While Facebook’s announcement of its Places product continues to roll in, I was struck by Mashable’s Ben Parr when he live blogged, “Facebook is playing a movie discussing the advantages of Facebook Places. They’re discussing check-ins, and much of it sounds like Foursquare.”
With over 150 million active mobile users of Facebook versus just over 2 million on Foursquare, one can’t help but wonder what this means to the darling of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). Continue reading »
In its purest form, Social Media is nothing more than a set of online tools/technologies that enable open conversation. The opportunity for brands, then, is to connect with their customers on a genuine, human level. Those that are the most successful in leveraging social media (in this way) already have a passionate customer-centric attitude embedded in every fiber of their culture and operations.
Much has been written about Zappos’ business model and the company’s “social voice”. And while I spend most of my time working with national, large-scale brands, the businesses that have been turning my head lately have been those that are closest to home. Their use of social media on a local-scale creates the perfect storm for a relationship: intimate, genuine, approachable, and human.
One of the benefits of working in advertising, besides the short hours and the lavish cocktail parties every day at 3 pm, is the fact that we are living in the future. If it’s digital, social, technological, or just plain new, chances are we’re on top of it, and finding ways to use it. So by default, a lot of this stuff is second nature to us.
It’s not that way with everybody, though.
We have recently built a social network – a community for sharing stories and support – for a CPG client. Our client had no ROI expectations and no comparable past experience. This was a completely new tactic, in a new medium, targeted at unquantified attitudinal goals. How would you benchmark this kind of activity?
Advertisers often struggle over what benchmarks to use or whether benchmarks are even relevant. Here’s what we did to provide accountability and justify the expenditure.
The season premier of Mad Men made us dust off our family album and reach for the pictures from the agency’s first year (which are best viewed to the sounds of the special Mad Men station on Pandora Radio.)
Each summer, our interns partner with an organization in the Greater Boston area to volunteer their time and service. Last Friday, 37 of our interns partnered with the Esplanade Association to help clean up the park along the Charles River. The volunteer coordinators from the Esplanade kicked off the day with a history and overview of the Storrow Memorial, and then the interns got to work. Over the course of the day, the interns trimmed nearly half a mile of weeds along the river’s edge, cleaned up litter, and provided playground maintenance.
When Lebron James announced his move to Miami in an hour-long ESPN special, the entire state of Ohio was upset. Most notably, the Cleveland Cavaliers Owner, Dan Gilbert, who wrote an “Open Letter to Cavs Fans” and posted it on the team’s Web site.
