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...However, for the most part, this was not a marketing opportunity in which cooler heads prevailed, whether it was the unfortunate racist tweets that followed Wieden + Kennedy’s lovely, multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” on behalf of Coke or JC Penney, which… oh God, where do I start?
Well, here goes. So, about halfway through the game, @adage wondered if @JCPenney had been hacked, or whether the person man- or woman-ing the account was drunk. How else to interpret tweets such as the following: "Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???"
Or the epic: “Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0”...
...The most surprising thing about Outbox shutting down is that it didn’t do so because it couldn’t tackle any of these problems. In fact, the company overcame each and every one. It invented and then built the machines for automated mail opening and digitization. It invented and built the machine for key creation off a photograph. It set up delivery systems and customer service branches and an app in San Francisco. It did it all.For all of Outbox’s shortcomings, it didn’t fail because of the enormous challenges it faced getting things off the groundground.
It failed because it was just not that good of an idea. And therein lies the big lesson for an entrepreneurs studying Outbox to see what went wrong. All the challenges in the world can be overcome, except starting off with a sucky idea that customers don’t care about....
The Appalachian State Mountaineers have just unveiled a new logo and it looks like a deranged Simpsons version of Abe Lincoln. What were they thinking?
On Monday, Appalachian State University unveiled an official new secondary logo for the school's athletic department: a disastrous figure that looks like a Simpsons rendering of Abraham Lincoln’s drunken evil twin. Probably drawn in Microsoft Paint, it shows a grumpy, frowny old man smoking a corncob pipe and with a top hat hiding his bald yellow head. This character’s name is “Victory Yosef,” but his face is the picture of defeat. .
The cardinal rule of conducting business on social media is don’t embarrass your brand. It’s so easy to avoid, after all, given the ample opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn from big companies’ mistakes online.
To help you avoid any missteps, here are five of the worst errors that Corporate America has ever committed on Twitter....
Don't become a Marketing Horror Story Legend. Here are three content marketing stories you can learn from.
With Halloween just around the corner, cable channels are deep into playlists of horror movies. Tune in, if you dare, and see how everything from a cabin on a quiet lake to a doll can go fatally wrong. But for sales and marketing pros, these movies aren’t half as scary as the idea of executing a failed campaign and missing important sales numbers.
This is equally true for Content Selling and Content Marketing programs. Just alike a scary movie, one wrong move and the guillotine comes down on you – or even your whole team. The good news is that we can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid the pitfalls of failed campaigns. Let’s take a look a few content program horror stories and avoid making the same mistakes ourselves....
Marketers including AT&T are getting schooled on the fact that jumping in on the social conversation around national tragedies is not the safest arena for real-time marketing.
A handful of brands are being smacked around today for posting 9/11 commemoration tweets perceived as inane at best and insensitive at worst. AT&T received the brunt of the outrage after tweeting a picture of the beams of light shooting up from the Twin Towers site, captured in the screen of a phone that's poised to take a photo, with the text "Never Forget."The tweet was promptly removed, and AT&T issued an apology....
Tomorrow marks the twelfth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which means it's also the time of year when people get angry at other people for not being sufficiently reverent about the occasion.
We polled our communities on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ asking them why they unfollow brands on each social network. Hundreds of you were quick to respond, sharing your biggest social media pet peeves.
Although there were some common issues across all three networks, there are clear differences too.We’ve made a comparison between the top 3 answers, take a look....
Chipotle was the latest brand to engage in a “fake Twitter hack” marketing stunt, following in the footsteps of MTV and BET a few months ago. The intention behind these stunts is to clearly boost fans and followers for their brands, but, unfortunately, exposes a major flaw in how brand see their customers and how their perception of social is flawed. Furthermore, these types of theatrics deter from the game-change possibilities of how brands and customers can build mutually beneficial and long lasting relationships through these platforms...
Design professional Andy Rutledge may have bitten off more than he could chew by trying to address the “broken design” of news websites.
In a blog post that outlines all the problems with The New York Times’ design, Rutledge makes bold claims like, “It is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity.”
So what he proposes is his own rendition of what a NYT.com section front should look like — and journalists on Twitter, especially from the publication under scrutiny, weren’t feeling it.
And, really, they’re right. It’s hard to take seriously a design that completely ignores the constraints of a typical newspaper, or as Ryan Sholin mentioned, “Boy, it sure is easy to redesign a news site without any regard for advertising, performance, or politics. But so much fun!” Because, really, couldn’t we all whip together something glorious and beautiful if we weren’t constrained by practical needs within the newsroom?...
