Social media has became a company’s best tool in disaster management.  Borders advised their loyal customers via Facebook and Twitter regarding their reorganization the same day it was filed.

Wall Street Journal reported on this pending bankruptcy last week.  So, it isn’t new news to the inside circle.  However, to many Borders consumers, the social media postings are likely to represent breaking news.  Social media is also allowing Borders to continue to communicate with their core consumers as the proceedings evolves.  It also gave Borders an avenue to communicate important information such as store closing.  During such a difficult time, it also gave Borders a way to continue to build good will and retain loyal consumers to the best of its abilities.  A quick glance on Borders twitter stream shows numerous personal replies.  Social media gave Borders the opportunity to continuously engage, and to address (or potentially discover) any consumer concerns.

Social media is now an essential tool for any public relations effort.  It’s particularly helpful in incidents where events are continuously changing, and you need a way to communicate with your most loyal consumers with the latest and greatest.  Traditional media cannot be compared with social media in its ability to respond quickly.  News is on TV three times a day.   Newspaper comes out once a day.  Tweets can be posted continuously.

Click here to view a few screenshots of Borders effort.

The shout out for the “smartest” brand must goes to Old Spice. It’s an old brand that has been revitalized and reborn from last year’s Super Bowl campaign.  This is what nirvana looks like for an integrated marketing campaign with both traditional and new media: The Old Spice Guy from TV replies to tweets via YouTube videos!

At the end of the day, the results say it all. The campaign achieved 1.4 billion impressions. Video view was 40 million per week. And sales increased double digits. Market share grew, challenging for segment leadership.

I haven’t even got to the smartest part of this whole campaign… This Super Bowl campaign didn’t include a $3 million Super Bowl ad!  The television commercial was released around the Super Bowl. Then, the marketers bought key search terms. So, when all that 18% of people looked up “Super Bowl ads” online, they would have the Old Spice Guy!

The campaign was such a success that it’s calling for a second act from the Old Spice Guy.  Again, the campaign will include a TV commercial that will debut the day after Super Bowl.  Though, I’ll have no doubt that if you search for “Super Bowl Ads”, you will find the Old Spice Guy.

Check out my guest post over at Brainzooming for a more in depth look at this campaign.  And join me (and people way cooler than me) on Twitter during Super Bowl using hashtag #BZBowl.

Email Subscribers: Link to Old Spice Guy on YouTube announcing his return.

Related articles

• Who’s watching the Super Bowl? (curiousmarketeer.com)
• Who’s watching the Super Bowl? Part II (curiousmarketeer.com)
• Old Spice Guy Round Three: 2011 Commercials Set To Begin (huffingtonpost.com)

Dabbling into social media has always been scary for big brands.  Because we lose control of it all.  Because we allow the voice of a few to be heard, and we can’t just use TV advertising to drown them out.  It’s like you have handed over a microphone to everyone, including your haters, and to let them broadcast to the world whatever they want.  However, it is still generally advocated that big brand should participate in the social media discussion, good or bad.  Why?  Well, the discussion is happening anyway, so you may as well be a part of it.  It’s the only way you can learn and improve.  If someone at your office is circulating rumors about you, wouldn’t you like to know what exactly is being circulated?

Sue is always eating at meeting.  What’s worse, she leaves all her napkins and breadcrumbs and stuffs behind in meeting rooms.  I hate going into a conference room afterwards.  She’s such a mess.

There’s no reason to go talk to John.  Just go talk to his boss.  I sent him three emails this week, and he didn’t reply to a single one.

Well, turns out John’s grandma passed, and yes, that’s making him a little less responsive.  If you were John, you’d want to set the record straight.

Turns out Sue really is a mess.  If you were Sue, and you didn’t bother to pay attention to these stories, you may never realize what you were doing is unappealing to people.

So, yes, it’s important to participate in the social space.  It’s just part of good customer service – paying attention to your customers.

However, allowing negative comments to happen organically is one thing.  I wouldn’t want to pay for negative comments to be broadcasted.  Am I really that old-school?

The latest in Facebook’s ad offering is “Sponsored Stories”.  This means when a Facebook user interacts with your brand via, Likes, Check-ins or page posts, it gets broadcasted to a much wider Facebook community like an ad would on the sidebar.  For example, if a user check-in to your venue, you can paid to have that broadcasted.  Now, that’s no so bad when the check in is positive.  For example, Megan may check-in at bar X (bar X being the advertiser) and with the comment of “having a great time at happy hour with friend Jane.”  Now, all (if the advertiser pays for it all) of Megan’s friends will see on the sidebar that Megan has checked in to venue x and is “having a great time…”  This is very on-strategy with a recent Nielsen study that found ads to have social context to be more successful.  In this case, Megan is serving to be an endorser of bar x to her friends, without her realizing it.

