I have been spending time the past two weeks revisiting the current blogosphere outlook of “social media.” When reading marketing news, I generally glance over the social media articles, due to an almost “banner blindness” effect – too many people writing about the same stuff, all the time. What I was on the hunt for the past two weeks were solid thoughts and theory around the state of social media and , most especially, measurement. Here is a roundup of some great thinkers who align with my perspective and really need their voices to be brought to the forefront.
Olivier Blanchard
Olivier is a strong proponent of measuring social media ROI in terms of looking across the full spectrum of marketing efforts within a given time line. It’s the same strategy we use here, but can be challenging as many companies are not so open with offering their full marketing spend or metrics. Read his blog. It’s good.
Logic and Emotion
Always love what these guys have to say. One post in particular on this subject aids marketers in spotting social media snake oil.I recently ran across one of these “salesmen” while working on a small project for a start-up. The salesman promised Twitter Followers and Facebook Fans and a % conversion rate. He also claimed a money-back guarantee. When the client asked me how this could bring them more revenue, and if there was a need for 50,000 Twitter Fans, I silently vomitted in my mouth. Check out this post here.
Random Acts of Data
Anna gets it. She’s just beginning this blog, but starts it off with a great post about social media measurement. It’s not monitoring! Her case is made to request that any measurement is brought into a larger view of business intelligence for the organization. As like anything meaningful, it takes time and dedication to measure. Read her first post – There’s a sucker born every minute
JetBlue is currently offering a great deal; all you can fly in one month for a flat rate of $599. Ticket holders are permitted to fly as many times as they want between any of the airline’s 56 domestic and international destinations. The best part is you only need to book 3 days in advance!
As I mentioned in a previous post, Kudos @JetBlue & @ Southwest that title still stands. Kudos to Jetblue for making yet another PR buzz!
We saw the craze of reality TV shows hit such industries as Fashion, Culinary Arts, Interior Design, Event Planning and Entertainment. Sadly, it appears that list is still growing. Next stop, Advertising!
That’s right a reality show is hitting the Internet Week scene. The Big Ad Gig will consist of eight contestants competing to create the best pitch. The winning campaign will be produced and run across Microsoft’s advertising media outlets such as gaming, online and mobile. The contest will be held in front of a live audience during Internet Week and judged by Rob Reilly, Tham Khai Meng and Andreas Combuechen. Winners are to receive no doubt a ton of exposure and some freelance gigs at unknown “top agencies”.
There’s talk Twitter too will be crossing mediums to develop a reality TV show, The Final Tweet. The pitch idea is simple. Four teams battle against non- profit organizations to win cash prizes (as high as $100,000), while traveling across the United States living off limited funds. This of course is just in addition to the constant Tweet updates created by the contestants along the way. This is said to be apart of Twitter’s big plan to help reach their forecast user goal of 1 Billion and revenue goal of $1.54 Billion by 2013. It’s still unknown if this reality pitch is a go or not, but I look forward to finding out what Twitter comes up with next.
With that said, I might have to start watching TV again.
I have been reading several articles about how epicly horrible the Bing logo is. This morning I found a site with a “Vent Off” for all those looking to voice their similar opinions.
Here are just a few lovely sentiments:
This logo is just outstandingly and epicly crap.
There is nothing about it that makes sense. Every thing that could be done wrong pretty much has been. The whole personal taste, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, its subjective doesn’t cut it here.
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Oh god. Regardless of what you think of the logo, it looks horrendous there. It falls so short of there target “Live.com” look. The logo looks much better when it’s reversed out on the dark grey, still an exercise in utter boredom though.
My guess is that the project lead on this identity was a pain in the ass and kept forcing the designer to dumb down the logo to what you see here. It totally looks like an identity defeated by a clients that THINKS they are creative and thus keeps having you tweak the design until all that’s left is uninspired garbage. Chris is right on, this bing is blah!
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As another MS-hater mentioned, the logo must definitely have been made in MS-Paint. Even that, though, doesn’t really manage to justify the shittiness. Depressing on part of Miscrosoft. Hilarious, from ours. Especially that “It is just simply outstandingly epicly crap.” Awesome!
The poor swished logo. See how it looks before the overdid the horizontal scaling. I wonder a. how much they spent on this and b. what the other logos looked like that were turned away?
A moment of silence please for the death of Yahoo.
It appears the ongoing purchase war with Microsoft’sBing is in its final stages of wrapping up. Yahoo put up quite the fight, founded in 1995 and sadly loosing fans to Bing and Google by the minute. Today, Yahoo decided to throw in their long lived towel and leave the hardball for the new wave pros.
Microsoft will go from owning 8 percent of the U.S search market to 28 percent. This is still less than half of Google’s 65 percent, but will certainly give them a jump with their soon to be search war with Google.
So, let us all take a moment to remember what a fantastic job Yahoo has done. 14 years in the business and I still can’t get their “yahoo-oo-oo” commercial out of my head.
If you’re looking for another creative outlet, take a peak at #Interactivemonday – a twitter ‘community’ started by Adverblog. Share your favorite digital piece you’ve seen the previous week by Tweeting: #interactivemonday, the project URL and the agency name every Monday.
A fantastic way of keeping up to date on what’s going on in the interactive world.
Polyvore must be doing something right, check out these stats:
3 million unique visitors per month
118 million monthly page views
800,000 registered users
10 minutes average session time on site
20 pageviews average per visit
What is Polyvore? It’s a “free, easy-to-use web-based application for mixing and matching images from anywhere on the web” and “offers an unprecedented level of direct engagement with real products and brands, while its social features make it a powerful platform for the creation and distribution of user-generated advertising.” Basically, registered users can create collages of images aka “sets” that others can view. These sets are created by choosing images of clothing/accessories/items that the website hosts, which functions as a way for companies to advertise their products. Turns out people love it, maybe you will too. They claim its a ddictive though, so watch out!
Engagement is compiling the first comprehensive guide to corporate social media, with hopes to build education on brand engagement. This site allows businesses to feature their company and gives consumers the opportunity to share what they know.
Great find today! - Booked a ticket and sadly can’t make it? No worries, sell it.
Re-ticket.com is an online marketplace that helps facilitate that process, providing passengers, tour operators and transport companies with a way to sell their unused or leftover tickets for travel by plane, train, coach or ferry. Sellers begin by listing the details of their tickets for sale, including the price they’d like to be paid and a time limit for the auction period. Buyers, meanwhile, can search for tickets by departure and destination cities, dates and price. They can then bid on the ones that interest them; after the auction is closed, the buyer placing the highest bid wins, transferring their payment to Re-ticket.com. The seller, in turn, receives the buyer’s name and makes the required name change with the airline company or travel agent, sending the ticket to the buyer once that’s done. Within two weeks after the departure date, Re-ticket.com transfers payment to the seller. Much like Miss Refund, Re-ticket.com also helps passengers get refunds on airport taxes when they don’t make a trip.
Awesome! 
