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Archives for June 2012

June 29, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Five Things You Might Have Missed!

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Want to impress your friends at the next backyard barbecue? Need some great social media marketing and online branding stories to add to your library of knowledge? Then look no further! Brandsplat’s list of Five Things You Might Have Missed is chock full of interesting tidbits sure to wow your coworkers and comrades.

1.) Tweet Songs: ’90s alternative band Blur is on the verge of making a big comeback, so to let the world know they’re still here, they hopped on Twitter. But unlike every other retro act sending out desperate “Remember me?” tweets, Blur is using the platform to release two brand new songs. The tracks will be recorded by the band at a secret location and then released via @blurofficial, the group’s Twitter account. It’s the latest music marketing stunt pulled by record companies using Twitter, and we have to say it kind of rocks.

2.) Teeny Tablet Trouble: Google’s Nexus 7 tablet with the 7-inch screen should have been bigger news this week. After all, it’s the first tablet of its size, and one experts say could take a big bite out of the iPad’s sales. Yet news of fires and Obamacare kind of took the wind of its sails. Still, we think this branding story is worth watching. As tablet tech gets cheaper to produce, brands are bound to get more competitive — and so will the marketing.

3.) Poetic Post-Its: Brandflakes for Breakfast pointed out this great viral music video by The Family Bones early last month. It’s worth the watch if you missed it because it’s incredibly creative — and it’s a great accidental commercial for Post-Its. Animated Post-Its express the sweet sentiment of the song while viewers are left humming the tune on their way to Staples to pick up some more of the handy slips of paper.

4.) Apps in Time of Crisis: The Colorado wildfires are undoubtedly a national disaster and a real tragedy. But as is often the case, an inventive person uses horrific events like this to help others. Colorado Springs-based programmer Robbie Trencheny came up with a web app to help track the wildfires so area residents knew where they were and how long they had before they needed to evacuate. It’s always inspiring to see developers use technology to help mankind, especially in times of need.

5.) News Breaking Blogger: And finally, we’d like to tip our hat to 81-year-old Supreme Court blogger Lyle Denniston, who was the first news source to break the story of the Supreme Court’s decision on the health care law. Denniston shows that blogs can actually be reliable news outlets while proving that you’re never too old to create headlines.

Filed Under: Blog Content Management, Blog Marketing, Brand Engagement, Digital Engagement, Facebook Management, Facebook Marketing, Five Things You Might Have Missed, Online Brand Management, Online Marketing, Social Media Management, Twitter Management, Twitter Marketing, Video Content, Viral Marketing Tagged With: Social Media Marketing, Twitter marketing

June 28, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Tweeting at Work on the Rise, New Study Says

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We suspected it all along. You’re on Twitter when you’re supposed to be working! We are, too — but we’re Twitter marketing ninjas, so it’s allowed. As for you, well… you’re totally busted (and totally not alone). A new study reports that Twitter use at work is on the rise, while Facebook use has dropped.

Twitter is quickly becoming the new at-work time killer of choice, according to Palo Alto Networks, a computer-security appliance firm that analyzed Internet traffic at more than 2,036 organizations around the globe between November 2011 and May 2012. Facebook, according to the study, is still the most popular social network for people to use on the job, but maybe not for much longer. Facebook use fell significantly during the six-month time period from 54 percent of total at-work social networking to 37 percent. Twitter, on the other hand, jumped from 11 percent of workday social networking use to an impressive 21 percent. Pinterest and Tumblr also pulled in respectable numbers for at-work usage.

This new study seems to be on par with what social media marketing types have seen firsthand within our industry. The at-work social media user is looking for a more casual relationship with social media and one that doesn’t require all of their personal information. Knowing this, Twitter’s surge in popularity makes perfect sense, since tweeting makes it easier for users and brands alike to achieve a more casual interaction. It’ll be interesting to see how the modern employee’s relationship with social media continues to develop.

