Social Media Tools for Parents (Part 2 of 2)
August 19, 2010 @ 1:58am
Updated — August 22, 2010 @ 7:08pm
by Andrew Kim
Welcome to Part 2 of this week’s look into the significance of social media in hands of consumers. All it takes is one mother to take down Pampers’ new line of diapers overnight. Like I mentioned last week companies have used social media and networking intensively in their websites, packaging, and PR in all medias. There is a dark side to this when your premier relaunch of your product line goes into a downward spiral.
Proctor & Gamble’s strongest baby brand is Pampers’ with a line of baby diapers and wipes. Pampers’ earlier this year revised certain diapers with Dry Max Technology. Without a doubt a prestige brand like Pampers’ would test their products extensively before releasing it. Slowly individual mothers have been reaching out to the internet and social media in sharing stories. The product that came into question was Pampers Swaddlers or Cruisers with Dry Max. At some point several mothers in different markets started a new movement on Facebook. The controversy started with a mom noticing several diaper rashes and investigated it with her pediatrician. Diaper rash has been a common problem for newborns and young toddlers, and there are plenty of solutions in dealing with it. No matter what advices, diaper creams or old wives tales that she encountered it didn’t help her baby. I personally used the product as well and my own child would have similar symptoms. These mothers eventually concluded that these several rashes or in some cases chemical burns have originated from the Pampers’ diapers.
Proctor & Gamble responded with normal PR practices in showing proven tests from various sources that these diapers were clearly 100% safe. With social media mothers continued to unite with one voice and demanded a recall of these diapers. Since May 2010 several mothers in Ohio have gone into court filings against Proctor & Gamble. What we can learn are companies cannot be naive any longer where social mediums have given mothers the tools to take down a Goliath. Of course I’m not scaring future businesses in avoiding social media, but to use it to stay ahead or be on guard of the modern consumer. The public are forgiving people, until a company thinks they know better. Elative marketing’s approach with clients is to look into long-term strategies and anticipate for anything.
Recent Article #1: Social media empowering parents with complaints against Pampers
Recent Article #2: Procter & Gamble in Bind Over Moms’ Web Attack on Pampers Brand
Recent Article #3: Pampers Parents Irritated at P&G Push-Back
Recent Article #4: Parents upset over P&G’s Pampers diapers
Tags
baby, child care, Facebook, newborn, Pampers, Parenting, pediatrician, Proctor & Gamble, social media, Swaddlers, twitter, Yelp
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Social Media Tools for Parents (Part 1 of 2)
August 9, 2010 @ 10:42am
by Andrew Kim
Part 1: Sooner or later parents of different generations and ethnics are getting involved with the basics of social media. Not as intensive as tweeting, but Facebook has strengthen family networks and rapid fire feedback. In this week’s blog is about the highlights of search engines and social media networks for parents. Next week I’ll give an example of a PR disaster companies need to be aware when their brands can be disseminated and easily tarnished overnight. 
Using Google, Bing, Yelp, and Wiki-Everything on the iPhone has given my wife, wealth of knowledge from the apple tree in a matter of seconds. As first time parents we are constantly seeking new methods and make split-second decisions as a family. What’s great is pulling information from several websites or batch of links from Google before getting it from the doctor’s office. Relying on the feedback of hundreds of other blogs has given us the second opinion we needed. Yelp has been the best in finding hopeful brick and mortar business where they have effective in seeking the right care for our child. Of course if something is obviously wrong and want more thorough information please consult with your pediatrician.
Facebook has been a great asset to get information, promotions and a structured way in giving back companies our feedback. How valuable is that? Companies not yet in online marketing must take advantage in these technologies, before spending critical funds elsewhere. Elative Marketing has the strong platforms for clients and companies can use to implement immediately.
Tune in next week.
Tags
baby, child care, Facebook, newborn, Parenting, pediatrician, social media, twitter, Yelp
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Tweet Your Menus, Dine with Immediate Satisfaction
August 2, 2010 @ 12:39pm
Updated — August 2, 2010 @ 12:52pm
by Andrew Kim
Having that midnight craving or sick of fast food solutions at work? Give your local social media food trucks in your neighborhood a try. Out the door of the usual greasy, iced, and forgettable foods, say hello to the new tech buffet line. How can we say no to Twitter, Facebook, blogging and every other social media avenue? It’s the perfect vehicle for informing your customers instantly of your restaurant or event. You can actually enjoy something good and know when and
where to be back for more. Significant challenges for meals on wheels are telling their customers when and where to find them. Today’s iPhones and smartphones give businesses affordable way to mass market their brands overnight.
