Archives for August 2011

August 31, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Let’s Make a Deal! Or Should We?

Last week, Facebook announced it was gracefully bowing out of the daily deal game and killing off Facebook Deals. Deals was the brand’s bid to lure in Groupon loving types who also happen to be on Facebook. It seemed like a natural fit to us since, as we’ve discussed here, the love of getting things on the cheap appears to be only getting stronger. Facebook tested its deals program in 5 markets and released the following “thanks, but we’ll pass” type of statement:

“We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses,” the release said. “We remain committed to building products to help local businesses connect with people, like Ads, Pages, Sponsored Stories, and Check-in Deals. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.” Translation? Facebook sees that the deal trend is evolving and wants to get out of an already-too-crowded arena.

Facebook is leaning heavily toward check-in deals which basically would marry Groupon with Foursquare. This drives consumers inside of businesses and rewards their loyalty. This announcement comes on the heels of a prediction from Forrester Consultancy last week which boldly stated that Groupon-type of daily deals will cease to exist in the next 5 years. Forrester predicts that marketers and buyers alike will burn out on the impulse-buying genre all together.

Uh. Yeah. We here at Brandsplat don’t see our age-old love of getting a good deal disappearing in five years — not even in ten years. As long as there are shoppers, there will be the proverbial (or physical) pack of gum by the register waiting for you to buy it. But let’s hear from you, readers. Are daily deals on the way out, simply evolving to appeal to more Internet users or here to stay as is? Let us know in the comments section below!

August 30, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Twitter Takes (and Keeps) Your Pictures

Last week, Twitter was buzzing with news that the site would now dip its toes into the photo sharing waters with a brand new image gallery. Twitter profiles are now equipped with a strip that features the photos you’ve recently shared in tweets. It’s cool stuff — and long overdue for the site that seems to become more and more conversational in tone with every passing day. The addition of photo sharing takes Twitter into more of the… dare we say… Facebook social territory.

Still, Twitter photo sharing has big-time possibilities for social media marketing and Twitter marketing.

Up until recently, Twitter marketers would have to obtusely yammer on about their amazing products and blogs in hopes that followers would be lured in by their 140 characters to go check out their websites. Now with photo sharing, marketers can put pretty pictures front and center on their profiles. The new photo galleries are a veritable visual archive of the pictures you’ve tweeted, so why not curate them to create great images of your company? These treasure troves of images can give your followers a visual to go along with your witty and wise words.

Twitter galleries also have the potential to help users avoid marketing trolls. As if the all caps, sales pitch-heavy tweets in their history weren’t evidence enough, Twitter profiles without photos could steer folks away from wanting to communicate with robots. Your four most recent images appear on your profile now and tweeps with no pictures could be considered persona non grata. The long-lasting photo memory of the site could also cut down on the amount of embarrassing pictures that are tweeted. Sure a Twit pic of you doing Jell-O shots with a midget clown is funny but if you had to look at it every time you logged in, some of the “ha ha” factor might dissipate.

All in all, more images and photos and content on Twitter is a good thing. It forces folks in charge of Twitter for business campaigns to get creative. But readers, what do you think? Are you loving the Twitter galleries? Or would you rather not look at the people you Tweet with? Chirp about it in our comments section!

August 29, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Jux Like Heaven

Imagine a blog where the content fills the entire screen. Picture taking your words and photos and turning them into a near cinematic experience in size and depth. The concept sounds too high art and too magazine-like for your standard blog, but Jux has just made this possible. Jux is the latest slick graphic blogging platform to capture the attention of tech writers and bloggers alike. The concept behind Jux is bold and unusual and after reading about it everywhere, I decided to take it for a spin.

When a visitors first arrives in Juxland, they quickly realize they aren’t in blogging Kansas anymore. Jux looks like one of those cool European magazines that cost the price of a pizza at a newsstand. But more than that, Jux stands out for what’s missing: ads and links.The start-up blogging platform hopes to lure new bloggers in by delivering a full-screen blogging experience, 100 percent free from blinking advertisement plugins. Sounds enticing, so I hopped right in and made my very own Jux. What bloggers will notice right away is how Jux lets you see your blog develop as you write and create it. No more posting in boxes and then waiting to see it pop up — Jux puts you right in the action and allows users to see a clear picture of what they’re blogging in real time. It’s a little clunky to use at first, but after a few tries, the process of Juxing becomes fun and easy.

