Papa John's launches pizza recipe and storytelling contest

• Papa John's launches pizza recipe and storytelling contest

  Papa John's has taken a lesson from Converse's playbook asking fans to submit recipes and stories. The recipes and supporting narrative will be featured in a gallery. People can be passionate about food, and certainly passionate about pizza. What stories will they tell? This will surely be the most engaging component of the campaign. 

  tags: smm, PapaJohn's, example, case, contest, back story, MediaPost, Facebook, gallery, Converse

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Who knew

• Who knew "Like" could be so powerful?

  Facebook Offers New Features Connecting to Broader Web  - WSJ.comWhat you like will be added to your profile data and help what you liked to link back to you in and out of Facebook. How do you feel about this? Do you "like" it? 

  tags: Facebook, smm, like, profiling, targeting, cb, research

  • Facebook Inc. announced an ambitious plan to get its tentacles further out into the Internet by better linking people, places and things, as it looks to turn a massive audience into a pool of well-understood consumers.
  • Facebook said more than 70 partners have signed up to embed "Like" buttons or other customization widgets on their sites, including ticketing site Fandango.com and CNN.com.
  • For years, he said, the Silicon Valley company has focused on tying together people on the Web, mapping out who knows whom. Now, Facebook wants to map out connections between people and their interests, gathering more explicit information about users' favorites in order to deliver them a more personalized experience on Facebook and on other sites. He called it "the most transformative thing we have ever done for the Web."
  • But Facebook's advertising business, while growing rapidly, is still in its early stages. While the company is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billi
  • The social networking site said it was also getting stricter about what information in allowed third-party developers to access, moving to address a series of criticism from users and privacy regulators that its policies were too lax.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

13 (Sort-Of) Selfish Ways to Go Green - Prevention.com

• 13 (Sort-Of) Selfish Ways to Go Green - Prevention.com

  Prevention gives 13 really easy ways to be green. Even little things matter!  Take a look at this list and to learn more, visit Prevention.com!

  tags: sustainability, green, eco, howto

  • • It’s Surprisingly Easy Being Green
    • 1. Shave 3 minutes off your shower
    • 2. Walk or bike two errands a week
    • 3. Snack on organic apples
    • 4. Air-dry your hair
    • 5. Drive to work with a friend
    • 6. Even better, telecommute weekly
    • 7. Cut your TV time in half
    • 8. Get a ficus plant
    • 9. Go meatless on Mondays
    • 10. Drive a little slower
    • 11. Stay snuggly with a sweater
    • 12. Buy fewer frozen dinners
    • 13. Let sunlight in

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Meaning of Gifts

Gift exchange is a part of our culture - one of the ways that we tell people who have a special place i our lives that they are special, that we care, that we want them to stay in our lives. Some of us play special roles with our gifts - we try to please, provide for, improve, make up for our own shortcomings, or just acknowledge the gift's receiver.

As the receiver, we want to be pleased. We want to have a heartfelt thank you to express to the gift's giver. But sometimes we aren't pleased. We might feel puzzled, confused, disheartened, or ambivalent.

These are some of the issues I'm studying with this survey on less than perfect gifts. Even if you've never received a gift you didn't love, please take a few moments to respond to the stories shared in the survey. And if you do have stories of your own, I hope you'll share those. All responses are anonymous, and the survey is completely voluntary (no penalty for not participating).

Visit http://bit.ly/GiftStories

MediaPost Publications Schwinn Pops Kickstand On $5 Million Campaign 04/16/2010

• MediaPost Publications Schwinn Pops Kickstand On $5 Million Campaign 04/16/2010

  My first bike was a Schwinn. So were my second and third bikes. I still have the third one - my first real adult bike. It's forest green with a white basket and a sumo wrestler bell. I grew up on Schwinn and remember spending hours riding through my neighborhood with a group of kids. My Schwinn went with me to college, and has stayed through all the transitions of my life. With this new campaign, Schwinn has recaptured its inherent drama  and an opportunity to reconnect with those who still love the brand. 

  tags: advertising, campaign, media, creative, example, case, Schwinn, MediaPost

  • Once upon a time, Schwinn pretty much owned the American bicycle market and, with models like Varsity, Continental, and of course, the Paramount, defined American-made bicycling dominance. But that was back when a carbon frame was something you made with a pencil, and brands like Trek, Specialized, Cannondale and Giant had not climbed onto retail bike racks.
  • Schwinn is hoping to get its brand mojo in high gear with a new campaign aimed squarely at a vast consumer base of recreational riders:
  • The $5 million-plus marketing push -- Schwinn's largest in at least a decade -- includes TV, print, Internet banners, a new Web site (RideSchwinn.com), social media, and a major retail rethink for Schwinn's big-box and independent bike shop retailers, based on the idea that a forest of bicycles on store racks does not a brand make.
  • Creative, via Cossette New York, carries a whimsical, nostalgic message about how Schwinn bikes are a way to step out of the rat race, slow down and smell the bitumen.
  • The print and TV ads hearken back to Schwinn's heyday, when kids played in the real -- instead of virtual -- world, and bikes could double as Abrams tanks, except for the little handlebar bell, which, in fact, is the central image in the campaign.
  • Andy Coccari, CMO of Dorel's Cycling Sports Group division, tells Marketing Daily that the ad push is focused on women 25 to 54 because, "while purchase decision and ability to really connect with family aren't feelings exclusive to women, women are the chief purchasing officer of the family."
  • Ads will appear in pubs like Family Fun, Parenting, Shape and Working Mother. The TV spot, starting this week, runs for the rest of the year on national cable TV. Digital strategies include display, search and social media.
  • In the TV spot a young woman rides her Schwinn down a street. When she passes a young boy in his yard, glued to his DS game, she rings her bell. Magically, the video game is gone and he's playing on a tire swing. Then, on a city street, she passes a man yelling into his cell phone.
  • He says dealers will get point-of-sale materials and local market support, and subsidized co-op advertising.
  • Schwinn competes most directly with brands like Electra, Jamis, and Globe, per Coccari. "It's a saturated segment of the bicycle market, but Schwinn is number one, with 85% awareness in the U.S.," he says.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

