Tag: Facebook
WellPoint Commits to Facebook With Fitness Tracker | Digital – Advertising Age
Insurance Giant WellPoint Commits to Facebook With Fitness Tracker
Timehop Takes You Back To The Future at SXSW 2012
Any company that shows up to SXSW with a spot-on Delorean replica from Back To The Future to promote their product gets my full respect and attention. Timehop’s Delorean had its Flux Capicitor pumping, a hoverboard in the passenger seat, and it’s modified blender ready for plutonium fueling. The only thing they could have done to take the stunt further was to hire Christopher Lloyd or Michael J. Fox to show up in costume.
Timehop’s product allows you to go back in time and see what you did exactly one year ago across several social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram. Users receive a daily email delivering “the ultimate personal history experience.” Based in New York City, Timehop was created by Jonathan Wegener & Benny Wong at Foursquare’s first ever Hackathon in February 2011. Visit http://timehop.com/ for more info.
Social media & the unbearable loneliness of being
It’s the security lines at airports that make me feel most alone in the world.
All that patting down, removing items from my person and from my belongings… For those few minutes where you shamble through the security scanner, barefoot, divested, unconnected, surrounded by strangers, and observed by cameras and armed security officers, I feel totally, and helplessly alone.
I’ll come back to that in a moment. But first–have you looked at the growth of social marketing activity lately? Exponential growth, faster than any other medium. It took television 30 years to reach an audience of 50 million people; Facebook did it in just two. Over 95% of Generation Y use social media.
The question that fascinates me is simply, “Why?â€
Continue reading “Social media & the unbearable loneliness of being”
8 strategies for reaching eco-minded customers
The green marketing space is exploding with new opportunities for brands to make their mark. And it’s no surprise why: According to a study released by Strategic Oxygen, GCI Group and Cohn & Wolfe more than 70 percent of global respondents said they “probably†or “definitely†would increase their preference for a brand’s green products if they were convinced of the positive impact on the environment and business. Almost 60% said they would expect to pay a premium for green products.
Brands that ignore the move towards greener practices (or exaggerate their sustainability efforts) do so at their own peril. Increasing numbers of watch dog sites such as the “Green Washing Index†evaluate brands’ environmental marketing campaigns for their authenticity.
But how exactly can brands participate in the “green†conversation online, showcase their sustainable efforts and products, and drive traffic to their online sites and physical stores in this space? Continue reading “8 strategies for reaching eco-minded customers”
Still think social media is a fad?
When clients visit the Lab, they always want to know:Â But what does social media mean to me? And ultimately, they want what Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character asks of Jerry Maguire.
Brands want to know they can prove their investment on social media platforms is a worthy one. They want to know it will reach wide and far–and will be as effective as television and print campaigns used to be. They want ROI, which means somehow, social media will have to prove it can not only connect people, but draw the dotted line to the cash register. They want to know it won’t backfire (we do our best to show how social media can save the day in a PR nightmare, but we also tell them that all content is viral content, for better or worse).
As new media advocates, it’s hard to know that brands MUST play in this space without being able to give them a pile of case studies and years of hard data to go on that show a direct connection to the purchase funnel. Continue reading “Still think social media is a fad?”
Facebook marketing boot camp
This month the Lab attended a kind of Facebook marketing boot camp, where members of the Facebook team guided us on best practices for integrating Facebook within brand marketing plans. The opportunity is much larger then capturing a portion of the 250 million Facebook users as customers; it’s also a prospect for new ways to be innovative in our marketing.
Most of the conversation of the day centered around two ways you can use Facebook to market your brand: engagement ads and Facebook pages. But the team did talk a bit about what’s new on the popular site. For instance, they are starting to put demographic and geographic targeting into action: Targeting keywords from status updates and users birthdays are new features.
Searching for Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson left the offline world last week forever, but his online presence has exploded into the infinite, and very much alive, abyss.
Much of the media has commented on the passing of Michael Jackson and the social media shock waves that jolted through the online hemisphere. Jackson had a profound effect on people all over the world. His passing left a void in the industry, but it also brought a new type of influence and swarm to the internet that hasn’t occurred with this magnitude before. This is because the last worldwide sensation to pass was probably Princess Diana, who died August 31, 1997–well before the Internet waves of influence were formed in a massive way. Continue reading “Searching for Michael Jackson”
Facebook’s creepy friend suggestions
Recently, I began to notice that Facebook’s friend suggestions were increasingly accurate, and increasingly far-fetched.
At first, it seemed innocent enough. My husband’s aunt appeared on my “Suggestions/Add as a Friend” sidebar. While I like Patty and was happy to friend her, I thought it was strange given 1) I’ve never uploaded my email list to Facebook, or given it permission to do so, 2) I’m not connected to any of my husband’s family or friends on any social network, and my husband has refused to join any social network except for one, and there he uses a fake identity and is not connected to anyone remotely connected to his aunt 3) My privacy settings are tight and in theory, I can’t be found if you’re not my friend.
At first I thought, well, we do share the same last name, so I figured perhaps Facebook was suggesting her for that reason. Over the next few days though, I began to mull this logic. Facebook had never suggested a friend based on last name before, and how would Facebook know which person with that last name to suggest? And what about people with the last name “Smith” – that wouldn’t be very effective.
Then, it happened again. This time, Facebook suggested my mother’s former boss. Continue reading “Facebook’s creepy friend suggestions”
Why Twitter has not jumped the shark
If I had a nickel for everytime someone asked me What is hot right now? I’d be twittering off my yacht in the Côte d’Azur.
In a recent meeting with some of my fellow digerati we were pitching ideas to get a client excited about what new’s in the media landscape and all of them declared, Twitter is dead…it’s over. But I think there’s plenty of life left in our friend Twitter.
We are at an interesting crossroads with Twitter, Facebook and a lot of other overly hyped platforms. In many cases, it’s not about the solution itself but about how people are leveraging the data and behavior surrounding that platform and hence, their API’s (application programming interfaces – see my recent article on using APIs for content delivery). Continue reading “Why Twitter has not jumped the shark”
