McDonald's

I came across this McDonald's article that is really milking what the two guys who made the fake commerical rap video did for them. In case you are unfamiliar with that story, two guys starting freestyle rapping about chicken mcnuggets outside a local McDonald's. The video exploded on YouTube and eventually the fast food chain got their hands on it. The two guys were offered money to make the commerical official and naturally they accepted. The commerical still runs in the New York area and can be found on YouTube using any of the above keywords as search queries. Anyways, McDonald's started a promotional event that will crown a winner of the create-your-own McDonald's commerical talent search. This time the commerical is supposed to be marketing the new chicken snack wrap and will be featured on YouTube's home page for a full day. It sounds like McDonald's is taking full advantage of a tactic that many companies still haven't gotten on board with. I guarantee that in 6 months to one year however, you will see more of these types of techniques. One example that actually went bad was the Chevy Tahoe make your own commerical campaign. The mistake that Chevy made though was that they chose the setup poorly, offering already existing video footage to be compiled into one episode that the creator organized. It looks like McDonald's has capitalized on the two rappers' improvement on that idea.
--westonJ OUT
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=54813

Viral Marketing

I browsed to this site because of what I think viral marketing can do for companies trying to get their product or message out there. I believe that viral marketing will eventually be just marketing because of the cost (free) and the use of employee resource (little). Viral marketing is marketing that camoflages itself as an online infomercial. You don't get what the point of it is until later when it has spread like wildfire. Then you think to yourself, hey they had a good idea. That is exactly what viral marketing is, something that takes people by storm before they even realize they are being targeting for a product or service. The article admits that many people see viral marketing as a tricky, sometimes deceitful tactic that people have to give props to. The six principles of viral marketing effectiveness that the article gives are that it gives away products or services, it provides for effortless transfer to others, it scales easily from small to very large, it exploits common motivations and behaviors, it utilizes existing communications networks, and it takes advantage of others' resources. Hotmail.com was one early example that the article offers that executed all of those principles to it's advantage. One of my favorite viral marketing campaigns was the Dove beauty YouTube video that made headlines within the past year that looks like a college student put it together in their dorm. It is a very interesting clip with an appropriate soundtrack and a simple message. Log onto YouTube and type in Dove commerical for a look at it. Anyways, viral marketing is the future for successful business and it will stay the course as long as the internet does.
--westonJ OUT
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

YouTube and MySpace

This article offers some logical opinions on the explosion of video posting site YouTube and social networking phenomenon MySpace. The article offers that these two sites particularly are so big because they are a couple of the first major players in Web 2.0, the generation-x version of the internet where consumers contribute just as much as they take away. The article is a huge fan of YouTube and why should'nt anyone be. It makes a rational point when it says that anyone who can send an email can upload on YouTube. The video sharing site makes it very simple to watch or add videos by cutting out the video format/player conversions that often make it difficult to use video from computer to computer. The arguments for MySpace being the top social networking site is that it is a one-click away dreamscape. Making things easier is always a popular attraction to tech veterans and internet newbies alike. So join in with the other 40 million or so people who check out vids on YouTube everyday and see what all the fuss is about!
--westonJ OUT
http://www.slate.com/id/2140635/

AOL Customer Service

This particular article that I found is a follow-up to the Vincent Ferrari case study on AOL customer service. Recently, Vincent Ferrari, a former AOL customer, called in to try and disconnect his service, but was relentlessly harassed by the cuastomer service associate who tried to change his mind. Ferrari recorded the phone call and posted it online expecting nothing more than maybe some fellow disgruntles who would also speak out against the internet provider. What actually happened however, was a widespread hysteria in response to Ferrari's blog/clip of his phone call. AOL took a pounding over the incident and are still trying to recover. Ferrari was asked to be on the Today show in addition to many other mainstream media outlets to tell his story and share the experience. This post is to show what AOL has done to try to alleviate some of the damage that this has done to their image. Supposedly there is a plan of action to reform the customer service portal of AOL and around $1.25 million was paid to the state of New York according to the article. Apparently, the article implies that customer service representatives received a bonus for meeting a customer retention quota which has since been done away with. Another key component to this reformation is the installment of a third-party watchdog to keep a close eye on customer/customer service relations. Other individual subscribers received refunds on their service due to similar situations and it appears that the state of Ohio also received a lump sum. I beleive that AOL has conducted itself well according to effective PR strategies but it will take much more to complete the seemingly impossible task of wiping the mud off AOL's name. As the textbook says, "Simply log onto Google and type in aol customer service." See what you come up with...
--westonJ OUT
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5842727.html

Blogger Relations Tips

I found an article here that talks about some various techniques and helpful tips on keeping positive blogger relations. The top five primary tips that are offered are be relevant, personalize, make it easy, schwag is good, and be persistent. When talking about relevance, the article says that when you are posting, look at the previous post and make sure that your's follows it in some sense. This is apparently one of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make because their information is disregarded when it is obviously no relation to the host. Another two items to note are personalizing and making it easy. When you blog, show the potential reader that they are important by including some kind of personal salutation. Also, the article suggests that you should definitely not paste any sort of long transcript directly into the blog because it is careless and lazy. Make the text clear, personal, and composed in shorter paraphrasing. When you are blogging, be persistent. I think that this is one of the implied most important tips since it is the one that they leave you with. If you keep throwing your opinions and information out there repetitively, then someone will eventually notice it and take note of what you are saying. I thought this was a great article for anyone that is new to blogging like most of us in class are. It is basically a bloggers survival manual in my mind.
--westonJ OUT
http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/10/blogger-relations-101/

The 1% Rule

I came across an article that highlights on the 1% rule topic that the Citizen Marketers book points out. It begins with a very interesting statistic that basically defines the 1% rule. It says that, "...if you get a group of 100 people online, then one of them will actually create content, 10 people will "interact" with it, and the other 89 people will just view it." That is amazing to me considering all of content available online with YouTube and MySpace and all the blogs out there. The article continues to say that although the creator to consumer ratio is less than one percent, you can expect it to increase because YouTube is still not something that is commonplace with everyone. The article ends saying that even Yahoo!, one of the pioneer search engines, reports that less than one percent of it's population are creating groups, with about the same corresponding numbers as the previous statistic interacting with it and viewing it. I believe that this 1% rule is probably a concept that not many people know about so I was just throwing that out there in addition to what we have already seen in the textbook.
--westonJ OUT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2