Dansk Port Teknik (DPT), garage door company recently worked with agency JWT Copenhagen this creative advertisement that really takes the most out of Toyota’s recall. This ad promotes 20% off on all garage doors, for Toyota owners only along with the broken garage door.

Marketing/ advertising industry is often cruel. It’s been only a week, Toyota loses more than $20 billion in market share and recalls couple million cars, companies have already published ads making laughs of their mistakes to generate sales.

Since the day anyone hears about Twitter for the first time, they would sure at some point think about how to gain more followers. Well, it is normal to think this way, but it’s time to stop.

People write all kinds of articles about growing Twitter followers, authors sell books about it, companies switch online tactics only to increase Twitter followers, and see the number of followers as one of the major KPIs. Truth is, does it really matter that much?

Fulfill the Desire for Power

Number of followers even slowly turns into a form of power and intelligence, also created all these “social media gurus”.  People automatically assume and feel like they suddenly have so much influence to the society they are in just because they have a few thousands of followers.

Connect it with Psychology

I’ve met people from industry networking events who are “social media gurus”, they are all so similar. They love to talk about the number of followers on Twitter, they love exposure and recognition and yet they haven’t achieved much in life. It’s all about the lack of self-confidence, their effort in other areas/ fields might not be noticed and they feel like the number of Twitter followers can somehow turn themselves into someone respectable. Virtualista actually had a great post about personal branding and social media guru.

Solution: Quality not Quantity

If Twitter is one of the channels in your company’s social media strategy, size of your audience is important, but number of followers however, does not represent the size of your audience. If you always tweet with links, the easiest way to track audience is to check the click through rates of the tweets, they are usually very consistant. To do so, you can use URL shorteners, one of the tricks that I always use is to add a “+” sign after bit.ly urls (e.g. http://bit.ly/d7PugD+ ), or simply post a twitpic and see how many views you get.

Photo Credit: KaranV @Flickr

Dolce&Gabbana has always been the leader in technology among other fashion brands. In 2005, D&G broadcasted their fashion shows live on it’s official website. In 2008, they started to get into the mobile market, established dolcegabbana.mobi to create a more interactive way to communicate with fans, then a free iphone app was developed after.

They just announced few hours ago (Feb/19/2010 12:46 PM Milan Time CET) that they are going to offer fans the opportunity to watch the upcoming Fall/Winter 2010/11 season fashion show live on iPhone and Android Mobile Devices. The live show will be available at live.dolcegabbana.mobi on February 25th 3:00PM (GMT+1).

It’s another case showing how important smartphone users are for businesses these days, can’t wait to see how they will execute it to create the buzz, I’m sure many social media elements will be included.

We’ve all learned that Pepsi has decided to skip the Super Bowl ads in 2010 and will be injecting 20 million dollars into Refresh Project to improve community and customer relationships mainly through social media.

Seven hours ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt posted this on Twitter:

Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)

It is quite interesting if you think about Google as a company built on advertising, is now placing ads on the mass media (previously for Google Chrome), while consumer goods like Pepsi is doing just the opposite.

From Eric Schmidt’s tweet, it is quite obvious to me that they have something planned for Super Bowl, will it be a Nexus One ad? I’m looking forward to seeing it tomorrow.

I’m not a good listener in conversations, but I’m pretty sure I’m the best listener on others’ conversations in public places. I was at a dinner tonight in a local restaurant, just one of those casual Hong Kong restaurant and I got inspired by some random influencers.

So people from the table behind me were talking about iPhone plans, they said Hong Kong telco Three (used to be the exclusive iphone provider in Hong Kong) sucks at it’s 3G network and customer service, and that he actually switched to Smartone (telco that started offering iphone service 2 weeks ago), even though his phone contract was yet to end. And he was saying that he loves the service provided by Smartone now.

Anyways, the point is, I’m a current Three customer, these people are not my friends, I have no idea who they are, and judging by how they spoke, they are definitely not experts in technology. Why did I trust their piece of advice and actually thought about switching?

Random Influencers influence others by not being influential. I prefer feedback from real users who  have no connection to the company or industry because I’m seeing it directly from a user POV.

