Grown Up Thinking

This article first appeared as a PROMO Xtra Editor’s Pick at promomagazine.com

There is a cultural identity crisis occurring among consumers and brands, with each wanting to emulate the other. The byproduct of this shared admiration is an exponential opportunity for word of mouth and social media marketers to play a central role in the facilitation of this ongoing shift.

Brands as People
Brands are finally starting to realize that they can no longer act like the faceless logos they once portrayed. They now need to establish a persona that is approachable and opinionated. Brands need to strive for relationships with consumers and learn to listen so that a two-way dialogue can be established. They need a face and voice that can fully express their multi-faceted product or service offerings. In short, brands need to emulate people.

Honda and Ford have done a nice job humanizing their brands as evidenced by their respective Twitter handles @alicia_at_Honda and @ScottMonty. These players are learning out how to build personas out of well-known brands that are approachable, distinct, and warm.

Both Alicia and Scott have mastered the art of seamlessly integrating their personal opinions with factual product information to serve as a human element to the historically bureaucratic automotive industry. Accessibility, humanity, and responsiveness are no longer traits people expect from just a trusted friend, it is something they demand from a trusted brand.

Click here to read the full article and learn how to morph your brand into a person.

This article first appeared as part of iMedia Connection’s Social Media: In Focus

More than a fan aggregator

With its recent F8 announcements, Facebook has again one-upped the world as we thought we knew it. Brand marketers need to start looking at Facebook as a much deeper and broader solution than one that purely amasses a fan base. As Facebook rolls out new functionality, brands have the opportunity to act immediately in a variety of ways. In addition, it’s important for brand managers to re-imagine their brands by leveraging social enhancements.

Brands need to be able to take immediate advantage of features such as the “like” functionality, but they also need to be visionary in how they can build their brands for the future and become truly social. While I encourage brands to take part in these new advancements, we also need to make sure that we keep an eye on the Facebook future and build with this future in mind.

So, in the quest to make your brand truly social, uproot your assets and think of new ways to infuse them through Facebook integration and by adding key social layers to the brand experience. Look toward the future and start evaluating the role that Facebook can play at retail, on the ground, and across every channel your brand touches. Not all opportunities will be a fit, but one thing is for sure: If you only look at Facebook as a place to have a fan page, you are missing the greater offering and will likely be sitting on the sidelines when the future arrives.

Get the full article here to take a look at some of Facebook’s new and evolving functionalities, as well as what they mean for your marketing efforts.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Facebook’s growth as they try to stay on top of social media development. No one site “owns” the entire social media landscape; however, Facebook is making significant headway in making their site a one-stop-shop for all of your online interactions. Here are six reasons why I believe that Facebook will reign supreme over other social utilities:

1. Connecting: The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and with over 400 million active users that’s over 52 billion social connections. This dominance affords a huge opportunity for Facebook to integrate new social platforms.

2. Email: Facebook is rumored to be developing a full-fledged email system that could eliminate the need for a separate email accounts.

3. Social Plug-Ins: Due to the popularity of the “Like” function, Facebook is now competing with sites like Yelp by providing integration on to other sites around the web.

4. Facebook Chat: Facebook recently added a feature to their instant messaging system that allows users to make Friend Lists within Facebook Chat which will no doubt increase its use over other services.

5. Geolocation: Applications like Foursquare have made a name for themselves in this increasingly popular space, but now Facebook is jumping on the band wagon.

6. Facebook Connect: Facebook Connect eliminates most barriers to entry for engagement on other sites. Now that this process is being made even easier, it will continue its rapid growth in integration.

Check out some more information and insights from today’s F8 keynote presentation here.

An hour-long high school dramedy series that’s a musical? Let’s face it: Glee initially had everything going against it. Time will ultimately tell, but skeptics be damned. This year’s Golden Globe winner for Best Comedy Series turned out to be a runaway hit that has yet to lose steam as it heads into the second part of its freshman season. Above all, the show’s writing is top notch by melding a perfect blend of edgy dark humor and a lot of heart. The talent of the young cast is undeniable. And Jane Lynch turns anything into comic gold. But producers were faced with some tough challenges right from the start. How to get people to actually tune in? Enter social media and a relatively risky gamble on an aggressive interactive marketing campaign.