A combination of Elative Events and Social Media services can provide businesses with direct marketing and cost-effective feedback. Utilizing social media for events, product release dates, PR alerts, and limited promotions are great to put information out there. Setting up these services for your website or business can save you on traditional marketing and reinvest where its more important.
So do yourself a favor find your local food trucks and treat yourself.
Kogi BBQ Truck, Greater Los Angeles, California
Dessert Truck, Greater NYC, New York
General Bao Bun Truck, San Francisco Bay Area, California
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dessert, Facebook, food network, food service, food trucks, restaurants, social media, social networking, twitter
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Ice Cream Sundae: An Email Marketing Blog
August 31, 2009 @ 11:09pm
Updated — September 1, 2009 @ 6:29am
by Mason Razavi
On the surface it seems simple, doesn’t it? You throw together a few lines of copy, your company logo at the top, and oh, don’t forget that list of email addresses you bought from a guy in an alley. Slap on a button to “Buy Now!”, and, oh, that subject line….how about “SAVE 10% TODAY!!!!!!!”
Not so fast. A well-crafted email can be a sweet treat, no different than the most inviting of desserts: the ice cream sundae.
Let’s start with the copy. Rich, flavorful, melt-in-your-mouth copy is the foundation, like a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. You copy should be sweet, simple, and provide a scrumptious place for toppings to lay. Don’t go rocky road, or neopolitan, or Cherry Garcia. Instead go with vanilla bean – not bland vanilla, but delicious creamy vanilla with specks of the bean. In other words, be brief, get to the point, but give it just a touch of excitement, enticement, or pizzaz to spark the reader’s interest.
The hot fudge, yes, that is the call to action button. What do you want your readers to do? Buy something? Take a peek at your new video? Donate to charity? Make sure your call to action buttons appear at least twice in the email – probably once at the top and once at the bottom (for those who actually read the whole thing…chocolate sauce drizzles all the way to the bottom, you know). Sure, the ice cream is good, but it’s the chocolate sauce that calls people to action.
Next, the whipped cream and sprinkles that make up the HTML email template. Just as fluffy whipped cream and colorful sprinkles excite your eyeballs and make you jump for joy, so it shall be with with an irresistible, visually delectable email template. Your company logo embedded in the attractive header, the sidebar with quotes, links, and promos….whipped cream and sprinkles make it all the more fun.
The cherry on top? Of course, the subject line. Perhaps the most important part of your email, a poorly written or spammy subject line will get as many people interested in your email as there would be people lining up to grab a sundae with a moldy yet mysteriously half-eaten cherry on top. Don’t type in all caps, don’t put 135 exclamation points in there, and stay away from cliches like “buy now”, “X% Off”, “Refinance Today”, or any other trite, rotten cherries. Even if your sundae, er, email makes it past the recipient’s spam filter, chances are that they will never be read with such subject lines. A marachino cherry is not only eye-catching, it is a sweet way to start a sundae. Make sure your subject lines are equally appealing at under 60 characters (the less the merrier, for the most part), and give people a reason to open your email.
Put it all together and you’ll have a delicious treat that will get the attention of your audience.
I’ve combined my advice and my vice in an effort to educate you, may it serve you well.
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Twitter Goes Down; State of Humanity Threatened
August 6, 2009 @ 11:13am
by Mason Razavi
It was a dark morning. For starters, it was cloudy. That doesn’t happen in California. Ever.
Then the news hit: Twitter is down. Twitter. Is. Down.
Upon hearing this, I rushed to the street, to see hundreds or more people fleeing their homes, grabbing one another, shaking each other by the shoulders, asking how this could be possible.
I drove through Cupertino and Mountain View and discovered that buildings once occupied with quiet cubicles, bothersome copiers, and endless meetings on riveting topics such as enterprise-level IT security were now in ruins. Office chairs torn to shreds, shattered glass everywhere, and the lowercase letter ‘t’ that is emblematic of the Twitter brand sloppily tagged onto the walls of once towering buildings that were filled with Silicon Valley’s brightest.
All along I sensed that everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally did. News started spreading around town (without Twitter?!) that Facebook was also experiencing problems. Stunned, I stood in the middle of the seemingly war-torn street, my jaw agape, contemplating the meaning of the events that had transpired.
