Want to do some Social Marketing for your brand but don’t know anyone who could code a Facebook App for you? IKEA shows you what to do:
All this with onboard Facebook features. Kind of “Ikea” to do it this way, isn’t it? Creativity has the power …
(On a related note: will Facebook, from now on, suggest they found a picture of me every time someone uploads an image with LACK in the background???)
(On another related note: Who said Social Media can only be used for marketing, not for sales?!)
It’s worthwhile to review friendfeed once in a while. Just found this Marco’s FB stream.
Apart from the somewhat corny sales presentation style of the video, it contains some concrete examples of how social media grew business as opposed to being just a medium for kids. My favorite quote from Morgan Johnston is: “Think of Twitter as the canary in the coal mine”.
On his website, Dustin Curtis writes about Mr.X, a user experience professional who was hired by American Airlines to sort out their substandard web site experience.
Dustin had complained online about AA’s website, and to his surprise, received an e-mail from Mr.X telling him about the challenges of redesigning the site for AA.
This was a mistake however. He got fired. Apparently responding to customers in a transparent way is not company policy. Shows that American Airlines isn’t too much into the whole “transparent company” and “listening to users thing.” Actually, the very fact that they fired him and thought this was gonna be without any repercussions goes to show that AA hasn’t understood that the playing field has changed: the result of the firing is that the twittersphere and blogosphere are now dissing American Airlines, but not only their substandard website, but also about firing people now people also know AA isn’t gonna do anything about it because they fire the people that could change it.
Apparently, the learning is: The social web takes care of their own. Companies that don’t get it will bleed.
Everbody wants to have a microsite where the user can experience the brand. Everybody wants to be on social media platforms. Everybody wants to have an integrated brand experiences. Together with our client Fiat, we created the Fiat Punto Evo Challenge where all of the above smartly work together.
Users have to collect codes and enter them online in their personal dashboard. The dashboard is a navigation tool and content box, that they take with them as they surf through all the social media platform sites.
The codes themselves are to collect from the dealers - where we put the code inside a Fiat Punto Evo, from Bluetooth Posters, from banners, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. Hints of where the codes can be found are delivered to the user via SMS or E-Mail. If you are on the run - you can play the Punto Evo Challenge with the mobile version of the site.
The high number of registrations tells us we are doing something right. So Microsite are not dead, but they have to adjust to new times and be a part of the sites and channels people are using. I guess they can live on afterall.
Sometimes it takes a long time for the simplest ideas to take shape. Flighttrackers have been around for a while, however nothing has been around for social media that had total accuracy (tripit and dopplr do connect to your social profiles, but they don’t do it in real time). In fact, we pitched a similar idea to LH earlier this year.
Finally, Lufthansa launched a service, called MyskyStatus, which allows users to have real-time flight data of their flight being automatically posted to their Twitter and Facebook. Not only does this mimic the already existing human behavior of people tweeting their arrival, it provides more accuracy and also twitters for you when you are still in the air.
What’s more, it doesn’t just work for Lufthansa, but pretty much all airlines, even when you’re booked on a competitor airline. Finally a common sense move based in the understanding that as a brand today, you cannot create proprietary experiences that last very long: you have to do something for people that makes a qualitative difference in their lives, enabled by not limited to your own brand. In fact, by offering this service, it could well be a first mover advantage that positively attaches to the brand image of Lufthansa. Kudos!! Next step: get existing services such as tripit and dopplr to integrate.
Who doesn’t like infographics like this? Women more into social? Makes sense. But it does NOT say much about what women/men do differently only or how many followers they have.
Finally some stats for what we have been telling our clients: “Hey, it’s great you wanna ‘do digital’ now, but don’t brief us with microsites”
Showing that reversing the “Build it and they will come” strategy into a “Build it where they go” strategy is a pretty good idea these days finally got visualized by Aden Hepburn. Brand site traffic down, Social Media site traffic up. However, it is important to note, that most of the brands heavily invest in SM and therefore direct their users to their SM destinations.
I was just about to write a post on brands and using social media for transparency when the David Letterman confession happened. What a perfect example.
Okay, so it must have been a really embarrasing day for David Letterman to admit he had sex with women who worked on his show on national television. But man, chapeau to him and his PR folks for doing just that. To come clean with the whole nation (a nation which is no quite as lax with the sex thing as, say France) and by doing so, catching the extortionist who wanted 2 Million Dollars.
Surely, a decade or two ago, this would have been the end of a career. But honesty goes a long way today, and I immediately thought: What if more brands actually communicated this way? Some brands still think admitting mistakes kills them. But what if they stopped being worried and neurotic about being honest about mistakes they made as corporate citizens or as manufacturers? What if they took failure as an opportunity to shape how they talk about their mistake instead of pretending it never happened and letting people talk about it without acknowledging people’s problems? Letterman couldn’t be sure if he wasn’t gonna be extorted again, so he did the right thing: he shaped the message instead of being a victim. Brand today should do the same. Some have, using social media to listen and respond and being transparent about what they need to improve. Others still pretend it never happened and then have to lamely apologize.
Fact is: today, people will find out about your mistakes and talk about it. They will shape the message, unless you are transparent about it. And you know what? If you’re honest, just like Letterman, you will even get applause, and you won’t become a neurotic brand no one can trust.
For those of you who haven’t seen the Letterman confession:
