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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
April 5, 2014 10:37 AM
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Before the “selfie” term was coined, many people were already figuring out ways to take photos of themselves...
Before the “selfie” term was coined, many people were already figuring out ways to take photos of themselves, whether it be with digital cameras, smartphones, or even film cameras back in the day. Safe to say “selfies” aren’t exactly new per se.
However with the term having been officially coined, it seems that there is now a mental disorder associated with it as well.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, the act of taking a selfie can be considered a mental disorder. The disorder has been labeled selfitis and is defined as an obsessive compulsive desire to take photos of oneself and publish it onto social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on..
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
March 6, 2014 10:08 AM
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By now, you’ve probably read the New York Times piece that’s been making the rounds lately. If not, here’s the upshot: it concludes that Google AdWords isn’t practical for small businesses.
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the Gray Lady has gone after AdWords, nor is it the first time that the paid search community has responded so vigorously in its defense. The real tragedy of the latest piece isn’t that AdWords has been singled out – it’s that the Times (and the business owners it interviewed) have once again missed the point....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
February 3, 2014 11:24 PM
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Earth to Marketing...
When it comes to social media, is marketing really listening to consumers? If so, tell me why your social media sucks so badly?
There are thousands of reasons why consumers loathe old-school marketing. For all its promise, social marketing is not faring any better. We’re doomed if we don’t learn from the lessons and marketing mishaps of the past....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 28, 2014 11:25 AM
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If you manage a brand's Twitter account, chances are you're not interacting as much as you could be. And that's not a good thing.
Simply Measured took a look at 98 of the top global brands on Twitter and found some eye-opening information.
From Mashable: During the final three months of 2013, 98 of Interbrand's top 100 global brands tweeted at least once and the average company tweeted 12 times per day, according to data from Simply Measured, a social media analytics provider. However, the report also found that 54% of these Interbrand companies send less than one @-reply per day....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 29, 2013 4:30 PM
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The cardinal rule of conducting business on social media is don’t embarrass your brand. It’s so easy to avoid, after all, given the ample opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn from big companies’ mistakes online.
To help you avoid any missteps, here are five of the worst errors that Corporate America has ever committed on Twitter....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 23, 2013 2:31 AM
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Don't become a Marketing Horror Story Legend. Here are three content marketing stories you can learn from.
With Halloween just around the corner, cable channels are deep into playlists of horror movies. Tune in, if you dare, and see how everything from a cabin on a quiet lake to a doll can go fatally wrong. But for sales and marketing pros, these movies aren’t half as scary as the idea of executing a failed campaign and missing important sales numbers.
This is equally true for Content Selling and Content Marketing programs. Just alike a scary movie, one wrong move and the guillotine comes down on you – or even your whole team. The good news is that we can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid the pitfalls of failed campaigns. Let’s take a look a few content program horror stories and avoid making the same mistakes ourselves....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
September 12, 2013 9:19 AM
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Marketers including AT&T are getting schooled on the fact that jumping in on the social conversation around national tragedies is not the safest arena for real-time marketing.
A handful of brands are being smacked around today for posting 9/11 commemoration tweets perceived as inane at best and insensitive at worst. AT&T received the brunt of the outrage after tweeting a picture of the beams of light shooting up from the Twin Towers site, captured in the screen of a phone that's poised to take a photo, with the text "Never Forget."The tweet was promptly removed, and AT&T issued an apology....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 14, 2013 9:57 AM
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We polled our communities on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ asking them why they unfollow brands on each social network. Hundreds of you were quick to respond, sharing your biggest social media pet peeves.
Although there were some common issues across all three networks, there are clear differences too.We’ve made a comparison between the top 3 answers, take a look....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 5, 2013 11:54 AM
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Chipotle was the latest brand to engage in a “fake Twitter hack” marketing stunt, following in the footsteps of MTV and BET a few months ago. The intention behind these stunts is to clearly boost fans and followers for their brands, but, unfortunately, exposes a major flaw in how brand see their customers and how their perception of social is flawed. Furthermore, these types of theatrics deter from the game-change possibilities of how brands and customers can build mutually beneficial and long lasting relationships through these platforms...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 5, 2013 9:24 AM
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Design professional Andy Rutledge may have bitten off more than he could chew by trying to address the “broken design” of news websites.
In a blog post that outlines all the problems with The New York Times’ design, Rutledge makes bold claims like, “It is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity.”
So what he proposes is his own rendition of what a NYT.com section front should look like — and journalists on Twitter, especially from the publication under scrutiny, weren’t feeling it.