Readers, what do you think? Is social media usage at work a big no-no? Or do you think it’s inevitable, so we might as well market to them? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

Filed Under: Twitter Management, Twitter Marketing Tagged With: Social Media Marketing, twitter for business, twitter management, Twitter marketing

June 27, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

The Rainbow Cookie Connection: How Oreo Rocked Facebook Marketing

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We’ve been talking a lot about the ever-changing face of Facebook marketing in these pages. But who knew one little rainbow cookie could say so much more than we ever could. On Monday, Oreo placed a photo of a gay pride version of its top-selling cookie and within hours, it’s become the summer’s most-talked-about Facebook marketing campaign.

The now-famous image featured a multi-layered Oreo with the creme centers in different colors of the rainbow. The cookie appeared above the date-June 25 and the word “pride” with the caption “Proudly support love.” If you were on Facebook on Monday, chances are you saw this image spread around the site at a lightening speed. This perfect example of Facebook marketing for business garnered a staggering 172,577 likes. But the real magic for Oreo happened in the comments section. What we social media marketing types pray for is engagement and the rainbow cookie got that and then some. An unfathomable 23,600 comments flooded the post. The image landed itself on the national news and the gay pride cookie was soon a hotbed for debate over marriage equality, the Bible and everything in between. The post was even shared over 50,000 times.

Talking heads debated if Oreo had a place getting involved in Gay Pride issues and blah blah blah. Oreo was really only doing what other brands like Coors and Absolute have done for years: Use the gay pride month of June to say “Hey LGBT people! If you love cookies, we love you back. You money spends the same.” Brands supporting gay rights (aka human rights) is a great thing. And leave it to a social media maverick like Oreo to develop Facebook-specific campaigns to get their followers talking. We say, long live brand Facebook engagement! Hooray for love! And pass the cookies.

Filed Under: Facebook Management, Facebook Marketing, News Tagged With: Facebook for Business, Facebook marketing, Social Media Marketing

June 26, 2012 By Brandsplat 1 Comment

Who Are You? Changing Your Blog Identity

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By the time most of us marketers are knee-deep in a blog content management strategy, a definite blog identity has been crafted. Just yesterday, we talked about how a blog’s greatest asset is the personality of both the business and the blogger. This identity is formed with a unique language rich in all the right keywords while staying true to our core beliefs as a brand. But what happens when this identity changes? Does our brand and our blog lose followers or will people stick with us through thick and thin?

We started thinking about matters of blog identity last week. Popular atheist blogger Leah Libresco shocked her readers when she announced she was converting to Christianity. Libresco has led lively discussions about atheism via her blog for faith and spirituality on the Patheos platform for the last two years. Libresco stared blogging about atheism and faith while she was dating a Catholic. But her well-worn image as an atheist blogger disappeared with one blog post.

“I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory,” she wrote last Monday when she announced her blog would now be found on the Catholicism section on Patheos.

Libresco and her blog have made national news. CNN reports her writing receives some 5,000 views a day and the number has bumped up since the announcement.

In some ways, a journey like Libresco’s is a personal one and one most corporate blog writing specialists wouldn’t have to worry about. But in others, her sudden switch is exactly the kind of thing brands face all the time. From image overhauls to mass employee turnovers, companies big and small face major changes in identity on a regular basis. A writer like Libresco would be wise to start pitching her well-read journey to book publishers turning this major change into a goldmine. For brands, changing the blog identity can also be profitable. A well-thought-out blog makeover in both content and style can bring in new readers and infuse new life in your blog.

So, readers, we’ll ask you: When do you know it’s time for a blog makeover? And has a blogger’s identity change ever turned you off as a reader? Sound off below!

Filed Under: Blog Content Management, Blog Marketing, Online Marketing Tagged With: Blog content management, blog creation

June 25, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Blog Like the Big Brands: JetBlue

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Many businesses are drawn to blog marketing because of its seamless and effective ability to introduce readers to a company’s core values. Within a few well-written posts, readers can really get to know how a brand ticks. A good corporate blog can talk about your company’s charitable causes, new safety campaigns and awards and accolades without being boring to read. This week, Blog Like the Big Brands turns its eyes on JetBlue.

