Archive for the ‘Total Strategy’ Category

Spectacular response to a Facebook rant from Bodyform, was it staged?

Posted: October 17, 2012 by captaininbox in Facebook, Social-and-viral, Total Strategy
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On the 8th of October some bloke called Richard did a giant rant comment on BodyForm’s Facebook page. It’s a very funny rant indeed, so funny I’m suspicious that it was part of a marketing trick from Bodyform themselves. You have to go and read the full post yourself but a few of my highlights include:

“as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years … at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things … I mean bike riding parachuting … this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! … my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin…”

At this point (17/10/2012 9:18 BST) it’s got 86,877 likes and 3,731 comments.

About a week later, ie: 14.30 yesterday Bodyform came back with possibly the greatest response I’ve ever seen to a social media rant, with a whole video from an actress playing Caroline Williams the CEO of Bodyform. I don’t even know if the CEO of Bodyform is actually called Caroline Williams or if the entire character is fictional and I can’t be bothered to find out either.

At this point – 20 hours later, it’s got 2,279 likes and 218 comments.

During the video she admits they have lied about the happy times and the adventures, all the time sipping a glass of blue water, a very nice touch. She then goes onto to apologise, describes the troubles men have in handling the reality of it and gives full credit to Richard for pulling the plug on the illusion and forcing men everywhere to confront the reality. She then finishes with a quick ‘fart’, looks at the camera and says “oops, sorry Richard, you did know that we did that too? didn’t you?” Utterly Priceless!

You must watch it to really get the full experience, it’s only 1.45 mins long. You can also watch it on Facebook.

The entire video is so well done and it is of course a concept that both men and women can understand for different reasons and it is very funny. So funny that I reckon they’d thought of the video response first, probably quite a while ago and had been sitting on it waiting for the best way to use it. I reckon they decided that the content was unsuitable for TV as well as being a waste of money due to not having any call to action. Subsequently Facebook would be the obvious choice as a viral platform to show character of the brand.

It’s very well done, obviously lots of people believe it is all real and I spose it could be but I don’t think it is?

What do you think?
Was it real?
Are there any other brand responses to social comment that are as good or better than this?
Feel free to tweet something #rantresponse

 

The web is full of write ups of this but one caught my eye in possibly the worst way where they have used picture from the movie Carrie to help illustrate their blog post, it’s funny but also a little stomach churning ;-)

Linkedin Welcome Emails

Posted: May 24, 2012 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Message Content and Design, Social-and-viral
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Recently I received an email the day after someone accepted my invite to Linkedin. This is great and possibly the only example I’ve ever seen when this worked, this was most likely down to the expertise of the bloke who implemented it…

It was a nice soft welcome email, suggesting I sign-up for a newsletter. I clicked through to the signup form, there was a lot of text on it. While I was reading the text the page went grey and a light box popped up asking me to sign-up for the newsletter.

When I got the email I was reminded of a giant bollocking someone got from John Caldwell and many others, including me, who added Linkedin Contacts to a list and sent them an email inviting them to a newsletter with one click.
This guy got properly ruined, it was awesome: RedPill Email was where the main forum ended up from Linkedin but there are also blogs from Word to the Wise and Al Iverson.

I believe the email they got was pretty poor and very salesy. The email I got was well written with a very welcoming and thankfull attitude with the newsletter sign-up as an obvious call to action but the copy had already won enough attention. Also seeing as the person in question was already a trusted source in email & content it was easier to click through than be offended.

However, I can’t help but compare the two.

I believe the reason why I accepted this email was due to the short time between connecting with the person and receiving the email. The momentum of engagement was still very warm, so there was more leeway and was more likely to want to further engage and stay in the zone, had this email got to me in two months, the engagement would have been less and so would be the rapport.

Once I clicked through I found the sign-up page was a bit too wordy for my attention-span and as I was working my way down the page I got hit with a lightbox asking me to sign-up for the newsletter. So while I was on the the newsletter form’s page reading about the benefits of signing-up I was interrupted with a call to sign-up for the newsletter.

I did not enjoy this and have not signed up.

I do believe that this was most likely an oversight, although I will be more than happy to be proven wrong if the lightbox on that page made a positive the difference in conversions.

Here is the email I got, as you will see, it is from a very very well respected member of the email community. I have since contacted him about removing the light box from sign-up form.
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Welcome to linkedin email

Here is the newsletter page with the newsletter lightbox:

I don’t know Christopher Penn personally, but we have interacted via Twitter once or twice. I am not being critical here at all, merely reflective of my experience. If it wasn’t for the lightbox on the newsletter page, I would have signed-up.

To be honest if someone had told me about this beforehand I’d have not taken the action but after having the concept forced upon me, I’m not unhappy about it.

My personal opinion is that the process was clever, the email content was perfect and the timing of the email was the key winning point here. I am not surprised  to get this kind of excellence from Mr Penn and he has certainly lived up to his reputation. While the concept was a risky proposition, the implementation was near perfect.