Jux is yet another sign that bloggers and blog readers want content that is full-bodied and bold. The site is part of a movement that is taking blogging into the realm once reserved for lifestyle magazines. Blogging for business can get in on the party as well. There’s no reason business-created blogs can’t hop on the style bandwagon and create beautiful and well-written blogs that people want to read.

August 26, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

5 Things You Might Have Missed!

Can Mountain Dew fuel another online gaming craze? Did a trillion people visit Facebook this summer? Did Twitter kill or reinvent the press release? The answers to these and other titillating questions in this week’s edition of 5 Things You Might Have Missed!

1.) VW Spins the Roulette Wheel: Oh, Volkswagen. Just when I think you couldn’t have possible another amazing online marketing trick up your sleeve, you pull out Roulette. Using Google maps, VW played a game of real-time roulette with followers who placed bets as to how long it would take for the new Golf BlueMotion to run out of gas. Players only got one guess, so they had to research the car and its fuel mileage. Winners won a new golf for themselves. Losers learned about a new product and had fun while doing it.

2.) Ready for Lift Off: We were intrigued and curious when we read about Lift this week. Lift is the vaguely-described app for achieving goals from Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. We’re not sure what the heck it is… and the shroud of secrecy around it makes us salivate even more. But we are sure that Stone and company are expected to cause a PR firestorm once Lift takes off in the next few months.

3.) Dew it Again: Mountain is back with more highly-caffeinated online fun for their joint promotion with Activision’s Modern Warfare 3. Nobody does bro-tacular marketing like Mountain Dew, and this marriage is one made in marketing heaven.

4.) Tweet and Release: To celebrate acquiring social media marketing company One Forty, HubSpot blasted the web with a tweet-rich press release. The digital release featured built-in “tweet this” buttons so readers could take the news to Twitter. Soon the PR world was not only talking about the acquisition but also about the genius of the Twitter-rich press release.

5.) Facebook is a Trillionaire: Finally, Facebook celebrated yet another milestone this week when it was reported that the social media monster had more than 1 trillion page views in the month of June! The news inspires us to keep on keeping on with Facebook marketing, regardless of how crowded it seems.

August 25, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Google Catalogs Lighten Up Your Mailbox

Catalogs are a universal guilty pleasure. I mean, who among us doesn’t have some kind of memory involving drooling over toys in the Sears Wish Book or coveting some gadget in those wacky Fingerhut catalogs — even simply chuckling at the all-too-serious model in a J. Crew mailer? Okay, maybe that’s just me. But the fact is that people actually shop from catalogs. The experience they’ve provided is one part wish list and one part armchair convenience. But catalogs as a category were starting to feel a bit, well, old.

At least until last week, when the Google Catalogs app was released for iPad. Now the whole ritual has been rocketed into a new dimension — one that mobile marketers and social media marketers alike can agree is pure genius.

The app is wisely populated with big, covet-worthy brands like Sephora and Williams-Sonoma. Catalog flippers can browse through lush layouts and seductively-photographed products just like they always have — but now on their iPads. The new catalog experience allows shoppers to zoom in on products, tap on tags to learn more, and even unlock videos, photographs and reviews about selected items. If there’s something buyers can’t live without, Google Catalog can direct them to stores nearby that carry the product or to the brand’s website where they can order online. Tapping into the inspiration board craze that we covered recently, Google Catalogs allows users to make collages of the items they love or have purchased and lets them share them with friends and other catalog users.

Googles’ commitment to merging shopping with search and social has manifested in some cool innovations recently and this one of them. Print and magazine-type marketing for tablets like the iPad was certainly inevitable. I would be willing to wager that we’re going to see tablet-based magazines and catalogs from brands big and small multiply in the next six months. Plus the idea is Earth friendly and is sure to save more than a couple of trees.

But you tell us, readers: Would you use a tablet catalog or do you prefer to kick it old school with a copy of Lillian Vernon on your back massaging chair? Order up a round of lively catalog-based conversation in the comments section below!

August 24, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Very Pinteresting: The Online Inspiration Board Explodes

Inspiration boards — you know, those collections of photographs from magazines and websites that help spark creativity from wedding planners, budding interior designers, bloggers and the like — are taking over the world. In fact, we’re beginning to wonder if the sudden surge in popularity of these glorified versions of the Madonna collages I used to make in junior high are symptomatic of a culture dying to reignite their creative campfires… or if online inspiration boards are just another trending social media craze.

