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.
Leave a Reply