I also love the idea that if someone pays $2,499.00 through Google cart, they’ll get a response for a speaking job within a day. I wish I had that kind of klout :-)

Brand Pages Finally Arrive on Google Plus

Posted: November 8, 2011 by captaininbox in GooglePlus, Social-and-viral, Total Strategy

As you may or may not have found, pages have finally arrived on Google Plus.
Brands who sell and market to consumers, have had to really make the effort with Facebook pages and these have fast become a very high traffic source for many sites. The easy ability to comment and like something from a brand has not only brought people closer to a brand but also given a brand more of a personality. It has also dramatically boosted the viral abilities of brands’ marketing. In Fact, Facebook has basically become Digital Word of Mouth, more than any other online place.

On a side note – it is important to realise that while we use the phrase Social Media as a media, it is more of a genre of mediums. Where Email is a medium, Twitter is a medium but also a brand. I’m not sure where Facebook falls. It is a brand but is it a medium? Anyway…

Google Plus PageCan Google Plus Pages have the same success as Facebook?

You can’t write it off. However, as far as the early adopting users of Google Plus are concerned, it does appear to be more business like that Facebook. So Google Plus Pages could end up more B2B than B2C.

In my opinion, Google Plus has failed to capture the consumer market dominated by Facebook. They may have a lot of numbers, but that does not mean they are getting the use!

The early adopters of Google Plus were Twitter users, basically having more characters to play with. Most people said it was Facebook for businesses, comfortably replacing Linkedin – which has turned into a CV Jobsite disguised as a business social community.

Early adopters of Facebook, were people who were, of course very web-savvy, but it was social and not business, unlike Google Plus. This could have easily been because there was not Twitter back then. We’d seen the slow death of MySpace and the Struggle of Bebo as the two loudest social sites before that, which ended up being dominated more by media and music than social communication, which has been nicely dominated by Facebook since and the rest appears to have followed – but not taken Facebook over.

Because Google tried to draw everything together so closely (search, email, rss, photos, videos, now social), it’s very open and it is a struggle control your online identity through Google. Yahoo tried this before and no-one really noticed.

Where as Facebook is more of a contained online world.

This could be because Google has fast become “the Internet” because it is where you start  - you “Google it”!
In fact more people just type the words, close to the place they want to go, into the address bar and then let Google give them the right link – it’s quicker, means less typing and because once you’ve hit go, it’s all mouse-work after that.

To think about the appeal of Google for Facebook users, you can compare and Android Phone to an iPhone. You can see that while Google may have some of the most talented software engineers programming for the general public, they still have not captured that wow factor in usability and look & feel in their products.

I’m a practical guy, Google’s products are perfect for me but for so many people, they have to work too hard to get what they want out of it – normally they want  no-nonsense. I’m still finding new things my GalaxyS2 can do – it’s amazing but I do have to faff about with it, which is sometimes part of the appeal. I have had to re-Rom it 3 times in order to make the battery last more than half a day – but is probably the abysmal attempt at software from Samsung – they’re great at hardware – not too special at software, it often feels like more of an afterthought most of the time.

To summerise, I believe that Facebook will remain, for a long time. Its self contained feel and the fact it is less nonsense than a lot of what Google produces, will keep it as the number one social site – for social. This will keep the consumer brands there.

Linkedin will vanish further into the genre of an online CV where you market your self as a potential emplyee, rather than make money from a brand.

Twitter will remain because its character count per post suits the attention span and makes it very to distribute and share online content, with the addition that it doubles up as a public Instant Messenger.

Google Plus looks to take the B2B version of Facebook that Linkedin thought they had but there will still be a fair amount of social and consumer activity going on, in the right markets – ie: more digital and technical than not as users.

We may see over the next two years that Facebook and Google Plus supply brands with a very different customer base. While many people will be on both, they will be in different modes on each, where Facebook is more about friends and family, Google Plus would be more about socialising with people in the same work and industry, rather than family.

I personally believe the current G+ interface restricts the opportunities to make new ‘connetions’ due to the over powering interface providing too much content and currently it is of both social and business content, which makes it hard to find relevance.

If Google created the option of a twitter type feed of your G+ stream and circles, it could be easier to decide when to engage with a post. right now I have to read too much in order to decide if I care, so I don’t make the time (not unlike emails from Amazon). They already have Buzz, just recommission it as a twitter type feed from Google Plus containing the subject and link back to the G+ post, and allow the subject and link pack to the G+ post to be tweeted, thus sending traffic back to Google plus from Twitter in an automated fashion, easy!

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edit 11/11/2011:

On a similar note, historically whenever a new network or technology has appeared, they have been filled by squatters who take a brand name for themselves in the hope that they brand will buy it off them.

I believe Fox did a nice pay out on a domain in 2000, Coke gave the originators of the Coke Facebook page jobs when Coke took the page off them and there was also the sad but slightly amusing story of the UK’s Ian Tunes.

