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| Pizza Hut And Amex Team Up on Foursquare for Super Bowl | |  Will football fans check in via Foursquare on Super Bowl Sunday? American Express and Pizza Hut plan to find out, offering a $5 rebate on any food order from the pizza chain that exceeds $10. While aimed at Super Bowl XLVI viewers, the discount and three-company partnership will run through Feb. 12. Here is why it's interesting for Pizza Hut. Foursquare users don't have to check in at any of Pizza Hut's 6,000 restaurants. Whenever Amex members check in to the geo-social app's "Super Swarm Sunday" feature created for the big game, they will receive a statement credit after ordering from Pizza Hut online, by phone, or in stores. They have to pay with their Amex cards, which need to be synced up to their Foursquare acounts. Then, Foursquare will send them an alert about the money-back reward within moments after the Pizza Hut purchase. Foursquare's Challenge While a compelling marketing innovation, the Foursquare initiative appears to be but a small piece to Pizza Hut's larger efforts for Super Bowl XLVI. For instance, the Plano, TX-based brand will run a pre-game ad on NBC. The spot is the result of a user-generated video contest on the brand's 83,000 Twitter followers about the Foursquare offer. Because of Pizza Hut's current $10 deal for any kind of pizza, Amex users would stand to buy pies from the chain for roughly $5 apiece - after the $5 credit is applied. The Super Bowl is in three days. Not surprisingly, the brand's community managers have published numerous messages about Sunday's huge TV event in which it will participate. For all the marketer interest in Foursquare, Pizza Hut's lack of attention to the deal offer so far seems to speak volumes about where geo-social stands in the real-world pecking order of advertising. In other words, platforms at reasonable scale like Facebook (845 million users) and Twitter (100 million) are welcome in King TV's court. New York-based Foursquare, with its 15 million users, appears to be still working towards such an invite. Mobile Marketing Taking Shape Around Big Game Meanwhile, the Pizza Hut offer extends a Amex-Foursquare relationship that became serious in March 2011. The development also underscores how many marketers seem to be viewing Sunday's big game as intriguing juncture in the evolution of mobile or so-called secondscreen marketing. Super Bowl advertisers increasingly want to maximize the impact of their spot by offering dedicated mobile content for TV viewers with smart phones and tablets in hand. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are among the brand advertisers that hope to engage game viewers with mobile video and other content. |
| Why Context Is King in the Future of Digital Marketing | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 11:45 PM | Jonathan Gardner |
|  Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at ad company Vibrant Media. He has spent his career as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications leadership roles and as a journalist around the world. An avalanche of devices, platforms, channels, and information is crushing consumers as they go about their daily lives. I'm crying "uncle" too, wishing a corporate entity (Apple?) would take the firehose of content and channel it into a trickle of relevant info on one simple device. Since that's not likely to happen, and since data, devices, and content just keep multiplying, how can we marketers help consumers make sense of the world? By going back to basics, and returning to context. Behavioral targeting is certainly valuable. Knowing what a prospective customer has recently read, browsed, watched, and bought online is definitely useful. But all it illuminates is past behavior. What if I spent the morning looking at travel sites to research a planned trip, but now I'm reading an article and thinking about buying a birthday gift for my aunt? If you want to understand a user's likely future behavior -- their intent -- you need to understand their multiple contexts. "Multiple" is the key word here. As Tom Wentworth wrote on Mashable recently, "You might be a 45-year-old technology manager who likes jazz and runs marathons, but you're also a husband, a son, an uncle, and a friend - and your purchases reflect all those different contexts." When you add "SoLoMo" (social, local, mobile) to the contextual mix, you begin to understand why context needs to be at the core of every smart marketer's strategy. