This Kraft JELL-O ad, which I spotted this ad in O Magazine, unintentionally makes light of dyslexia. Continue reading

Walgreen's is running various programs with Twitter, including a customer survey about their Balance Rewards program which I filled out yesterday. I then was targeted with the below promoted tweet. My first reaction to the promoted tweet was echoed by other users: "Walgreen's, are you calling me fat?". Their tie-in with popular show "The Biggest Loser" has garnered them mainly negative replies by users. I'd say they fell into the trap of trying to leverage another brand's popularity, without considering the pre-existing negative associations with that brand - this has created a juxtaposition between their goal of trying to play in the health and fitness market with the belief many people have that the approach The Biggest Loser takes is "lose weight at all costs". Key takeaway: chose your brand partnerships wisely. Continue reading

Bigger is not necessarily better Facebook is now apparently encouraging users to delete friends. Possibly, they are realizing people with too many friends are not seeing relevant posts from their "real" friends in their newsfeed. With their rollout of Graph Search, connections with only "real" friends will be even more important. This is the second time in recent weeks a social network has come out with a bigger-is-not-better policy. Niche site A Small World closed to new members to focus on "the integrity of their membership". Questions to ponder: Could this be the end of vanity metrics, like the raw number of Twitter followers (rather than engaged followers in the target audience)? How will this trend to reduce network size impact Klout scores? Related: Niche social networking site A Small World to close to new members Related to vanity metrics/buying Twitter followers: 4 ways to get Twitter followers Continue reading

Learn best practices from three companies who are doing CRM well: Zappos, LOVEFiLM, and Victoria's Secret. Who's doing CRM well? from DevonInspiration Ltd. Related posts: Supercharging CRM with mobile How social is driving the evolution of CRM A new bra-o-meter of the economy The importance of tone of voice Other posts about email marketing Continue reading

Niche social networking site A Small Word announced today that they are closing to new members on March 1. A Small World is an invitation-only site that targets affluent customers. ASW already has a relatively small membership base and they appear to want to get smaller. With MySpace recently attempting to reinvent itself, it will be interesting to see what direction A Small World takes. Continue reading

Patxi's, a San Francisco pizza chain, cooks up an innovative ordering process My local pizza restaurant just rolled out a new service that allows diners to select a pizza that's already in the oven, thereby cutting down the wait time. This restaurant serves deep dish pizzas that take 45 minutes to bake, so the advantages to the restaurant and to the diners are considerable. The diners get to eat sooner -- which for the target audience of families with children under 5 in my neighborhood is very important -- and the restaurant gets to turn over the table faster. The diners view a tablet which shows the type of pizzas that are cooking and how long it will be until the pizza is ready. One of our tech savvy dinner companions wondered if the information was dynamically generated, while another friend who is a mother of two young children looked... Continue reading

A presentation at OMMA Social Presenters Justin Kistner, Senior Manager, Social Media Marketing, Webtrends Eric Ludwig, Sr. Director of Online Marketing, Rosetta Stone John Underwood, COO, Adgregate Markets Justin Kistner's presentation: Fortune 100 companies had an average 23.02% drop in traffic between Nov. 2009 and Nov. 2010. This is adapt or die. Facebook fans vs. monthly site visitors: if only 10% of Coke's Facebook fans were active in any give month, there would be 10 times their current monthly web traffic. Average Facebook users have 130 friends. People who click "like" have an average of 310 fans. For every one click an average user has, fans click on 5.1 links. Fans are customers looking for deals, news, and community. 84% are existing customers. 83% want exclusive offers and benefits. 36% buy MORE after becoming a fan. Think of your Facebook fan page as a loyalty program that nurtures existing customers.... Continue reading

