All posts in Marketing

AMEX’s brilliant Twitter campaign

by Chris M on April 19, 2012 in Business, Marketing, Networking with No comments

Perhaps you remember two excellent Twitter Campaigns I posted about: Mercedes’ campaign which tweeted empty parking pays and Smart Car’s clever Tweet Stream. Well, I’ve got another great Twitter campaign to share with you today.

So this isn’t brand new news as I’ve blogged about American Express’ Twitter Sync, but it’s gaining more and more traction so I thought I should probably feature it again as a point of inspiration. To refresh your memory, the idea is that American Express customers can tweet with hashtags and receive discounts on certain products from 17 different partnering companies. After tweeting, the discount is loaded onto your account immediately (There’s a once off setup to link your cards and such).

“With Twitter, we’ve really hit the trifecta. We have a great platform in Twitter,” said Ed Gilligan, vice chairman of American Express. “We know our cardmembers are engaged in Twitter. We’ve been working with them to think about how can we help them move from conversations to commerce. To turn a tweet into a transaction.”

If you do a search on Twitter for #AmexWholeFoods, you’ll see the incredible movement:

As you can imagine, the campaign is going absolutely crazy, VentureBeat picked up on it and published a lot more detail about the campaign, so if you’re interested in drilling down into the finer details, then take a read of the post by Rocky Agrawal on VentureBeat.

Have you seen an awesome Twitter campaign recently? Please pop it in the comments below!

Make your Facebook Timeline rock in just 3 steps!

by Chris M on April 16, 2012 in Business, Marketing, Networking with 4 Comments

For those of you who have been following my blog recently you’ll know that I’ve been focusing a lot on the Facebook Timeline and have featured a number of companies that are making use of it. But tonight I want to focus on some things to assist you with making your Timeline rock.

For explanation purposes, I’m going to use the Subway Facebook Page as an example:

1. Cover Photograph

The cover photograph is the 851px by 315px image as represented above and is the biggest visual facing element of the new Facebook Timeline. This cover photograph offers brands, products and services huge potential for creating something striking to catch the attention of the audience and hopefully encourage them to like the page. It’s important to do something unique, fresh and funky. Here are some examples of pages I’ve found that I feel look great:

I think at this point it’s also important to note that Facebook do have some guidelines around what is allowed and what isn’t allowed on the cover photograph:

  • No promotions, coupons or advertisements
  • It shouldn’t be primarily text-based or infringe on anyone else’s copyright
  • No price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
  • No contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your page’s About section
  • No references to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
  • No calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

Rather strict and limiting in terms of marketing, but that’s how it goes.

2. Profile Picture

This to me is the most crucial element of the Facebook Timeline because it’s the representation that gets spread high and wide throughout Facebook and thus means that you need to cater for scaling. The profile picture appears on the actual Facebook Page, interactions as well as appearance on mobile devices. This means you have three sizes to cater for and you need to make sure that the image works in all three sizes. Far too often I see people creating profile pictures that work on the Page, but don’t work when they’re a quarter of the size. One thing I’ve found is that avoiding text is probably a good idea, at least if the text isn’t just a few characters long.

A brand that I’ve seen around Facebook a lot recently is Coricraft, a company that deals with home furnishings and production. I really like their profile picture, but when it’s scaled it doesn’t work because the font’s far too small, have a look:

You see what I mean? It just loses its effect when it’s in the smaller form. It’s very difficult to get it right, even logo’s often don’t scale downwards well, but if you work at it I’m sure you’ll find a good mix.

3. Custom Tabs

The final visual element I want to chat about are the tabs that appear on every page, you have control over these tabs and it’s worth taking the time to understand them. The examples of Pages that I’ve used in this post show great usage of tabs, if you click through to the Subway Facebook Page and click on the Freshbuzz tab, you’ll be taken through to a custom templated page with further information on the latest buzz around the Subway brand. You can use these tabs to create a real “website” inside Facebook and allow for far more engagement with users.

The Photos tab cannot be changed, this is a standard feature for pages so remember to upload some incredible photographs.

Setting up your tabs is quite straight forward:

1. Move your mouse over the little down arrow with a number on the right of your tabs and click the mouse. You will see the tabs change.
2. Hover over the tab you want to change and click the little pencil icon that appears followed by clicking “Edit Tab” from the options that appear.
3. Click the Change link in the popup that appears followed by clicking on Change again on the next popup.

That’s it!

One last example belongs to Fun. The group behind We Are Young, they’ve created a tab that links to an online store:

Conclusion

By following just these 3 steps you’ll already be setting yourself apart from your competitors, in most cases at least. Remember that branding your page alone isn’t enough, social networking is about networking, you’ll need to update your page often and engage with those that are interested in your brand.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, please consider clicking here and tweeting it to your friends, it would be appreciated and will encourage me to do more posts like this.

Brilliant Smart Car Twitter Campaign

by Chris M on April 12, 2012 in Cars, Marketing, Networking with 2 Comments

Oh man, how I love coming across incredible social media campaigns and this time all credit goes to Smart Car Argentina for this super viral Twitter campaign.

Head on over to https://twitter.com/#!/smartArg and hold down the ‘J’ key on your keyboard and see what happens .. that.is.awesome.

If you’re lazy, here’s a video:

I love it! They’ve got 1,445 followers at the time I wrote this post, it’ll be interesting to see how that increases as this becomes strikingly viral.

