KLM Meet & Seat

Dutch airline KLM will soon be introducing its Meet & Seat app on Facebook – it will allow passengers who have opted in to choose who they sit next to based on their social media profiles. I’m guessing the majority of us have had a bad experience sitting next to someone we’d rather not – my most prominent was when I sat next to a nervous flyer who shouted, ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIE, WE’RE GOING TO DIE!’ every time there was a bit of turbulence. Although the journey was ever-so-slightly disturbing, it still wouldn’t be enough to push me to use KLM’s Meet & Seat service – to me, it seems a bit too set up, and if you end up disliking the person, there’s no escape. I’ve had some brilliant conversations with interesting people on flights, but I also like the time to sit back, read and relax – the idea of being forced to talk to someone doesn’t appeal to me. The campaign has a lot of potential though, and I think the number of people in the mile-high club would increase significantly.

KLM isn’t the first airline to embrace social media, Malaysia and Delta Airlines both have Facebook apps that allow users to purchase tickets, check in, view seating plans and share their itineraries with friends. Virgin America is using Foursquare to promote brand loyalty by asking fans to check-in and post geo-located photos in return for loyalty points. People naturally post holiday photos and check-in at exotic destinations so this is a brilliant idea to build brand loyalty and also gives the user money off a future break.  The loyalty campaign is run by Topquest and also includes the Hilton and Best Western hotels.

Strada uses user-generated content to drive sales

Strada is encouraging Facebook users to share their dining experiences by posting photos or writing reviews on popular social networking sites in return for promotional vouchers. Tragus Group own Strada, Cafe Rouge and Bella Italia, and all three are using this user-generated content strategy to help drive more foot traffic into their restaurants. Bella Italia recently ran a Facebook campaign where users were able to make their own personalised pizza and share it with friends in return for a money-off voucher.

Levi’s uses Instagram to find a model for upcoming ad campaign

Instagram is a popular photo-sharing app currently only available on the iPhone but still has over 10 million users. Levi Strauss has opened worldwide casting via Instagram to find a new model for their September 2012 campaign. Users are to take a photo of themselves with the tag #iamlevis to be in with the chance of becoming the new face of Levi’s.

It’s not the first time the brand have used Instagram as a marketing tool, Levi’s Brazil set up an Instagram account ‘levisbrasil’ to keep users visually updated with their latest items. The Brazilian campaign didn’t reach a huge audience but as the number of users on Instagram keeps increasing so will its popularity. It’s interesting to see how brands are choosing to use the application for marketing, and I hope other brands follow suit in the future.

The ‘Save to Foursquare’ button has recently been revamped and a few American sites have added it (Time Out, New York Magazine). The previous button was too clunky and didn’t take off well but now it’s far easier to code into websites, hopefully more online publishers will start to use it to promote their Foursquare presence.

The button allows users to save reviews and places from websites to your Foursquare to-do list and if you are using the recent Radar feature, Foursquare will notify you when a place you’ve added is nearby. They’ve also introduced a bookmarklet that can be added to browsers so places can be saved quickly and easily.

I think the button could be very useful, I’ll always read reviews before I book a table in a restaurant so having those reviews readily available to help me decide where to go would be beneficial. Foursquare could also be used as a handy travel guide if you’re visiting somewhere new; the Radar feature will notify you of the places you’ve saved in the past making it easy to decide where to eat if you are on holiday or visiting somewhere you’ve not been to before.

The final button Foursquare has introduced is the ‘follow’ button, businesses can add this to their website to promote themselves on Foursquare and reach out to potential new customers.

Heinz personalised ‘get well’ tins

First up is a clever concept from Heinz; personalised ‘get well soon’ soup tins. Send a personalised tin of soup (either cream of tomato or cream of chicken) to a poorly friend and cheer up their day. You can purchase your personalised soup tin for £1.99 from the Heinz Facebook page. It will take three to four days to be delivered so it might be worth ordering now and storing away until your friend is inevitably full of lurgy. Everyone gets at least one cold a year.

The Feed’s 1st Birthday

A year ago this month Orange launched The Feed, an ongoing collection of social media delights created by Poke London. Popular campaigns over the last 12 months include:

‘Keep me cool‘ – an  ice-cream give-away where users were encouraged to enter their postcodes to entice the ice-cream van into their area.

The winter warmer campaign, which invited Twitter users to nominate their friends to win a hot chocolate delivery to their door.

