Thanks to Adam Hart for finding this timeline showing the online PR battle between Nestle and Greenpeace . How could Nestle have handled this better? Seems like the traditional PR model of control only fueled the flames.
Social Email Campaigns Expected to Increase Nearly 400 Percent in 2009
A record number of email marketers plan to bridge the gap between online social networks and their email marketing campaigns in 2009, according to new research from Ball State University, the Email Marketer’s Club and ExactTarget.
The study surveyed 351 email marketers in March and found that while only 13 percent leveraged the power of online networks last year to grow their email subscriber list, more than 46 percent plan to use social media and email in tandem in 2009.
“While the global reach, rapid adoption and high engagement found in social media have email marketers salivating at the potential these environments offer to engage with customers and prospects, the real challenge is how best to facilitate meaningful interactions,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy.
Although the demand for the integration between social sites and email is surging, the success with the integration remains largely uncharted, according to the study featured in ExactTarget’s newest whitepaper entitled, “Expanding the Reach of Email Through Social Networks”.
“Consumers are reluctant to invite marketers into social environments, and this is because they don’t want to see the channel overrun with irrelevant commercial messages,” Stewart said. “However, marketers who are able to align their messaging with the distinct mindset of consumers engaging in social networks are posting positive results and building a quality following in these environments.”
The whitepaper features research that highlights how brands such as Carmex, TripAdvisor and Papa John’s have scored success by broadening their communications to include social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg and others to their traditional email-based efforts.
“We want visitors to share the experience with their friends, but we don’t want to force them to use a channel they are uncomfortable with,” said Paul Woelbing, president of Carma Labs, the maker of Carmex (a Bolin Digital client). “By offering visitors choices, we are learning a lot about the dynamics of integrating email, social media and text messaging – namely that they complement each other very well.”
The release of the whitepaper follows Tuesday’s launch of ExactTarget’s Social Forward, its new flexible metrics-driven social sharing solution for email. Debuted at ad:tech San Francisco, the new functionality gives marketers the industry’s first social media integration for email that allows multiple ways to leverage sharing and provides the industry’s most complete solution to enable and track sharing through its Direct to Social capability and through a partnership with social media syndication powerhouse ShareThis.
ExactTarget’s Social Forward will be available to users through its online Innovations Lab starting May 1 and will become an integrated solution for all ExactTarget users worldwide as part of the company’s Summer release.
The whitepaper and an overview of ExactTarget’s Social Forward technology are featured in ExactTarget’s Social Media Kit for Email Marketers. Marketers may download the kit free of charge at www.exacttarget.com/socialmediakit.
Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.
How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction? We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:
These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.
We’ve been talking about Motrin’s issues with Mom’s who found their new ad condescending, patronizing and disrespectful. Our armchair quarterback response is that J&J should have engaged moms online about this approach beforehand rather than lobbing it over the fence the way they did. Several of us felt Motrin can get past this if they keep the moms engaged while they now have their attention. The worst thing they could do is to retreat and pretend like it never happened.
This also acts as a word of warning to brands. Brands may think they don’t need a social media strategy but they may be dragged into it kicking and screaming like J&J. Also, the old rules of PR and crisis management may not hold up too well online. Other conclusions or learnings?
Snagged this image of a the airplane tray table on the way to Charlotte yesterday. Couple of thoughts- this Zicam ad was in front of me for a total of 6 hours yesterday with no escape! Having 6 hours to digest the message, one might think that more than a simple headline could have been employed and consumed. The ad had no call to action whatsoever – online or mobile.
After paying a dollar for a cup of coffee, I noticed that the napkin had an SMS frequent flyer sign-up through a simple 2 way campaign.
Who would have thought that a napkin advertisement would be higher-tech than a complete airplane tray table takeover? (ps- what’s with the Rhino?)
Marcus Didion
(caption: The movie Minority Report helped us all catch a vision for a world that requires physical movement in our daily interactions.)
If I had one wish for our user experience and design team here at Bolin Marketing, it would be to spend the rest of the year (and quite possibly the next) focusing on how we could extend beneficial online customer experiences that extend beyond the norm: text, image and video content. Smart navigation and interaction design are also (of course) imperative in this equation. But the real silver bullet will lie in smart interaction design that builds a friendly relationship between customers and a company’s products and services.
While working on my draft for part two of my last post on Customer Experience Strategy, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our interactions with products and services have been changing. Then I read Adrian Ho’s post about the psychology of human movement and what this means for companies and their relationships with their customers. Of course, we all think Apple (iphone) and Nintendo (Wii) are leading the charge, with the way they involve natural human gestures as an essential element in how we experience their products. This is the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s pretty safe to say that gesture, movement, and even ritual are becoming part of the lexicon for the design of future customer interactions.
Our Team at Bolin Marketing is always trying to come up with a thoughtful and holistic approach to how we solve marketing problems for our clients. Beyond internet marketing, we’d like to think we’re making big strides in how we can integrate a smart user experience practice as part of the design process for all our clients. But the real challenge is putting this thinking into practice. If ritual, gesture, and nonverbal communication in the physical and digital world are the next frontier for brand/customer strategy, what is the next best way to integrate this thinking into a design process?
McDonalds Corp at American Dietetic Association Show
At the American Dietetic Association’s Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, McDonalds Corporation had a booth. At the booth was a wheel that attendees could spin. On the wheel were a number of McDonalds menu items. Based on the menu item you landed on, you would guess what the calories were. It is one of those type of tradeshow “games” to get attendees to your booth …
However, what the real point of this post is this: McDonalds is a huge corporation with thousands of restaurants in over 100 countries worldwide. They do millions of dollars in sales every quarter. Their market cap is $64B — that is nine zeros! Worldwide, they have over 390,000 employees. It isn’t a company; it is a global powerhouse. A machine.
Despite its sheer size and worldwide dominance, McDonalds Corporation is concerned with talking directly to food and nutrition professionals. I think it illustrates what is happening with healthy living through food and nutrition. A corporation the size of McDonalds wants to establish a presence with food and nutrition professionals. These professionals work directly with patients to help establish eating and nutritional habits for people. It is admirable.
In my years working in marketing in the health care arena, I’ve heard it is restaurants like McDonalds’s fault the majority of Americans are obese. About two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight, and almost one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) … we are talking 200,000,000 Americans.
Fast food restaurants like McDonalds are getting into the game. They want to be part of the solution and not be exclusively labeled as part of the problem. McDonalds still has a way to go, but they should be applauded.
Bolinite Marty Moore will be reporting from this ADA conf this week. Look him up if you are attending to see how digial marketing is being leveraged in this space. http://tinyurl.com/58sde9
Here’s a teaser for the Carmex Kiss for Carma Labs and Carmex Lip Balm we have been working on for the last few months. It will have several options for delivery. It should be ready to roll out at the end of October.
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