A panel discussion on mobile CRM at OMMA mobile Moderator Shaun Quigley, VP, Digital Practice Leader, Brunner Panelists Alex Campbell, CEO, Vibes Media Patrick Collins, CEO, 5th Finger Ben Davis, Co-Founder, Phizzle David Wachs, President and CEO, Cellit Chris Wayman, VP, General Manager, Merkle Interactive What does mobile CRM mean? For a panel discussion on mobile CRM, it was telling that the panel didn’t even agree on the definition of mobile CRM. Some of the panel members simply think it means communicating to customers who have opted in to SMS messages. But CRM isn’t about one channel – CRM is about all of the touch points you have with your customer. “Mobile CRM is still evolving. It’s not a stand-alone medium. It’s really important to start segmenting who's who to effectively engage and create pleasant relationship with customers,” argued Ben Davis, Co-Founder of Phizzle. Chris Wayman, VP and General Manager... Continue reading

How do you get an Oscar-winning actor to promote your brand? Product placement has long been a tactic in the U.S. film and TV industry, but with the Netflix-produced show House of Cards (executive produced by Kevin Spacey), a new medium for product placement has emerged. In one of the first episodes of the series, Spacey's character Francis Underwood is seen playing with his PlayStation at home, then in episode four, there's this exchange: Underwood: Is that a PS Vita? Russo: Uh -- Underwood: Which games does he have? Russo: All of 'em. Underwood: I have a console at home, I play sometimes to relax. I oughta get one of these for the car. [Pause] So, Peter. We need to close the shipyard in your district... That's quite an endorsement, and much more powerful than pre-roll ads on YouTube or Hulu.com. In the UK, product placement on TV shows has... Continue reading

Could Facebook hold the key to MySpace's successful resurgence? With their repositioning as a "social and music discovery destination", MySpace can target relevant Facebook users. In fact, they can cherry pick the demographics they want to lure back by age, gender, location, and interest. However, since I don't "like" any music-related pages or bands on Facebook, and I am presumably slightly (ahem) older than their target audience, it looks to me like they are casting a pretty wide net. Still.. maybe it's time to dust off my old MySpace profile. Continue reading

For a location-aware mobile app, promoting a Baltimore Ravens pint glass the day after the Super Bowl to someone living in San Francisco seems like a pretty big fail to me! Continue reading

Symantec has jumped on the opportunity to advertise to customers who may be "concerned" or "uncertain" about Autonomy due to the recent scandal. Check out their Google AdWords ads below: (click to enlarge) Benefiting from someone's demise...who else has done that?: Continue reading

Though I typically work with clients at a more strategic level, from time to time, I like to "get my hands dirty" so I can can gain a deeper understanding of the fast-changing digital space. For instance, when I launched my first blog in 2003, I Iearned to hack a bit of HTML to get the blog to appear the way I wanted it. Now, the customizations I had to work so hard for are readily available as drag and drop options in most blogging platforms (kids today have it so easy!). My latest endeavor was to launch an iPhone app so I would more fully understand the process. I know the limitations of my coding skills [read: severely limited], so I was seduced by a company called Appmakr which very prominently promises that no coding skills are required to build a mobile app. Though that claim may be true,... Continue reading

This has to be the best free offer ever: free tea for jazz hands! Continue reading

Warning: This is what happens when you skip QA! I guess I have become somewhat of a collector of "oops" email messages (see links below). It's become somewhat commonplace to send out an email with an error and then follow up with a correction. But make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease - check out this example from The eMarketing Association that was sent with the subject line "woops". There are three egregious errors in the first two sentences. Woops, indeed. (Click to enlarge.) Related links: Oops! Fixing email mistakes Oops! Sending the apology email Other posts about email marketing Continue reading

I have bipartisan annoyance at the emails I have been receiving from politicians in the run-up to the election. Somehow I got on Mitt Romney's email list. His emails are all addressed to "David Dudgeon". For some reason, I receive a LOT of spam this way. So either there is someone named David Dudgeon who has enjoyed annoying me by signing up for email lists using my email address for the past five years or so, or Romney bought an email list - and not a high quality one. I received an email from Nancy Pelosi, the Congresswoman for my district, saying I should sign up for her email list now because otherwise she can't email me for 90 days prior to the election. Fine, but her email contained no compelling reason to sign up. (Sorry - I was annoyed so I deleted it immediately. If I can find a... Continue reading