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to make it part of yours. What Are You Doing? Planning a social media campaign? Consider the contexts. A teen looking at Facebook is in the context of seeing what her friends are doing, where they are eating, shopping and hanging out. She's watching funny videos her peers have liked or posted. She's chatting about weekend plans. Even as the content is curated, controlled, and shared by consumers, marketers need to understand the contexts within which that sharing happens. Ask yourself: What kind of marketing message are users receptive to in these contexts? Where Are You? Local creates amazing opportunities to examine context. If I'm checking in on Foursquare, I've chosen to share my real-time, local context. Smart companies like Local Response understand the resulting data and harness it to create powerful, relevant marketing. I'm sure this will evolve further, as devices (wearable and not) get more intelligent and NFC-enabled. Marketers will have simplified my life and performed great acts of contextual relevance when they can send me a waffle coupon as I arrive in the frozen-foods section of Whole Foods. Who's Mobile Now? We all are. Social and Local are mobile. With mobile Internet usage expected to soon surpass desktop, at some point in the future, nearly all media consumption will be untethered. And as with So and Lo, more Mo means more constantly shifting contexts. As users, we all understand these contexts. And as technology advances, marketers will begin to be able to leverage these new contexts as well. Our contexts change dozens of times a day: In the morning, you're an athlete, working out on the elliptical -- while at the same time you're an executive, watching the early business news. Then you're a cook, making breakfast. Then you're an executive again, making decisions at the office. Then you're a friend, consoling a colleague who had a bad day. And so on. Think of the possibilities for marketers and consumers who want relevant, personalized brand engagement in the right context. Ford and other auto companies are pushing forward with new telematics that can understand your health and wellness. Google's self-driving car concept is not only logical but possibly inevitable. After all, in-car marketing really isn't a huge leap from what we do now -- looking up rest stops and gas stations from our GPS devices or smartphones. "The time is ripe for the next generation of contextual branding -- the art of sending the right message, to the right audience, at the right time," Martin Lindstrom has written about marketing in cars. But this could apply to any other context, too. Regardless of the platform or strategy, we must not forget that content may be queen, but context is king in the future of marketing. We have seen brands such as Lowes and Jeep build this in the core of their in-image, in-text, display, and toolbar strategies that reap the benefits. They have taken branded content, dynamic creative, valuable information and special offers into relevant contexts where their customers can (and do) choose to engage with them. As David Doty of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has said: are rich, relevant, and indicative of what the future of all advertising is going to be." Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Maliketh |
| Facebook IPO Sends Tech Stocks Surging | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 11:21 PM | Zoe Fox |
|  Facebook filing for IPO Wednesday did good for more than just the social network. Companies associated -- even tangentially -- saw their stocks soar in trading Thursday. As the largest Internet IPO to date, Crunchies2009 via Flickr |
| Old Spice's Terry Crews Crashes a Bounce Ad [VIDEO] | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 10:33 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  In the latest evolution of Old Spice's "what will they do next?" social media ad campaign, spokesman Terry Crews literally crashes an ad for Bounce. The brand chose Crews, a former NFL player perhaps best known as Julius, the father on Chris Rock's Everybody Hates Chris, to personify its "Smell is Power" campaign for Old Spice's Red Zone body sprays. In a previous ad, which broke in January, Crews's brain came out of his head. This latest ad starts out as a conventional spot for Bounce fabric softener, a Procter & Gamble sibling brand. At around the 10-second mark, there's an explosion and Crews zooms in on a Jet Ski. "It's so powerful, it sells itself in other people's commercials!" Crews bellows before flexing his pecs. The wacky ad comes after Old Spice pulled out all the stops this summer with a YouTube campaign that pitted Isaiah Mustafa against Fabio for the role of brand spokesman. The campaign, which logged more than 22 million views within a week, followed the hugely successful "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign from 2010 that won the Cannes Film Lion Grand Prix and broke new social media ground by having Mustafa answer comments from YouTube and Twitter in short video clips. In case you're wondering, Crews hasn't replaced Mustafa, according to Old Spice. Crews starred in ads in early 2010 that coincided with Mustafa's campaign. Josh Talge, Old Spice's brand manager, told Mashable last month that Crews was more in keeping with the current campaign's idea of "power." Does the ad score a touchdown? Let us know what you think in the comments. |
| Facebook IPO: How Will the Social Network Be Affected? [POLL] | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 9:38 PM | Todd Olmstead |
