Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

A Frenchman may now be the fastest man in Europe over 100m but it seems French winemakers are slower off the blocks when it comes to social media.

Reuter’s Leslie Gervitz created a bit of a storm this week suggesting that French winemakers were a bit antisocial when it comes to social media, compared to their New World counterparts. ‘When it comes to social media, most [French] winemakers prefer to drink alone’ she wrote.

The comment was based on research by My Social Winery who discovered that although 95% of French wineries export their wine, 91% have no Twitter account, 87% no blog, 85% no LinkedIn account and 57% no Facebook page.

Furthermore, only 37% offer an English translation of their website. Respondents said they are both too busy and know not enough about social networks to be on them, though only 15% dispute their value.

For this reason perhaps, 44% of the 500 wineries surveyed said they were considering integrating social media into their overall marketing activity. It seems, like good wine, social media will take time to mature in this most traditional of industries.

Fascinating interview via SMI with Alexandra Wheeler – Starbucks’ Digital Director of Strategy on how the company has executed its market leading social media strategy. Ideas are surfaced internally, buy in is from top to bottom and the result looks more like core brand philosophy than mere marketing tactics.

Mattel are doing a social media treasure hunt in four US cities starting today. Clues will be posted on Twitter & Foursquare and if you can find Barbie’s ’street team’ in their secret location, and show them a Foursquare login for their current location or ’something pink’ you win a Barbie video doll worth $50.

Now I don’t know the ins and outs of this social media campaign but a few practical problems seem apparent. To start with, it won’t be the world’s actual Barbie fans, aged 5 to 8 running around with air tickets and iphone on their own –  they’re going to have to bring an adult.

OK so it’s down to mum to make it happen – a tech savvy mum at that. But what smart mum would take their daughter on a Barbie hunt across the city knowing only one Barbie is available in each location. The inevitable tears of disappointment, not to mention exhaustion would mean she’d have to buy her one anyway and presumably they’re not in the shops yet so she can’t.

And if by steely ambition you did manage to get there first by dragging your child across six lanes of traffic, eyes glued to your maps app, why would you then bother to check in on Foursquare if you’re standing in front of the ’street team’ anyway?

Read the rest of this entry »

A Regus survey of global businesses has found small companies are doing better than large ones at using social media to attract new customers.

44% of small companies have successfully acquired a customer through social networking compared to 36% for medium sized companies and 28% of large businesses.

The most popular use of social media  is keeping in touch with business contacts – 58% of respondents globally declaring they use networks in this way.

By sector, Financial Services (26%) lags behind the Media/Marketing and ICT sectors (48% & 46%).  By country, India is the leading nation, followed by Mexico and Spain. Read the rest of this entry »

Curbside Cupcakes, a Washington DC mobile cupcake vendor has customers queueing down the street for its products, having dropped the traditional press release for Twitter and Facebook marketing.

Company Profile

Freedman International implements marketing campaigns worldwide for leading consumer brands, specialising in bringing new levels of efficiency and innovation to the global marcomms process. Headquartered in London, they employ over 150 staff with overseas offices in New York, Singapore and Atlanta, working for well known global brands including Electronic Arts, InterContinental Hotels Group and Philips.

The Challenge

Disillusioned by previous PR experiences that had delivered piecemeal coverage and failed to prove value and with an international marketing customer base that had no clear media routes to it, Freedman were unconvinced that a PR solution could work for them at all.

What they needed, if it indeed existed, was a PR campaign that could cross international borders and convey a complex, but compelling narrative of their work direct to global marketers, encouraging engagement, raising profile and reputation and ultimately generating new leads.

Following an article on online pr, that Freedman CEO Kevin Freedman had read in a Furlong PR email newsletter, he invited in the company to discuss online pr strategies. Read the rest of this entry »

Forbes has added a social media ranking to its annual most powerful celebrities list, topped by Lady Gaga.

Forbes explains, “Because of the growing power of social networks, we added a social media ranking that reflects each celebrity’s presence on Facebook and Twitter.”

The Celebrity 100, which includes film and television actors, TV personalities, models, athletes, authors, musicians and comedians, is a measure of entertainment-related earnings and media visibility (exposure in print, television, radio and online).

Oprah Winfrey topped the overall money and fame list, followed by Beyonce Knowles and James Cameron.

Cameron came second on estimated income – $210 million whilst being at the bottom of the social media rankings at 81st, proving that in 2010 at least, you still make shed loads of cash without a million Twitter followers.

PRESS RELEASE

The slow adoption of social media channels by FTSE 100 companies is limiting their potential  influence on investors and ultimately share price, according to a new survey by online pr and social media agency Furlong PR.

Furlong PR analysed corporate websites for the FTSE 100 constituents in May 2010 and found that the majority – 78% are lacking in basic social media functions such as a blog or an RSS feed.

Only 12% have a blog linked to their site, an omission that Furlong contends at least halves (1) their potential website traffic and therefore restricts the information flow that can have a positive effect on share price.

Furlong cites the example of a Canadian copper mining company, TVI Pacific Inc (2), who began a social media investor relations programme in November 2009.  By January 2010, the company had increased website visits from 100 to 4000 a week, trading volume rose 55% and the share price doubled from $0.06 to $0.12.

FTSE 100 companies are more active when it comes to Twitter accounts – 23% having one, the lack of integration with an overall strategy suggests many may not know what to do with it.  Furlong says that in any case Twitter is not the most important social media channel for influencing share price. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.

LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).

Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.

Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.

Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%). Read the rest of this entry »

New data on the world’s most popular consumer and media brands has been released by Famecount, a media measurement service to aggregate online popularity across multiple social media channels.

Starbucks was found to be the world’s most popular consumer brand with 7.4 million Facebook fans, 901,925 Twitter followers and 6,509 YouTube subscribers resulting in a Famecount index of 69.7 percent.

Coca-Cola ranks two  (53.8 per cent), followed by the whole Foods Market (48.4 per cent), and Skittles (48.3 per cent) with food and drinks brands accounting for 6 of the top 10 worldwide consumer brands.

The highest ranked non-food & drinks consumer brand is online shoe and clothing shop, Zappos.com, with a Famecount index of 46.3 per cent. Red Bull, at 47.3 per cent, is the only non-US brand to make the top 10.

“It is interesting to see established offline brands perform so strongly.” said Daniel Dearlove of Famecount, “ Social networks are helping them to tap into wider audiences Read the rest of this entry »