‘Pimp my pic’ was an opportunity for Facebook users to get a new body illustrated for their Facebook profile picture – click here to see some of the works of art.

Innocent Tweet and Eat

Innocent is offering Twitter and Facebook users discount on one of their tasty veg pots. The more the users tweet the hashtag #tweetandeat, the bigger the discount, so get tweeting your way to a free veg pot.

In his commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs tells his audience, “You’ve got to find what you love.”

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

If you haven’t listened to this speech yet, then you must. I always listen to this when I’m feeling a little down or unsure of myself; it’s inspirational and moving without being too cheesy.

In his speech, Jobs talks about being sacked from Apple after an argument with a co-worker, and from reading various sources, it’s safe to say Jobs was a slightly controversial character. He was known for publicy humiliating his employees and having a temperamental personality. But that doesn’t deter from the fact that he was a creative mastermind:

“When you judge Steve as a person — the great things he brings to the world versus, maybe, these encroachments on personal decency or personal honesty with other people or disrespect of people when they’ve worked very hard and do a great job and he’ll say, “Oh, that’s just shitty,” that sort of thing — those are probably outweighed by the good that he does for the world.” Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and friend of Jobs

During his time away from Apple, Jobs founded NeXT, a computer platform development company. He also co-founded Pixar with John Lasseter; a groundbreaking animation studio that produced the likes of Toy Story (the first film of its kind in computer-generated imagery), Wall-E, Up, Ratouille, Monsters Inc and lots of other heart-warming, state-of-the-art productions.

Jobs returned to Apple eleven years later but the company wasn’t performing well and was being slated by its competitors. Jobs’ high standards and perfectionist attitude, which occasionally got him into trouble, turned the company around and made Apple what it is today. The iPods, iPhones, Macbooks, iMacs and iPads are all visionary products, and not only has Jobs had a huge impact on the electronical market but also on the music, film and mobile industries. Apple’s iPod changed the way we purchase and listen to music and the iPhone has introduced us to the world of smartphones and mobile marketing.

The last part of the speech relates to Jobs being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he was told the disease was terminal and he had a few months to live but after a biopsy later that day, his doctor discovered the tumour was curable. Unfortunately, in later years, the cancer reappeared leading to his death. Jobs tells us how facing death makes emotions like pride, embarrassment or failure seem insignificant, so take a risk and push yourself while you are healthy and able to.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Jobs is proof that you can overcome personal challenges, and here are some of his wise words to encourage you to make the most of yourself.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Product descriptions

Many ecommerce sites make the mistake of using the original manufacturers’ product description or don’t include any description at all – your site’s copy must be unique, for SEO purposes and for credibility.

Use short sentences on each product description and bullet points to emphasise features and benefits. Users don’t want to spend too long on the page – they want to view your product, read about its benefits and features, and quickly browse over the delivery information before (hopefully) proceeding to checkout.

ASOS is a leading online fashion retailer and their product descriptions follow a good format:

• A short, concise paragraph listing key features/benefits
• An easy on the eye information box with tabs highlighting delivery options and their returns policy
• A prominent CTA (Add to bag button)

However, I think bullet points would serve just as well as a succinct paragraph and I’d personally use both: a descriptive paragraph to sell the garment and bullet points to list its features. It’s important to remember that the user has a picture of the product, and often a video, but they cannot get a proper feel for the item like they would in a shop, it’s the copywriter’s job to convey the texture and feel through words.

Good practise

Avoid jargon – If you are writing descriptions for technical products you will need to include some specialised language but remember to simplify everything. The majority of people won’t understand technically-worded descriptions so break down the copy by describing how each technical point will benefit the user.

Write unique product descriptions – Original and compelling copy will attract the reader whereas copied product descriptions will bore the reader and produce duplicate content, which doesn’t rank well.

Find a tone of voice – You’ll need to find out your target market to decipher your tone of voice and you must keep it consistent throughout the whole site.

Highlight benefits – Everyone wants to know how a product is going to benefit them, what’s in it for your customer?

Your site’s copy should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, it should show off your company’s personality and help to sell your products. Get in touch if you need any help with your ecommerce site.

The filtered content from your connected feeds is presented as your ‘Daily Brew’ and from what I’ve seen so far, the filtering process is impressive and has churned out content that is interesting and relevant. Noah Brier, co-founder of the new social platform, explains that ‘popularity, recency and authority’ are some of the factors used to decipher the content that appears in your Daily Brew, the other filtering techniques are top secret. At present, Percolate only connects with Twitter and Google Reader but more will be added in the future.

