Social Media

Swing and a miss – 4 seasons of marketing mistakes

BMW – Winter
The weathermen amongst us may or may not be familiar with the branded snowstorm which recently caught fire and burst BMW into PR flames. I am of course referring to last month’s story about BMW who sponsored a cold front so that it would be named after their latest model of Mini Cooper in Germany. Unfortunately for BMW, the stunt back fired when the cold front was responsible for a number of deaths resulting in some very negative press for them.

With this in mind let’s take a look at the other 3 seasons and remember some marketing mistakes and absolute howlers that somehow managed to get that all important sign off!

Walkers – Autumn
Sticking with the weather theme, lets digest Walkers’ 2010 attempt at generating some heat using people’s predictions of when it would rain in the UK. Sadly for Walkers the campaign went cold once people realised that the UK has a strong chance of rain a lot of the time meaning consumers had an 8/1 chance of guessing winning the £10 prize, as the Telegraph reported. According to some sources the crisp giant were effectively paying out a tenner for every £3 worth of crisps sold! The website mysteriously went offline before its closing date.

Hoover – Summer
Right up there with the greatest marketing fails of all time and probably one of the  most commented on promotions of all time, although not in the way intended.

In 1992, Hoover launched a campaign to sell a backlog of vacuum cleaners using an incentive of free flights to entice customers. You only needed to spend £100 on a hoover and in return they would give you two free flights - initially to Europe, predictably people began to play the system and demand for the flights soon spiralled out of control, with dire consequences for some Hoover employees. One customer in fact took a Hoover van hostage in protest of the way he was handled.

Kenneth Cole - Spring
Spring 2011 was a definite swing and a miss for fashion brand Kenneth Cole, or at least it was for whoever the agency behind their Twitter feed was. Now it doesn’t quite fall into the spring months but I think jumping in on the #Cairo to shamelessly promote its spring collection duly qualifies it for our final season marketing fail. It was a risky move and wasn’t received well. It’s a clear demonstration of how not to use social media.

If you’ve got anymore examples of marketing fails then please get in touch via the contact page.

Facebook Depression [infographic]

Something which has been in the public eye for the ast couple of months is mental health. I saw the following infographic on Mashable on Friday which was created by Help For Depression. The infographic shows how we use the social network to share our feelings and the reaction that these statuses receive.

 The survey found that positive updates receive more likes, while negative statuses get more comments. There are also some interesting findings regarding the words people use and how these change depending on your friend count.

Related articles

• Mental Health Awareness (everydayhealth.com)

Social Commerce Psychology [infographic]

Social commerce is a big talking point at present, particularly now that brand pages have been released across most social media sites – Facebook, G+ and recently Twitter.

This infographic by tabjuice.com gives us some insight into the consumer buying behaviour for social commerce.

Black Friday – who, where, why & what? [Infographic]

Ok, this may be turnng into an Infographic blog but in my defence Black Friday is a trending topic at the moment. So, exactly who’s buying what and for who? This visual from Mashwork gives you the lowdown for the US.

Related articles

• Who’s Tweeting About Black Friday? [INFOGRAPHIC] (bjconquest.com)
• Infographic: Black Friday As Seen Through Foursquare Check-Ins (searchengineland.com)

Top 3 Premium Music WordPress Themes

There are some really eye catching wordpress themes out there for pretty much any genre or niche. Here’s a little top 3  for band or music themes.

Faded Theme
The faded theme by Mint Themes looks great for rock bands and indie bands alike. The theme includes most things that a band would need with a cool rotating banner. $79 for this one.

Soundcheck Theme
Created  by Press 75 this theme is probably my favourite, the design is slick and has an almost social media feel to it, with tiles and widget boxes which reminds me a little of the Tumblr dashboard. Yours for $75.

Dark ‘n’ Gritty
You’ll gather I’m a fan of dark websites and so its no surprise that this one has made my top 3. This has a grungier feel to it and offer pretty much everything a musician or band could need from a site. This theme costs around $70 from Foxhound.

For more cool Wordpress music themes check out this selection from Premiumwp.com.