SAS Seeks to Improve Data Mining of Social Media - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

• SAS Seeks to Improve Data Mining of Social Media - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

  There is rich data available in consumers' social media streams but how can it be collected, sorted, and meaning made from it? SAS Social Media Analytics seeks to do just that. The software will automate sentiment analysis for social media data. One tester said the software achieved 92% accuracy with that of human readers. 

  tags: research, SAS, smm, Twitter, sentiment analysis, example

  • No one doubts that social media – all the stuff on Facebook, Twitter and other online forums – provides a rich lode of user sentiment that companies ought to be able to exploit. And not just to sharpen their marketing, but also to improve their products and services – potentially, the ultimate source of customer views and a crowd-sourced suggestion box.

    But the challenge is how to make sense of the ocean of information, find meaningful patterns and use it as guide for action. The digital tools for social media monitoring and analysis, analysts say, are still primitive.

  • SAS Institute, the leader in advanced business intelligence and data analytics software, thinks it can do better. It is introducing a software service on Monday called SAS Social Media Analytics that analysts say seems to represent a step ahead in social media analysis tools.

    The new SAS service is powered by the natural-language processing technology that SAS picked up in 2008, when it acquired Teragram, a Cambridge, Mass., specialist in that niche of artificial intelligence.

  • Until now, they say, software alone has not come near the caliber of “human readers” (a person reading through thousands of tweets related to a given company and rating each as positive or negative).
  • Katie Delahaye Paine, head of a communications measurement and research firm in Berlin, N.H., said the best sentiment analysis software has been about 70 percent accurate, compared with human readers. But when she tested the SAS service it scored 92 percent.
  • In the case of a hotel company, Mr. Chaves said, the technology could be used to find people on Twitter who have the highest percentage of tweets related to the hotel industry or that specific company. Then, a heavy hotel twitterer would be graded by number of followers, a sign of influence. Next, the hotel twitterer would be graded by how often he or she is retweeted, an indication of the engagement of the poster’s online audience.
  • Along with online ads, he noted, working with “these influencers can become an important part of a company’s digital media mix.”

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What the Hell Is a Creative Director Supposed to Be? - Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age

• What the Hell Is a Creative Director Supposed to Be? - Small Agency Diary - Advertising Age

  Are you wondering what your life would be like if you finally got your dream of becoming a creative director? Read here for an insightful overview on the day to day role of the creative director from Phil Johnson. The snapshot? Like most jobs of any importance today, the job changes by the day, hour, and minute.

  tags: advertising, jobs, creative director

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twitter Has a Plan to Make Money With Ads - NYTimes.com

• Twitter Has a Plan to Make Money With Ads - NYTimes.com

  tags: smm, Twitter, monetization, business model, Starbucks, Virgin, Bravo, example, case, advertising

  • The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads.
  • Several companies will run ads, including Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo.
  • “The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.
  • According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago, and that does not include the millions more who use the service through third-party smartphone and Web applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie.
  • Though Twitter already has some revenue from deals to license its stream of posts to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Twitter’s announcement is the first significant step toward a business model.

  • Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

    “When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Microsoft Launches Kin Phone

• Microsoft Launches Kin Phone

  Are your friends really your friends? This phone ensures you never miss the posts from your closest friends. Aggregating Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Live, the hardware helps people be socially connected to their strongest ties. 

  tags: phone, mobile, Kin, Microsoft, smm, hardware, networks, weak ties, strong ties, cb, sns

  • That's the premise of a campaign from Microsoft that introduces itsKin phone, which is pitched as a device designed specifically "forpeople who are actively navigating their social lives."
  • Kin pools several social mediastreams, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Live. Butunlike Motoblur, Kin lets consumers program their phone so theirclosest friends' updates rise to the top, a feature Microsoft calls"The Loop."
  • An online and TV campaign, from agencytwofifteen (formerly T.A.G),San Francisco, breaking this week called "The Social MediaSociologist," will focus on that feature by homing in on oneconsumer: Rosa Salazar, a 24 year-old aspiring comedian fromBrooklyn. Camera crews have and will continue to follow Salazararound, as she explores how she really relates to her 700-plusFacebook friends. (View the spot here.)

• Twitter Has a Plan to Make Money With Ads - NYTimes.com

  tags: smm, Twitter, monetization, business model, Starbucks, Virgin, Bravo, example, case, advertising

  • The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads.
  • Several companies will run ads, including Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo.
  • “The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.
  • According to comScore, Twitter.com had 22.3 million unique visitors in March, up from 524,000 a year ago, and that does not include the millions more who use the service through third-party smartphone and Web applications like TweetDeck or Tweetie.
  • Though Twitter already has some revenue from deals to license its stream of posts to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Twitter’s announcement is the first significant step toward a business model.

  • Starbucks, for instance, often publishes Twitter posts about its promotions, like free pastries. But the messages quickly get lost in the thousands of posts from users who happen to mention meeting at Starbucks.

    “When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.