Black Friday Goes Social
November 14, 2011
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means retailers are pulling out all the stops to prepare for their own important tradition, Black Friday sales. Most brands have already started online campaigns to get customers excited about the upcoming sales. Brands offering online deals and using the web to promote their sales is nothing new. Cyber Monday, the online equivalent to Black Friday, has been an extremely successful component of holiday sales for some time. Last year’s Cyber Monday sale set the record for the “heaviest spending day in e-commerce history” according to TechCrunch. What is new is the increasing number of brands working with social media agencies to find creative ways to incorporate a social element into their holiday sales.State Farm's Effective Use of Facebook Reveal Tabs - State of Chaos
October 31, 2011
If you haven’t seen State Farm’s State of Chaos advertising campaign, you are missing out. It’s a rather ingenious use of social media marketing because if you “Like” State Farm’s page on Facebook, you are in for a treat. After entering your name and address, it uses Google Street View to locate your house, and then you get to watch a video of a giant robot tromping through your neighborhood and blowing up your house. Fun, right? And it’s a great way to get new fans for their Facebook page because you have to like it before you can access the fun video.Switching a Personal Profile to a Page Using Facebook’s New Conversion Ability
September 20, 2011
Many business owners have made the innocent mistake of accidentally setting up their business page as a personal account. They may have been pioneers who saw the need to set up a page when there was no such option for businesses, or they may have given the task of setting up the page to an uninformed employee. For a quick review, a personal profile has the ability to approve and disapprove friends, email directly, chat, and add a variety of personal use applications to the profile. A business page gains fans without approval from the business page and has the ability to add different applications that are geared towards business objectives instead of Farmville and other games. Business pages also have the significant bonus of being able to advertise on Facebook, a vital & necessary option if you want to gain fans.The Social Network: Remember When Facebook Was Cool?
October 13, 2010
Our recent company outing to see The Social Network was a fun evening. The movie itself was well-paced and showed an insight into the beginning of the largest online social media site in the world. Others have interpreted the portrayal of Mark Zuckerburg by Jesse Eisenburg as dislikable or obsessed with making himself popular. He actually struck me as your typical genius programmer—somewhat socially awkward, prone to saying the wrong thing in an offensive way occasionally, and generally with his head in a computer at all times.
Facebook Places Causing a Stir
August 23, 2010
Last week Facebook announced a new application designed to let all your friends know exactly where you are by using GPS in smart phones. The blogosphere is already full of articles lambasting Facebook for privacy issues, debating whether Foursquare and Gowalla will stand a chance, and some even praising Facebook for considering privacy issues before the release of a potentially prickly service.
Already, the Internet is full of contradicting information on how the program will actually work. This Associated Press article on Yahoo gives kudos to Facebook for anticipating privacy issues and states, “If you're out and about with friends, you'll be able to "tag" them using the (at) symbol, much the same way you can already tag them in your status updates. Your friend will then be notified that you have tagged them and can choose to check in too, or reject it.” To me, this implies that I will get a new notification every time someone tries to check me in, which I can either approve or deny.
Facebook User Data on Pirate Bay
August 06, 2010
Yet another issue with Facebook user data privacy has come out this last week with the recent post of over 171 million user’s data to Pirate Bay. Facebook is actually not responsible for this one though. (Who knew?) This data was published by someone who created a script to pull data from all publicly searchable profiles. Scraping data from Facebook is actually against its terms of use, and anyone could have compiled this data.
