• Foursquare: Growing 40% Month-Over-Month
    Foursquare is now experiencing 40% growth per month, says Eric Friedman, Director of Client Services at the popular location-based social network. It now has 1.6 million members, so, if our calculations are correct, the company plans to add 640,000 members this month. Guess all those big partnerships with Bravo Media, Zagat, Warner Bros., and HBO are paying off. Back in April, top VC's were valuing Foursquare at $100 million, according to Business Insider -- but not because they thought it would be the next Twitter, or that the location-based social network can crack the local advertising nut. On the contrary, …
  • Was Facebook Firestorm Overblown?
    So, is all the fuss over Facebook's privacy and sharing issues way overblown? Yes, says Andrea Harrison, VP of Strategy at Razorfish, who likened the media firestorm to the uproar over Britney Spears shaving her head. No, says Martin Green, COO of meebo, who admits that an "overwhelming majority" of consumers don't care, but, as a society, we should. "When what a user thinks is private data becomes public ... that's where the problem exists." Meanwhile, Mike Germano, President and Co-Founder of Carrot Creative, says Facebook is a private company, and that it doesn’t own anything to anyone. …
  • Is Promoted Tweets Too Granular?
    So, what do we think about Twitter's Promoted Tweets program, which lets advertisers insert messages into users’ streams? As it stands, it's hard to take it seriously -- at least as an ad model -- because it's "so granular," says Derek Rey, VP of Sales & Marketing for Ad.ly. Also, if marketers don't already tweet, they’re going to have trouble because of the "resonance score," which Twitter is using to judge the value of tweets. Well, "They're just rolling [the program] out, in fairness to Twitter," said Eric Oldfield, Co-Founder & SVP, Sales & BizDev, LiveIntent. Furthermore, "What I …
  • Creating Lasting Content In A Real-Time World
    Ideally, content should play well the moment it's released, and retain its value over time. So says Karen Cahn, Head of Sales of YouTube Partners at YouTube. Perhaps surprisingly, half of all videos watched on YouTube are over 6 months old, says Cahn. "It's important to think about content living on," she said. Creating evergreen content is hard for some to contemplate amid the evolution of the "water cooler effect" -- which used to occurred the day after, but now happens in real time -- notes Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus.
  • What's The Social Advantage?
    Why bother with social media. For TurboTax, "We want to get more consumers, and we want to keep the ones we got," says Christine Morrison, Social Media Marketing Manager for TurboTax. "It took us a while to get to that [idea] crystallized," she said. Don't think of TurboTax as a particularly social brand? Well, "We are known for our online communities," insists Morrison. Believe it or not, the brand's social efforts are actually "organized around sales," Nick Collier, SVP, Interactive Creative Director at Dailey, TurboTax's creative agency. The brand's first campaign – featuring Vanilla Ice doing a little "tax …
  • Here’s A Stretch, Literally: ShareThis' Schigel Shares An Insight
    Tim Schigel of ShareThis.com, not surprisingly, believes “sharing” is the new, most important metric of ROI in social media. That’s not the stretch. The example he gave at OMMA Social was – literally. It was for Mederma, a brand that is a remedy for people suffering from scar tissue or stretch marks. Schigel’s team did some research and figured out that there are 12.5 million people actively sharing information about those skin ailments on the Web, so they developed a campaign explicitly targeting them and directing them to a page where they could download a coupon for the pharmaceutical …
  • The End Of Viral
    Asked what the current industry "threshold" is for a corporate video to be deemed "viral," Feed Co.'s Josh Warner responded that it might be time to retire the term altogether. "Viral is a myth," he told an attendee at OMMA Social in New York. "I'm over viral completely and utterly." Instead of planning for a viral result, Warner said he tells Feed Co.'s clients to "dig deep to get quality engagements." "You can go out and pound views through a [media] buy," he said, adding that ultimately that will just get you a paid media campaign. He …
  • What The #*&@!: Tom Troja Doesn't Like Hearing The F-Word
    Troja, founder of Social Symphony said the new dirty word in social media marketing may be "free." No, not free in the sense that Wired's Chris Anderson might mean it, but in the sense that budget-conscious marketers and PR agencies do. Speaking during a panel on "paid" vs. "earned" strategies at OMMA Social in New York, Troja said the whole nomenclature comes out of the PR industry, which was first to begin using the concept of "earned media" long before social media emerged. Heck, he said they began using it before the Internet emerged - about 20 to 30 …
  • Earning Diminishing Returns
    That's what Feed Co. President Josh Warner said is happening on the social graph, where the viral nature of brand news seems to be dissipating at faster rates than it used to. Warner, whose company "seeds" branded videos to social users, says that a typical campaign used to have a half life of about "four weeks." "Now it's a week. Next year, it is going to be several days," he predicted during the morning session of OMMA Social in New York, adding, "It gets harder and harder." Warner didn't explain the phenomenon, but it could be that users …
  • What To Do When Social Media Marketing Goes Awry
    PepsiCo. Social media marketing guru Bonin Bough spend a lot of time talking about what's been good about the soft drink marketer's social media efforts to date, but asked by an OMMA Social attendee to share what has gone wrong, Bough put his former PR hat on and did a masterful job of spin control. "We faced our share of bumps," he said, quickly shifting his response to something that has universally been viewed as a success: Pepsi's ground-breaking "Refresh" campaign. On the first day of the campaign, Bough said PepsiCo's social marketing team was aghast to see …
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