You’re a Person, Talk Like One

I really don’t understand why businesses tweet like there’s not really an actual human being behind the keyboard. Twitter is a pretty casual experience. When you’re reading your time line of tweets, they’re not formal.  I’m not saying I’m expecting big businesses to go dropping f-bombs everywhere, but you’re allowed to show a little personality. This could be a great chance for you to express the attitude of your company by simply tweeting the way you’d like to be looked at.

An example of a good tweet from @zappos
“HR employee had an intervention, forced me to clean my desk for an hour. I found a letter from @zappos_fred to me. From 2004.”

An example of a bad tweet from @chevrolet
“Following the @AllStarGame? Did you know Chevrolet has a baseball app for download! http://bit.ly/9LI071 #ChevyASG”

Side Note: Chevrolet is one of the top car manufacturers in the United states and they only have 5,741 followers. That’s pretty pathetic.

Engage and Comment with Users

Facebook offers so many ways for businesses to reach out to their customers. It boggles my mind why companies that have thousands of followers don’t update their company status. I also really don’t understand why that same company doesn’t respond to comments on their Facebook profile.

It really doesn’t even take much to engage, just do it.

Conclusion

As someone who is passionate about the online marketing experience, the internet gives businesses a brand new way to interact with customers in a close and unique way. Many businesses will continue to miss the point here, but the ones that get it seem to be finding continued success.

Keeping your product free of ads seems like just a basic principle of business, but once you look a little closer it seems like this is where hidden advertising comes into play.

“Creativity is truly a key to successful ads”

Let’s take HBO for example… you pay for their service and you don’t see any commercials. So how do they fill time between their movies and TV shows? They have their own in house commercials promoting new movies and TV shows that they have. These are ads! We as consumers don’t really look at them as ads because they’re not all that bothersome, but nevertheless they’re promoting something so I would call them advertisements.

I guess the only logical answer for why there are ads in things we pay for is because companies want to make money. If there is some sort of promotion they can run on the side of a soda can that could get them more visitors to their website, they’ll do it.

To me, some of the best ads are advertisements that we don’t even recognize as traditional ads. Creativity is truly a key to successful ads and promotions.

I’ve seen these “red boxes” all over the place now for quite sometime, and finally the other day I decided to rent a movie from one of them. So I drove to a local gas station, picked out a movie, slid my credit card, and I got my movie. Later that night I watched the movie, and then the next day I returned the movie. I did all of this for $1.

So if you haven’t yet realized why Red Box is so great, I’ll point out a few of the reasons why I like this service so much.

They Don’t Advertise

Red Box has over 24,800 kiosks and I’ve never seen a single advertisement for Red Box to date. It seems like their core focus is word-of-mouth advertising which is truly the best form. Granted their huge vending machine “red boxes” out front of numerous gas stations and super markets do provide them some sort of advertisement, but not really in the traditional sense of the word.

They Promote Competition

When Netflix came out it seemed like it was one of the most practical uses of the internet to date. I really love Netflix and their business model. As a company, they seem to get it and understand that they can’t just sit back and watch the money roll in. Their latest endeavors seem to be taking streaming movies head on, and it seems like their succeeding so far. Up until Red Box, Netflix didn’t really seem to have any real competition. Blockbuster and a few others have tried their hand in the online movie-at-your-door game, but none have really been a “success.”

They’re Screwing Blockbuster

Blockbuster Video has been screwing us since 1985 with unnecessary late fees and even hurting our credit. New technology has emerged and Blockbuster is stuck in their old ways, and is now paying for it. They’re trying their hardest to fight off these new companies, but I don’t know how long it will last.

All-in-all it seems like Red Box as a company really does seem to understand the concept of good business. Taking on Blockbuster and Netflix is no easy task, but they seem to be doing really well considering every time I leave my house I see another new Red Box.

I really like these ads, they’re simple, funny, and have girls in them. The latter two being great factors when advertising your beer which has a target market of early to middle-aged men. I actually went to their Facebook page, but that’s when I realized that is seems like Keystone could be doing a little more with this campaign.

They went through the trouble of redirecting facebook.com/keithstone to facebook.com/keystonelight. What would have been awesome-er would be to not redirect facebook.com/keithstone and create a Keith Stone profile (which the user can “like”) which the user can then click on some sort of action link to either send them to keystonelightbeer.com or facebook.com/keystonelight.

I know there is a picture and updates from “Keith Stone” at facebook.com/keystonelight, but I just don’t understand that. It almost seems like your hurting your brand. If it were me, I’d keep them at separate Facebook accounts, but still link to each other. I just think that it seems like there’s a Facebook opportunity wasted (no pun intended).

In terms of PR, Adobe seems to have chosen the best response to the recent attacks on Flash. Instead of going and trying to hit Apple under the belt, they’ve gone and hit apple under the belt… but in a clever manner. They haven’t come out and said that they disagree with Apple, but they’d like to give users a choice.

I’m sure the Flash wars will continue, but it’s interesting to see how Adobe rebutted Apple’s gripes with Flash.

First off, when learning about CloudApp I visited the site (which is Apple-esque to say the least). The website should let you know how simple things will be if you choose to use this app. So I registered for an account, installed the app, and away I went.

The app sits in your menu bar and whenever you want to share a file, all you have to do is drag and drop the file onto the “Cloud.” I was blown away at how easy I can share files! You can also download “raindrops” which are add-ons for apps like Firefox, Photoshop, VLC Player, and a bunch more.

Probably one of the only down sides I see as of now is the file size limit. Currently, the maximum file size is capped off at 50 megabytes. If you’re looking for a different “cloud” hosting option, take a look at Dropox (maximum space is 2gb for free).

All and all I’m excited to see how much further this app can be pushed. I really enjoy it and since it’s free, you should give it a try.

Yesterday they announced their plan: Promoted Tweets. It seems as if Twitter is easing us into their ad platform because they’re only planning on putting these tweets in search results… for now. I have a feeling though as time goes on and if the platform is well received, we’ll start to see Promoted Tweets up front and center.

I’m sure many users will be outraged that they’ll have to start seeing ads on “their” (free) service, but you can’t please everyone. I’m just glad Twitter is going about different approaches to advertising within their own content, similar to what Digg’s been trying to do.

It seems as though Twitter has been busy lately between acquiring Tweetie, and now introducing Promoted Tweets. The company only seems like it’s growing and now with some sort of monetization strategy in public, they can start to see more potential profits.