Fashion company Benetton caved in to pressure from the Vatican and pulled a Photoshopped ad that showed Pope Benedict XVI kissing a leading Islamic imam, the International Business Times reported Thursday.The Vatican responded with furious protests over the image in the company’s Unhate campaign, released Wednesday, which showed the Pope smooching with Egyptian Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb.“This is a grave lack of respect for the Pope,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi fumed.
While it may seem an oxymoron, the problem with marketing is it's full of marketers. Here's why we need to get back to "real" marketing....
I’m a marketer. In marketing, our mission, if you like, is to instill desire.You may see a product you like, but don’t necessarily need. Marketing’s job is to instill enough desire around that product to make you need, or want, it.While there are several facets to marketing – including the afore-mentioned desire, as well as awareness and promotion – the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to increase growth of a brand....
At its simplest, marketing is the hub that holds much of sales, service, PR and more together. And while that’s part of marketing’s biggest strength, it’s also increasingly becoming its biggest weakness....
...What happens to those companies that make mistakes on a much greater scale and cost their company millions in clout or (gulp) dollars? They go down in history as the biggest marketing mistakes of our time. It's hard to move on when you're being cited as the example of what not to do, huh? We looked into the biggest mistakes from many popular brands -- but glossed over any smaller companies because we don't want to hurt the little guy ;-) Keep reading for a little entertainment, and some reminders of what you should never do to ensure you don't repeat these mistakes yourself....
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Attaching a star to your brand is something that advertisers have done since the first rock retailer made a cave drawing of Thutronk the Hunter carrying one of his store’s special stones. And yet, science says that people just don’t care, and that it may have a negative impact on your brand.
New research from the folks at ad analytics service Ace Metrix, who released a similar study in 2011, claims to confirm that celebrified ads do not generally perform as well as ads with unknown actors who hope to someday be celebrities...
The results found that ads without celebrities continue to outscore star-studded ads in all seven facets of the Ace scoring system. It’s not a huge difference, with the overall average score for celeb ads virtually the same as regular non-celeb spots. But Ace says this underscores just how little a difference having a celebrity in your ad makes....
If you manage a brand's Twitter account, chances are you're not interacting as much as you could be. And that's not a good thing.
Simply Measured took a look at 98 of the top global brands on Twitter and found some eye-opening information.
From Mashable: During the final three months of 2013, 98 of Interbrand's top 100 global brands tweeted at least once and the average company tweeted 12 times per day, according to data from Simply Measured, a social media analytics provider. However, the report also found that 54% of these Interbrand companies send less than one @-reply per day....
I’ve collected eight recent social media posts by large companies. Most of these updates are from the last month. To try to pick the abjectly stupidest one would not be easy.
...McElligott was a very smart ad man. Today, many of the social media managers at large and important companies are, by contrast, not very smart ad men. To say that they regularly underestimate their customers’ intelligence would be a great understatement. They seem to believe their customers have the brain power of a baked potato.
I’ve collected eight recent social media posts by large companies. Most of these updates are from the last month. To try to pick the abjectly stupidest one would not be easy. You can go ahead and give it a try, though....
One start-up learned the hard way that negative stunts don't bring positive buzz.ay be the worst marketing idea of 2013: Faking a school shooting to advertise your start-up.
The team at Bevii, a social media app founded by students at the University of North Carolina, learned this hard way on Thursday. They sent a marketing email that tricked their college classmates into believing there was a shooting occuring on campus, reports Valleywag's Sam Biddle."
Chapel Hill Police are investigating a report of innovation which occurred around 10:01 a.m., Monday, October 14," the message began. "The current suspect is Bevii, a mobile, location-based social network only available to select Universities." It didn't sit well with students that the email copied the format of UNC's university-sanctioned alert system, alertcarolina.com. The university has blocked Bevii on its servers, and now it will be hard to downplay the stunt....
...Multiple studies conclude that online reviews can make or break companies. According to one survey, 90% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions. A highly-cited Harvard Business School study from 2011 estimated that a one-star rating increase on Yelp translated to an increase of 5% to 9% in revenues for a restaurant. Cornell researchers have found that a one-star swing in a hotel's online ratings at sites like Travelocity and TripAdvisor is tied to an 11% sway in room rates, on average. Gartner projects that by 2014, between 10% and 15% of social media reviews will be fake.
