Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

February 23, 2010

Learn Social Media by Example: “It Has to be Heinz — Dip & Squeeze” Campaign

Stat Box

Brand Name: Heinz (Consumer Products)
SM Channels Used: Twitter, Facebook & website
Appeal: Emotional appeal
Target Audience: USA bloggers, microbloggers, Facebook users, social networking users and Heinz lovers
Date: February, 2010
Campaign Duration: Ongoing

Previous campaigns

Dip & Squeeze with Ease!

Dip & Squeeze with Ease!

Heinz might be famous for its ‘57 varieties’, but that was a portfolio for a long-lost age, when stores sold your brands, rather than competed via offerings of their own.

Therefore, and in efforts to innovate and freshen up, Heinz has launched its biggest umbrella brand marketing campaign to date, in a £5m push to build on its “emotional connection” with consumers.

The “It has to be Heinz” campaign has been designed to celebrate the way people perceive the food brand.

[read full article >>]

February 17, 2010

10 Tips to Ensure That You’re NOT A Social Media Sucker!

Learn all you can from the mistakes of others.  You won’t have time to make them all yourself“.  ~Alfred Sheinwold

Mistake

If only we, for once, actually took the time to understand the value of this quote, most of us wouldn’t have gone through most of the crap we had to deal with, whether on a personal level or business wise! But we are humans and we are stubborn!

My mother knew better than to try to teach me from her mistakes, however, I still have faith in you, my readers, and in the fact that you will trust me enough to learn from my own experience on social media venues as to not commit the same mistakes I did!

Top 10 Tips You Should Follow When Using Social Media!

Are you ready for this? Here we go..

1. Culturize!

Being culturally aware and sensitive is very important when using one or multiple social media platforms or venues. Cultural ignorance is highly destructive in your relationships with the communities you are trying to be a part of!

2. Emphasize!

When active inside a realm as impersonal as social media, it is very important for you to be able to emphasize any point you are trying to make in order not to be misunderstood. No one can hear the tone of your voice or see your body language so your words are your weapon and your executor!

[read full article >>]

February 5, 2010

Learn Social Media by Example: “Give Me My Chuck” Campaign

Stat Box
Brand Name: The series “Chuck”
SM Channels Used: Twitter, Facebook & blogs
Appeal: Emotional appeal + subway sandwiches for US residents
Target Audience: Worldwide Bloggers, microbloggers, Facebook users, social networking users and show fans all hoping to “Save Chuck”
Date: April, 2009
Campaign Duration: A few weeks

Events, whether they are a local tweetup, a championship game or the world’s largest conference, can be notoriously difficult to plan, promote, and execute. But the end result can be amazing, and that is why we plan them in the first place“. Mashable’s Ben Parr

In one of my most retweeted posts, 10 Social Media Campaigns that Rock! Learn How to do the Same!, I listed the top most successful social media created through the different social media channels available online.

One of the most campaigns that I enjoyed was: The “Give Me My Chuck” Campaign. read below to find out why.

[read full article >>]

July 16, 2009

20,000 visitors in 3 hours – The Ashton Kutcher Effect @aplusk ! [video]

About 8 hours ago, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) tweeted about my post entitled “Reclaiming the Longest Tweet in History at 250 characters!”. I noticed a spike immediately, and the highest number of concurrent users surfing the site was 3000 users! This post is dedicated to show you what you can expect when someone as popular as @aplusk tweets about you.

Ashton Kutcher #1 on Twitter according to wefollow.com

Ashton Kutcher #1 on Twitter according to wefollow.com

Note: at the time of writing, Kutcher was the #1 on twitter.com based on the number of users following him: 2,780,274 followers.

45 minutes after the tweet…

As soon as I was able to think again, it occurred to me, with GetClicky, I can use the “Spy” mode to see how many visitors are surfing the blog in real-time. I was shocked to see that about 10 people where accessing the site per second! The concurrent number of visitors at this point was about 1500!

To share this experience, I took a video screen capture. Watch it below:

The stats 8 hours later…

As expected from a real-time messaging platform like Twitter, the life span of a tweet is not too long. The good thing about twitter is that people Retweet what they like, that definitely gave the traffic a bump up and kept the traffic coming for a longer time.

Within these first hours, the post got about 200 retweets according to BackTweets, and more than 30,000 bit.ly clicks overall!