It wouldn’t be horrible either if the check in turned out to be Jason checking in Starbucks with a comment “still waiting for my date to show up… hope she’s not a no show”.

But what if someone check in to restaurant Z with a comment “just got served raw chicken…”  That isn’t so good.

Or someone may just post a negative post on your fan page and says “your place sucks!”  And that became the copy that shows up as a “Sponsored Stories”.

Now advertisers do have some control.  Advertisers could limit this to just “Likes”.  “Likes” are by definition positive.  Generally speaking, I don’t have any problems with the existence of the negatives either.  I’m believe in negative comments.  Because in general, every brand stands for something, which automatically means they are not going to stand for something else.  Every brand is supposed to have their pagans.  These are people who doesn’t believe what your brand is selling.  These are the people who never got it.  These are the exactly the opposite of your core consumers.  For example, these are the tree huggers and you are a fur coat maker.  (I’m using this as an example and using labels to simplify the example.  I am not making a political statement here.)  But that’s okay.  These two can co-exist.  Fur coat makers are not trying to sell fur coats to tree huggers.  Tree huggers are not their demographic.  Fur coat buyers also know that they are not tree huggers, and they’re okay with that.  They are okay with tree huggers saying fur coats are bad, and they’ve reconciled themselves with that opinion.

Negative comments are there.  They exist regardless of whether social media is around.  PETA existed long before Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook promotes this new tactics as being more effective to buy word of mouth.

However, as open minded I’m about negative comments, I’m not sure about this.  For some brands, this may not be a concerned at all.  For others that have put a hard line in the sand on what they are selling and what they’re not, this is not just embracing the existing of negative comment.  This is paying to have them broadcasted.  Am I too old-school to think that’s not necessarily a good advertising model?

Photo Credit: Microphone by Daehyun Park.  Facebook image via AdAge.com

Related articles

• Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format (mashable.com)
• Facebook Turns the ‘Like’ Into Its Newest Ad (AdAge.com)
• Facebook Adds ‘Sponsored Stories’ to Ad Arsenal (AdWeek.com)

It’s January.  How do you know?  Go to a gym.  It’s pack with people who have made this year the year to lose those extra pounds.  Where were they last month?

This happens every year.  Everyone is enthusiastic in January.  People join aerobic classes.  People sign up for gym memberships.  People commit themselves to showing up at the gym every night.  A month goes by, that long wait for a treadmill disappears.  Another month goes by, the classes become less crammed.  By March, well, no one keeps resolutions anyway!

It’s easy to make resolutions, but it takes dedication and commitment to keep them.

It’s easy to make a jump into the social media bandwagon.  It takes dedication and commitment to maintain them and make social media work.

This was the thesis of Tom Fishburn’s cartoon this week.  He highlighted a particular example where his local diner still calls attention to a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated for months.  A Facebook page doesn’t run itself.  Online dialogues with your fans won’t magically happen.  Just like those extra pounds won’t magically disappear.  You have to commit to make it happen.

Coincidentally (or perhaps timed purposely), Tom launched his Facebook page today.  Go friend him!

Photo Credit:  Tricia Wang

Why hasn’t more companies adopted social media? Because social media is not social at all.

According to a recent study, only 20% of tweets are meant to share information. 80% of tweets are private thoughts that just happened to be shared with the world. However, that’s still a private transaction. That social media network is a small group of friends, and that tweet is the electronic version of a private conversation.

Consider my version of the real-life equivalent: An email conversation is completely private. That’s like a group of people in a closed door room having a conversation. A tweet, for these 80% of people, is a conversation that happens in a public place. Since it’s a public place, sometimes people overhear and chime in. “Sorry, I hear you’re talking about that new restaurant. I was thinking about going, you say it sucks?”

So, yes, private conversations can be extended to strangers. However, these are still strangers. At the end of the conversation, each party goes back to their separate ways.

Now, if this stranger happens to be Oprah, you may all of a sudden call Oprah a “friend”. “Oh yeah, Oprah and I the other day was talking about restaurants. She suggested that I should go try the one on ABC Street.” Now, of course, this doesn’t have to be Oprah. This could be a local celebrity, or a celebrity within a specific circle. Or, just someone, someplace, something that’s well known and well regarded within a specific audience.