I had to make a split decision. Knowing that chaos would ensue, I packed some canned food, a bottle of penicillin, my BlackBerry, and some raw fish (Pompano, to be exact) I managed to steal from Marina Food in Cupertino, and fled town. I quickly realized that I was not alone; hundreds, no, thousands had setup camps outside of the bay area, in desolate areas such as…..whatever is east of the Bay Area.
As I prepared to plan out the rest of my life as a nomad, I got a text on my BlackBerry. “Hey, it’s Mark. Twitter’s back up, and Facebook seems to be working intermittently”.
Oh.
I dusted off my dockers shirt, did my best to straighten out the crease in my slacks, and started to make my way back to the office. I looked up and saw that the sun was starting to creep out from behind the clouds. That’s not even me using a clever literary device to imply hope and well-being, seriously, it just got sunnier, check the weather report. “Everything is going to be ok”, I thought, “everything is going to be ok”.
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Observations from Hearing Alan Cohen of Cisco Speak
July 16, 2009 @ 3:21pm
Updated — July 24, 2009 @ 3:22pm
by Mason Razavi
I recently attended an event in Mountain View in which Alan Cohen, VP of Enterprise and Mid-Market Solutions for Cisco, spoke his mind about the nature of contemporary business communications. The meetup was billed partly as a networking event and partly as an opportunity to learn about emerging social technologies in enterprises, so naturally I was compelled to go. Unfortunately, the event turned out to be little more than a recital of the obvious mashed up with some advertising and seed-planting for Cisco products.
Don’t get me wrong. Alan Cohen is a talented and charismatic speaker who seemed to have the audience in the palm of his hand. As I am someone who truly appreciates talented performers, watching him deliver his piece was in this sense a delight and an education in itself.
However the content was….shall I say, lacking? Allow me to summarize:
“Meetings are boring, and people fall asleep during them. Big companies are inefficient, as they spend too much time trying to get information from one place to the next. Email kinda sucks. Not important. Sorta annoys me. Human interaction is important. Face to face contact is important. That’s why Cisco makes this really neat video stuff that lets you do that, and in the near future we’re coming out with some more neat video stuff that lets you do that even better. Awesome, huh?”
Alright, I might be simplifying just a tad. Still, talking about the sloth-like path of information within giant corporations and how meetings are boring and inefficient is not exactly groundbreaking news.
I was lured to the event with advertising that teased potential attendees by asking if Twitter and Google Wave were the future of enterprise-level communications. My disappointment stems from the fact that I was expecting to actually hear what tools, specifically, were going to change things, and not just some stats and filler about how you only retain 10% of what you read and how 39% of people admit to falling asleep in meetings, and how Cisco is going to save Mother Earth and all its businesses.
In the end, I have to say that observing Alan Cohen’s delivery and the Thai food provided were the true highlights of the evening, even if the noodles were a bit cold.
Tags
Alan Cohen, Cisco, communications, Enterprise, Google Wave, twitter
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NFL Says ‘No’ to In-Game Tweets
July 10, 2009 @ 4:59pm
by Mason Razavi
The NFL has banned its players from in-game Twittering, citing a rule they already have in place that prohibits cell phone usage during games. In doing so, they might be missing a golden opportunity.
On one hand, you have to side with the NFL. Giving a bunch of rowdy, adrenaline-pumped, larger-than-life professional athletes a forum to say whatever they want to the entire world during the heat of battle, with all the raw emotions that go with that – you can see how that might quickly turn into a PR nightmare.
Top that off with coaches who would likely not want their players diverting their attention from the game at hand, and you can see where this might start to make sense.
However, the NFL is missing out on a ton of fun. And really, isn’t that what sports is all about?
Imagine a player telling the world what he feels like as the final seconds tick off the clock to a superbowl victory. Or loss. Perhaps you could envision an injured player taken off the field letting the world know first hand that he’ll be ok. The possibilities are limitless.
My suggestion to the NFL would be to give a few key players the privilege of using Twitter during games. This could serve a similar function as an isolated camera that follows a single player during a game, and is similar to the “mic’d up” idea that some sports leagues (including my beloved NHL) have used to get prime audio clips from players during games.
In the end, it’s all about entertainment, and fans are increasingly searching for behind-the-scenes coverage on what players are doing and saying before, during, and after games. The occasional tweet would only be the next step in taking it to an online format.
