Healthy Blog Reviews

Sometimes an ad for a product is so clever that you remember the ad but not the product. Not so with Old Spice’s new “Smell Like a Man, Man,” campaign which went viral earlier this year. According to a Nielsen report which was noted in Brandweek , sales of Old Spice Body Wash have jumped 55% in the past three months and 107% this past month. “Gary Stibel, CEO and founder of The New England Consulting Group, said his data also shows a lift for Old Spice. “We think that Old Spice is up. We don’t think it’s up in the double digits, but it’s up meaningfully, and we think it’s driven 100 percent by marketing.” What’s not measurable is how much help the campaign had from the news coverage it received. Type “Old Spice” into Google news and you’ll find more than 2,000 articles have been written by everyone from Business Week to MTV to. . . us. If P&G had bought ad space on all of these publications, the cost would have been astronomical, but now they’re a part of advertising history and that is, to quote another ad genius, priceless. The “Old Spice Guy”, Isaiah Mustafa, is now on his way to becoming a movie star with a role in Jennifer Aniston’s new movie. Now that’s how you breath new life into an old brand.

Tags: Business, business-week, Campaign, campaign-which, data, flickr, Isaiah Mustafa, news, Social, spice-body, video
Posted July 28, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

I’m at the bank depositing money. That’s a real tweet I saw this week and it was followed by a Foursquare link showing the exact bank. According to new research by Forrester, that tweeter was probably a young adult male with a college degree and he’s one of only 1% of online users who actually do this kind of thing. From my experience, it seems that half the people I follow on Twitter use location-based tweets, but the data says that only 4% of online adults have even tried geolocation and only 1% uses it on regular basis. Really? The study also says that 70% of the users are between 19 and 35 and 80% are male. Again, not my experience, so apparently I have unusual friends. The good news for marketers is that though the group is small, they’re powerful. Melissa Parish of Forrester wrote on her blog: “Our research shows that these users are typically young, male, well-educated, and influential.  In fact, LBSN users are users are 38% more likely than the average US online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions before making a purchase decision.” So the question becomes, how much of your time and money should be spent marketing to this group? Parrish says very little. “Though many LBSNs are gathering steam, the landscape is fragmented and the programs can’t scale just yet. But with large companies preparing to enter the market (I’m looking at you Facebook and Yahoo!) the time for marketers to get involved is coming.” That is unless you’re marketing a product of interest to college-educated male trendsetters under 35. In that case, it’s time to start working on that Foursquare Mayor of Marketingville badge.

Tags: data, experience, facebook, Forrester, group, half-the-people, landscape, Local/Mobile, marketingville, Melissa Parish, people, Research, time, Yahoo
Posted July 27, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

People who have way too much time on their hands, have done a study to chart the mood swings of the average Twitter user over the course of a week. Stick with me, it gets good-ish. The people running this test come from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance , Harvard University . They used over 300 million tweets that were posted between Sep 2006 – Aug 2009 and they charted them based on geographic location and mood of the tweet. The moods were determined through the use of the ANEW scale from the University of Florida which rates a large number of English words in terms of the emotions they convey. (Still with me?) What the study determined is that there are more happy tweets early in the morning, late in the evening and on weekends. Not surprising when you figure that everything in between those times are traditional working hours, which proves that most people are not happy at their jobs, or at least not happy enough to tweet about it. Sunday mornings are a particularly happy tweet time for people and Thursday evening is rough. I think that’s because all of the best TV shows are scheduled on Thursday nights and it’s frustrating to have to choose. It’s also interesting to note that West Coast moods generally follow East Coast moods with a delay of. . . you guessed it. . three hours. While this data is intriguing and the chart they made is fun to look at , there really is some information here that you can use. If you’re running a Twitter campaign, schedule your tweets to hit before noon and after seven in the evening but be wary of time zones. Sending tweets from the NY office at six will land at the ultimate low tide for Twitter users in Los Angeles. There is an exception to this rule. You may want to send your tweets in the middle of the day if you’re selling something that depends on a negative mood such as an ebook on quitting your job or 101 Ways to Get Revenge After Being Dumped. What do you think? Can timed tweets effect the results of your Twitter marketing campaign? Or is one tweet time as good as any other?