|  Facebook's $5 billion IPO filing yesterday took the social media world by storm, but if you woke up today and logged into the social network, you probably noticed nothing's changed -- yet. Yes, Facebook Timeline is in the process of rolling out to all users, so it may actually have looked different to you, but yesterday's filing won't create any immediate changes to the service that 483 million of us log into every day. Contained in the 213-page S-1 document was Mark Zuckerberg's letter to potential shareholders, in which he wrote that Facebook was "built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected." He also talked about Facebook's culture of "The Hacker Way," writing that "the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world." But the Facebook IPO filing means it will now be beholden to shareholders and a board, and while its offices may be filled with idealists, they'll still have an obligation to generate revenue. The company already laid bare a comprehensive list of risks that could hamper its ongoing prosperity. Certainly things will change -- but the question is how much. Let us know in the comments and take our poll: How do you think Facebook IPO will affect the social network? How do you think Facebook's IPO will affect the social network? |
| Social Media Has Turned Super Bowl XLVI Teams' Marketing Upside Down | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 8:50 PM | Sam Laird |
|  The explosive growth of social media over the past four years has drastically changed how the Giants and Patriots market themselves and connect with fans compared to the two teams' most recent Super Bowl trips. "It's a whole new world compared to last time," Nilay Shah, the Giants' director of digital media, said in an interview. When the Giants and Patriots reached the Super Bowl in 2008, Twitter barely existed, Facebook had less than 100 million users, and Google+ wasn't even a gleam in Larry Page's eye. Today, Facebook has grown to more than 845 million users, Twitter has become an integral communication tool of the sports and media worlds, and Google+ now claims around 100 million members. Other sharing sites such as YouTube have swelled in popularity too. "Last time we were here, the social world was still sort of new for us, and our main communication method was email," Shah said. "We didn't focus on it a lot back then, but coming back now we knew we had to place a lot of emphasis on it, find a way to incorporate our fans as much as possible and make them a part of the experience." "We didn't focus on it a lot back then, but coming back now we knew we had to place a lot of emphasis on it, find a way to incorporate our fans as much as possible and make them a part of the experience." The Giants are among professional sports' most social media-savvy teams. But Fred Kirsch, the Patriots' vice president of content, said that growing social networks have played a real role in fan outreach and marketing during New England's Super Bowl run as well. When the team won the AFC Championship, it decided to run a contest giving away free trips to the Super Bowl for fans who worked in healthcare, law enforcement, the military, firefighting or education. Kirsch said that the team was able to promote the contest effectively in a short time thanks to Facebook and Twitter, gathering about a thousand nominations. "It made it tough to choose the winners but it was well worth it," Kirsch told Mashable in an email. The Giants, meanwhile, have run a number of promotions built entirely around social media. They installed a button on the team website to allow fans to follow more than a dozen players on Twitter before Super Bowl XLVI with one click. They have a player shooting behind-the-scenes footage -- but 10,000 new fans have to "Like" the team's Facebook page to unlock each day's content. They are even hosting a "Social Media Night" on Thursday, in which a number of players will participate in a live webcast from the team hotel, answering fan questions sent via Twitter and Facebook. Four more players are hosting exclusive Google+ Hangouts, each with five chosen fans who joined their Google+ Circles. "It's more relaxed, more informal, a chance to know the guy behind the uniform." Tyson Goodridge was one of the fans selected for a Hangout with linebacker Mark Herzlich. Goodridge, who works as a social media director for a marketing agency, told Mashable his two young sons wanted to ask what players eat before games, while he wanted to ask what goes through the players' minds in the moments before the ball is snapped. "It creates a level of intimacy that is so cool," Goodridge said. "Anyone can know all his stats, but in this case it's a private session where he's not in the locker room. It's more relaxed, more informal, a chance to know the guy behind the uniform." That, said Shah, epitomizes the wealth of new engagement possibilities opened up by social media's maturation since 2008. "We've always tried to provide the best content possible, but before that might have meant just putting up exclusive-access videos and that was it," he said. "Now we're able to give the fans more and make them feel like they have a voice." BONUS GALLERY: Who to Follow on Twitter for the Super Bowl XLVI Scoop |
| How LinkedIn Gave A Former Pro Athlete A New Career [VIDEO] | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 6:08 PM | Mashable Video |