The quirky airline is a beloved and trusted brand and its blog, BlueTales, stays true to that image while talking about things the company cares about. BlueTales isn’t filled with juicy stories of misbehaving passengers and behind-the-scenes drama. Instead, JetBlue uses its blog to paint the picture of a brand that has a good time, is always innovating for its customers and even makes time to do right for mankind.

A recent entry entitled “JetBlue Takes Time with Tots” profiled a visit to an Orlando nursery by JetBlue pilots and crew members. Other entries talk about new services, celebrity sightings, environmental efforts and employee profiles. The style of BlueTales is the chatty, friendly and informative language the brand uses in its traditional advertising and social media marketing. The blog is clearly meant as an online magazine for both employees and customers of JetBlue who want to see what the brand’s been up to.

It’s a simple format that works and one that can work for you, too. Blogging so followers get to know your brand is great place to start for nearly any size company. Blog about new employees, community involvement, favorite causes and procedure changes that will help your customers. To keep it from turning dry or clinical, infuse your posts with personality and humor like JetBlue does. There’s no need to overdo this kind of thing, but you don’t want your words to put readers to sleep, either. Just remember the majority of the big brands we talk about in these pages got to be big by having a distinct personality; that’s a trait every blogging-for-business expert can tap into.

Filed Under: Blog Content Management, Blog Marketing, Brand Engagement Tagged With: Blog Marketing, blogging for business

June 22, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Five Things You Might Have Missed!

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Twitter marketing meltdowns! Juicy blog writing plagiarism scandal! A dirty old broad selling beer! All of this and even more exclamation points in this week’s edition of the Five Things You Might Have Missed!

1. Gimme Pizza: Let’s Pizza, that mind-blowing fresh pizza vending machine with the gangbusters global viral video, is coming to America. News hit our shores this week that the miracle vending machine from A1 Concepts will be stateside later this year. OK, so Americans don’t need yet another way to get fat. But don’t pretend your inner 10-year-old isn’t excited to see this magic pizza maker in person.

2. The Lehrer of His Ways: Jonah Lehrer, the author of the bestselling book Imagine: How Creativity Works, committed a blogging blunder this week when he padded a post with previously-published content. The twist? Lehrer got busted for recycling content he’d written for last October’s Wall Street Journal in the June 12 edition of the New Yorker. By Tuesday afternoon, Lehrer had apologized and promised it wouldn’t happen again. It’s a 21st century blogging issue for sure and we doubt Lehrer is the first or last to “borrow” from himself.

3. Meet Ethel: Using a raunchy old lady to sell a microbrew from Brooklyn doesn’t sound like the world’s most original idea. And it’s not. What’s more, the company’s line of comedic hooey on how this grandma got into business is as believable as a conversation with Mrs. Butterworth. Still, we’ve gotta give Ethel’s Brew major props for great digital branding and kick ass online marketing. Since its debut earlier this month, Ethel’s Brew and its randy senior citizen spokeswoman have ignited Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, and beer bloggers can’t stop talking. Not bad for an 88-year-old.

4. #Donations: Politicians are just cuckoo about Twitter, so leave it to those crafty marketers to use it to get more donations! Politico reported this week that both sides of the election will be rolling out Twitter-based donation programs via the new startup Chirpify.

5. Redditors Do Right: We round out this week’s fivesome with a story of how one brutal video inspired Reddit users to chip in. The now-famous video, which features a school bus monitor being violently harassed by a student, prompted Redditor Max Sidorov to start a fundraising campaign via Indiegogo. Sidorov and his cyber buddies have raised more than $200,000, a gigantic amount more than the $5,000 goal to send the woman on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. That’s social media marketing we can really get behind.