Or, if you happen to run into this particular stranger everywhere, you may begin to be interested in getting to know this stranger. Obviously, you have like interests. (For example, I have made it a point to get to know someone after seeing that particular person at various art shows around town.)

My hypothesis is that social media works the same way.

If you are strangers, you will remain strangers. There are a few ways to overcome this. One of which is to form an offline relationship. Be the Oprah that they want to get to know better. The other way is to engage your audience in their natural habitat and keep “running into them”. That’s why musicians were successful with myspace. Recruiters are successful with LinkedIn.

This may also explain why Twitter is particularly challenging for marketers. There are no specific purposes for Twitter. Twitter is a public plaza. Many different conversations happening, but it’s virtually impossible for a marketer to form an engaging relationship with any one of them. It’s very similar to a marketer holding a product demonstration in a public plaza. People may just ignore them, or they stop, watch, and move on because they’re there to meet someone. They don’t have time for marketers.

That doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t have value to marketers. What’s a better way to disseminate news about a crisis than to use a speaker over a public plaza? No one putting up a flyer would ignore the public plaza, because at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game and there are a lot of eyeballs in a public plaza. Twitter works the same way.

In conclusion, social media has its value, but as always, it’s only a part of your marketing mix. Perhaps even only a small part.

Link: STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me

Photo credit: New York Public Library Outdoor Plaza, originally uploaded by celikins.

I’ve been reading a lot of Al Ries recently, and I have learned a lot from his books. If I have to pick one lesson to highlight, it’d be focus, focus on being the best you.

Today, Facebook bought FriendFeed.

Big news for the social web.

The objective for Facebook purchase is assumed to gain FriendFeed’s search capabilities to better compete with Twitter. *This is simply a speculation. Maybe Facebook would not utilize this acquisition to make itself more like Twitter, via new search functions. But then, why buy FriendFeed?

However, why can’t Facebook define a separate but distinct niche from Twitter altogether? Why can’t the two be complimentary to each other and in fact grow the usage of social web in general? It is the whole growing the pie versus growing your own slide of the pie story.

(Hmm… pie…)

In fact, Facebook and Twitter probably already occupy different spaces in users’ minds. This article on Mashable highlights a great discussion on this topic. Facebook is for people to connect with friends. Twitter is for people to follow complete strangers. So, what purpose does it serve to make them look more alike? Shouldn’t they instead play to their differences and to their respective brand equities?

So, Facebook, instead of striving to be the best Facebook, it is trying to be the best Twitter. Hmm…

Why are branding basics so counterintuitive to us marketers / business owners, in our constant quest for the more, more, more?

Photo Credit: Pie chart, originally uploaded by net_efekt.

When is it fair to judge? I don’t know… but I know that I do it anyway, fair or not.

I have long subscribed to various marketing emails, etc. But, as you may know from my previous post, I only recently discovered the wonderfulness that is Twitter. Now, everywhere I go, I see Twitter’s impact, potential, usefulness, etc.

As you may also know, I started with Twitter is because as a marketer in this day and age, I must be at least be familiar with these social media applications.

So, I ask the question: If you don’t tweet, are you a true marketer?

I know, that’s a pretty broad question. And of course, I know that the answer is “it depends” for those of you who speak the “it depends” speak. Others may quietly say “of course” because you’ve been in marketing for, well, forever. Still others would yell “No way!”

Well, I must say that I empathize with all of the above.

HOWEVER!

I subscribe to a newsletter that specializes in direct-to-consumer marketing. As I look for people I want to follow on Twitter, I thought I’d look up the editors of this newsletter. Curiously, I couldn’t find the first one, the second one, or any one of them. Not even the one who was supposed to be covering “all aspects of e-commerce and online marketing.”

Now, I understand plainly that this newsletter is supposed to cover more of the tested and true DTC tactics. But, if the guy who was supposed to be the guru on the online aspect isn’t jumping on the social media bandwagon at all, I question how in touch they are with the current marketing environment. Even if the newsletter doesn’t specifically cover social media marketing as an area of interest, the people behind it should be all over social networking… shouldn’t they? Or am I judging them unfairly just because they don’t have a Twitter account?

Another question that may be worth asking… am I really the only one who may judge them so?

twitter – What are you doing?, originally uploaded by keiyac.