RyanShell.com

Marketing, public relations, social media... and a little of this and that.

PUMA Runs a Great Twitter Promotion but Doesn’t Engage

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PUMA has been doing a promotion via Twitter to help raise funds for a charity that will eventually win their Project Pink contest. Here’s how their website describes it,

“The winning charity gets 100% of profits from the sale of PUMA Project Pink gear! Tweeting? For every time you use the #projectpink hashtag now through October 18, PUMA will donate $1 to the winning charity, up to a maximum of $25,000.”

Over time this has proven to be a good way to raise awareness for both a cause and a brand on Twitter… and that’s been no exception with this particular promotion.

But, PUMA may have seriously dropped the ball as pointed out by @KrisColvin. She recently sent a tweet saying,

“@KrisColvin: Hey, @thepumastore, we’re trying to help raise money for your #projectpink cause. You haven’t tweeted in 6 days.”

Kristi eventually corrected herself and stated that they sent a tweet on October 7, but that doesn’t change much.

PUMA is getting lots of mentions on Twitter and they are doing nothing to interact with the conversation. To put this in perspective they’ve only sent 15 tweets for the month of October – nine of which were retweets.

Promotions of this nature that have a charity tie generally bring good PR, but PUMA is missing a big opportunity to connect with consumers and create new customers, not just people sending tweets.

Imagine how cool it would be to send a tweet for this promotion and then get a reply from @thepumastore with a link giving you 15% off your next purchase.

“Content isn’t Important”

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I’ve read multiple blog posts / comments over the past few days where people seem to be getting on this “content isn’t king” kick.

Say what?

That’s absurd.

Let’s take digital media completely out of the conversation for a moment. Would you send a mailing with no copy? Nope.

We might even say that if someone is saying content isn’t important that they may not have an understanding of how to gather said content, or simply don’t know how to tell the story.

Yes, having an understanding of digital tools is important, but having the ability to tell a story (this can have a vast meaning) and engage the audience is just as important.

Twitter’s Promoted Accounts vs. Shady Auto Follow Process

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I sent a tweet earlier today highlighting the fact that Twitter has finally launched something that has been widely rumored, promoted accounts.

Moments later, @MitsuYamazaki, someone I met while speaking at a conference last week sent the following reply,

“@ryanshell u can always set up “SHADY” auto follow to gain more followers… what’s the difference?”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s a big difference in the promoted accounts and the shadier auto follow process Mitsu referenced.

Why?

Promoted accounts will show up in the “Suggestions for You” section and allow users to proactively follow said accounts. Doing so offers no guarantee of a follow in return and the motivation for the follow is likely that of common interests.

On the other hand, the auto follow method Mitsu referred to is simply a way to game the system. Here’s part of what I previously said in a blog post on this topic,

“There are programs that exist that allow users to mass follow people based on location, keywords and various other requirements. Once the criteria is set they then hit the “magic” follow button and hundreds, if not thousands of people can be followed all at once.

That’s only part of the game though.

Once the mass following is done there hope is that the newly followed people will politely follow the individual in return.

After X days the mass follower will fire up the program once again and unfollow any new person they followed that didn’t follow them in return. (I guess it wasn’t true love.)”

Promoted accounts are not people paying for followers, they are accounts paying for added exposure that could potentially lead to legitimate new followers.

Facebook Should Allow Pages to tag Non “Friends”

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I’ve decided (consider this an official proclamation or something like that – ha) that Facebook needs to add a feature to pages. This item in particular has to do with photos and tagging.

You’ve heard time and time again that businesses/organizations should have pages, not profiles. That’s great and all, but if you don’t have a profile you in theory can’t tag people that are in pictures. Why? If you don’t have friends you can’t tag.

But… in the age of sharing, pages should be able to somehow tag people in pictures. If you’re worried about privacy, we could go a step further and require tags from pages to be approved by the person being tagged.

Why is this feature needed? There are plenty of reasons, but let me give you one simple example. If I load a video of my boss on to our Facebook page it would be nice to be able to tag him in the video… but I can’t because we aren’t friends on Facebook. He’s a good guy and all, but I don’t know that we should be Facebook friends. Get what I’m saying?

Have any thoughts on this or a good solution?

Media Hit Results in 5,302 Tweets… in 24 Hours

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I previously wrote about a media hit in The New York times and the excitement (that never seems to get old) around doing so.

But now… I want to share some data with you highlighting not only the reach of media, but also how you, and many others play a direct part in spreading news on various social networks. The chart below provides insight as to how this story exploded online and on various social networks. Oh… and by the way, these are the results 24 hours after the story broke.

To be clear, the 2,197 tweets highlighted above are from those seven sites alone. When additional data was reviewed it became clear that this story was tweeted 5,302 times within 24 hours and received 9.8 million impressions. It’s truly astonishing to see how quickly the news spread.

Twitter has a statement on it’s about page that, without a doubt, backs up how this story spread online,

“Twitter asks “what’s happening” and makes the answer spread across the globe to millions, immediately.”

Big news hits are one thing, but big news hits placed on sites with readers that are socially active… that’s a completely different ballgame.

Note: This case study has been featured in a new book titled, Economic Development Online, written by Anatalio Ubalde.