Coke's Positive Contribution to Society

The Social Media Guard

Courtesy of my friends at Zone

You Only Send Emails Every Now And Again

...so it makes perfect sense to get your 'Fans' to get the 'news' when it's 'news'

Nice touch from my beloved Leeds United in setting up separate Twitter accounts for Ticket News, Commercial and photos.

Only one thing missing..... getting back into the Premiership!!!

Sartorial Videos To Inspire

I'm a big fan of Mr. Porter..from their website, to their emails, to their products.

I've now become a big fan of the video content they produce. Check out this video they use to help inspire what we should be wearing by showing the trends in Florence, Italy.




Why is video important? Well video and photos are a sure way of driving engagement. Take a look at this infographic from MBOOTH



But in the case of Mr. Porter, selling fashion, it makes complete sense to inspire by suing real people in video  rather than stills or models wearing the clothes.

Anyway, I'm off to sort my wardrobe out!

Check out more Mr Porter videos on their YouTube Channel

How To Get Your Pins Noticed - Infographic

Image courtesy of Pinnable Business

Social Media Around the World in 2012

Interesting piece of work from InSites Consulting...take from it what you will

Social Media around the World 2012 (by InSites Consulting) from InSites Consulting

Our Foods , Your Questions - via MacDonalds

It would be a fair statement to say that MacDonalds is not everyone's cup of tea..or rather not everyone's favourite global fast food retailer

But I have to say I do like the way the restaurants in Canada have put together an online PR drive to boost the brand.

Based around the Our Foods, Your Questions strapline they say

Ever wanted to ask us about the food in our Canadian restaurants?
Now's your chance! We'll answer any questions about our food - even
the tough ones - then post a personal reply from McDonald's® Canada.

http://yourquestions.mcdonalds.ca/

They promise to answer all questions, even the tricky ones

These also get posted to their YouTube Channel 

The following video attempts to show how you can make a Big Mac as "just like something you would make at home."

This only inspired you one question from me...You have an executive chef ??

Still, I think a very noteworthy attempt at being transparent

Being Social...In Person

It's good to see that teenagers still like to meet up in the real world




There is hope !

Barclaycard and its Social Media Credit Card

Barclaycard Ring MasterCard is the real first venture into a Social Media based Credit Card.

Driven by its community of card members, it promises ro be shaped by its card holders. The community is a forum where exchange of ideas takes place as well as knowledge share to make Barclaycard Ring whatever its members want it to be.




Judging by the (to put it politely) inconsistent approach to Social Media use by Barclays in the UK, this is not likely to happen here in the near future.

Integrating Social and Email

Interesting video conducted by my friend Jim Ducharme from Get Response with Sundeep Kapur of Email Yogi at the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit . 


Yogi answers this question: “What is the optimal way to integrate and connect the activity of your social and email marketing efforts?”


In particular Sundeep talks about using Social to get more customers, cut costs and improve email marketing results.

What Do Teens Really Think Of Email?

>Data and infographic by AWeber Email Marketing

Twitter and the Art of Storytelling

I recently had the pleasure of meeting John Sadowsky again at an event run by the DMA and Emailvision.

For those of you who don't know John, he is a great exponent of the importance of Stories and Storytelling for both Leaders and Brands.

At the recent event, he highlighted how the Hero of the Story is often the key difference between a Brand Story that is successful and one that is not. He cited the Facebook pages of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. The former having fewer fans than Starbucks but more highly engaged ones.

And the main difference was Hero of the stories being told. In Starbucks' case it was the brand, while with Dunkin Donuts it was the Customer. This makes sense doesn't it? I am more likely to share a story that has me at the centre of it than a Brand.

So this brings me to Twitter. Now you might say that a story can't be told in 140 characters or less. True But what Twitter have done very cleverly by launching Twitter Stories, is to talk about the Stories behind the Tweets.

Here's how Aaron Durand saved his mom's bookstore with a Tweet.

Aaron Durand’s mother was in trouble. She had run an independent bookstore for nearly two decades when an economic downturn hit that threatened to close the shop. Aaron wanted to help his mom, but wasn’t sure what he could do. He wrote about his mom’s plight on his blog then tweeted it out, adding at the last second an offer to buy a burrito for anyone who bought $50 worth of books during the holidays at his mom’s shop.

