MTV’s public health campaign encourages young people to get routinely checked for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The Associated Press reports, “MTV says the idea is to remove the stigma attached to getting checked out for STDs.”
While this is a nice idea in theory and I applaud MTV for fully integrating mobile into their campaign outreach, I think most people, no matter how much they typically share via Foursquare, are unlikely to publicly broadcast their appointment for STD screenings.
This Foursquare partnership would be more successful if it was linked to MTV’s political campaign, “Rock the Vote” which encourages young people to register to vote and make their voices heard. If they offered a badge for checking in to a voting location, I think the response would be tremendous.
What do you think? Can MTV leverage Foursquare for such a person declaration?
If you’re a foodie, you have a login for restaurant reservation website OpenTable. If you’re gadget savvy, you may also have their mobile app on your smartphone. The popular reservation service has seen great success thus far in 2010, confirmed by their recently quarterly earnings announcement.
In a post by Erick Schonfeld of TechCruch, he reports “OpenTable is installed in 14,128 restaurants and seated 15.6 million diners last quarter, up 27 percent and 52 percent, respectively.” Not only is OpenTable becoming the go-to source for reservations, but users are also raising their level of engagement with the site.
Schonfeld wrote, “Those diners have now written more than 7 million restaurant reviews. As a point of comparison, Yelp has a total of 12 million reviews across all local businesses, and CEO Jeremy Stoppleman considers the those reviews to be Yelp’s single most important competitive advantage.”
Digest that for a second. Yelp, which reviews all types of businesses, not just restaurants, has 12 million reviews, and OpenTable, which exclusively provides restaurant information has 7 million?
OpenTable clearly understands the value of creating a site users want to spend time on, not just log in and log out. By allowing customers to write reviews of their dining experiences the site becomes about something more than just reserving your table.
Additionally, OpenTable is hopping on the “group buying” bandwagon and offering a new weekly special they are calling “Spotlight.” This will operate the same way Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe do, and offer specials like “$25 dollars for $50 dollars worth of food at Grill 23.”
As RaceTalk commented in a post last week, the group buying concept entices customers to try places they normally wouldn’t because they are being offered a discounted price (recession, anyone?). Additionally, the sites incorporate social media channels allowing users to post their purchase on Facebook, Twitter and more. Some sites also offer referral bonuses to customers who bring in new users.
Should OpenTable decide to incorporate social media sharing on their site and explore referral bonuses, the company’s growth potential is exponential. OpenTable is paying attention to emerging trends and adapting quickly.
Social Media Michelin awards OpenTable three stars!
We’ve been talking a lot about Facebook this week. The site hit 500 million users on Wednesday and has become a sheer force in our digitally obsessed society. Earlier this spring Facebook made the “Like” button universally available across the world wide web, not just on their own site. Brands and businesses have incorporated the “Like” functionality into their own websites to visually demonstrate customer support. While there was a great deal of buzz about the expanded reach of the “Like” button, there has also been a storm brewing around the concept of a “Dislike” button.
I for one would like to see Facebook add a “Dislike” button. If I can express my support for something so easily, why can’t I express my opposition or distaste? There are nearly 3.2 million people that agree with me who belong to a Facebook group called “Dislike Button.”
There are a few obvious reasons why Facebook has held off: first, there is potential for bullying and hurtful use of the proposed “dislike” button. While I would like to think Facebook users are capable of using the “dislike” button wisely, I am sure there are users that would be abusive.
A second reason is highlighted in a new column by Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore for CNN. In his most recent column, Cashmore explains that the “dislike” button opens door for users to negatively impact the brands and businesses that use Facebook for marketing and promotions. He writes:
“Facebook will never add a Dislike button because it would damage the company’s relationships with brands, businesses and web publishers — these groups are essential for building both web traffic and ad revenue.”
While Cashmore makes a strong point that Facebook does not want to alienate the primary source of its revenue, Facebook has also been known to respond to strong user feedback.
Who do you think will win this debate? Are you on team Like or Dislike?
Infographics are quickly becoming a media and public relations industry buzz word / topic. Why you ask? Two major reasons. As corporations continue to shift into their role as media companies and content curators, they’re realizing the opportunity to package interesting data to the media and consumers in new ways. More importantly, media organizations and editors are now focusing on finding new ways to engage their readership. Infographics happen to solve both of these problems by packaging data in a way that makes it both engaging and easy to read.
