they understand and figure out the application after the fact. Unfortunately, that can waste a lot of time and effort. E-mail is terrible for communicating between groups of more than about five recipients, yet people routinely organize massive projects with dozens of participants by e-mail. Even if the tool is poorly suited for the task, they reason, at least people know how to use it.

A better approach is to define business objectives and then search for tools that support them. For customer feedback, for example, blogs and social networks are a good choice. However, podcasts and video won’t do the trick. So if your objective is to improve customer relations, a podcast may not be a good place to start.

Technology vendors encourage the tool focus. Many of those firms are run by engineers who love to create cool new stuff. They’d much rather talk about features and functions than how to solve business problems. You need to block that tactic. Any vendor that won’t give you references to customers who are solving problems that are similar to yours is blowing smoke.

Social media tools are cool, but they’re always irrelevant if they don’t solve problems. Don’t let technology distract you.

Labels: blogging, social_media, social_media_tools

  ¶ 7:56 AM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 03/09/2008

Memo to Hillary and Barack: YouTube Is a Two-Headed Beast : StraightUpSearch, March 7, 2008

tags: social_media_useful

• OneUpWeb says it's amazing that the political candidates aren't optimizing their Web presences for search. It also includes a link to Hillary's perfectly-timed answer to Jon Stewart's opening question in her March 3 Daily Show appearance.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/08/2008

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo

tags: social_media_useful

Here's a great viral video that has the dual effect of promoting both the service that hosts it and the ad agency that created it. The lip-synch involves dozens of agency employees, some of whom are clearly drinking beer, and shows the agency to be a fun a free-wheeling place to work. It's scored almost 1.5 million views since launching last April.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  'Infuencer Marketing' challenges assumptions When my copy of Duncan Brown's and Nick Hayes’ Influencer Marketing arrived in the mail, I looked at it a little bit like a trip to the dentist. I knew it was going to be good for me, but I didn't expect to enjoy it.

What a pleasure, then, to find that this engaging and provocative book not only challenged many of my assumptions about markets and influence, but did so in a readable and persuasive manner.

The authors are co-managers of Influencer50, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies identify the key influencers in their markets. Like many authors of their kind, they think a lot of marketing today is badly broken. Unlike many authors, though, they have concrete advice on how to fix it.

The central premise of this book is that the people who influence markets are largely unknown to most marketers. In fact, the authors’ firm offer clients a 50% discount if they can name even 20 of the top 50 influencers in their sphere. They've never had to pay up. Most marketers, they assert, consider influencers to be mainly press and analysts. In fact, they suggest that the list is far larger and more diverse than that, encompassing more than 20 categories ranging from channel players to venture capitalist to government agencies and systems integrators. They argue that many of these influencers are far more important than the media because they speak directly to a company's customers. They pay particular attention, for example to second-tier consultancies, systems integrators and buyers groups. These people are whispering in the year of customers every day, yet most marketers aren't even aware that they're talking, the authors assert.

This book defends its case pretty well, using logic and ample case studies. It's also written in a disarmingly down-to-earth and at times tongue-in-cheek style. Hayes and Brown aren’t stingy with their opinions. Bloggers, for example, get far more attention than they deserve, they suggest, and many bloggers are simply people who are awkward in social situations. Referencing Twitter, they say simply, “How anyone can maintain a proper job and use Twitter is beyond us." You may not agree with their opinions, but you have to respect them for the directness with which they are stated.

They hate awards programs, believing them to be valuable only to the organizations bestowing the awards. Partnerships are meaningless in most cases because companies have far too many partners to manage effectively. They believe that brand equity is overstated and that celebrity endorsers play mostly to the egos of the marketers who recruit them. That's just a sampling of the often counterintuitive assertions in his book.

I did have some nits to pick with Influencer Marketing. The case studies lack much in the way of hard ROI and are limited mostly to Influencer50 clients. I thought the rather critical chapter on bloggers underestimated the influence that those influencers have on mainstream media. The authors are also big fans of using consultants to identify influencers, a position that obviously favors their company.

Nevertheless, if the greatest value of a business book is to challenge assumptions, as I believe it is, then Influencer Marketing succeeds admirably. It's one of the best marketing books I've read in a long time. For a commitment of five or six hours, it is well worth the time spent reading it.

Labels: bookreview, influence, influencermarketing, marketing

  ¶ 7:45 PM 1 Comments

  Daily reading 03/04/2008

Check Out

Wal-Mart, whose history of deception has made it a poster child for what not to do with social media, has launched a branded blog. This time it's chosen a non-controversial topics - consumer electronics - and followed a recent trend by letting employees do the talking. We'll watch this one closely. Thanks to Alex Howard for tipping us off to this.

  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  Daily reading 03/03/2008

35 Ways to Stream Your Life - ReadWriteWeb, Feb. 29, 2008

tags: social_media_useful

• Still trying to figure out how to get your arms around Twitter? ReadWriteWeb lists 35 different services that offer variations on the concept of "lifestreaming," which is the word for the new uber-category that Twitter inspired. Many are still pre-launch and most appear to build on the Twitter concept to include content from other sources. The comments list a bunch of other options, too.
   - post by pgillin

  ¶ 8:30 AM 1 Comments

  Marketing in the sky: Another reason I hate US Airways So there I am, squashed into the middle seat of a packed US Airways flight from San Francisco to Charlotte. I wasn't supposed to be on that flight, but my scheduled flight had been delayed past my connection time, so that's that.

I hate long flights and I hate middle seats even more, so I try to tune out and focus on my laptop, book or Sudoku puzzle, whatever suits the moment. I'm in my "zone" when the plane's PA system springs to life with...an advertisement!

That's right, US Airways, of which I am a customer paying good cash money, has decided that it will take advantage of my captivity to sell me on the merits of the US Airways Mastercard. I have no choice in the matter. The ad isn't broadcast over the in-flight movie system, where I can choose not to listen, but over the PA system. The same one that' s used to tell us that our seats can be used as a flotation device. There is no getting away from it. For two minutes, I listen to the flight attendant read ad copy in a monotone while another smiling crew member walks down the aisle, waving brochures.

The US airline industry has quite possibly the worst customer relations of any major business category and US Airways is at the bottom of the barrel, for my money. I didn't think it could get any worse until it came up with this stunt. Sure, it was only two minutes of my time, but it's the principle that bothers me.

Airlines are one of the few businesses that have a legal right to physically confine their customers. To take advantage of that confinement for the purpose of delivering an advertisement is just wrong. US Airways, you suck.

Labels: ads, marketing, USAirways

  ¶ 8:45 AM 1 Comments