Monthly Archives: January 2009

Where to start with Social Media Marketing Strategy?

January 11, 2009 – 9:53 pm

Where to start with all these social media sites?

Where to start with all these social media sites?

It’s tough to be successful marketing with social media tools without a strategic plan. I ran across a method of helping marketing professionals decide where start their social media marketing plans. It’s called the POST Method. It was derived by social media analysts at Forrester.POST is an acronym, which stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. To break it down further, below is a list of questions within each category that should help you think about starting a social media marketing plan.People: Who is your audience? Are they online? What do they do online? What influences their decision making? Are they producers, readers, or both? Are there existing communities within your industry?Objectives: What are your goals? Do you want to gain exposure? Do you want to create brand evangelists who will promote your product to passers by? How will you measureyour results?Strategy: What are your key messages? What do you want evangelists to tell passersby? How do you want to change or improve relationships with customers? How can you get the most out new relationships forged?Technology: What resources do you need to connect with customers? Do you want to create an entire community? Do you want to create an application to interact with customers in existing communities? Does your audience listen to podcasts? Watch videos? Read blogs? Or watch presentations?Lots of questions of here to get you started thinking about creating a social media marketing strategy. If you find yourself unable to answer a lot of these questions, support numerous social media relationships and/or execute social media development, it may be best to contact an agency. If you are entirely new to the social media and are a bit overwhelmed or uncomfortable, they best way to learn is to indulge yourself, explore and listen.If you need some more advanced tips, check out this post by Rohit Bhargava.

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I Like My Friends, But I Love the Whopper

January 8, 2009 – 10:20 pm

Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App

Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice Facebook App

Burger King, home of the flame broiled Whopper, has recently launched yet another unique, edgy, marketing campaign. The brand that brings you The (creepy) King, meat smelling body spray, and many other odd, attention grabbing campaigns, is at it again. The Whopper Sacrifice is a new Facebook application that provides users with a coupon for a free Whooper, if the user is willing to sacrifice 10 friends from his/her Facebook account.There has been a lot of negative feedback on this campaign, citing the fact that it encourages users to exhibit anti-social behavior on a platform fueled by social connections. Many bloggers are shocked that Burger King would launch an application that doesn’t make friends, but instead creates potential enemies. Good or bad, it certainly got a lot of press.Which is exactly why this is a brilliant campaign – it is a unique idea, funny, and it has sparked a lot of attention and discussion. It has all the ingredients for a successful campaign: the brand is getting a ton of exposure and it is driving users to a measurable, revenue driving (most will buy a soda and/or fries), event when customers visit to Burger King to redeem the coupon.  Not to mention it is  accomplishing what all marketers hope and wish for, it has gone viral.To those that argue that it is damaging to the brand, you are taking this campaign way too seriously. Facebook users have plenty of pseudo-friends and are easily able to remove “friends” without damaging any real/online relationships, this is simply a funny way of cleaning up a friend’s list. Also, the fact that people will actually go through with this shows that the Whopper must be THAT good, right?Although a great campaign, it could certainly be improved. Sure, this was pretty viral, getting over 15,000 users in its first day, but Burger King missed an opportunity by not having a way to encourage users to invite friends to add the application. This could have been accomplished through a feature to get free fries by having enough “true friends” identify a certain user’s friendship as being worth more than a Whopper.Another fun idea to improve on the idea would be to add a level of competitiveness to the application, like awarding the Whopper’s biggest fan, the user willing to sacrifice the most friends, with free Whopper’s for a year.Overall, great idea, very good execution.

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