The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday that a California marketing company had settled charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients’ games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.
OK, so we’re taking this whole “paid promotion content” thing seriously.
Interesting.
(via NYTimes.com.)
A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here’s how it’s going down.
So far, this is one of the best advertising pushes I’ve seen on the Internet. It’s truly inspired.
(via How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – Read Write Web.)
It should be easy to address a problem, and we should be proactive and have a manager touch each table. People look at that like it’s amazing customer service. No, it’s not. It’s the fricking baseline of customer service. That’s the minimum you can do.
What I don’t like about department-based marketing is the belief that the only people who can send the messages about what the products are, who the company is, and what they believe in are the people in the marketing department. That’s the way I see most companies today operating. In reality, it’s everybody, every single person. The customer service department has some of the most important marketing people, but they’re not traditionally in the marketing department. Their impact is marginalized, when actually they have a huge impact. I don’t mean to say we’re perfect at this, but everything we do considers the overall impression we make on our customers to be our marketing. We want all our employees to worry about that.
Josh Bernoff on why traditional marketing and social media marketing are at odds with one another:
The problem is simple. Marketers don’t understand channels where you have to talk and listen at the same time. Like one of those maddening not-full-duplex speakerphones where you can’t interrupt somebody, this is what drives customers nuts. Think about it. None of those talking channels allows a response. None of those listening channels encourages actual feedback from the company.
The marketing industry’s idea of a two-way communication is to put an 800 number or a web address in an ad and take orders.
Like any shift in thinking, it’s already started with motivated individuals who wish to make a difference. It’s only a matter of time before this kind of thinking begins to permeate the culture of successful organizations.
Ryan Markel 