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Review: Seesmic Desktop
June 30, 2009 @ 2:46pm
by Mason Razavi
In the world of Twitter desktop applications, Seesmic Desktop has shown that it is perhaps the most valuable of them all for the novice Twitterer and the so-called power user alike.
The first thing that sets it apart is the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts. There are some others that do this as well, but just this one feature whiddles down the list of competitors significantly. Perfect for business users that have a personal and business account, as well as the split-personality sociopath who wants so bad for people to think they really are Brittney Spears, being able to manage multiple accounts in one place is a major plus. Additionally, you can also dedicate a pane to updates on Facebook, which is a nice touch.
It is a cinch to view, manage, and reply to responses in all of these accounts. For example, one smart feature automatically selects the current account with which to provide a response. User lists and searches can also be saved for future reference, a nice touch indeed.
A button to shrink text as well as the ability to add short links through bit.ly, digg, and is.gd round out a nice set of options for Seesmic.
One of my favorite things? The look. Perhaps not as important as the functionality of the application, it is none the less significant for the design of something that is meant to be stared at to be at least somewhat pleasing. Seesmic Desktop offers a slick and contemporary look that compliments my Mac desktop nicely.
If you’re looking for a feature-packed, easy to use Twitter application, I highly recommend giving Seesmic a try.
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Where were you when….?
June 29, 2009 @ 2:07pm
by Mason Razavi
Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died? I was in my office, and found out when I switched tabs on my browser and saw a friend’s Facebook status. How did you find out about the passing of the world’s foremost pitchman Billy Mays? I found out through some Twitter posts, and learned more about it using Scoopler.
Though I could go on about paying homage to the tragic deaths of a handful of celebrities and TV personalities this week, I won’t. There are a million sites and a million blogs and a million groups on Facebook for that. So, I hope you don’t mind if I set the emotions aside and instead focus on the technology that empowered me to stay connected with these stunning current events, as well as a question to you: where were you?
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, social media has in many ways risen above traditional media in delivering up-to-the-minute information on a number of topics (Iran, anyone?). The past couple of weeks in particular have made for some tumultuous times and have provided incredible examples of how social media works in the context of our times.
So, where were you when David Carradine, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcet, Ed McMahon, or Billy Mays left us? How did you use social media to find out about it, communicate others, organize groups, etc? I’d love to know! Let’s see some comments about how we’ve used these incredible tools to talk to each other.
Tags
Billy Mays, David Carradine, ed mcmahon, Facebook, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Scoopler, social media, twitter
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Scoopler Gives You The Scoop
June 18, 2009 @ 12:42pm
Updated — June 24, 2009 @ 8:43pm
by Mason Razavi
What exactly are real-time search sites? Imagine being able to type in a buzzword, a hot news item, or just any word that could spark a conversation. Then imagine being able to get a real-time stream of information from both major news sources as well as people all around the world.
Now stop imagining. It’s real. And your boss isn’t going to like you sitting around with your eyes closed looking like you need your 3pm shot of java.
I’ve checked out a few of these sites, my favorite so far being Scoopler. A search engine with a clever and dynamic twist, Scoopler will take whatever words you enter into it and pull up relevant articles and videos on the right side of the page while pulling up Twitter feeds on the left side of the page. If you want to see how it works, try typing in a few words related to a hot topic. Simply typing in “Iran” or “Obama” will give you enough information to make your head spin right off your shoulders – in a good way.
If you’re trying to stay abreast with what is going on in Iran, this is an excellent tool. As I mentioned in my last entry, Twitter has become the preferred vehicle of repressed Iranians to spread their word around the globe. By seeing all of the Twitter feeds relevant to the situation all in one place and chock full of links to pictures, videos and articles (oh, and did I mention it updates Twitter feeds in real time?) is juicy enough, but to have all of the coverage from major news sources in an adjacent pane makes for an atmosphere that can only be defined as media-junkie bliss.
Scoopler and other real-time search engines are slightly less exciting when you are searching for anything other than white-hot news. I typed in a few words related to my beloved hockey team, the San Jose Sharks, and got nothing more than a couple of Twitter feeds and a couple of uninteresting articles.
The lesson learned here? Use Scoopler to find out about the latest, most exciting, and most relevant news out there. Give it a shot, I’ll bet you’ll be hooked!
Tags
Iran, Obama, real-time search engines, Scoopler, twitter