And, really, they’re right. It’s hard to take seriously a design that completely ignores the constraints of a typical newspaper, or as Ryan Sholin mentioned, “Boy, it sure is easy to redesign a news site without any regard for advertising, performance, or politics. But so much fun!” Because, really, couldn’t we all whip together something glorious and beautiful if we weren’t constrained by practical needs within the newsroom?...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
June 22, 2013 1:29 AM
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...What happens to those companies that make mistakes on a much greater scale and cost their company millions in clout or (gulp) dollars? They go down in history as the biggest marketing mistakes of our time. It's hard to move on when you're being cited as the example of what not to do, huh? We looked into the biggest mistakes from many popular brands -- but glossed over any smaller companies because we don't want to hurt the little guy ;-) Keep reading for a little entertainment, and some reminders of what you should never do to ensure you don't repeat these mistakes yourself....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
May 1, 2013 6:54 PM
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Sometimes you come across a PR fail that is so big, it’s hard to believe. Marketers at Mountain Dew (owned by PepsiCo) hit the bottom of the barrel when it comes to racism and disrespect to abused women everywhere with a new video spot. The firestorm for Mountain Dew's marketing fail is just getting started.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
March 25, 2013 9:16 PM
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After disturbing—not to mention unsanctioned—mockup ads appeared online, the PR pros in Ford’s Asia Pacific division snapped into action on a Saturday morning. Are you having a rough Monday?
At least you weren’t handling a fast-moving PR crisis all weekend.
That was the case for Ford Motor Co.'s public relations team as it crafted a response to a disturbing mockup print ad for its Figo model that staffers at an unaffiliated agency had posted to the Internet....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
March 22, 2014 11:07 AM
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From purple ketchup to baby food for adults, these brand extensions were nothing short of miserable failures.
Brand extensions, or when a company rolls out a new product that’s still connected to their core brand, are a mainstay of the food product industry. Most are well-thought-out, field tested, and happen to make a lot of sense: Oscar Mayer’s known for its lunch meat, so why not buy little rounds of their turkey, with cheese, crackers, a drink, and dessert, all packaged up in a tidy box? Lunchables were a hit when they were rolled out in 1988 for that very reason: it made sense, and parents trusted that the brand would be able to provide a decent, complete lunch for their kid.
However, while the brand extensions we’ll be taking a look at today might have made sense to some exhausted brand development executive somewhere, they certainly weren't hits with the general public....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
February 13, 2014 11:49 PM
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Is all fair in love and marketing? Check out some recent notorious marketing moves and judge for yourself.
Fashion house Valentino has apologized for its tacky press release sent Friday enthusing that actress Amy Adams was spotted at Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s wake in New York City carrying one of their bags. In addition to misspelling the name of the bag, the Valentino rep included two photos of a grim-looking Adams – reportedly a good friend of the deceased – clutching the ridiculously expensive Italian bag....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
February 3, 2014 2:39 PM
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...However, for the most part, this was not a marketing opportunity in which cooler heads prevailed, whether it was the unfortunate racist tweets that followed Wieden + Kennedy’s lovely, multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” on behalf of Coke or JC Penney, which… oh God, where do I start?
Well, here goes. So, about halfway through the game, @adage wondered if @JCPenney had been hacked, or whether the person man- or woman-ing the account was drunk. How else to interpret tweets such as the following: "Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???"
Or the epic: “Who kkmew theis was ghiong tob e a baweball ghamle. #lowsscorinh 5_0”...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 5, 2013 10:43 AM
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The Appalachian State Mountaineers have just unveiled a new logo and it looks like a deranged Simpsons version of Abe Lincoln. What were they thinking?
On Monday, Appalachian State University unveiled an official new secondary logo for the school's athletic department: a disastrous figure that looks like a Simpsons rendering of Abraham Lincoln’s drunken evil twin. Probably drawn in Microsoft Paint, it shows a grumpy, frowny old man smoking a corncob pipe and with a top hat hiding his bald yellow head. This character’s name is “Victory Yosef,” but his face is the picture of defeat. .
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 25, 2013 1:52 AM
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One start-up learned the hard way that negative stunts don't bring positive buzz.ay be the worst marketing idea of 2013: Faking a school shooting to advertise your start-up.
The team at Bevii, a social media app founded by students at the University of North Carolina, learned this hard way on Thursday. They sent a marketing email that tricked their college classmates into believing there was a shooting occuring on campus, reports Valleywag's Sam Biddle."