|  While playing for the Tennessee Valley Vipers in the Arena Football League, and pursuing his dream of playing football professionally, Lewis Howes broke his wrist diving for a pass. He gutted out the rest of the season, playing through his injury, but underwent career-ending surgery in the offseason. For the next six months he wore a full-arm cast and went about trying to answer the lingering question, "What now?" He didn't have a back up plan -- it was football or nothing. Following the advice of a mentor, Howes got on LinkedIn. There he discovered a way to build a brand identity for himself around something other than his talent on the field. He became so engaged with LinkedIn that he wrote two books about using the site and today he is in demand, as a speaker, as a sports marketer and as the host of numerous webinar training sessions. Watch our interview with Howes and learn how to maximize your presence on LinkedIn, his suggestions and best practices for freelancers and why he recommends all job-seekers start their search on LinkedIn. Follow Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor. To join Venture Studio's Facebook page, click here. Thanks to Mike Brown, Jr. for hosting our shoot at AOL Ventures. More Recent Episodes of Venture Studio: How an Innovative Startup Turned Retail On Its Head/a> How One Entrepreneur Is Connecting Celebrities With Their Fans/a> Why Startup Founders Need to Talk to Their Customers/a> |
| What to Do When Your Website Gets Hacked | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 4:54 PM | Dallas Lawrence |
|  Dallas Lawrence is the chief global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's leading public relations and communications firms. He is a Mashable contributor on emerging media trends, online reputation management and digital issue advocacy. You can connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence. If an individual or activist group broke into an organization's office, raided confidential materials and then burned the building to the ground, local, state and federal officials would have swarmed the crime scene in an all out effort to bring the perpetrators to justice for an act of terrorism. Meanwhile, savvy online audiences and members of the media almost dismissively refer to the online versions of these raiders as "hacktivists," conjuring up images of harmless school kids having fun pushing the boundaries of online security. As we saw this morning with the Susan G. Komen Foundation website hack -- and again as "Anonymous Brazil" signaled they had successfully "taken down" the website of Brazil's largest state bank -- these groups are anything but harmless. One study from 2011 identified the average financial impact of these types of breaches to be just north of $7 million per incident. SEE ALSO: 6 Tips for Handling Breaking Crises on Twitter Whether you are a respected non-profit with a decades-long track record, or a state-owned financial institution in Latin America, organizations must diligently prepare for inevitable online intrusions and the challenging communications demands that result. There are four key considerations for organizations seeking to retain credibility and confidence as trusted stewards of information before and after a breach. 1. Think Ahead and Anticipate The best offense is often the best defense -- and this is certainly true in the online security game. Every organization involved in any form of data (online contributions, email petitions, online sales, social gaming, employee data, etc) is vulnerable to attack. Smart organizations are using their pre-hack peacetime wisely to invest in a forensics security assessment and to address identified weaknesses. In addition to the technical diligence, organizations must ensure their corporate communications, IT and legal teams understand who will be responsible for managing breaches and have a well planned rapid response crisis program in place. 2. Say Something In the immediate aftermath of an attack, the lack of information can cause severe organizational paralysis. This paralysis hampers communications efforts, ultimately allowing external forces to shape the lens through which a response is viewed. Identifying immediately what you know for certain and what you don't know is critical. For example, organizations need to be prepared to address questions and concerns about the security of the system. Even though an activist may hijack a site to make a political point, it highlights a deeper potential for vulnerability that must be addressed. Importantly, saying something does not mean saying everything. The rush to respond can have equally devastating consequences for the ill-informed and unprepared. Communicating what you know for certain and what you are doing to investigate -- and even what you are still trying to determine -- demonstrates responsiveness and transparency to stakeholders that rightly feel equally violated by the breach. Creating a direct response channel for those exposed -- via an online registration system or a 24/7 call center -- is another important sign of responsiveness. Total silence creates a vacuum of frustration that antagonists