Any way you slice it, inspiration boards themselves aren’t a bad thing. Sure, Hummel figurines and pictures of floral wallpaper may not personally inspire you. But if somebody out in cyberland gets his or her creative juices flowing this way, then by all means, feel free. And that’s where Pinterest comes in handy.

Pinterest is a sassy startup with an exploding membership that allows users to “pin” their favorite photos and images from around the web on themed inspiration boards. Users are responding big time to Pinterest’s social aspect, which allows you to follow folks whose boards excite you and repost the photos that you love. Brides and folks giving their bedrooms a makeover are clearly Pinterest’s biggest audience — but the site also appeals to moms, photographers, artists and creative professionals. Other sites like Ashton Kutcher’s discount design site fab.com have started using product-filled inspiration boards to hopefully inspire customers to buy more. Online versions of fashion and beauty magazines have also started posting inspiration boards on their sites in hopes of joining the party.

Yet there’s a larger movement at work here. Inspiration boards are a part of the ever-growing world of creativity-based social media. Sites like Pinterest, ArtWeen and Tumblr are giving birth to a whole new market of social media users interested in talking about creativity either through images or online conversations. Social media marketing and blog creation for clients in this shiny new creative world have now been given the go ahead to be as artistic, beautiful and provocative as humanly possible.

We don’t need a board to tell us that this new trend is downright inspiring.

August 23, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Social, Savvy and Specific

We’ve been keeping on our eye on the specialized social media market this year, and with good reason: Niche social media sites — and the social media marketing that comes along with them — are exploding. From television watching to fashion to vampires, we’ve seen thousands of social media users who have something specific they want to talk about make the leap from Facebook and Twitter and give the specialized guys a try. So when GOOD reported on Healthcare Savvy, a site devoted to folks talking about healthcare triumphs and disasters, we had to see what the fuss was about for ourselves.

The concept is too brilliant to resist: The social networking site allows registered users to review and discuss healthcare. It’s kind of like your basic shopping or restaurant social media platform, but devoted to shopping for healthcare. Clearly neither the private sector nor the government is making these decisions easier for people, so the people are speaking back… and what they’re saying is funny, wise, proactive and interesting.

Everyone has been faced with shopping for healthcare, and this commonality is what binds the users of Healthcare Savvy together. The site just launched this month, so it isn’t loaded with content but it also isn’t bogged down with advertisements and sponsored blogs. There’s a kind of subtle rebel spirit on the site but the content generally (and wisely) avoids the great healthcare debates. We enjoyed clicking around Healthcare Savvy and couldn’t help thinking what other niche social networks could be next.

The boutique effect on social media and online branding is one we’ve just started to see. Technology and desktop publicity is as such that anybody anywhere can now sew together a network of folks who have something distinctly in common with one another. Niche networks allow marketers and bloggers to talk to target their audience just that much more directly rather than getting lost in a sea of social media drones.

August 22, 2011 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Al Gore: Nobel Laureate & Amazing Marketer?

There are a few negative things one could say about Al Gore — that he isn’t an engaging speaker (or even that he sounds like your most boring science teacher from middle school), that as a politician he didn’t have enough fight in him to really make an impact while he was in office or that he promotes just one side of the climate change story. But you can’t accuse the man of not knowing how to market himself and his pet projects.

Gore has long used the Internet to champion his cause of climate change awareness. For a decade, the former vice president has kept up with technology and like any brilliant marketer, using every new innovation to his advantage. His latest endeavor, which we stumbled upon thanks to Mashable.com, is no exception. Long exhausted from accusations which claim climate change isn’t real, Gore was inspired to create The Climate Reality Project. The project hopes to re-open an honest and unbiased conservation about the realities of climate change.

On September 14, 2011, “24 Hours of Reality” will be unleashed on the world. This global event will feature 24 climate change speakers and presenters from around the world. Partnering with Ustream means the messages can be seen from anywhere without interruption. The call to action also features a social element to help spread the word and ways for everyone to take action.

We’ve seen Ustream channels take viral video into the next phase: branded, independently-broadcasted programming. The ease and quality of Ustream means anybody with a cause or company can broadcast in ways YouTube never even dreamed about. Seeing as we’re in the blogging and marketing and social media biz, we’ll stay out of the climate change debate — but we do love the way good old Al is bringing attention to his cause.