Well apparently Google does not intend to let this happen on Google+, this blog from MikkieTech explains more…read on

Social media helping deliverability

Posted: October 25, 2011 by captaininbox in Best Practice Strategy, Deliverability, Email Marketing, Social-and-viral

I’ve just read a very cheeky little post from Laura at Word to the Wise about how clever use of Social Media can help you get safe listed in inboxes ie: just ask for it!

On reflection, another tie in with social media is the fact that they send so many notifications, retweets, mentions, DMs, friend requests etc.
These are deemed important by people but due to their volume and frequency are commonly filtered off to a folder/label.

Either way it is these notifications / transactions that people will go to the junk folder for and whitelist and filter.

welcomeWith this knowledge it makes it very easy to make the point that a sign-up process medically requires the safe listing  request at the point of sign-up.

If you don’t do double-optin send a welcome message. then on the landing page after submitting the form tell people to check their email, tell them the address it’s from and ask them to safe list it and mark it as not junk if it’s junk. and make the same request in the email.

Transactional social share

Posted: August 3, 2011 by captaininbox in Email Marketing, Message Content and Design, Recipient Experience, Social-and-viral, Total Strategy

This has literally just occurred to me, I’ve not seen this anywhere but it seems like a good idea?

Many people are quite proud of their new purchases, sometimes it’s a bi-product of the adrenaline of spending money or just the joy or getting something new. These people are likely to be inclined to tell people about it.

I do see it on Facebook and Twitter, where people take photos of their new gadget or shoes and tell their friends.

If I were in on-line retail, I’d want those shares to link back to that product page on my site.

The way I would do it is to add a “tell you friends” button on the transactional emails associated with that order: payment confirmation, delivery details, follow-up review request, etc. etc.

It maybe more popular to do from a mobile app that integrates use of the camera, eg: the Amazon app could do it and the paper work in the box would remind you to do it when you open it.

As far as email is concerned, providing the opportunity to do something someone is already motivated to do but also get the traffic to my site at the same time must be a good thing!
If someone doesn’t want to take a photo, doing it in a browser should be an easy and enjoyable experience using intergations from your site to the scoal networks using the site’s images to help.

If they do want a photo, a mobile app may well be the better way, but also to make it easy to get a photo from your computer to the share would also be s good idea.

One thing that springs to mind would be a link in an email saying “tell your friends” that click will take you to the product page on the site, then a light box pops up providing the opportunity to share, possibly with screenshots of how it would look on Facebook, G+ and twitter.

If this is not a new thing and I’m just in the dark a bit and anyone has seen this in action, please let me know.

 

 

How Google Plus can complete the Twitter Migration

Posted: July 25, 2011 by captaininbox in GooglePlus, Social-and-viral

google plus logoMany people seemed to think G+ was going to be a Facebook killer, the early adoption has actually seen a giant twitter migration and G+ has been hailed as the Facebook for business.

You can’t be surprised, Facebook is already set-up with our mates and GooglePlus has limited access so it’s no remotely encroaching on Facebook’s true social network. Subsequently it’s the tweeters who are taking it up and testing it out.

Currently due to the convenience, integration options and the fact that Tweets are so short, Twitter is surviving, however, Google could finish Twitter sooner rather than later…

 

All Google needs to do is create a 160 char interface for Google plus, linking back to the Google plus page for the longer posts; At the same time, allow the main Google Plus account to drag in tweets that can be sent out as a Gplus post and/or allow tweets to appear in the interface that could be re-shared Gplus posts.

Of course this could sound like a big job. After all twitter is a whole app on it’s own, separate from GooglePlus, this could mean that Google would have to write a whole other app on top, or does it?

No it doesn’t, Google already has a 160 char content feed, it’s just that no-one uses it – they called it Google-Buzz and it was Twitter without being Twitter. No-one actually uses it because there was no point at the time – we already had Twitter. But now it can have a use.

On Twitter, most people use Hootsuite or TweetDeck with a column for mentions, the main feed, DMs and then columns for certain lists and searches.

Imagine going to a page where you have a column of all of your circles’ content but just the 1st 140 chars  +  a link back to the full GooglePlus post on GooglePlus if it’s longer than 160 chars.

Then the ability to give each of your Google Circle it’s own column to aggregate the content so you know where to concentrate your time.

This way you can do the quick and easy twitter style use and you have an easy interface to find relevant content on Google plus. You can easily get into the main Google Plus interface to reed and put more of an elaboration in and they will be automatically picked up and feed out into the 160 char interface – not unlike sharing a blog comment through apps like Disqus.

 

If you like this idea and you want to be able to use Google Plus a bit more like Twitter: TELL GOOGLE about it now!
There is a Feedback Button on the bottom right of every Google Plus page, just hit it type in your needs a suggestions, hit preview then hit go -please make sure you are polite and constructive – the good people at Google are hard working people and if you want something from them, don’t kick the gift horse in the teeth – thanks you.

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