One day prior to Overstock's private sales site, upstart Kembrel, yesterday, launched what it claims to be the world's first Facebook private sales store for college students. Accessible from browsing to checkout completely within Facebook, the store, the store now has 20,000 registered users gleaned mostly through word of mouth during the beta period.
At launch, 50 brands which are "tightly curated by young buyers who understand the student market" have signed on with the platform.
"We offer a direct marketing channel to a niche demographic untapped by other private sales sites, as well as a chance to build brand loyalty among an educated, trend-savvy and young demographic," said Valerie Muvdi, Buyer at Kembrel
Social Rewards, a new service for brands that want to add a social media element to their loyalty programs launched today during Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco. The company, which aims to blend together loyalty marketing and affiliate marketing with social media will allow brands to reward people for spreading brand messages across the social media universe.
Sanyo, The Venetian and The Palazzo are the first brands to launch with Social Rewards.
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Viral plant? Seeded video? Stealth marketing? Random video which just happens to have three Frito Lay products in it? You decide.
It's got 24,000 YouTube views so far. It's on eBaums World. It's on Digg. Who knows. Who cares.
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 We've said this many times before but Big fuel Communications CEO Avi Savar is saying it with much greater detail. Check out his guest post on the notion social media should be approached as if it were a cocktail party.
I've been using this analogy for some time now and it seems to resonate with everyone who hears it. If you are a brand looking to connect with consumers through Social Media, think of Social Media as one giant party. Here's why:
1) Social Media is one giant party.
Let's set the stage.
Imagine the social web as one huge cocktail party. In one corner of the room, a group of moms are talking about education and parenting issues. In another corner of the room, a group of recent college grads laugh over Will Ferrell's latest movie. Everywhere you turn, different groups of people are enjoying themselves, sharing stories, discussing current events, pop culture, trends, etc. All the groups are mingling, making new "friends," and the most influential people in the room have the most "followers" hanging on their every word.
Sound familiar?
Social Media is a true reflection of society today--and what better representation of social behavior, fragmentation, hierarchy and influence than a giant party?
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Moms Who Need Wine, a website and fan page started by Boston-based mom (and former agency co-worker of ours) Marile Borden has just seen it's number of "likes" surpass the 250,000 mark, making it one of the largest online cocktail parties for moms on Facebook.
Second only to Fans of Being a Mom, MWNW's fan base has surpassed traditional publishers on Facebook, including Parenting.com (27,000), Real Simple (41,000) and O Magazine (21,000). Other metrics are impressive as well with .56% engagement on MWNW over the course of 10 recent posts - compared with fan response on heavy hitter publisher pages such as The New York Times (.036%) and The Huffington Post (.07%).
Borden recognized the growing popularity of Facebook for moms so she put her efforts into a Facebook publishing model as a way to deliver content to her readers, rather than the traditional e-newsletter model she used with her first online venture, Momicillin.com.
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Having worked with high tech clients back in the dot com days, we're acutely aware of their unending need to give everything an acronym. So we weren't surprised when Cisco's Doug Webster introduced us to Cisco SPice, or as he explains, Cisco Service Provider Interacrive Communications E-thingy.
What is Cisco SPice? Its a direct copy of Old Spice's response video campaign which garnered 40 million views. How many views did Cisco's one day effort get? 2,750 views from 18 different videos in the first 24 hours. Can you say fail?
Megan O'Neill can and she does so at great length in a post on SocialTImes. Read and learn, people. Read and learn.
A recent article by Advertising Age's Social Media and Event Content Manager David Teicher got us thinking. And writing. Here's what we had to say after reading his thoughts on why agencies don't need separate units for social media:
Back in the day when we ran a media department, the public relations department in the agency used to come to us for information about audience research and the media consumed by the audiences in which they were interested. Because, in a certain sense, the media department is the keymaster to the research vault and all the demographic and psychographic nirvana within. Even account planners would come to media looking for insight.
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So when Obama Girl aka Amber Lee Ettinger was all the rage, she was kind enough to send us a personalized message telling us how much she loves Adrants and why everyone should read it if they're interested in advertising.
We wrote about her and her work for Barely Political a lot. And we mean a lot. So we were very pleased to have that thank you message arrive.
Perhaps we haven't yet written enough about Isiah Mustafa and his work for Old Spice to warrant one of his personalized videos now making the rounds. He's done one for Kevin Rose over at Digg, friend with similar interests Susannah Breslin, Gizmodo, Ashton Kutcher, Peter Shankman and several others.
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IZEA has launched WeReward, a Foursquare-like check in application that awards redeemable points for completing tasks and checking in. It's like Foursquare but instead of a game, it's a revenue source. And that's a good thing. Because after a while collecting badges becomes tiresome. On the other hand, collecting money never does.
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The social graph. Data portability. Privacy. Data control. Peerset CTO and Co-founder Amit Kanigsberg has a few things to share on these topics in this second post in a series on the use of personal data.
Pursuing Transparency is no Private Matter
What does transparency mean to you? In the online advertising industry it conjures one of two things: 1) For the advertiser, full insight into the ad serving stack (from agency to publisher) or 2) For the consumer, full insight into the targeting data ad networks and data providers collect (e.g., Google, Bluekai).
If your first thought was #1, you are forgiven. It is after all natural to follow the money. And there is plenty of it being strewn across that field. But I'll argue that you should be thinking about the consumer a bit more, the sleeping giant as it were. And if you jumped straight to #2, then I'd bet you felt that current efforts and lackluster hype around transparency seems a bit, well, lacking, slight, effervescent, wispy, ethereal - more translucent really.
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