Filed Under: Blog Content Management, Blog Marketing, Brand Engagement, Brandcasting, Digital Engagement, Facebook Management, Facebook Marketing, Five Things You Might Have Missed, Online Brand Management, Online Marketing, Twitter Management, Twitter Marketing, Video Content, Viral Marketing Tagged With: Blog Writing, Twitter marketing

June 21, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Facebook Marketing Works. Maybe You’re Just Doing it Wrong.

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We can’t speak for you, but we’re just about exhausted by all of this “It’s the end of Facebook marketing as we know it!” talk. Sure, maybe the bubble has burst on the usefulness of Facebook advertising, and maybe the demographic of Facebook users is changing. But that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t have its merits when it comes to being an incredibly effective marketing tool.

For example, no social network platform is better at simply being a social network than Facebook. With that one billion users mark right around the corner, Facebook is unbeatable when it comes to the sheer number of people brands can be in touch with. But what marketers are slowly discovering is that Facebook users don’t want a hard sell. They want a long conversation. Recently, we’ve used Facebook for different clients to reach out to their audiences. Facebook is a great place to run by new products, specials and programs while getting the input of the people who already love your company. There’s no other site that gives you instant access to consumers’ thoughts, so why not get inside their heads and use the tool in a more thoughtful way? Research continues to show that Facebook users don’t dump brands who are willing to actually talk to them. This shift back to using Like pages for brand-consumer interaction is great news for local independent businesses.

And ads, as much as they don’t work for big brands on Facebook, are truly hit and miss for the little guys. Instead, small companies can drop the intense selling tactics and talk to their loyal following. But the Catch 22 with this return to conversational social media marketing is this: Instead of blasting ads that we hope users will respond to, we now need to go back to taking the time to get to know our Facebook friends.

Filed Under: Facebook Management, Facebook Marketing Tagged With: Facebook marketing

June 20, 2012 By Brandsplat Leave a Comment

Adidas Shackle Shoe: Stylish Sneaker or Slavery Shout Out?

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Nothing shows a company’s brand management prowess better than a good, old-fashioned controversy. Over the past few months, big-time brands have used social media and online marketing to put out major media fires. This week, shoemaker and apparel giant Adidas extinguished a blaze set by a new shoe — after the public outcry that the footwear was reminiscent of slavery shackles — by pulling the product off the market. But was this a politically correct move to keep consumers happy, a savvy public relations-created controversy to get the line of shoes more press or a little bit of both?

Fashion designer Jeremy Scott is known for being cutting edge and a little bit kooky. His designs are often thought of as cartoonish, bold and whimsical. But rarely is his work thought of as polarizing or racially charged. That all changed on Monday when Adidas announced it was pulling a shoe Scott designed off the market. The JS Roundhouse Mid, as they were called, were a pair of Adidas hightops which featured a pair of plastic cuffs and chains.

A Twitter outrage quickly arose after the shoe’s introduction, with many calling the sneakers “slavery shoes.” The shoes were soon the hot topic among fashion bloggers and political bloggers alike, one of which decried the shoes as “a product of rappers glamorizing criminal behavior & prison for years.” The stink arose when Adidas posted a picture of the shoes on the brand’s Facebook page featuring the caption, “Got a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles?” After hundreds of complaints, Adidas folded and announced it was taking the shoe off the market.

But the company stood by Scott and his creativity, saying in a statement, “the design of the JS Roundhouse Mid is nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery.” After all, Scott’s other designs for the brand featured shoes with a stuffed gorilla and silver wings. Scott himself says the shackle shoes were inspired by ’80s toy My Pet Monster.

Many in fashion have poo-pooed the whole controversy, while marketing peeps are rightfully asking when the last time was that anything by Adidas generated so much publicity. But readers, what do you think? Are the shackle shoes racist or just really great for PR? Sound off below!

Filed Under: Brand Engagement, Online Brand Management, Online Marketing, Social Media Management, Twitter Management, Twitter Marketing Tagged With: brand management, Digital Engagement

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BRANDSPLAT creates articles, blogs, social media, and all written content in the voice of your brand. Our clients include entrepreneurs, personalities, mid-size companies, and some of the world's biggest brands.

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