Home sales might be down, but virtual commerce is booming. According to a new survey, an amazing 12% of Americans say they’ve bought a virtual good– a category that covers everything from little Facebook trinkets, to weapons in online games and even virtual “land” in persistent worlds like Second Life. The biggest buyers are younger women, aged 12-44. The average virtual consumer has bought $30 worth of online goods, but 15% of buyers say they’ve spent $100 or more. Of course, as always, signing up for the daily newsletter from SmartBrief on Social Media is free.
Photo credit, iStock (read more…)
The 5 most-clicked links in SmartBrief on Social Media this past week:
- 7 ways to tweet about your company
- EA Comic-Con contest faces Twitter wrath
- 3 easy ways to revamp your site
- Tools for hearing what customers won’t tell you
- Be careful what you tweet
Photo credit, iStock (read more…)
During the planning of Buzz2009, we reached out to Business Wire, our partner in industry-specific press release listings, to try out their new EON (Enhanced Online News) service. We mostly employed free word-of-mouth techniques to generate interest in Buzz2009 and wanted to see how an enhanced version of the more traditional PR route measured up against the flurry of WOM activity that was going on around the event. [Disclosure: Business Wire agreed to give us a free trial (value $295) in exchange for this review.]
We liked that EON does a lot of the painful stuff for you: Distributing the press release via RSS feeds for news hounds, consumers, and journalists. When you create the release, the Enhanced Online News service prompts you to tag it by industry, subject, geography and keywords so it can target your announcement to the most relevant readers possible. To optimize search engine placement, EON requires you to select keywords from your press release that might be hot search words. (read more…)
A site like Facebook ought to a be a paradise for advertisers. All those people! All that data! How could anyone fail to strike marketing gold with such a powerful medium at the their disposal? A lot of folks, actually– it turns out that finding a way to take advantage of the site’s social media properties while still respecting the terms of service can be a little tricky. Several ad agencies say they’ve run afoul of the site’s privacy policy. Two big takeaways here, experts say: engagement beats data mining any day and if you’re thinking about doing something even vaguely fishy with a network’s TOS, knock it off. The customer outrage you’re risking just isn’t worth it. To find all kinds of tricks that do work, try signing up for SmartBrief on Social Media‘s daily newsletter.
My company, GasPedal, recently hosted BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media, in San Francisco. The fantastic event featured eight case studies on corporate social media from some of the world’s biggest companies. As we gear up for our next BlogWell in Minneapolis on Aug. 13 — featuring case studies from McDonald’s, H&R Block, Wal-Mart, CME Group, General Mills, Ford, and Progressive — I’m sharing some key lessons from San Francisco.
Here’s three key takeaways from General Mills’ public relations manager, David Witt, based on their outreach campaign for Yoplait Kids that resulted in the delivery of nearly 300,000 coupons:
- For every product and category, there’s a community. Whether it’s dish soap or sports cars, there’s an online group you can find and reach out to with relevant, useful information.
- Give talkers lots to share, test, and give away. When reaching out, General Mills provided influencers with product information, samples, coupons, and prize packs that they could give away to readers — all while encouraging them to be “overtly transparent.”
- Maintain the relationship.
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