A few weeks ago I sat down with Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey for Racepoint Group’s video newsletter to discuss how brands and agencies can leverage infographics and why they’re becoming the “new slide shows” for media outlets desperate for engaging content. While Sam cautioned that infographics aren’t B-roll (most media outlets like to play a role in building them), he did pass along some interesting insight into how PR practitioners and marketers can leverage the media’s interest in this new category of content.
For more insight on infographics, along with the latest news and trends in marketing, PR and communications in the technology space subscribe to Racepoint’s “The Point: Tech Edition.
Last night Racepoint Group hosted an event about social media and its return on investment (ROI). As social media continues to become a larger focal point in public relations and marketing campaigns, it’s critical to understand how to articulate it’s value to clients.
Last night’s event centered around a panel discussion with three social media experts: Larry Weber, Chairman of Racepoint Group, Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics and Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing for HubSpot.
After Larry Weber’s opening remarks, Qualman shared how he first dipped his toe into the digital space by sending a company-wide email instead of the standard hard copy memo. View his story here:
Volpe was up next and shared with the group the origins of his marketing career and the way tracking and reporting on ROI is evolving. Watch him provide tips here:
The evening was full of tremendous ideas and recommendations. The five big takeaways from the panel were:
1) Social media is not about technology. It’s about human interaction. It’s about sharing information and making connections. People who are intimidated by the technology aspect of engaging in social media should not view the applications as a hurdle. It’s simply the current mechanism to maintain relationships and reach out to new people.
2) When it comes to tracking social media, its important to focus not only on the quantitative (number of followers, number of re-postings) but also the qualitative. We need to take into account engagement and tone. Qualman said, “If social media is so trackable, we should just have robots running things. The human element is necessary here.”
3) Everyone and anyone can be a content creator, a publisher, a media property. As we shift away from traditional print and broadcast media, both we and our clients have the opportunity to get innovative and create and distribute our own content. Additionally, content creation should not be isolated to the PR and marketing staff. Volpe shared that, “50% of HubSpot employees have written posts for the HubSpot blog.”
4) Although much of PR and marketing is based in the written word, we need to start thinking more visually. We need to tell stories through pictures and videos. We need to make our content more authentic and dynamic.
5) On a personal level, Volpe stated, “The new resume is what comes up in Google when I type in your name.” As digital and social media continue to play an increasingly vital role in our PR and marketing efforts, we too have a digital and social persona, and that is now what employers are most interested in.
Thank you to Erik Qualman and Mike Volpe for joining us at Racepoint Group last night and providing such pragmatic, realistic, useful and inspiring guidance on the social media ROI frontier. Be sure to follow @equalman and @mvolpe on Twitter for real time updates on their social media adventures. You can also view all the live commentary during the event with the #smroi hashtag here.
According to Russell Adams’ post for the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Conde Nast is working with Activate to launch the iPad application in the fourth quarter. Adams writes, “Though Gourmet Live is free to download, people who surpass a certain threshold of usage will be prompted to sign up for a membership.” Sounds a bit like a magazine subscription, no? Just the way you can access a magazine’s website and peruse the content for free, but they save the best content for the pages of the magazine; a reward to their loyal subscribers.
Conde Nast already has iPad applications for three of its magazines – GQ, Vanity Fair and Wired – with plans to launch apps for Glamour and The New Yorker as well. Could it be that print magazines will soon be a thing of the past? Will your beach reading now be exclusive to your mobile device?
Conde Nast’s Chief Executive Chuck Townsend isn’t exactly denying it. He told the Wall Street Journal, “The future of Conde Nast is a consumer marketing machine.” I find this statement particularly compelling. Rather than positioning Conde Nast as a publishing house, Townsend is shifting the company’s direction to focus in a more targeted manner at reaching consumers exactly where they are – on their mobile device.
Check out a preview of the Gourmet Live iPad application below:
This is a guest post contributed by Micah Azzano from Racepoint Group’s Washington, DC office
As communicators, we continue to hear about the new communications landscape, where two-way communication is necessary for success. Nowhere is this more apparent than in than public affairs industry, where traditional tactics for influencing legislators — lobbying, advertising, writing op-eds and forming physical grassroots communities — can be expensive, limited and ineffective.