are only too happy to fill. 3. Know the Law Every single state in the Union has separate reporting rules and regulations for what constitutes personally identifiable information (PII). These rules also govern when organizations that have been the victim of a breach must notify the public. Attempting to unravel this multi-state patchwork for the first time with your stakeholders, the media and law enforcement officials all demanding answers can be crippling. Ensure that your team understands the regulations in each state -- and country -- you operate in, and make sure your compliance team is fully integrated with your communications team. Often, you will not be the arbiter of when to go public with news of your breach. The worst thing an organization can do from a reputational standpoint is to allow the narrative to shift from being the victim of an attack to the villain who failed to notify and protect those individuals whose data may have been compromised. 4. Remember, You're Not Alone In almost every case of online breaches, the "victims" number in the thousands -- if not millions. It is not just the organization that has been violated, it is every employee whose social security number may have been exposed, every charitable donor who supported a cause, every business partner that shared data and every consumer who purchased a product. Keep these important groups informed and at the forefront of your communications efforts. They can be powerful advocates. Engaging quickly with local and federal law enforcement officials shows transparency and responsiveness -- don't be afraid to tell that story of cooperation. In 2012, data will continue to emerge as the new form of global currency, and hacking will continue its evolution as the new face of popular protest. The fundamental reality for every business or organization is that everyone is now in the business of data -- and its protection. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tomhoryn |
| Zynga Tests 'Reward Advertising' in CityVille | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 4:19 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  Zynga, aiming to expand its advertising revenue without annoying users, is quietly experimenting with "reward advertising" on CityVille that lets players earn energy by interacting with a sponsor. Sponsors for the program, which rolled out in December, include Coca-Cola, MasterCard and the DVD release of the 20th Century Fox film What's Your Number?. When players got to a point in CityVille where they needed more energy, some had the option of "interacting" with the advertisers in various ways. In the case of the film, players were required to watch the trailer. MasterCard gave users a short survey. Players were exposed to the ads when they ran low on energy, in which case they'd see a window like this: The idea of using in-game rewards as a prize for being exposed to advertising isn't new. Facebook rolled out a program last May that rewarded users with Facebook Credits for watching ads in games from Zynga, among others. The Facebook program appears to have been limited, though. Zynga, which only makes a fraction of its revenue from advertising (most come from purchases of virtual goods), seems to have had more success with reward advertising and is planning to include roll it out to FarmVille and Empire & Allies in coming weeks. Zynga's other forms of advertising include banner ads and branded integration. For instance, a June program gave FarmVille players coveted "Double Mastery" points on crops and trees harvested within seven days when they place a Capital One Visigoth statue on their farms. Will you click on reward ads? Let us know in the comments. |
| Tumblr Hires an Editor-in-Chief | | Thursday, February 02, 2012 4:01 PM | Lauren Indvik |
|  Tumblr may have lost a fashion director, but it has now gained an editor-in-chief. The blogging platform told The New York Times Thursday it brought on Chris Mohney, formerly Senior Vice President of content at BlackBook Media, to serve in the newly created role of editor-in-chief. Mohney will be joined by executive editor Jessica Bennett, formerly a senior writer editor at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. The pair will work to cover the "ideas, themes and people" of Tumblr, says Bennett, making that content available on Tumblr's staff blog and a new area of the site that isn't up yet. We expect their coverage will function much like Etsy's blog or Twitter Stories, which highlights trends and users in the community. The timing of the hires makes sense given that Tumblr is moving away from a vertical content structure (i.e. having separate content directors for fashion and film) to a more horizontal one. Tumblr VP Andrew McLaughlin told The Times that he wants Mohney and Bennett to do "real journalism and analysis, not PR fluff." He added that it is "obviously isself-interest as a company to surface more compelling stories about creators on Tumblr; at the same time, though, we think Chris and Jessica will be able to do so in ways that embody professional rigor and first-rate writing." |
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