I received some interesting data today from Dessert Gallery (DG), a Houston-based cafe chain about their recent Facebook fan page campaign.
Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Emily Durham, a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston?based restaurant consultancy surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery (DG).
The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical Dessert Gallery customers, the company’s Facebook fans:
- Made 36 percent more visits to DG’s stores each month.
Read more... (187 words, 1 image, estimated 45 secs reading time)
Really interesting article in the Boston Globe yesterday on how the Boston Celtics are using social media to not only increase revenues, but also to reach out to fans who cannot see the team live.
What the Celtics are doing?
The primary goal of the Celtics online efforts is to drive people to their web site. Celtics.com features GameTime Live, an application that features real time scores, tweets, and blogging with supporters throughout the world. The team beta-tested GameTime Live during the 2009 postseason, and more than 50,000 unique visitors checked it out during the triple-overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the first round. Read more... (547 words, 2 images, estimated 2:11 mins reading time)
Getting results from Twitter campaigns are rare but Computerworld had an interesting article on the Georgia Aquarium which sold 2,500 admission tickets through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter earlier this year.
To get its social media followers to take action, the aquarium offered 25% to 40% off admission prices from February through May to people who followed it on Twitter or signed on as Facebook or MySpace fans.
The campaign used a specific URL for the promotion which allowed the aquarium to track sales directly, according to Dave Santucci, vice president of marketing and communication.
Buy using a specific URL for the campaign the Aquarium was able to measure the ROI of the campaign. Read more... (170 words, 1 image, estimated 41 secs reading time)
Great interview of Scott Monty by Amber Cadabra from Altitude Branding. Scott is head of social media at Ford Motor Company and he had some very interesting things to say about how Ford uses social media.
Three interesting points that Amber and Scott discussed were:
What do you believe is the single biggest mistake companies make when integrating social media into their efforts?
Read more... (340 words, 1 image, estimated 1:22 mins reading time)
About six weeks ago we began to develop and implement a social media marketing plan for a soccer web site. Soccer Tickets Online is a new site and the initial focus of our social media marketing efforts has been to build brand awareness.
As I mentioned, Soccer Tickets Online is a new web site so the first goal of the campaign was to make people aware that the site exists. There are many different ways to approach that sort of goal, but the one we took was link baiting. We developed a page called “The best 5 soccer players of all-time” and submitted it to Digg. The post made the front page of Digg and crashed the server. Not a bad start? Read more... (669 words, 1 image, estimated 2:41 mins reading time)
An increasing number of marketing managers are slowly buying into the benefit of social media marketing. The one question they all ask is, can you tell me some social media marketing success stories. Rather than focus on the big brand successes, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the success that two small businesses are having with social media marketing. My thanks to The Arizona Republic for doing this research.
Last year, Scottsdale-based ice- cream chain Cold Stone Creamery used the popular video-sharing site YouTube to disseminate a video it created to promote a new flavor. In the video, two ice cream flavors fell in love and got married. The ice-cream couple even had their own MySpace profile. Read more... (395 words, 1 image, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)
It might be summer, but there is no rest in the social media world. This week in our social media interview series we interviewed Sujan Patel of Docshop to talk about some of the social media tactics that he is using.
Sujan spoke about the importance of testing a social media campaign before you launch it: Read more... (374 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)
Great article by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net titled “Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg. In the article Daren looks at the referring traffic for one of his blog posts titled “11 Surefire Tips for Improving Your Landscape Photography” and what he found was really interesting.
Traffic Data From Week 1
- Digg – 24,410 page views (43% of all traffic to the post for this period)
- Direct Traffic – 8634 page views
- StumbleUpon – 5599 page views (9.5% of traffic to the post)
- Wykop (A Digg clone)- 4661 page views
- Delicious – 2523 page views
Read more... (230 words, 1 image, estimated 55 secs reading time)
Interesting social media traffic experiment by Marketing Experiments called Harnessing Social Media – Web 2.0 Grows Up – Free Internet Traffic. What premise of the year-long experiment was whether social media sites could a substantial amount of “free” traffic to four web sites over the 12 months. They then compared this traffic with the cost of buying traffic via Google AdWords to see which one had the best ROI.
To handle the social media tactics Marketing Experiments hired someone at $10 an hour. Throughout the year this person spent 360 hours working on the project posting 255 blog excerpts and attempting “to engage in real and meaningful conversation with the community”. Read more... (401 words, 2 images, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
