I agree that over time consumers are getting smarter and as such they tend to make more informed buying decisions particularly in retail but also in the boardroom. I was working on a RFI this week that was asking me the bidder what % of the market my competitors had marketshare in! I thought is was a cheeky way for the company to do less work and still be able to make informed decisions :)
This problem goes back to the 70s, to the then-famous speecy spicy meatball commercial. People thought it was a commercial for a brand of Italian food. It was actually a commercial for Alka Seltzer.
I think that's an excellent point, Mitch... the campaign popularity might overshadow that actually marketing message -- and people forget what brand was behind it all.
The example of the "Duracell Bunny" comes to mind.. where consumers were confused and thought that the Bunny was advertising for Duracell instead of Energizer... the same sort of thing can happen with social media virality... people remember the joke, but not the underlying sponsor.
It's an indication of how important it is to have a social media operation which can respond instantly to developing situations. I think that's about empowerment.
Have there been any studies on whether or not consumers actually buy more "Oreos" (or other specific products) based on the slickness of the parent company's social media team?
I didn't rush out to buy more cookies, but maybe it kept the brand alive in my head....?
Indeed content is king. With so many options, consumers and business decision makers have to make careful use of their reading and research time. Engaging with sites or sources that insult their intelligence, are biased, or otherwise make ill use of their time can't be tolerated.
@Alison -- the content is critical. In our case, we had created a novel cartoon specific for our target audience, which was something that had never been done before but was possible now thanks to products like Flash.
Content's the hardest part -- the rest is mostly paying attention to the situations and really listening to people, understsanding that it's a two-way media.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