Now think about an expert site/ blog that talks about a product, comparing to some random comments by the public. Although not many people are as nosy as I am, but with the growth of social media, these random influencers are becoming very powerful since you can easily see what they are saying online. In general, I would say the influence of 5 random influencer can beat the influence of one expert these days when it comes to purchase decision making.

Therefore, depending on the product or service, marketers these days should not focus too much on getting experts/ publications to talk about your brands, all these years, we tend to go for the way of influencing the influential ones, and get them to influence the “random influencers” (left in image), but now maybe it’s time to influence the “random influencers” to influence the “experts” (right in image).

Photo Credit: _rogers

On January 21, Facebook announced a new function on Facebook Page, this function allows Facebook Page or Facebook application creators to collect emails of their fans. I don’t know about you but I think it’s not safe at all to give out emails to companies these days, even through Facebook. Will email marketing be the next trend on social network?

Email Exchange for App fucntions

Although fans have to approve on giving out the email, but companies would try anything to collect them, which means there might be a new era on Facebook that Applications might start to collect emails for companies, users might have to allow these apps to get their emails before they can use them (obvious ones would be the games).

Not all of them unsubscribe

Users can of course unsubscribe from the mailing lists; however, not many users are as internet savvy as most of us, they will just end up getting all these junk mails not knowing how to unsubscribe.

Out of Control

Some companies also buy emails, it’s not hard to create a Facebook App that’s interesting enough to collect emails, if these email lists are sold and it’s out of Facebook’s control, it might even be impossible for people to unsubscribe, AKA spam!

Happy new year everyone, this is my first blog post in 2010 and I would like to start off this year with this ebook I just completed. 2010 is going to be the year of social media, I hope “Social Media Basics for Executives” will help organizations make the right decisions in social media.
Don’t forget to share it with others if you like it!

I always think it’s interesting to see movies’ online mentions because movie business rely so much on Word on Mouth. I believe that “word of mouse” can somehow reflects how the movies are doing.
You might also want to check out my previous post “Social Media Mentions of Movies predict Revenue“.

Avatar is obviously ahead of the game, but Sherlock Holmes is catching up, I believe mention numbers will grow after it official releases on 24th Dec. See graph below:

I used these 2 movies on this research because they both have interesting social media strategies.
To learn more about their social media tactics, read: Avatar The Movie and Social Media Marketing also Sherlock Holmes Turns to TweetDeck for Film Promotion and Tickets Giveaway on Neon Punch.

I love advertising. I not a fan of American football but I watch Super Bowl only for the ads. I enjoy watching TV ads purely because of it’s form of art and creativity. So I would believe that I’m not a person who get easily influenced by an ad.

A recent research conducted by Synovate shows that 67% think there are too many ads on TV, and only 39% think the same to the Internet. However, they also revealed that 42% would accept even more ads on TV in exchange for discounts on their TV subscription, and 41% would do the same on Internet.

Although numbers are pretty good, and ad channels would likely go for this plan, I still don’t think it would be effective advertising if advertisers can’t figure out a way to deliver extremely relevant and targeted ads.
Would you get more ads for discounts, and actually pay attention to the ad?

Technorati Tags: advertising

It’s hard to gain new customers, but it’s even harder to keep existing ones. I was about to switch to another hosting company this morning, but a 5-minute online chat stopped me from making this decision.

If you own a website/blog, you should know that the customer lifetime value in web hosting industry is very high, which means one customer can bring hosting company long-term revenue, similar to mobile network companies. This is why hosting companies invest so much in customer relationships to keep existing customers happy.

I was thinking about switching all my hosting services to mediaTemple because of their great reputation on speed, and all the positive comments I heard from friends. I even contacted them for information about the services and they responded me in no time. I was going to switch when this current hosting plan expires, which will be next week.
As I was trying to create my Posterous blog (which will be launched soon) with this current hosting with IXwebhosting, I had problem with the DNS settings, so I got on to the 24/7 online support. In 2 seconds, one of the representatives greeted me and asked how he could help, I told him the problem and he set up everything for me from his side in 5 minutes in excellent manner!

I was very impressed and promised him that I would publicly thank Vadim Chichkanov from IXwebhosting.
So that quick 5 minute chat kept me for at least 2 more years in their company.