Obama and Romney are using Google AdWords in an effort to control the message online. But how effective are they, and which issues do they think are important enough to warrant online ad spend? Here's how they stack up: VEEP Romney is capitalizing on the buzz that will inevitably precede his VP selection. Google "Romney VP short list" and you'll see an add promoting his new app. Obama wisely doesn't have any ads if you search for "Obama VP short list" but if you search for "Obama Biden" the message is "we've come a long way, but there's still more to be done." PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN MOBILE APPS Searching for "Romney app" leads to the ad shown further above, whereas Obama is promoting his own app to those searching for it. IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID What message are the candidates trying to push on the economy and unemployment? The Romney campaign... Continue reading

A recent Harvard Business Review blog post suggested that sales reps should avoid customers who are ready to buy. The rationale is that customers who are too far down the purchasing funnel are probably just using your business for a benchmarking exercise – they most likely have already chosen their intended supplier. According to the article, the better opportunities lie in finding "customers who are going through change and will be open to new ideas...where demand is emerging but not yet established, where they can shape customers' needs, rather than react to them." While the article is geared towards traditional sales people, it makes sense for agencies as well. Agencies put a huge amount of time, effort and top talent (often at the figurative if not literal expense of existing clients) towards responding to RFPs. So why not task those business development folks with creating opportunities instead of getting invites... Continue reading

Now that I live in the land of Silicon Valley giants and future billion-dollar startups, I see more companies looking for marketers that know how to get scrappy - i.e. find ways to acquire new customers and/or get the word out about their product or service with minimal budget. For small businesses, startups and solo-preneurs, the need for low-cost solutions isn't going to go away, but as I've stated before - there is no silver bullet. However, I wanted to share something that caught my eye. Murray Newlands, who runs a meetup for Bloggers in San Francisco, is launching a course on Udemy. His course, PR for Startups and Small Business, costs $49, but he has reached out to his blogger community and offered the course for free to the first 100 people who blog about it. If you have not heard about Udemy, it is a website that facilitates... Continue reading

This OMMA Social session attempted to answer two questions: How do you prioritize, coordinate, and manage engagement points ranging from your Facebook page to email to the in-store experience? And how do you evolve your product-centric organization to one that is customer-centric? Presenters Brett Billick, Director, CRM, Virgin America Matthew Howland, VP, TIBCO Loyalty Lab John Zell, VP Global CRM Solutions, Razorfish Razorfish, Loyalty Lab, and Virgin America discussed results of their proprietary research found in Liminal: 2011 Customer Engagement Report. In their research, they confirmed what every CRM marketer should already know: “Engagement isn’t just about a channel. It is about the consumer’s relationship with a brand, his or her ability to choose how and when to engage, and the value each channel represents.” Razorfish asked the question “How do we take a bottom-up, customer-centric approach to prioritize channels?” Their answer was to define six Engagement Elements that should... Continue reading

I often get asked "what's the next big thing in digital marketing"? Scores of articles and blog posts continue to be written about this; conference seminars have titles promising an answer to this milllion- (ahem, these days make that billion) dollar question; social media "rock stars" sell their clients on the idea that they can predict it. Chances are, they can't. If they could, they'd invest in that big thing, make a wad of cash from the IPO and retire. Socrates had it right: "“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” The key is to listen, learn, be involved, be curious. Take the Socratic approach that "wisdom begins in wonder". You can't possibly read or even find every blog post, article, Twitter feed and Facebook post about digital marketing, nor should you*. But you should let your curiousity guide you to continue learning about your field. The... Continue reading

Sorry, sorry, sorry! Nothing tests the limits of your marketing team's speed more than realizing that there was a mistake in the email that was just sent - whether it was a broken link, an invalid voucher code, or just a mess of foreign characters where text should be. As I've highlighted previously, the best thing to do is to just admit the mistake and address it as quickly as possible. If you find yourself in this situation, you're in good company. For reference, here is what other brands have done to address their mistakes. (Click images to enlarge.) Subject lines: Issues with foreign languages and characters Note lastminute.com's issue with foreign characters in the subject line. To rectify this, they removed the quotation marks and replaced them with single quotes. They also fixed the more egregious error of a missing apostrophe. The original email copy also came through as... Continue reading