I love the E*Trade baby and am so jazzed to see him back!
And not only will he be returing to the Super Bowl, but the company is wisely stretching its $3 million as far as it possibly can with a YouTube page, a Twitter account and a Facebook effort.
E*Trade says that its 2008 Super Bowl ads were viewed more than 5 million times online, and there were 5 million searches for the ads after the game. Social media tracker Collective Intellect also claimed that E*Trade’s spots produced the most positive social media sentiment of any game ads. Check it! Super_Bowl Super_Bowl_advertising ETrade ETrade_baby Super_Bowl
My latest experiment is Twitter. I’m a bit late to the game according to some, but better to “tweet” late than never (I think).
Twitter describes itself as a conversation, a service for people to “communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”
The “what are you doing?” element sounds a lot like Facebook’s “Stephanie Fierman is…” status question, but thankfully more people seem to ignore that forced piece of organization on Twitter and just say whatever they want to say. And unlike Facebook, Twitter only gives you 140 characters (including spaces) to get your thought out. Great for loooong talkers like me.
Here are the basics of Twitter: You sign up at www.twitter.com. Then you cruise for friends. When you find one, go to her Twitter page www.twitter.com@name and “follow” her. Following means that all of her updates will land on your Twitter homepage. The easy way to find interesting people to follow is to snoop around your friends’ pages. Check their lists: who’s following your friend and whom is your friend following? From there, it’s simple to click over to a person’s page and decide to “follow” them, as well. Your home page keeps score: how many people are following you (in other words, how many people are interested enough in what you have to say to have your “tweets” gum up their home pages every day) and how many you are following.
I’m still learning Twitter etiquette, but it’s clear that too terrible an imbalance between your Follows and Following is uncouth: tres tacky to spam lots of people (by asking them to follow you), and equally tacky to be a freeloader who never comments yourself but just follows what others have to say. 2-3 tweets per day seem to be within the acceptable range.
Like Facebook, there are people who unfortunately believe that “Getting on plane now” and “Wow, it’s cold in New York” deserve space on your home page (did I mention you can “unfollow” people, too?). But I’ve found many to have useful insights on politics, marketing, business and other topics that I enjoy perusing, and I try to contribute every day. As a jumpstart, here is Guy Kawasaki‘s post on how to get the most out of Twitter. You can also search Twitter at search.twitter.com to see if anyone is talking about a topic of particular importance to you.
So try it! Sign up and follow me at www.twitter.com/stephfierman. Give the service a little time to blossom into something useful. It is true that we’re all faced with information overload, but a lot of that information is entirely useless. If you can use Twitter in a surgical way to enrich your understanding and “tune in” to people you respect, I consider it a net gain.
If you’re like me, you don’t need external affirmation or reinforcement of your decisions all the time… but sometimes is nice!
Back in June, I told you about The Consumerist, a wonderful online community and blog owned by Gawker. I raved about its informative stories about good and bad customer service experiences (“Shoppers Bite Back”), along with all the corporate phone numbers, addresses, etc. you frequently wish you had at your fingertips. The site also does a great job for its 1.8 million readers of promoting great deals and discounts.
Now comes the affirmation I mentioned: Consumer Union has just purchased The Consumerist! Jim Guest, President and CEO of Consumers Union, says that the Consumerist community’s passion for helping consumers shop in a “fair, safe and just marketplace” will add exponentially to his company’s relevance and reach. It will also bring younger readers into the Consumer Reports fold.
And for The Consumerist and Gawker: WOW. The site’s new owner knows a thing or two about online marketing and revenue generation. With 3.3 million loyal, paying readers, ConsumerReports.org is the largest paid-subscriber website in the world.
A good deal all around! Let’s just hope that Consumerist readers will continue to have access to its content free of charge… with some heavy-duty Consumer Reports cross-sell pitches thrown in, of course. Consumers UnionConsumer Reportsconsumerreports.orgThe Consumerist Consumers Union Buys Consumerist
* Grand Prize – John McCain’s Presidential campaign
* Overly confident LifeLock CEO brags about his company’s identity theft protection service by publishing his own social security number – and gets his identity stolen.