As well as a content curation site, Percolate is also a social network; as you follow users, their tags will appear in your ‘Percolating’ feed. You can tag a piece of content as win, awesome, interesting or fail (or you can create your own tag) and there’s also a box for you to write a comment but this optional. Brier believes tagging is the easiest way to curate content; if you’re in a hurry you can simply tag a news article as ‘awesome’ and this will appear in the feed of all of your followers, who can also comment on what you’ve posted. Brier says Percolate can be used as a publishing platform for those who feel daunted by blogging but want somewhere to voice their opinion.

Percolate and Twitter definitely have similarities but they also have a few important differences, Brier explains how Twitter and Facebook ‘shrunk the box’ when it came to curating content. Percolate’s purpose is to completely remove the box – encouraging users to react to content rather than start from scratch (à la Wordpress and Blogger).

The content curation platform is currently in ‘Double Secret Alpha’ so you’ll need an invite to have a play. Luckily, we have a few invites to share here.

Once you have registered your Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn account(s) with Klout, you’ll be given your score and a charming little label. I’m a ‘specialist’ and apparently my opinion, in my specialist area, is second to none. Well, you know.

Your score is based on a large number of factors, some of the obvious include the amount of retweets and @mentions you receive and also the amount of comments, likes and shares on Facebook. Other less obvious factors taken into account are your @mention count, your list count, your unique likes and unique retweets. To get your head around Klout’s scoring system take a look at their beginner’s guide.

Your score is analysed by three factors:

• Network Influence:  How well you influence the people you are already engaged with.
• Amplification Probability: The ability to create compelling content that spreads across not only your own network but across others too.
• True Reach: Size of your audience that is actively engaged with you (for example, my reach is 348 but I have 700 odd followers, quite handy to know how many of your followers actually engage with your content). Not entirely sure how this applies to Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare.

Klout recently introduced Perks in the US – a clever way for the company to create revenue by integrating brands. For example, Virgin America gave away free flights between Toronto and San Francisco or Los Angeles to top Twitter ‘influencers’. Those who won the Perk were not asked to blog or tweet about their experience but it’s likely they would have. Klout describe this as a more targeted form of receiving a free sample in a supermarket. Mashable has covered the Virgin America Perk in far more detail here and in case you were wondering, the winner of the free flight had a Klout score of 42. My score is slightly higher than this so when Perks are introduced in the UK, I’ll be expecting a freebie… a round trip to Croatia or something would be alright. And I could blog about it on here, are you reading this Klout Perk people?!

Yesterday, Spotify launched in America and they partnered with Klout to give away free accounts to top influencers in the entertainment industry. The Perk was so popular, Klout collapsed. This shows Klout has the potential to be a very powerful promotional tool.

Last month Klout partnered with Involver, a Facebook page management company, to allow companies to target their fans based on their Klout. The idea is for brands to award consumers based on their social influence, different users will view different Facebook content based on their score. The Klout app is built in Involver’s Social Markup Language (SML) and this is the language that allows brands to choose what they show to users based on their online influence. Klout use the term ‘fan-gating’ which is similar to ‘like-gating’ – you have to ‘Like’ a page to view its content. The same goes for fan-gating but it is related to your Klout score, which will determine the type of content you see and the perks you receive.

I’m not so keen on this idea. Brands can only target consumers based on their Klout – what about the die-hard fans who don’t have a good Klout score? They won’t receive any freebies or perks because they aren’t popular enough? Maybe I’m missing the point but I don’t like this idea.

There are aspects of Klout that are clever and original, there’s no other social analytics tool that measures a person’s online influence in as much detail. At the moment, Klout seems to me like a popularity contest and (easily led) people are starting to believe a Klout score actually means something. Look at your score as an interesting way to measure your social reach, but don’t get sucked in, it’s really not worth it.

Firstly, you need to click the ‘circles’ tab at the top of your feed and create a new circle, I called mine ‘invites’ (not very original, I know).

Click on your new circle and add the people you want to invite to Google+ by clicking ‘add a new person’. Once you’ve entered their email address(es), click ‘view stream for this circle’. You’ll then need to post something on to your ‘wall’ (for want of a better word) to share with the people you’ve invited in order for them to join.