Chapel Hill Police are investigating a report of innovation which occurred around 10:01 a.m., Monday, October 14," the message began. "The current suspect is Bevii, a mobile, location-based social network only available to select Universities." It didn't sit well with students that the email copied the format of UNC's university-sanctioned alert system, alertcarolina.com. The university has blocked Bevii on its servers, and now it will be hard to downplay the stunt....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
October 3, 2013 11:01 PM
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...Multiple studies conclude that online reviews can make or break companies. According to one survey, 90% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions. A highly-cited Harvard Business School study from 2011 estimated that a one-star rating increase on Yelp translated to an increase of 5% to 9% in revenues for a restaurant. Cornell researchers have found that a one-star swing in a hotel's online ratings at sites like Travelocity and TripAdvisor is tied to an 11% sway in room rates, on average. Gartner projects that by 2014, between 10% and 15% of social media reviews will be fake.
Nineteen SEO Companies and Small Businesses Entered into Assurances of Discontinuances
The OAG has entered into Assurances of Discontinuance with 19 companies, with penalties ranging from $2500 to just under $100,000. The practice of preparing or disseminating a false or deceptive review that a reasonable consumer would believe to be a neutral, third-party review is a form of false advertising known as "astroturfing." Astroturfing is false and deceptive, and it violates, inter alia, New York Executive Law § 63(12), and New York General Business Law §§ 349 and 350...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
September 10, 2013 11:14 PM
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Tomorrow marks the twelfth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which means it's also the time of year when people get angry at other people for not being sufficiently reverent about the occasion.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 14, 2013 9:49 AM
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Domino's and Bank of America show that having humans handling social media doesn't mean they'll act human.
Last week, Domino’s stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand’s Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote “Sorry for your bad experience” response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.
And yet the error was actually a mistake made by a human, according to Domino’s. In much the same way as Bank of America screwed up last month by having a social media team sounding a lot like robots, a Domino’s employee mistook the compliment for a complaint. The employee then, it would appear, gave the default response for social media complaints. Domino’s, to its credit, tried to regain its footing by taking it in stride. The rub with brands in social media is that they’ll need humans, who are prone to make mistakes....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 5, 2013 10:07 AM
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For companies that haven't found a humorous voice on social media, the joke's on them. For those that have, here's how they leverage laughs....
Done well, tweeting can even land you a dream job. Here at Fast Company, our executive editor Noah Robischon even has a framed edict on his office wall: “Stop tweeting boring shit.” But stifling yawn-worthy tweets is one thing, composing a one-line comedic gem for the masses is quite another.
We’ve come to expect it from stand-up comedians such as Megan Amram, the spambot @horse_ebooks that posts bits of context-free hilarity randomly pulled from online texts, and formerly unknown Justin Halpern, who rose to fame tweeting the caustic observations of his father from @shitmydadsays. But brands bringing the funny on Twitter? Not so much.
To wit: @ChipotleTweets took to fake hacking its feed to produce a stream of nonsense notes meant to evoke a chaotic mirth similar to that of @horse_ebooks. Though the tactic earned the burrito chain several thousand new followers, Chipotle quickly resumed its regular (not particularly humorous) promotional voice....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 17, 2013 3:04 AM
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Fashion company Benetton caved in to pressure from the Vatican and pulled a Photoshopped ad that showed Pope Benedict XVI kissing a leading Islamic imam, the International Business Times reported Thursday.The Vatican responded with furious protests over the image in the company’s Unhate campaign, released Wednesday, which showed the Pope smooching with Egyptian Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb.“This is a grave lack of respect for the Pope,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi fumed.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
May 17, 2013 12:03 AM
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Earlier this week, I posted about the Facebook meltdown and trials and tribulations of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale. Arizona (Epic Facebook meltdown, PR fail or publicity ploy?). This un-reality show couldn’t get much stranger. It has more twists, turns and intrigue than a Shakespearean tragedy. Or maybe the Keystone Cops would be more accurate? The bistro was featured in a raucous season finale episode on Kitchen Nightmares featuring explosive celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. It was an entertaining and highly-charged reality TV episode complete with drama, screaming, yelling, heroes and villains....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
April 4, 2013 9:31 AM
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Ford isn't the only major company that has had to answer for a controversial ad it never wanted to go public. A series of Pepsi ads in Dusseldorf showed graphic images of a personified calorie committing suicide in various violent ways. The World Wildlife Foundation had to apologize when DDB Brazil created ads in which dozens of planes were shown flying at the World Trade Towers with the text, "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11." WWF said it never approved the ads even though they were submitted to various ad award ceremonies. Click here to see when big brands had to answer for huge ad fails ...
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Apparently, a lot of disturbed are people walking around and working on Madison Avenue. Marketing and PR pros take note. LOL