Jason Fried on Marketing by Sharing

by Chris M on April 7, 2012 in Guru's, Marketing, Video with No comments

This is an awesome talk by Jason Fried of 37 Signals, worth the watch/listen:

Donate blood with a torrent?

by Chris M on April 4, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with No comments

Hah! Blood donation plays such an important part in society and those people who donate blood deserve a lot of respect. I’m too scared of needles and unfortunately I can’t look past myself to do it, so instead I have to just hang my head in shame, but support those who do. Enough about me, here’s a really awesome campaign I came across this evening:

A Blood Transfusion Service in Russia hired a really smart agency to come up with this campaign, take a watch:

I’d love to hear what you think about it?

Twitter for Small Business

by Chris M on March 27, 2012 in Business, Marketing, Networking with No comments

Introducing Promoted Products for Small Business. Twitter helps you reach more of the right people at the right time.

Learn more at https://ads.twitter.com/amex/

Incredible banner advertising

by Chris M on March 26, 2012 in Marketing with No comments

Haha, we all know how difficult it is to create a banner advertising campaign that attracts clicks, so what do you do to get clicks? Create a smart phone application that allows you to fly an object around a website? Hell yes!

Check this out for innovation:

Buy product with Social Media

by Chris M on March 25, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with No comments

Another brilliant social media activation involves a chocolate store in Denmark. The concept is really simple and it’s always these simple ideas that work the best. So, when you go to buy chocolate, instead of paying with money, you pay with social media in this case, by logging into your Facebook account and sending a promise to someone else’s profile.

I really hope we start seeing this sort of thing in South Africa, implementation is so simple, all you need is a couple iPads and a product that obviously isn’t too expensive. Or, you just do it for a set amount of time to avoid being crippled; the pure viral-nature of this would drive so much awareness to your company it would be impossible to measure against most other forms of advertising.

Watch the video:

One of the local ADSL providers could really do something cool here .. LIKE us and receive a free gig of bandwidth, for example :)

A Pinterest marketing campaign by Kotex

by Chris M on March 24, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with No comments

It’s really awesome to see agencies making use of new social networks, and new features that social networks are rolling out. Just a couple days ago I talked about a campaign idea for the new Facebook cover photographs, and although Facebook’s terms and conditions make this difficult, a clever team could find a way around it to avoid direct and hard marketing, just takes thinking outside the box, which is what marketing agencies are meant to be doing anyway.

Anyway, this is a new campaign by Kotex, whereby they engaged influencial women to promote a brand. I’m impressed, they’re the first to use Pinterest to this level and it’s definitely triggering many ideas in my mind – what a perfect social network for any e-commerce shop to utilize.

Take a watch, be inspired:

How Important Is Blogging To Your Social Media Strategy?

by Alessio on March 8, 2012 in Internet, Marketing, Networking with 4 Comments

Are you using social media to market your company or brand? Are you using social media to generate leads for your business?

I’ll bet that while it works to a degree, it leaves much to be desired. Firstly, while social media is a fantastic tool, it’s pretty useless unless we know how to use it effectively and properly. Social media is all about communicating with prospective and current clients.

By communicating with clients, we’re building relationships with them. Sales has become about building strong relationships and nurturing them. In order to win clients over, they also need to feel that they can trust us. Building trust is not so easy. Our customers need to feel that they are in safe and capable hands.

This brings me to the this post’s topic. How much trust can we gain within 140 characters? Or from a Facebook update? Quite a bit actually. There are companies out there that are getting social media right. Woolworths, First National Bank and Afrihost come to mind. These companies have a strong social media presence and deliver fantastic customer service with social media.

However, if you’re starting out and you aren’t an established company with a substantial following, you are going to have to start somewhere. A blog is that somewhere. Here’s why. Not many people may know you yet. Sure, you have a website and it has all your details on it. So what? You’re just another company out there.

People do business with people. People write blogs. Blogs give insights into companies that business websites do not. Blogs reveal your human side. Your blog could explain how you manufacture your products, where they are sourced and how you give back to the community. They can reveal the inspiration to your latest design.

The nice thing that I like about blogs is the promotion of interaction. Readers can leave a comment, contributing conversation around your post, and ultimately around your business, company or product. In fact, it can create quite a stir about you too.

Writing about a specific topic helps teach people about that topic. The secret here is that you don’t need to know everything about that topic. You don’t need to be a guru. You just need to know it and understand it. You need to be able to explain it to people who know nothing about it and help them comprehend it. To them, you will be the expert. You will be the go-to person. The person that took the time to help. In fact, the more you actually help someone, the more successful you will be.

Think about it. In this day and age, we are marketing and selling nearly everything. Including ourselves. Imagine trying to sell a cellphone to somebody. You can tell them all the features, but how will it benefit them specifically? You’re not selling this cellphone to this person. You’re helping them buy it. You’re making it easier for them and yourself.

While it may not be the easiest thing to do within a tweet or a Facebook update, a blog certainly is the right platform to help people and build your credibility. Social media can now be used properly as a means to send traffic to your blog, as well as providing real time customer care. With social media, you direct people to your useful content and if your content is any good, and it must be, your readers will share your content with their friends and followers via their social networks.

Installing the appropriate plugins on a blog will allow you visitors to share your useful content that much easier. A rule to remember though, is that social media is a medium of two way communication, not only one way self promotion. Share links about your industry and the people or topics that inspire you. Your message should be a well balanced one, always promoting conversation.

What do you think? Is a blog essential to a social media strategy or not?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →