I thought the folks at Groupon were nuts to turn down Google’s offer of $6 billion, but Henry Blodget explains why. The article makes sense and it was frankly an eye-opener.
Category: Social Media (Page 8 of 12)
The shift from old media to new media is accelerating, and now more companies are using bloggers to help deliver their brand messages. Here’s an interesting example from Vaseline.
If you’ve been complaining about dry skin on the Internet, Vaseline may have heard you. With winter just around the corner, the brand is announcing a new advertising campaign for its Vaseline Intensive Rescue skin cream product, sold by Unilever. The campaign represents the first time Vaseline has used crowdsourcing to find product spokeswomen.
“The core of the idea here is to find women where they talk about this problem,” Anne Jensen, the senior brand building director for beauty care in the Unilever personal care division, said of the company’s decision to the scour the Web looking for women who were talking about their dry skin.
Vaseline worked with the New York office of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty on the campaign to restage the brand with things like new packaging and product improvements and to find women bloggers who could represent the campaign.
“Most Vaseline campaigns are rooted in real stories by real people. That’s what makes it authentic,” said Ashley Bekton, group business director at Bartle Bogle.
The agency worked with a subcontractor to crawl the Internet for conversations around words like “dry skin,” “lotions” and “skin issues,” and to scan blogs and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for conversations people were having about those topics.
The company ended up selecting three bloggers who will write about their experiences and be spokespersons for the brand. Interesting stuff.
At least the approach is methodical. Some companies think they can hire a couple of interns to run Twitter and Facebook and all will be well . . .
With the advent of Facebook Faces and the ability it gives the social media behemoth to track the location of a user via their iPhone, it seems only a matter of time before several things start happening. First came the break-ins as intrepid thieves learned that certain users were out of their homes. Suddenly, it seems obvious that for every new application under the sun, someone is plotting a devious usage of that technology. Other crimes might be enabled, or deterred, by new technology.
Is that utilitarianism limited to hackers and identity thieves? As the technology improves, it seems obvious that even large companies would use it to their advantage. In this case, the iPhone’s GPS capabilities make it a potentially unwitting partner in causing you some futuristic feeling grief. In time, as Facebook Faces manages to track its users’ locations to the square yard of the Earth’s surface, more than thieves will have their day.
An example would look like this: your auto insurance company, long your friend as they utilize social media, tracks your driving down the freeway on a road trip. Suddenly you decide it’s time to show your pal the full acceleration capabilities of your new car. Stepping on the gas, you’re quickly driving at well into triple digit speeds in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a soul to be seen, especially not a state patrol cruiser.
But eyes could be watching you through the GPS capabilities in your phone. And when they notice that you’re moving across the desert at 130 plus miles per hour in a 75 mph zone, something unusual happens. A few days after your return from the road, you get an email from your insurer. You’ve been dropped. No explanations, no begging for leniency. Ultimately, you’ve been seen in the commission of a major violation. You didn’t get away with your crime this time.
The battle between Google and Facebook is heating up. Google is working on “Google Me” – a social network alternative to Facebook. This article explains some of the perceived threats. It really boils down to a battle between two of the biggest titans on the web, and the decisions of these two companies will have huge implications on how we use it going forward.
Google has already had a dud with Google Buzz, and it seems clear that they don’t understand the concept of social networking. They understand math and algorithms, but they seem to have little understanding of how humans interact with one another. They seem to avoid human input at all costs, always trying to solve problems with an algorithm.
We’ve seen this with some of the heavy-handed tactics used by Google with users of services like Google Adsense. If Google perceives a problem with an account, that account is shut down automatically, and the user is forced to endure a bureaucratic as they implore Google to restore their account.
If Google wants to compete in the social network space, they will need a team that understands this very different environment.
Meanwhile, Facebook is reportedly on “lockdown” as Zuckerberg rallies his team to deal with the coming threat.
The growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare has often been described as a way to grow business for a company. Social media can be an inexpensive way to get a message out to an ever-growing number of people. But without a strategy, social media may not offer businesses any tangible benefits. Planning a business’s foray into social media may eliminate confusion and add more customers.
All businesses do not need to be on all types of social media. Businesses should reach to determine which social media service contains the customers that would use the company’s services. Also it is important to see if the type of communication that is utilized on a particular social media is appropriate for the type of message that the company wants to get out. Twitter may be too brief if the business message needs to be explained a bit more in detail.
Social media is not just for advertising. Businesses can use the various platforms to reach out to customers and potential customers to find out both what the business is doing right and what the business can do better. A company can use social media as some gamblers use sportsbook reviews sites by giving the customers the opportunity to rank services or ideas online. Besides helping the company with internal reviews, this can also pique the interest of other customers who might see the interactions on the social media site.
A company also must monitor its presence on a social media site. If there are complaints circulating, it is important for the company to address them directly. It also allows the business to have some form of personal response to a complaint where often businesses have a more generic response.
Social media can be a great benefit to many companies but successful use requires some action and a bit of creativity.
FOLLOW US!
CATEGORIES
© 2026 Linked and Loaded
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