I spotted two articles today reporting that moms are postponing or canceling plans to buy themselves things so that they can treat their kids this holiday season. 61% of moms plan to shop less for themselves this year vs. 56% of all women and 45% of men (No comment on that last statistic).
What a fabulous opportunity for clever marketers! Celebrate the mom! I’m riffing here:
* Clothing stores, department stores, etc. could have momathons. A mom would have to sign up in advance (with email address), naming all her kids and their ages, maybe one thing they wish the could buy themselves and then choose an hour or whatever during which moms got special discounts, BOGO, GWP, whatever.
* Brands and retailers, let’s say Pampers (P&G) and Gymboree, could hold contests, sweepstakes, giveaways – do something BIG! – to proclaim the wonderfulness of moms. And an international company like a P&G or Coke or Kraft could create a worldwide event.
* Spas, hair salons, nail parlors – ‘nuf said.
Get moms interacting with you now and long after the holiday is over. My recommendations for stores that are seeing a lot of returns is relevant here: if you’re going to give discounts or coupons, for example, give one for the holidays and one that activates, say, in February 09.
Women are responsible for over 80% of household purchases! Momfluentials are everywhere! 89% of moms use the Internet at least twice a day, and 35% of moms spend 3 or more hours online. 70% use search engines before making an online purchase. Yoo-hoo, Yahoo!78% of mom bloggers review products and 96% of online moms value these bloggers’ recommendations (and moms have higher word of mouth credibility than all women). Moms purchase appliances at twice the rate of the general population. Dear Electrolux: shift a little of that Kelly Ripa cash into a big mom idea. Moms love technology just as much as the rest of us? Verizon Wireless: can you hear me now? Do a cool mom promo!
Yes, it seems like it could be Mother’s Day in December for great brands out there… McDonald’s has the Happy Meal – why not a Harried Mom meal for the women running around shopping for the holidays while the kids are in school? And local shops and restaurants could get in on the act, too.
Have you ever emailed someone at 1am and regretted it later? Consider poor Jerry Maguire. If the movie was made today, surely Jerry would have sent his manifesto by email in the middle of the night. And you just know that any missive starting with “It’s 1 AM and this might be the bad pizza I had earlier talking, but I believe I have something to say…” should not be sent.
Now there’s hope.
Google has launched a little feature called Mail Goggles that tries to protect you from yourself, late at night, when you’re drunk or otherwise under the influence and should therefore be nowhere near a keyboard. You set the time range during which you want the feature to be active and then – if you try to send an email during that period – Mail Goggles forces you to answer 5 math questions before the message can be sent.
If you answer such mind-benders as ”11-2=?” wrong or you’re too slow, all you get is a note saying “Water and bed for you.” No email crime committed, no sentence before the proverbial judge later.
Ars Technica has called it “a breathalyzer test for your Gmail.”I think this is great. Now if they could only figure out how to deposit the same kind of feature on everyone’s work email…Mail Goggles
Wednesday November 05th 2008, 12:29 pm
Filed under: blogs
Alan Wolkthinks it’s “amusing” to hear people “react in horror and utter amazement” to McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin. He says that it’s a sympton of “Nascar blindness,” which is essentially the affliction of many to assume that everyone shares their own beliefs and values.
I think that’s a knock on Nascar.
Fortunately, Wolk says that the cure is “listening” – so here we go:
- “They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan.”
- [The Vice President is] “in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better”
- “Dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time.”
It seems possible that the bottled water phenomenon is finally losing steam.
Brand Keys recently conducted a survey of more than 25,000 consumers indicating that the most important attribute sought by an individual buying bottled water is “value.” As a marketing executive and student of consumer behavior for over 20 years, I do not necessarily believe this. Convenience and – for the higher-end brands such as Voss and Fiji - status have both reigned as key purchase drivers since bottled water took off in the 1990s. While 25% of the bottled water sold in the United States is re-processed tap water (including the two largest brands, Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani), bottled water has been sold as everything from a healthy choice to a fashion accessory. So I absolutely do not believe that “value” is historically a top criterion for purchase.