First of all, Fox chose to debut the pilot episode months before its actual season debut in order to capitalize on its 20+ million captive audience from American Idol. They then utilized the down time to really gain traction online by engaging with their most passionate fans (or ‘Gleeks’). Currently, @gleeks has a nearly 50,000 person following on Twitter and almost 2 million fans on Facebook. Mix that with its very own YouTube channel with exclusive content, PR-worthy appearances (Oprah!) and even nationwide mall performances. Yep, everyone’s all abuzz over the little show that could.

Blurring the line between fan and fiction even further, Glee has since launched a national casting campaign for new characters to appear on the series. Fox also recently released an interactive “hypertrailer” allowing viewers to click and “fan” the show’s cast members on Facebook, who also participate live on-air in weekly re-run episodes (or “Tweetpeats”) much like the cast commentary on today’s DVD and Blu-ray discs.

So what’s so significant about Glee’s marketing strategy, anyway? At its core, it is truly a niche show. But a very enthusiastic niche crowd at that. And Glee is giving that very core audience exactly what they want: access and interaction. At a time when studios are shuttering unauthorized playback of content and guarding creative copyrights like a fortress, this show is practically shooting it across America through a t-shirt cannon. Whether it be the show’s music content (consistently charting week after week on iTunes) or capturing that “underdog” spirit in everyone, Glee has succeeded in truly crossing all media types, including a forthcoming iPhone/iPad app. That makes it one of the very first scripted shows to actually achieve results in reaching out to a young, digital audience with significant viral success. That’s definitely a social media coup to be gleeful about. I, for one, am proud to be a Gleek. Who’s with me?

Glee resumes its season on Tuesday,  April 13 on Fox.

If I were in the sports marketing department at Northern Iowa, I’d be working overtime (no pun intended) to get my basketball coach on Facebook and Twitter by, like, yesterday. Your school just knocked off a giant in the NCAA Tourney and now you’re the trending topic of the week. Embrace it.

How many opportunities does a small school such as Northern Iowa get to have millions of people reading, watching and talking about them? Schools are businesses, and businesses need to build their brand in order to attract new customers (or in this case, students).

A school and coach that’s doing it right? Check out Kentucky’s Coach Cal. He has over 138k fans on Facebook and over 1.1 million Twitter followers…WOW. I imagine there are a couple brands that would pay good money for that type of online community.

How many of those Facebook fans are high school students still deciding on which school they will attend? How about potential basketball recruits looking to get to know the coach? He even goes on to promote a Nike contest that the University of Kentucky is participating in to help rally votes and get the University more exposure.

So, Ben, even though your Panthers crushed my dreams of bracket supremacy by defeating Kansas, I forgive you and would like to offer you a bit of advice if I may:

Please, speak to your marketing department and ask that they set you up with some social media networks pronto. The world is listening and you’ve just signed a big ol’ 10-year contract extension to stay at Northern Iowa (congrats BTW) – better start building that brand while you have our attention.

In the fuzzy afterglow of the Chat Roulette frenzy of the past few weeks, I find myself thinking “what’s next”? Lucky for me, I don’t have to spin my wheels on that brain buster quite yet as two similar sites have already distracted me with their unique interpretations of the random chat craze:

RandomDorm connects college students on the prowl for some dorm-to-dorm interaction (only those with a .edu address need apply).
MyChanceRomance Billed as the “fun way to find love”, MyChanceRomance is a dating site with a Hot-Or-Not mentality that’s bound to give you an inferiority complex.

Not ready to move on from the original just yet? Don’t fret. It’s  still alive and well, even spawning it’s own Chat Roulette Missed Connections site (which I can assure you is comic genius in its own right).