This week I was able to attend a panel in DC moderated by Marijean Lauzier, President & CEO of Racepoint Group on this very topic. The panel asked public affairs experts in DC to explore this new landscape and how public affairs teams can use social media to promote issues, reach influencers and engage grassroots and community organizations. Panelists included: Erik Hower of AT&T, Bill Knapp of SKD Knickerbocker and Allison Giles of Cook Medical.
Below are highlights from the panel:
Bill acknowledged that in the past DC and the government has lagged behind the rest of the world in social networking, but that’s changing at a rapid pace. He notes that social media provides a useful avenue for public affairs specialist to push out necessary communications and nullify incorrect or adverse information. The two examples he discussed are his work with Toyota during their recalls and ABC when considering pulling broadcasting in New York. View Bill’s complete response
Marijean followed up by asking Allison about what concerns she has about leveraging social media over time in a heavily regulated environment such as medical supplies. Allison’s response noted their public affairs team is starting out by slowly dipping their toes into the social media world and using it primarily for monitoring and staying updated with key members of the federal government, media and hill staffers. View Allison’s complete response
The conversation moved into the challenges in communications structure moving forward and whether big brands like AT&T view social media as an opportunity or a risk. Erik said that while AT&T has some of the best PR on the traditional side, there’s a lot more they can do in the online social media world. The challenge they’re facing is how to do social media strategically where it will have the most impact, and not just put up a Facebook or Twitter page just to have one.
Themes throughout the morning addressed the way campaigns have transformed and influenced social media uses inside and outside the beltway including the mobilization of the youth community by the Obama campaign. Because of that, it highlighted and illustrated the advantages of using social media not only for messaging but also for fund raising.
The panel also addressed the difference between traditional and social media messaging. The social media messaging is more segmented to smaller niches than traditional media does. Overall, the event takeaways included that while public affairs has a unique opportunity to reach and interact with key influencers and their audiences via social media, just building a community, social experience on a central hub or even simply opening a Facebook or Twitter account is not enough. The experience must be coupled with the ability to reach and engage key audiences on a constant and ongoing basis for the success of future campaigns.
Additionally, as digital and social media continue to expand as integral parts of media planning, it will continue to grow as the central influencer and information source for many. However, this means public affairs professionals must be prepared to further pare down and segment their messaging to address the needs of extremely targeted audiences.
On June 1, Brad Stone of the New York Times wrote an almost glowing review of the Pulse news reader on the iPad. A week later his parent company forced Apple to take the application off of iTunes because it allowed users to view New York Times Co. content (nytimes.com and boston.com) within the application. And with that, we have the first debate around monetizing content in the tablet-era.
In essence the New York Times Co. is objecting to Pulse creators (two Stanford graduate students) using the company’s RSS feed on the iPad. Something that has been done for years on all sorts of devices (i.e. Google Reader). The problem it seems in this case is the creators had been so successful with that app that it had risen to number one on the paid, iPad application store for some time and they’ve made more than $40,000 in doing so. Steve Jobs even praised the innovation of the application at Apple’s WWDC, before he received a letter from the Times Co. With their own FREE, iPad app, the Times Co. wants a piece of the pie.
However, while the Times Co. sticks with its current position, Kara Swisher, who sat down with the two creators of the app in the video above, notes in an update that they resubmitted Pulse yesterday without the Times’ RSS feed included and it is now on-sale again on the iTunes store. For the time being, anyways.
Social media site Mashable recently posted an infographic with some odd Facebook statistics. While normally one might gloss over this, the graphic actually contained some pretty useful information for marketers looking to leverage Facebook to reach their target audience.
Noteworthy stats include:
• Of the 400 million people that log into their Facebook account each month, 50% of them log in daily
• 70% of Facebook users live outside the United States
• Women aged 55 and up are the fastest growing Facebook demographic in America
Lesson learned? Facebook is a daily part of the lives of people around the globe, specifically our moms. Kidding. Sort of.
In all seriousness, this data offers shining, golden opportunities for marketers to reach demographics via Facebook they may not have realized were present.
Check out the infographic below. Any other stats you find surprising?