I don’t think that consumers are lying. I think that the prism of mores through which individuals now view bottled water has fundamental changed, based primarily on the recession and, secondarily, the green movement. Efforts such as Mark DiMassimo‘s and Eric Yaverbaum‘s Tappening have done a tremendous job of not only pointing out the absurdity of bottled water (“Being charged for water is like being charged for gravity,” says Dimassimo), but also the profound environmental waste and damage associated with its consumption. The pictures accompanying this post are from Tappening’s first ad campaign.
So how have manufacturers reacted? Pepsi and Coke are discounting like crazy and refocusing their efforts on “enhanced water” such as SoBe Life Water and sugary VitaminWater, respectively. While these companies’ bottled water sales dried up in the first half of 2008, then enhanced water category grew by 18.4%.
Will bottled water sales come back? Tappening‘s Dimassimo says no, that a cultural shift has taken hold just as price sensitivity is reaching its highest point: the “perfect storm,” as it were, for those trying to discourage bottled water sales. “Bottled water is… environmental wastefulness… and it’s caught in the same storm as Starbucks” he says. ” It felt good to be a little extravagant a few years ago. Now it doesn’t feel good to waste money.”
Facebook appears to be selling virtual gifts like crazy.
What’s a virtual gift?It’s an image of something (a birthday cake, a beer, a rose, a bottle of champagne) that you can send to a fellow Facebooker for his or her birthday, new job or… just because.The image is then posted to the recipient’s Facebook profile, and the gift giver can specify whether her name and message are visible to the public or only to the recipient.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is now estimating that 10% of Facebook’s revenue ($35 million) comes from the sale of these virtual gifts.In assessing what seems to sell the best, Lightspeed says that holiday-themed gifts are a bonanza in November and December and account for 40% of the year’s sales.They have also observed that 80% of all sales are made off the first visible page of gifts.
I suppose none of this should be a huge surprise:
At a price of $1 for something that is delivered instantly, it’s a nice ADD-like way to wish someone a happy birthday, or an even easier way to suck up to someone you’ve neglected.
Holidays – big pain.Very few people have the time or energy to send (real) cards anymore.And, frankly, after factoring in the cost of a good card and the stamp, $1 isn’t too bad.
We ride in herds.Wisdom of crowds, and all that.If it’s not on the first result page of Google – or on the first page of Facebook virtual gifts – forget it.
$35 million for tiny images that cost Facebook essentially zero is impressive.I believe I’ve given Facebook $20-30 myself for the privilege of sending little blue robots and flowers now and then.
If you had a window into a loony bin, it could not be more entertaining than this show. And Jeff Lewis? That’s a lot of pressure to deliver a latte at exactly 140 degrees. And to make sure there are precisely six bottles of French Vanilla CoffeeMate in the fridge - with all the labels facing forward.
But before we jump all over poor Jeff, let’s face it: who hasn’t asked their assistant to combine two tins of breath mints into one!?!
Well it had to happen sometime. With marketers transfixed by the concept of word of mouth, some finance person somewhere was bound to ask, “But what the heck is all that blahblahblah worth??”
BzzAgent – one of the first companies in the WOM with any kind of brand recognition – has put a stake in the ground, declaring that conversation with one of its “agents” should be valued at $.50. They got there by dividing total sales (that can be tied back to BzzAgent’s efforts) by the number of conversations.
I think that’s a little aggressive – and possibly silly. Sales are affected by so many variables, and not all BzzAgents (or targeted consumers) are created equal. In addition, I doubt if anyone has compared the financial impact of a conversation initiated and extended by paid agents vs. one that takes off on its own.
If asked, I would resist trying to value WOM just yet (and I’ve been asked, and I did indeed resist!). If anything, I would agree with a fellow member of The CMO Club, Deb Eastman of Satmetrix, the company that created the Net Promoter score.
Eastman and her company believe the score (which gauges how many consumers would recommend the product toa friend) is a better indicator of the value of “pure word of mouth” in general, and most certainly when compared to paying people to deliver your message. net promoter scorebzzagentsatmetrixwomma
And speaking of www.consumerist.com, I just read about a New York event put together by The Climate Group out of London that “vetted solutions that actually do result in both CO2 and dollar savings for everyday people.”