Nineteen SEO Companies and Small Businesses Entered into Assurances of Discontinuances
The OAG has entered into Assurances of Discontinuance with 19 companies, with penalties ranging from $2500 to just under $100,000. The practice of preparing or disseminating a false or deceptive review that a reasonable consumer would believe to be a neutral, third-party review is a form of false advertising known as "astroturfing." Astroturfing is false and deceptive, and it violates, inter alia, New York Executive Law § 63(12), and New York General Business Law §§ 349 and 350...
Perhaps Kmart panicked after having a nightmare that it was November and had forgotten to put together a holiday ad campaign, or maybe some prankster at Sears changed a Kmart marketing exec’s desk calendar. Why else would the beleaguered retailer start airing a holiday shopping ad while it’s still summer?AdAge reports that Kmart started airing the below ad yesterday in various markets around this country, much of which is still reeling from all the back-to-school sales.Granted, it’s an ad for Kmart’s holiday layaway program so it makes sense that it would be on TV before the huge holiday commercial push, but can’t we at least wait until the autumnal equinox has come and gone before clogging our TVs with hallucinatory images of talking gingerbread men?...
I was lucky to start my social media journey when people were still trying to figure things out. It was a quiet place focused on people and relationships … almost to a fault. The pioneers in this space were radically anti-company, anti-advertising, and anti-measurement. I can remember one Chris Brogan rant in particular when he literally yelled at a corporate audience “This is not about your stupid company.”
Today, it is nearly ALL about your stupid company. The social web is like a carnival midway with shrill hucksters barking at you to come over to their stand.
And here is what most people have forgotten — Business has always been built on relationships, not people yelling at you. Social media used to be an extraordinary opportunity to build those relationships. And, it still can be....
Domino's and Bank of America show that having humans handling social media doesn't mean they'll act human.
Last week, Domino’s stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand’s Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote “Sorry for your bad experience” response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.
And yet the error was actually a mistake made by a human, according to Domino’s. In much the same way as Bank of America screwed up last month by having a social media team sounding a lot like robots, a Domino’s employee mistook the compliment for a complaint. The employee then, it would appear, gave the default response for social media complaints. Domino’s, to its credit, tried to regain its footing by taking it in stride. The rub with brands in social media is that they’ll need humans, who are prone to make mistakes....
For companies that haven't found a humorous voice on social media, the joke's on them. For those that have, here's how they leverage laughs....
Done well, tweeting can even land you a dream job. Here at Fast Company, our executive editor Noah Robischon even has a framed edict on his office wall: “Stop tweeting boring shit.” But stifling yawn-worthy tweets is one thing, composing a one-line comedic gem for the masses is quite another.
We’ve come to expect it from stand-up comedians such as Megan Amram, the spambot @horse_ebooks that posts bits of context-free hilarity randomly pulled from online texts, and formerly unknown Justin Halpern, who rose to fame tweeting the caustic observations of his father from @shitmydadsays. But brands bringing the funny on Twitter? Not so much.
To wit: @ChipotleTweets took to fake hacking its feed to produce a stream of nonsense notes meant to evoke a chaotic mirth similar to that of @horse_ebooks. Though the tactic earned the burrito chain several thousand new followers, Chipotle quickly resumed its regular (not particularly humorous) promotional voice....
Apple's new ads are failing.
Here are the 10 most effective ads of Q2 2013, according to Ace Metrix, a company that measures audience responses to commercials. The No.1 spot was by AT&T, advertising a Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, which can survive being dunked in a fishbowl. Samsung's own ad for the GS4 came in at No.8
Apple wasn't on the list...
...When done well, content marketing is remarkably product agnostic when you really think about it. There is no selling involved because selling runs contrary to the primary purpose of content marketing, which is to become a trusted resource.
By building credibility with an audience as a trustworthy source, brands have been able to later leverage that trust, which can be viewed as a subconscious chip stack. They’ve accumulated with readers at a strategic time to say “We’ve never tried to push any of our products on you, but we’ve got something you really need to see.”
And, that one sales pitch will cost the whole stack of chips. You can’t market your products directly to readers, despite the term “content marketing.” At least not with any real frequency....
Every broadcast from the local news station includes a call to action for people to connect with them on Facebook and use their mobile app. The promise of immediate access to breaking stories is too good to refuse for news and weather junkies.
Huge stories are a rarity in Western North Carolina except for weather related events. We jokingly say that if you don’t like the weather in the mountains to wait a minute and it will change. Over the last few weeks, violent storms have been rolling through the area making an app that gives early warning helpful...
Unfortunately, this mobile campaign failed...
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Catharine Taylor writes the game was a bust and the social marketing fails were even worse!