Toluu

Social Media Spin

How Corporations are Spinning Their Companies in Social Networks

Motrin - An Avoidable Social Media DisasterNovember 18

No Social Media Monitoring Strategy Helped Kill Motrin Moms Ad

Think about that for a minute. A targeted advertisement by one of the most respected pharmaceutical companies in the world was brought down in less than 48 hours by a relatively small number of social network users. What’s more, these social network users were on Twitter - one of the social networks many companies find most challenging to use because of its format of 140 character messages, and a culture of interaction - not broadcast.

Motrin used traditional media to distribute the advertisement - they weren’t using social media specifically for distribution of this ad. It was on the Motrin.com website and YouTube, but it was also distrubuted via traditional and print media - “Safe media”. Not using social media for the main ad push likely made Motrin advertisers consider putting resources elsewhere, and not in a social media monitoring strategy. Yet, by not having a solid social monitoring strategy in place, the outrage of Twitterers to the ad swelled so quickly that Motrin didn’t notice until it was too late, and ultimately lost complete control of the entire campaign.

Some consequences of no Social Monitoring Strategy

The advertisement was a bust - it had to completely stopped. The financial implications of their misstep are likely painful. Here’s a shot of the graphic on the Motrin.com homepage.

Family Social Media Network Sites Love Baby BoomersNovember 3

“From the last seven years of polling, we’ve found that what older people like best about the Internet is being able to connect to family and friends,” - Susannah Fox - Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Kaiser Family Foundation

New family social networks are popping up almost every day. The real draw to these sites for Boomers seems to be the huge disconnections families have these days. More families are geographically separated from each other than ever before. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the family event coordinator (usually a Boomer) is looking to the internet to connect geographically distant family members. Family is a big deal to Boomers, and family social networks provide an easy way to gather the family group together again.

Boomers also feel a need to pass on to their family and the next generation the story of where they began. So family social networks are not only a place to connect socially, but they’re also a place to discover your family’s past, and discover yourself in the process.

In meeting with family social networking executives recently, I’m finding that one of hottest trends in family social networks is in the field of DNA social networking. I recently spoke to a company whose USP is based on having a large database of DNA results for users to access. There’s huge potential in this area of social networking. So much so that Google recently invested $3.

Social Media Marketing MysteriesOctober 28

If you haven’t noticed already, Social Media Marketing is different. Don’t let the word Marketing fool you. The days of Ad Gurus, sitting in their Ivory Towers, dispensing magical potions on your products to bring in automatic sales from Television, Radio and Print are GONE. Your customers are immune to that brand of “magic”. They have diminishing loyalty to brands they hear about via the traditional methods.

Your product sales and customer loyalty will also not be improved anymore by paying high-minded consultants high fees to berate your previous marketing campaigns and insist that only their proprietary (read: excessively expensive) methodology will work for you. Your customers are rejecting that kind of manipulation.

Celebrity endoresements? Press releases? Interactive advertising? SEO? Still effective methods to get your website seen, to be sure. They’re nothing to dismiss in your efforts for website visibility. But you want *more* than just to be seen, right? You want customers who are loyal to your brand, even when other companies slash prices. You want customers who are so excited about your product that they tell their friends. And their friends, in turn, tell their friends. Ultimately, you want more sales, more consistently, with less expense on your part. You want the promise of Social Media Marketing. But leveraging Social Media to reach concrete business metrics is a mystery to most companies still.

Your customers ignore market

5 Tips to Measure Success in Social Media MarketingOctober 22

Let’s say you’ve gotten the approval to get your company involved in social media marketing and are ready to launch a campaign. How do you define whether your campaign will be a success or not?

This is an important question, because a large number of companies have jumped into social media campaigns without any clear business and communication strategy. Before the financial meltdown of the last few weeks, some companies had the resources to experiment with social media without worrying about financial accountability. But now, most businesses are forced into having solid success metrics for social media.

In fact, the lack of good metrics is cited as the biggest barrier to marketers’ adoption of social media. Particularly in this shaky financial climate, measuring impact is one of the definitive measures of a marketing strategy’s value. If you want to skip the experimentation, particularly in view of our current global financial crisis, I’ve assembled a list of 5 tips to help you measure success in your social media campaigns.

Success Tip #1: Identify your communications target and listen to them
The first step to measuring success in social media marketing is proper scope. There are new social networks popping up each week. It’s a waste of resources to join every new social network only to find you have no time to manage them. Find out where your most active customers & influencers spend time online

Supporting A Great Cause - SLC TweetupOctober 20

Salt Lake City’s Twitter community is coming together again tonight for our monthly Tweetup. This time we’re welcoming Danny from Provo UT to our group. He’s a contestant in Wells Fargo’s Someday Stories contest. The contest encouraged people to submit a 250-word true and inspiring story about their “someday” dreams and how Wells Fargo could help them achieve it. Danny’s one of the five finalists chosen and you can see a video of his story here. The video with the most votes wins the grand prize. All we need to do to give our support is vote for his video. This is social media and viral marketing in action!

Danny has a great story, has a dream of becoming a physical therapist, and our support can help him achieve that dream with $100k from Wells Fargo. I’m also really proud to support the causes being helped by this contest. One of the causes you can support is Jr Achievement. A turning point in my life was when I was invited to join Jr Achievement in middle school. It really opened up my dreams to be an entrepreneur. From the site:

“Junior Achievement helps young people become economically empowered. The volunteer-driven, K-12 programs uses hands-on learning to teach students how to be work-ready, entrepreneurial, and financially literate.”

Jr. Achievement is my prefer