The article I spotted mentioned that several brands were eager to be (voluntarily) involved in order to show their clima-worthiness, including Dell, Chase and Target. There were a bunch of video screens in Times Square, Dell laptops you could use to check out www.together.com (the campaign was called “Together”) and so on.
So the www.consumerist.com connection is… Wouldn’t it be fantastic if one website built its credibility as THE source for determining whether a company is really green or not? You could go to the site, type in any company’s name and the site would present its “Green Sheet” on the company’s activities, charitable donations to environmental causes (if any), its estimated CO2 impact in, say, the last 25 years and an overall rating on a scale of 1 to 10. The site would also present a curated selection of articles and news about that company related to its environmental impact.
www.treehugger.com is the closest I can think of – here is what comes up when I typed “General Motors” into the site’s search box – but the site doesn’t pull everything together (as in my Green Sheet idea) nor is it comprehensive.
It’s an interesting thought: would you pay a subscription fee for a site that was truly sort of the “Consumer Reports of environmentalism?” The one place you would know you could visit for the right amount of information on any company you could imagine? I think I would. climate changewww.together.com
Perhaps you’ve heard that Rachael Ray was responsible for 9-11, or that her recipes are actually written in code, hidden messages of love to terrorists everywhere. Or maybe she should just fire her stylist.
Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts made a silly story even sillier by pulling a Web ad showing Rachael Ray wearing a scarf and hawking iced coffee. This, after a Fox News commentator observed that the scarf Ray is wearing looks like a kiffiyeh, a traditional Middle Eastern headdress ”popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos.” The story began on the Web, when blogger Pam Geller posted an item titled “Rachel [sic] Ray: Dunkin’ Donuts Jihad Tool.” Once it hit the mainstream airwaves, Gershom Gorenberg of The Huffington Post wondered to himself whether he’d missed the fact that “The Onion ha[d] bought out ABC’s news division.” The story is that bizarre. I always knew in my heart that paisley was dangerous, but the real danger is that Dunkin’ Donuts caved.
Does anyone believe that big, bad Annie Leibovitz forced/tricked/cajoled/hypnotized Miley Cyrus into posing seemingly without a shirt on? I hope not.
There are two possibilities here, in my opinion:
(1) This was a considered effort on the part of the Cyrus family to begin marketing Miley – have someone even be able to envision Miley – as an adult performer. If this is the case, it was probably more trouble than it was worth, based on the fact that Miley is frequently seen looking, uh, older. Additionally, one must wonder about the judgments made on the set, as I think this photo with her dad is a lot creepier than the one causing all the brouhaha.
Like any product, the handlers of child stars eventually begin to struggle to keep their product relevant and current – no one wants to be a child star has-been (or worse), or let the gravy train grind to a halt. Unfortunately, things don’t always go your way.
(2) Some experienced media observers think that it just sort of happened. That there’s no dramatic story here at all. You’re getting your photo taken by the Annie Liebowitz! She’s an artiste! If she says do a one-handed cartwheel (or look like I’m half-naked) I’m gonna do it! Then you go home, sober up and suddenly Disney’s holding on Line 2.
Either way, it seems that marketers forget the lessons of the past. What does America love more than anything else? Contrition. An apology. And sometimes, these are actually quite sincere (think Tylenol) and the “product” is embraced even more intensely than before. This is not only a “teachable” moment that Miley could deliver on a silver platter to parents, but she can come out and make a big deal out of this being a mistake.
The problem is not Vanity Fair – it’s that anything Miley might do or say regarding this one photo shoot looks hollow in the face of her own, voluntary behavior. The Cyrus family and Disney have a tremendous franchise here. But no one, really, has figured out how to turn child stars into automatons that don’t do what all their friends do: that is, act stupid for a while and then grow up. DisneyDisney ChannelVanity FairMiley CyrusBilly Ray Cyrus
Lobbycon. barcamp. SXSW. Foo Camp.
How many of these terms do you know? If you’re too busy prepping your slide presentation for that conference coming up, you may have a problem.
