Social marketing

I don’t follow many brands on twitter or facebook. Those that I do are local businesses we actually shop at. It’s been interesting watching these local groups use the social networks to market.
One is The Milk Pail Market in Mountain View. They have a reasonably active Facebook page. How have they been using social marketing?

  • Announcing specials “from now ’till close, come in and tell your cashier “Milk Pail Rocks” and get a free pint of ice cream.
  • Posting about special events and tastings.
  • Posting their weekly sales pages.
  • Promoting other local food related businesses.

Another is Gordon Biersch Palo Alto. They have a Facebook page and a twitter account. They regularly tweet about which bartender is working. As they are a brew pub and all their beers are made on-site, they also tweet the status of their current seasonal. It’s a good way for fans to keep up with the beer status.
The thing about both of these companies is they feel authentic. They really are ways for the companies to keep in touch with their regular customers. It’s not always about driving new customers in, but more about keeping the current customers happy.
 
 

Quote of the day
No one harvests email addresses any more

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Social networks and bulk email

There’s been a bit of a commotion on Twitter and over at J Caldwell’s blog about Al’s reaction to someone harvesting his address off LinkedIn and then adding that email address to his company’s marketing / newsletter database. Al objected to getting the mail, the person who did this shot back that it wasn’t spam, there was lots of arguing both over twitter and on the blog post.
This also recently happened when a well known email marketer took all 500+ of his Linked In contacts (including me) and added them to his corporate Christmas card list. His behaviour also created a bit of a stir, although it was a little less public.
That mailing was interesting, because a number of people who received the card thought this was the Best Use of Email, EVER! Some of them went so far as to opine “How could ANYONE not like this mail? What are they, Scrooge?” Well, actually, I found the mail irrelevant and a bit annoying. I have to admit I would have been a lot less annoyed if I knew this was a one time thing. However, in order to comply with CAN SPAM he included an opt-out. Which lead to some head scratching: have I been added to their full list? Am I going to get their newsletter from now on? Do I have to opt-out? What was he thinking?
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Beware: Phishing and Spam in Social Networks

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In Rik Ferguson’s investigation (which I read about on CNet News), he came across a link to a URL that asked for his Facebook credentials, supposedly necessary to allow installation of a specific Facebook application. Once the credentials were handed over, the app immediately spammed all of his Facebook friends, sending them a bogus notification, attempting to draw them into visiting the phishing/malware URL, with (one assumes) the hope of spreading the infection even wider.
He’s a researcher for Trend Micro, so he knows what he’s doing. But for the rest of us, this highlights how necessary it is to be careful with who you give your usernames and passwords to. In my opinion, it’s never safe to take your username and password from one site and hand it over to another site. Some social networking make the problem even worse by blurring the lines between safe and unsafe by asking for usernames and passwords to third party accounts, but you just can never know with 100% certainty which sites are legitimate and which ones aren’t.
— Al Iverson

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