Happy Birthday, Twitter! As we reflect on four years of compacting our thoughts into 140 characters, social media pulse point Mashable.com is asking readers how Twitter has changed their lives, by using the hashtag #thankstwitter4. Sifting through the 140 #thankstwitter4 tweets that Mashable chose to highlight got us well-connected folks at Mr Youth thinking about what we’d like to thank Twitter for. Here’s just a smattering of our grateful gospel:

@courtneyc: #thankstwitter4 helping our generation fuel the biggest text-based fundraiser in history via the @RedCross

@laural:  For the information I learn from everyday #thankstwitter4

@kennyh:  #thankstwitter4 forcing me off my butt on #lazysunday by showing me what all my friends are doing

@jennaa:  #thankstwitter4 the most hilarious trending topics – i.e. #myfuturehusband & #dearfuturewife

@ericab:  For celebrating pithier wordsmithery #thankstwitter4

@ericab: (and for @ShitMyDadSays) #thankstwitter4

@alexisd: #thankstwitter4 giving me a place to voice all of those random thoughts that come to me on my commute to and from work

@manisham:  #thankstwitter4 helping me get hundreds of clicks a day on manishainmanhattan.com!

@laural:  For all the new friends and business contacts I have made #thankstwitter4

@giancarlop: #thankstwitter4 making human interactions, thoughts, and feelings searchable. (sorry to get all heavy on you)

From outlandish one-on-one encounters to themed bar nights, ChatRoulette has swept the nation with its unapologetically uncensored take on the classic internet chat. Marketing types around the world held their breath wondering who would be the first brand to tap in to the 500,000+ unique users per day.

And the winner is…. French Connection. The international clothing brand has launched a ChatRoulette competition challenging participants to use the service to seduce a woman in exchange for a $250 voucher. Risky move for an international brand, considering the proliferation of shady stuff going down on the site. But foolish or not, they’ve been getting a lot of coverage for being the first.

Only time will tell if ChatRoulette can become a useful tool in the marketer’s arsenal. Thoughts?

There are many among us who cherish the days when we get to indulge in a hearty breakfast of pancakes and syrup instead of our usual cup of coffee and too much to do. Well today is our day, because it is officially National Pancake Day according to IHOP, and the folks over at the famed food shop are taking a new approach to promoting it with a Web 2.0 spin!

For starters, IHOP enlisted Miss America 2010 to be the official spokesperson for National Pancake Day to support the nationwide promotion and tie-in with the Children’s Miracle Network. On the official National Pancake Day website consumers can share information via their social networks and sign up to receive celebrity wake up calls reminding them to celebrate with some pancakes. If you’re one of the 74,000+ IHOP Facebook fans you may have noticed that you were automatically sent to the National Pancake Day tab this morning while IHOP employees across the country took to their local IHOP Twitter accounts to spread the news about the promotion and were even triumphant enough to earn IHOP a spot in the coveted “Trending Topics” list on Twitter. Overall I’d give IHOP an “A” for effort, but a “B” overall for their Web 2.0 centered celebration. They’ve got a lot of room to make this a full-blown social media extravaganza, and this is a great step in that direction.

Facebook is celebrating its 6th birthday this week, which seems a good a time as any to reflect on its path to world domination.

Let us not forget Facebook’s humble beginnings as “Thefacebook”. As if they were concerned there could be another one, this was THE facebook for all your networking needs. That is- assuming you’re an ivy leaguer buried in books in the Bay State. May I remind you that at its inception “Thefacebook” was only available to students at Harvard, where creator Mark Zuckerberg held his dorm room brainstorm sessions.

What you may not know is that even before “Thefacebook” there was “Facemash”- a Hot or Not game Zuckerberg created after hacking into Harvard’s computer network and stealing his peers’ student ID photos. “Facemash” generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in its first four hours online.

I still remember the Facebook buzz growing my sophomore year of college- eagerly anticipating my D2 school‘s addition to “the list”. This came around the beginning of junior year, my three roommates and I wasting hours of valuable study (and party) time polishing our profiles until they became a sharp snapshot of who we each were (on our best day, of course.)

I clearly remember my attempt to demystify the “poke” and debating with actual, legit friends what the rules were for deciding “Facebook friends”. Today, Facebook has 400 million members and anyone, anywhere over the age of 13 is allowed to join.

This tremendous growth doesn’t look to be slowing either. Membership this year is double what it was on Facebook’s fifth birthday. The social networking powerhouse also blew out the candles with some celebratory changes this week, including a shuffling of menus and an apps and games dashboard.