As you can see, I’ve written, ‘Hope this works!’ to share with the people I’ve invited. They will then receive an email to view my post and join Google+. Make sure you keep the ‘email people not using Google+’ box checked. Job done!

Librarything is the first book-social-networking-thingummy site I joined and I have a bit of a soft spot for this one. My favourite feature is its ‘early reviewer’ section where you can request a book to review. If you are lucky enough to win it, you’ll be sent the book for free. Thousands of books are released each month giving you a good chance of winning a freebie. As with the majority of book-shelf sites, you can add your favourite authors and titles and connect with other like-minded people. Another original feature is the ‘local’ tab which will pick up your location by your address and list events near to you (book signings, meet the author, Q&As). Librarything is a brilliant site for uniting book lovers but there’s certainly room for improvement. The design reminds me of a public library home page – slightly outdated and a bit higgledy-piggledy. And the logo could do with a bit of a retouch. They should also make better use of other social networking platforms, they already allow you to sign up through Facebook and Twitter but it would be even better if you could share your reviews on these platforms for friends and followers to see.

Shelfluv is only in its BETA version at the moment so there’s lots of room for improvement, but it does look promising. At present, you need an invite to join and you can only log in through Facebook. Hopefully the variety of ways to join the site will widen when the site goes live. I prefer not to log into sites through other accounts as they often gain access to personal information. Shelfluv follows the Twitter, Quora format – you follow people, they follow you, you receive notifications and you have a little feed showing your followers’ actions. There’s even a little, ‘What are you reading?’ status update type-thing. The best feature on Shelfluv is its interactive book-shelf (which looks rather similar to the iBooks book-shelf) where you can add books to different categories: like, own, reading, finished and wish list. The ‘like’, ‘own’ and ‘finished’ categories are all quite similar so I’m not entirely sure the category choices have been thought out thoroughly. There are a few more features Shelfluv could include to compete with Librarything but it’s not quite there yet.

Other book-shelf sites worth taking a look at include Goodreads and Shelfari.

And while we’re on the subject of books, I’d like to introduce you to a book-related crowdfunding idea, which I LOVE. Authors pitch their ideas on the Unbound website along with a target number of supporters needed to launch the book. Users can donate tens or hundreds of pounds towards their preferred pitch and depending on the donation amount, you receive special privileges. The benefits include access to the author’s private area and invites to launch parties – the higher the pledge, the better the reward. The site is fairly new at the moment but I’m hoping it takes off.

Econsultancy recently published a blog post where the value of social media was questioned – are companies experimenting with social media for the right reasons, and do they even know what results they are getting from their effort? How can social media return on investment be measured when it is such a broad concept?

“For firms who do measure, metrics that reflect reach and engagement (shares, likes, views, downloads etc) are often subjective.” – Are we in a social media bubble? Econsultancy.

This is true, it’s difficult to decipher the return on investment from reach and engagement. However, just because the form of measurement may be subjective, it doesn’t mean it’s not valid.

A client of ours, American Soda, has a successful Facebook page with nearly 12,000 likes. From the beginning of this year ’til the end of May, American Soda’s Facebook page accounts for 1.14% of its total sales. For example, if they turned over £300,000 in total sales, that would equate to £3,000 of revenue directly from Facebook. This may not seem like a high percentage but compare it to how much was spent on the original social media campaign and it’s a successful profit, a ROI of 50% to be exact.

The 1.14% of total sales is the amount of users who visited American Soda’s Facebook page and then went on to purchase items from their website. This figure doesn’t include the ‘subjective’ measurements of reach and engagement but they must be taken into consideration when looking at the total sales figure. For example, American Soda has incorporated Facebook like buttons into its online store and therefore a product liked by thirty people will be shared with each one of their Facebook friends. Moreover, a recent talk at SASCON revealed one out of every ten visits to a website comes from Facebook. How can 10% of your audience be ignored just because reach can be subjective?

A survey by Econsultancy found 47% of companies were not able to measure the value of their social media campaigns. And maybe this is where the problem lies, not with social media itself but with its execution. Followers, likes, engagement and conversation are all essential factors in succeeding with social media but companies also need a clear objective of what they are going to achieve. Putting a lot of time and effort into social conversation is all well and good but companies need to ensure they are creating a balance between investment and payback.

Social media can be an effective tool for communicating and reaching others without even thinking about a return on investment. Just being ‘out there’ and communicating your brand or services to the public can be of benefit. This poses the question whether social media needs to be measured to show its worth? What do you think?