That’s how the number of uniques go:

  • Hour 1: 10,847 unique users
  • Hour 2: 6,357 unique users
  • Hour 3: 3,475 unique users
  • Hour 4: 2,225 unique users
  • Hour 5: 1,586 unique users
  • Hour 6: 878 unique users
  • Hour 7: 632 unique users
  • Hour 8: 407 unique users

What did we learn? Things to keep in mind…

Twitter drives large numbers of mobile users!

Twitter drives large numbers of mobile users!

If you have a self-hosted blog and you’re trying to get loads of traffic via Digg, Reddit, Twitter or any other social medium, you need to make sure your blog can survive the spike in traffic. In our case, we got 2% failure rate due to database configuration issues (see #3 below):

  1. Make sure you have a powerful server hosting your blog – I’m using MediaTemple Grid Service, it’s quite good in handling traffic, but gives me some weird glitches every once in a while. Upgrading to a dedicated server soon!
  2. Make sure you have the WP Super Cache plugin installed. This plugin serves static copies of your posts without running PHP or connecting to the database, in turn saving your precious CPU cycles and memory usage.
  3. Make sure you have the MySQL my.cnf file variable “max_connections” set to 100 or more. We had it set to 60, but that was not enough!
  4. Consider testing how your blog loads on iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, Android and other phones. We received 12% of the traffic from mobile users!
  5. I’m now considering using CSS Sprites for the blog, which reduces load on the Apache server by delivering all the small images in one image file.
  6. Make sure you have a big and clear retweet button. I don’t need to explain why that’s important. Wordpress blog administrators have 2 options that I’m aware of: TweetMeme or BackType Tweetcount.
  7. Always keep an eye on your log files!

 

Did I miss any points for surviving The Kuther Effect? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet linking to Thoughtpick

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet linking to Thoughtpick

July 1, 2009

Interview140: An optimistic chat with @MARCOME – Singer, Songwriter & Producer

Interview 140 Brief: During our research and while looking into different profiles on Twitter, we stumbled upon a certain trend being carried out by a few great Twitter lovers who have the ability to use Twitter in a way that makes the world a better place! Thus, the idea of Interview in 140 characters came into play! We decided to pick one Twitter user every once in a while and interview him/her about different topics of interest to the whole Twitter community and us as well.

Thoughtpick's twitter interviews...

Thoughtpick's twitter interviews...

A line about the interviewee:

Marcome – pronounced Marko-may – Singer, songwriter & producer. Calls her voice her “main instrument“. She loves world travel which helps her create different dialects and she greatly enjoys producing,  arranging, remixing and engineering all of her musical works.

Marcome’s Blog embraces a blend of different interesting writings, topics, music compilations and testimonials. She truly enjoys meeting people via Twitter. With 6,914 updates and 19,958 followers on twitter, it is very obvious how active and popular @MARCOME is.

Marcome in reply to "What interests you most in tweeples?"

Marcome in reply to "What interests you most in tweeples?"

Interview140 Analysis and Lessons:

The main reason for every interview140 is learning more about the best ways to utilize Twitter and interact with tweeples who spend their time sharing information and tweeting about different topics of interest to many people out there. [read full article >>]

Filed under: interview140 — Tags: , , , , , , — Beirut @ 4:49 pm

June 15, 2009

10 Social Media Campaigns that Failed! Avoid their mistakes!

What truly defines a failed social media campaign? What are the factors and elements that drive a social media campaign to its doom? What are the worst social media campaigns online? What can be learned from the mistakes they have made?

Success is 99% Failure - This is why we like to also learn from the failed campaigns!

Success is 99% Failure - This is why we like to learn from the failed campaigns!

In my previous post entitled “10 Social Media Campaigns that Rock…“, I listed and discussed, in details, the 10 best social media campaigns that I was able to find online and that had a great the ability to grab my attention and gain my interest. Furthermore, and in the same post, I added a list of elements and advices that should be considered to ensure the success if any social media campaign.

For this post, as promised, I will be mentioning 10 social media campaigns that failed with a few following tips of how to avoid falling into the same trap!

10 Social media Campaigns that Failed:

  1. Wal Mart’s Facebook Campaign – Wal Mart here tried using Facebook pages feature to market itself in a different image, “practicality” vs. “style”, and failed miserably as opposed to Target, the company!
  2. Skittles Twitter Campaign – Although it should have worked out in their favor, skittles underestimated the power of tweeting when it utilized Twitter, which in turn turned what could have been a great campaign against them through the attacks they received about their product through the Twitter community! [read full article >>]