Tumblr Numbrs: The Rapid Rise of Social Blogging [infographic]

Here we have a fairly funky infographic based on the massive growth of social media blog platform Tumblr. I’m a fan of both Tumblr and WordPress for social blogging, both sites for me offer something slightly different:

Tumblr
I find Tumblr to be very creative and extremely popular with photographers and designers. Although I’ve not really used it for articles yet I do follow some blogs who publish articles regularly. I guess it depends what theme you use and your search and share style. You’ll notice my tumblr is a little random and includes lots of images without any real structure.

WordPress
WordPress for me is much more tailored to a journalistic magazine style approach. I find the platform easy for article based posts, although the CMS is perhaps not as user friendly as Tumblr. Again this depends on your theme and various add-ons and widgets.

The problem I have with Tumblr is that a lot of content is copied or reblogged. This may be the sites that I follow, but with WordPress sites I feel I gain a little more insight into topics but perhaps without the creative cool factor.

Anyway, here’s the infographic:

Minimalist Music Posters

Love this collection of minimalist music genre posters from Jlaven.com. My favourite has to be FOLK.

Movember – ‘Tis the Season to Mo! [Infographic]

There is a cool/ strange trend for November this month, loads of males (and perhaps some females) have been attempting to groom the most epic of epic moustaches. Affectionately known as Movember, the Mo’s aim is to raise awareness of men’s health in particular prostate cancer. Donations can be made at www.movember.com and there are a number of companies blogging about their progress (or as the case may be lack of).

Anyway, ’tis the season to Mo so here’s a nifty infographic that I saw on Sortable.com.

SEO is Marketing isn’t it?

The search engine optimisation (SEO) industry has been growing for some time now. I myself have been an avid marketer for around 6 years and have been involved in SEO for the last 12 months. A constantly recurring theme throughout the last year has been that SEO is an industry all of its own.

Last week saw Search Engine Land announce that they would be launching a sister site Marketing Land, suggesting that in fact the two are a separate entity.

This is something that I find hard to agree with, as marketing in its truest form is about understanding consumer behaviour, predicting it and then meeting the consumers needs. With this in mind surely online marketing is therefore these three steps but translated for the internet.

SEO can be defined as a the practice of increasing the traffic that a site receives via a search engine. The process itself has developed from the understanding that consumers behaviour when using a search engine means that the higher the rank of the site the more users will visit that site.

As more and more marketers become aware of the Google Panda update, what does appear open to debate is how important SEO is to your marketing strategy and equally how long using SEO in your marketing strategy will last. There is no greater lesson to be learned than those sites which have all their eggs in one basket and have been punished by the Panda update.

It is this unpredictability on search engine updates that provides the sole reason why it isn’t recommended to build a business based upon search traffic, and illustrates why SEO should be carried out as part of an overall marketing strategy.

Beware of Google Image Search for Competitions

For those of you using search engines on a daily basis you will be familiar with Google Image Search. Paste in your image URL or upload a picture and Google find visually similar images for you. A great tool particularly if you’re looking to measure coverage or ‘take up’ on any campaigns your brand may have run such as an infographic.

Whilst this tool is undoubtedly useful for marketers, it may also poke a serious hole in some online marketing campaigns.

Take Vouchercloud for example, who are currently running their Christmas comp (we all LOVE a Xmas viral) where you have to “spot the snowball” from a picture which has been airbrushed – to remove the snowball.

Unfortunately for them, using the google image search tool, you can are able to find the original picture – COMPLETE with snowballs, on Shutterstock.

So the real question here is, intentional move by the marketing department to embrace the image search functionality or not? We’ve all seen the TV competition questions which are so easy, it guarantees entrants. Is this the case? As a marketer I’d like to think so, but then again……

…..Hope I win!

Update: Apparently the original picture is not what counts here – according to Voucher Cloud, the winner will be the one closest to where the judges think the snowball(s) is(are). Sounds a little strange to me, but check out item 15 on the terms and see what you think!

Brought to you by the epic combination of Matthew Jackson and Liam Stilgoe.