Deviate From The Norm
Relaying the best of the interweb, complimented with flares of sarcasm and a dash of witty banter.
By Nicole Fletcher
With the insane explosion of the social sphere over the last year, football and marketing fans alike woke up Sunday morning with lofty expectations for Super Bowl XLV. Like little kids on Christmas morning, many wondered what social wonder would reveal itself during the biggest televised event of the year, or ever as was the case. The hype, I must say, was not worth the wait..not that there was a wait…
Brands including Volvo, Doritos and a few others released their ads days before the Super Bowl and while I understand why, they killed the fun anticipation of the unveil. I’m all for hype, fan interaction, video views etc, but instead of just spilling the marbles all at once, couldn’t they have figured out another way to build the excitement? A campaign or a plan perhaps? Apparently not.
As consumers, socially savvy professionals and beer drinking Americans we still expected a creative and colorful call to action, thereby driving traffic to social networks, increasing consumer interaction and basically boggling our minds. Needless to say, this Social Super Bowl included nothing more than the banal facebook url, twitter icon and social buying commercials from sites like Groupon and Living Social. What was most surprising to me though is that people were actually impressed by this lackluster icon inclusion. I was not. I think the corporate brands copped out and frankly, it just seemed lazy, haphazard and not well planned out.
Here are some fun stats to illustrate my point. According to Nielsen, a record breaking 111 million Americans sat down Sunday night to take in the game. The second spot goes to last year’s Super Bowl with 106.5 million viewers while M*A*S*H rocked the number one spot before then with 160 million. 30 second time slots top off at $3 million, or $100,000 per second. Yea. Digest that for a moment.
Now, onto more stats…..
As written on the Jacob Tyler Creative Blog
People always ask me what they should do regarding social media and their business. In my professional opinion, this loaded question cannot be answered on the fly, let alone without doing a solid amount of research. That being said, asking is the first step and so I will answer it. Here is a quick list of what your business MUST be doing to avoid being left in the antisocial dust of yesteryear. Mind you, this list is the BARE MINIMUM so please act accordingly.
1. Create a Facebook fan page and Twitter account and use them. Keep them updated with fresh, relevant content and bring in your personal network for growth. Ask your community what they want to hear about and then provide them with that information. Talk to them, respond to them and do it in a timely manner…not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Make time for these tools - you’ll be glad you did.
2. Install social network links on your website. Your business website should ABSOLUTELY have social links (preferably in the top right corner). Include Facebook and Twitter to be sure, then comes YouTube, Yelp. LinkedIn and Flickr to name a few. Make sure the links work – broken links don’t do anyone any good.
3. Write blog posts. Blog posts don’t have to be perfect or long or serious. They can be fun and short and funny and informative. Post often (but make sure you’re creating good, original, fresh content) and link key phrases (that pertain to your business) back to relevant pages on your website. This does wonders for your search engine optimization and counts as a link back to your website (even though it’s from your own blog). Also post these articles to your social networks. Feel free to tweet your blog post a number of times but be careful with excessive posting on Facebook – people tend to get annoyed with anyone takes over their newsfeed.
4. If you’re a restaurant or other service business, claim your business pages on review sites like Metromix, Citigrid and Google places. Also claim your venues on geo-location sites like Yelp, Foursqare, Facebook Places, SCVNGR, Gowalla, the list goes on. Run specials (start with foursquare – it’s the easiest in my opinion) and track your conversion. It’s easy and it’s free. People are talking about you whether you’re watching or not- why turn a blind eye to such a valuable tool?
These in short, are the BARE ESSENTIALS to social media. To clarify, once you have these set up, you are far from striking social media gold – so don’t celebrate just yet. That being said, if what I’m talking about sounds like jibberish, shoot me an email (nicole@jacobtyler.com) and I’d be happy to get you going. If you have a solid grasp on the aforementioned points and you thought you were sitting pretty, shoot me an email as well. We’ll take the next step together as the sky is the limit when it comes to being social.
In watching a recording of a social media conference, I learned some pretty interesting things about Oreo’s social standpoint and some facts that may very well blow your socks off.
This conference took place on August 11, 2010 – the speaker began by expressing her feigned annoyance in that while she started putting together the presentation a few weeks earlier, she was forced to consistently edit it as a result of Oreo’s staggering fan growth. Okay, I thought, I get it. Oreo wants their information to be the most recent, the most impressive, they want to report the biggest numbers possible. Then she noted a fan increase of 200,000 … overnight. After picking my jaw up off the floor I frantically surfed to Oreo’s fan page. This speaker noted the number of fans to have been 8.4 million in early August. It’s now December. Oreo boasts an astonishing 16 million fans. You heard me correctly friends; Oreo doubled their fans in 4 months. Party on Oreo.
In case you didn’t take my word for it before, social media is a big deal. America’s favorite pink drink Pepto Bismol has jumped on the glorious band wagon along with the rest of the world and has shifted their marketing budget from nearly 100% traditional, to a mere 10%, leaving the other ~90% for the world wide web. Remember when I talked about finding your target market, no matter your industry and that every demographic has a presence online? Well, antacids just found theirs.
An Alexa ranking is every kid’s nightmare: a number that measures popularity. You heard me right, an Alexa ranking is a number that tells you exactly how many websites are more popular than your website. And you thought you left lunchroom dramas back in high school. Obviously as the big wigs in the social web, Google, Facebook and Youtube take the cake as the ‘Populars’, while everyone else sits waiting and anxious for a chance to hang with the cool kids. The number is expressed in relatively big numbers and obviously, the more popular you are, the smaller Alexa you get. These number are updated often, usually daily, so with an exception of the big three, the numbers shuffle fast. You could be in with the in crowd one second, and out like moon shoes the next.
This is awesome.
Check out my latest blog post and an AWESOME Christmas video HERE
I joined Twitter a while back expecting miracles. This of course was well before I jumped head first into my social media marketing career, but regardless, that’s where most people start. I found my friends through the search feature and followed them. They followed me back. I tweeted…then I stopped. Period, paragraph. My twitter account was left dusty and alone for many moons. READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON JACOBTYLER.COM
It truly baffles me how even today, at the end of 2010, people are still completely blind to the wonderful world of social media and the endless list of possibilities this exciting new industry brings. I get that people ‘don’t have time to tweet‘, ‘don’t care what their sister’s friend ate for breakfast’ or simply ‘think this whole thing is just a fad’ – but everyone is on Facebook and everyone is inundated by the web daily. Why then are people so against learning about and taking advantage of all this new age of tech wonder has to offer?