Web 2.0 has come to the conference circuit, and it’s crazy! Gone are the days when you sit, they present. You pay, and sit some more, someone else talks. You write your grocery list while – you get the picture. Web 2.0 tools including Meebo, Twitter, Utterz, the reliable old chat room, Flickr and a host of other sites are transforming audiences into event participants – or disrupting events entirely.
Witness the unfortunate, widely-covered case of BusinessWeek‘s Sarah Lacy interviewing Mark Zuckerburg at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) on topics the audience decided were booor-ingggg. Many began twittering, and the angst in the room built to the point of mutual hostility between Lacy and audience members who began hollering (or worse) once the microphone was opened to the floor.
At a lobbycon, people show up to a conference without paying and mingle with speakers, organizers and fellow enthusiasts in the lobby for free. That’s how we get the most of these things anyway, right? And back at SXSW, the line for the Google party became so long that tech bloggers shot video of the line and started twittering they were going to set up a separate party down the street at a bar. Within 30 minutes, 100 people had arrived.
And then there’s the un-conference, where people show up and determine the agenda on the spot. A group might determine areas of key interest, vote on them and those able to present do so. The two most notable un-conferences thus far are Foo Camp and barcamp.
Personally, whether I’m on the dais or sitting there in the dark, I’m excited. If I’m presenting and can get some (polite?) signals to head in another direction, great. And if I’m in the audience and can help transform a tedious session, fantastic. This is just the beginning, but I’d say that the overall effect at tech-savvy conferences will be more value (and entertainment) for your conference dollar. And presenters had better bring their A game, or be prepared for some virtual tomato throwing. sxswlobbyconbar campfoo camprobert scobletwittermeeboflickrweb 2.0
“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again… It’s happened four or five times.”
So says the blogger Matt Buchanan‘s boss in yesterday’s popularNew York Timesarticle “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” Six people have sent this article to me in the past 24 hours, including my mother.
It’s one of the first pieces I’ve seen on the “lifestyle” of the contemporary blogger, but then again, this is still a very new way to pass one’s time and/or make a living. It’s also a new way to drop dead from stress, as the article tragically explains. Two bloggers have died since December from heart attacks and Om Malik, the prolific founder of techy GigaOm, survived a heart attack over the holidays.
If I had to sum up the article, I would say that the total and utter lack of boundaries that once existed and protected our professional lives have caused such a fundamental breakdown in external and internal expectations that life has become work, and work – life. Not so long ago, you couldn’t work all the time even if you’d wanted to: there was a physical workplace to which one traveled that was only accessible at certain times, work hours were tied to mores and productivity, the ability to communicate (fax, copier, typewriter, computer…) was tied to the office environment, and so on.What appears to happen when the shackles are taken off is that we run in circles all day and all night long until we keel over.
It’s complicated, too, by this idea of “even if we’d wanted to”: generations of people worked to survive without particularly liking their vocation. Many still do. What happens when you actually enjoy your work, your pay is directly tied to production and you can work anytime from anywhere? Who’s responsible for setting healthy limits – for saying that loving what you do is only great unless it envelops your life and the life of your family and then kills you?
Personally, I have observed that writing two blogs has changed my level of awareness. Particularly since I began this daily blog, I am always thinking about my next post even when I’m not thinking about it, if you know what I mean. If a blog I write for fun (with a definition of “daily” that only covers weekdays) has had this impact, I don’t want to think about how quickly I could become a member of this stress-by-blogging club.
If I were a PhD writing a thesis, this would be fertile, untilled ground related to any number of subjects including sociology and anthropology, psychology, technology, communication and economics and business. As a marketer and student of consumerism, it makes me think about how products and services – and the method of attaining them – will evolve to accommodate a 24-hour-a-day work clock lived by people who no longer divide their personal and professional lives. I have no doubt that Mr. Buchanan’s admission that he stays awake by mixing a protein supplement into his coffee (bleck!) has people everywhere trying to think up the next “instant bloggy booster.” Hopefully, a longer-term equilibrium will develop within the professional blogging community, as well. blogsbloggingom malikdeath by blogging
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