Tags: data, flickr, Florida, mood, over-the-course, Research, science, Social, social-science, study, through-the-use, Twitter, university
Posted July 23, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Just minutes after Twitter announced a feature to see which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, Facebook blocked it ! Now, thanks to Techdirt , we can see that this is not just some harmless mistake. Facebook does not want you having access to the data you’ve worked hard to compile. In other words, if you try to access any of your Facebook data via a 3rd-party app then the social network won’t just block you, it may sue you! We’ve been following the rather bizarre and dangerous lawsuit filed by Facebook  against Power.com , an online service that tries to let users aggregate various social networking activity into a single service. All Power.com does is let a willing user have Power.com’s tools log into Facebook and reuse/reformat the data within its own framework. From a user’s perspective, this could be quite useful. From Facebook’s perspective this is both a  violation of copyright law and a violation of  computer hacking laws . Why? Because Facebook says so. That is, it says so in its terms of service, and it’s arguing that in ignoring the terms of service, Power.com is criminally hacking. And, that is exactly what Twitter just attempted to do with its new feature! Two questions are now raised? 1. Will Facebook sue Twitter? Doubtful, but if the company allows Twitter to have this kind of access, does it weaken its case against Power.com? 2. Did you know that you can’t use another service to access what’s really your own data anyway?

Tags: been-following, copyright-law, data, does-it-weaken, facebook, legal, online-service, power-com, Social, social-network, social-networking, then-the-social, Twitter, words
Posted June 24, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

If you are a big player in the Internet space these days you will be brought into the spotlight for anything around privacy. You can be confident of that. With Apple getting plenty of attention with a new iPhone OS release (iOS 4) and the latest generation iPhone 4 about to hit the hands of those pre-order folks (keep your fingers crossed!) there is also talk about the new privacy policy that comes wit these changes. All Things Digital reports Apple is rolling out its new iPhone operating system, which means that it is also rolling out its new iAd platform. Which means that Apple now has to make its users the same offer that other big digital ad players offer: You can opt-out of our ad targeting program, if you’re willing to do a little work. In the case of Apple (AAPL), that means reading the new 45-page privacy policy that comes with the iOS 4 update and finding the section about cookies. Now personally I am a little baffled by the 45-page privacy policy cited above because the link provided goes to a page on Apple’s site that would have to be put on some tiny screens to get to 45 pages. I digress. As the post points out the most important part of the policy is about cookies and what you can do to keep specific information away from marketers. Here is that section of the policy Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks. To sum up there is no way to stop ads from being shown. It’s just that the ads you see will be less targeted if you opt-out. This only applies to Apple’s ad network so third party ad servers will need to be addressed separately which might be an interesting experience. Here’s the bottom line on all of this in my humble and far less than expert opinion. It’s the Internet. Advertisers want as much information about targets as they can get in order to make sure their message goes to the right place so money is not wasted fishing in the wrong place. They will do whatever they can to look like they have the end users’ privacy as their main concern. This is not for the end users’ benefit it is for the company to do a full legal CYA. They put these policies out there and keep their fingers crossed that few, if any, will actually take themselves out of the system. They also know that the well informed who actually know this stuff are a relatively small group compared to the overall market. So even if they are influencers of sorts they are really only influencers to other influencers, not the masses. It’s a funny little business we are in because we tend to have a pretty inflated view of our impact on the market at large. What happens more often than not these things ‘findings’ rarely get too far beyond the walls of the industry so the ‘damage’ is minimal to Apple’s and other companies efforts to provide a lot of targeted data to marketers. So complain if you like about convoluted legalese in Apple’s privacy policy but they are no different than anyone else. Of course, Steve Jobs would tell you differently as he did at the D8 conference. We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. That’s one of the reasons we have the curated apps store. We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up into the cloud. Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for. In plain English, and repeatedly, that’s what it means. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data. That’s nice conference speak. Too bad privacy policies don’t read the same way.

Tags: aapl, advertising, Apple, companies, data, fingers, industry, interests, internet, legal, mobile, rolling-out-its, spotlight, things-digital
Posted June 22, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media