The story took hold. The Tweet was passed along from person to person across Portland’s art and design community. It was retweeted and retweeted until hundreds of people had read the story.

Overnight, new customers started to arrive and business began to pick up. The story continued to snowball on Twitter. The bookstore went on to have its best holiday season ever, and has continued to thrive each season since.

 Twitter is not the story. Brands are not the story. People are the story

What's your Twitter Story?

The World Park Campaign

Phygital* - Will The Real QR Code Please Stand Up

A read an interesting piece from Adam Hutchinson the Lead UX Architect at EHS4D ( in fact there he is sat 10 feet away from me), on the value of QR codes.

Adam argued quite legitamately that 'for all their wizardry, they are currently being used in exactly the same way as URLs. That is, to link to a web address'


And indeed in the majority of cases that's right. eConsultancy did show, however, some really clever uses in a recent article, my favourite being the one below





The jury is still out in particular as QR codes penetration is still quite low although recent experiments by broadcasters such as the BBC could very well increase awareness. The BBC One TV Program ''The Good Cook'' now has QR codes on screen to allow you to access recipes from the show.




Danny Cohen, Controller, BBC One, says: “I want BBC One to lead the way with interactivity and technological innovation so that we can keep engaging audiences in new ways. I hope viewers will find this experiment with QR codes to be a simple but useful tool to help them re-create the recipes they see on screen.”

But of course as soon as one technology is in the consumers hand, another one takes another large step forward. Why stop at black and white boxes when actually the object itself ,once plastered with a QR code, becomes the tag itself. Check out the video


>
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*Phyigital belongs to those clever people at Momentum

Reading the Signs

I came across the FIAT Street Evo app recently and was impressed by the numbers claimed at the end of the clip.

1. 1 million signs spotted
2. Great feedback
3. The most viewed Fiat brochure in history!

I think the use of technology, location , gamification make the campaign truly engaging.

Let's hope the conversations turned into conversions.

My Most Used Hashtags #

#ecrm, #b2beu, #email, #emailmarketing, #fusionmex

Courtesy of www.tweetstats.com 

Love Me or Like Me...Just Follow Me

In a previous post I talked about best practice in terms of un-subscription pages. One of the suggestions was to give subscribers the opportunity to follow your brand via another channel such as Facebook or Twitter.


Of course ideally you don't want subscribers to un-subscribe, but what if you notice that they are not engaging with your emails? Should you try and head off the un-subscribe at the pass?


Recently I've not been opening my Habitat emails - not because I've fallen out of love with them, but just because I'm not buying for the house. They have spotted the lack of engagement and I received a very interesting email from them this morning. The subject line was 'Love Habitat? Like us on Facebook!' and the main image and copy looked like this

'We noticed you're not loving our emails, so why not like us on Facebook instead?'


I think this is a great example of using email engagement data to keep subscribers engaged with the brand..one way or another

Sexy Email Event Amsterdam

I had the honour of being invited by the Dutch Dialogue Marketing Association  to present at their 3rd Sexy Email Event. I gave my view on what made email sexy...data or creative?

Here is a snapshot of the event.

IKEA 365 Campaign -

It seems that IKEA are running a 365 day long campaign - thats longer than the shelving they sell, when I get my hands on them!!

Not seen it how they have tied it in with Social, Mobile and bringing the global local, but a great opportunity missed if they don't integrate with other channels

Social media quotes Enterprise Social 2.0 2011

I wasn't able to attend this conference but it seemed to generate some interesting sound bites
Social media quotes Enterprise Social 2.0 2011

An A to Z of eCRM - X

X is for X-Ray

Ok, so I got stuck on X.

But what we are trying to do with eCRM is to get under the skin of the customer and really understand them.

We have to remember,however, that an X-ray is just a snapshot in time and can often give a much distorted view of what is actually going on. Whether or not the customer is one of our best or is worthy of cross or up sell communications can't be determined as a one off.

Today’s Open and Clicks, yesterday’s Social Mentions are of no use without understanding the context and trend within which they sit.