Ning’s new pricing system, in moving away from free community building
In his bookFree: The Future of a Radical PriceChris Anderson proposed that the rapidly falling cost of digital technology enabled companies to create digital content and spaces for essentially nothing. In addition, he added that the word free is so popular that the mere use of it will increase demand and instant engagement with consumers. Therefore, his hypothesis was that the future of digital business is free.
While this approach may assist companies in gaining traction for a new digital technology, it doesn’t always work in trying to establish a sustainable business strategy. Especially, it seems, within the social media space. One of the big misperceptions of social media use has been that it is free. The truth is for companies interested in using social media tools – it has always cost money in hours and resource allocation. However, in addition to those resources – it will cost money going forward as social media service providers realize the demand is there for premium, paid services.
Yesterday, Jason Rosenthal, the CEO of Ning, sent an email to Ning users that officially noted the company’s plans for phasing out all free uses of the Ning network by July – as part of its new pricing and business strategy. According to Rosenthal, “We (Ning) want(s) to provide a new level of innovation to Network Creators — including all the valuable features Network Creators have asked us to build. To get there, we need to focus 100% on paid Ning Networks.”
Why now? Ning’s problem seems to be the same as the issues faced by YouTube in endorsing “free.” Although, their model was able to entice millions of people to share videos, their revenue model suffered because brands didn’t want to advertise against videos made in people’s basements. Now Google and YouTube are pushing for premium video content that advertisers want. In the same vein, Ning drew lots of users (including marketers interested in an easy and free way to build a community), but the advertisements it leveraged on its free communities for revenue were hardly targeted and drew little interest from big name brands (it was mostly Google display ads). They also found that a large portion of their traffic was willing to pay for premium features. Hence, they’re now focusing on different levels of paid services. Even an enterprise or professional level for $49.95 a month. With that move, according to some reports, Ning sizes their market around $4 billion.
Yammer, which has taken a similar track towards the premium market of microblogging, may be a good case study for Ning. Unlike Twitter, they’ve cornered a market on enterprise collaboration over bits of information and now have 70,000 customers (many of those happily paying). In fact, according to Yammer , “A number of Fortune and Global 500 companies such as Cisco, Nationwide, AstraZeneca, Alcatel-Lucent, SunGard, and Molson Coors have upgraded to Yammer’s paid product. ” This news has some investors calling them the next billion dollar company. Meanwhile, Radian6, the popular social media monitoring service used by the likes of AMD, Comcast, Microsoft and Dell (to name a few) starts its pricing at $500 per month and can reach several additional figures.
Of course, there are other examples of “free” social media tools thriving with no plans to make their services pay-per-play. The aforementioned Twitter has been adamant in stating that they have no plans to charge corporate accounts. Even, Co-Tweet, which assists brands in engaging and monitoring Twitter (and was acquired earlier this year), offers its service for free. Facebook doesn’t seem to have any plans to make users pay, although they could make a nice amount for a $1 a day and would certainly find brands willing to pay for fanpages.
Others are adding paid-for, premium features, in addition to free features. PitchEngine, which has become a very popular free (and paid-for) tool (platform) for PR practitioners and social media mangers to share news and information, recently announced a new pricing system for agencies and brands interested in additional features. However, according to their CEO Jason Kintzler they have no plans to abandon free use of the service’s entry-level features. “We will still be ‘freemium’ and people will be able to publish for free. We’re just adding more premium features,” he told RaceTalk in an email.
However, any way you look at it, there is a current set of market happenings that makes pay-for services a new attractive option for social media tool or platform providers.
Online advertising cannot support most businesses (including social media services) in its current form as the only revenue stream (low CPM’s, etc.) and investors are shying away from companies that are only looking at ad revenue to support their business.
Measurement of social media campaigns is improving and any tool’s use that can be measured against (or that do the measuring!) previous strategies , mediums (traditional or otherwise), can now be budgeted for. In short, folks are willing to pay for social media tools that work.
Investments are now following in the footsteps of the demand for these tools and platforms. Look no further than investor interest in the social media measurement space. New social media service providers will now have the money and runway to move away from launching as “free.” Something that can be painful to shut the door on down the road.
This morning the Associated Press reported that MTV has partnered with Foursquare to offer a special badge to users who check in to health clinics via the mobile application. The new Foursquare badge is part of MTV’s “GYT: Get Yourself Tested” campaign.
