SeaWorld San Antonio Gets Social Influence Marketing

This report by Shel Israel for Global Neighbourhoods TV gives a quick overview of how  SeaWorld San Antonio used social media channels to launch the “Journey to Atlantis” last Summer. You can also find more details about the initiative here.

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Congrats SeaWorld San Antonio on a successful launch and an outstanding social influence program! The google search for”Journey to Atlantis” alone shows the popularity of user-generated content surrounding the campaign.

Have some Social Media with those Hash Browns

I had the pleasure of attending Jeff Pulver’s  Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco.  It was a great group of social media folk.  The mix of deep thought and greasy hash browns courtesy of Sear’s Fine Food is a tough combo to beat.  There was a lot of discussion about the nature of “community” and the changing ways in which we interact with community.  We are immersed in user/consumer communities for our clients so this is something we think a lot about.  There are a couple of interesting companies I’ll cover in my next posts.

Another prevalent discussion was around how companies can interact with social media.    Not so much the toolbox itself, but the importance of the mindset around it.    Engaging with social media means just that – “engaging”.  Tough concept for a lot of companies because it involves doing a lot of micro activities well.  The antithesis of doing one macro campaign (Super bowl ad anyone?) with a big impact.

Jeff gave everyone a Personal Social Networking Toolkit. It contains a profile (name and tagline), tag cloud and a “wall”.  In the form of Avery labels, post-its and a bic pen.  It worked.  Really well.

 If you want to see more here is Jeff’s video on how to use it – great idea for any networking event:

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Do Social Shopping Sites Have Enough Traction to Stick Around?

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

Amazon + Facebook = Strong Social Shopping Relationship

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com – relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album – relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books – not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.

Does adopting social media mean we can ignore social etiquette?

I’d like to say I’m behind on my social shopping posts because I’ve been hob nobbing and absorbing all things social media at SXSW. Sadly I was unable to make it.

Every year SXSW has been one of the highlights on my event calendar. Even when it wasn’t 100% relevant to my job at the time, I would do whatever it took to get there. Ironically, this year it is 150% relevant to my job and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make it work.

But I kept tabs on the presentations through tweets, webcasts, blogs, and **gasp** actual conversations with folks who were there. I’m honestly shocked that despite all of the fantastic topics covered, people are mostly buzzed up about the keynote hosted by Sarah Lacy.

For those of you that haven’t heard (read: aren’t social media nuts), here is the reader’s digest version of the situation. Per the direction of SXSW, the keynote was intended to be a casual conversation between Lacy and Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

The crowd wasn’t one bit pleased. Feeling robbed of their access to Zuckerberg through the typical Q&A style, they became restless (booing, shouting out complaints) to the point that Lacy, facing ridicule and humiliation, had to change the interview style to the Q&A approach.

First question:

“Other than rough interviews, what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?”
“Has this been a rough interview?” Lacy interjected – light-heartedly interjecting.
“I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Mark,” the attendee. Responded.

I understand Zuckerberg is an icon among an audience of tech geeks. And the crowd was expecting to learn more about the secrets of Facebook. And I may be the only person who actually enjoyed the casual conversation between the two versus Zuckerberg’s canned responses to the audience’s questions.

But each time I read/hear/talk about it, I grow increasingly more irritated with this gentleman and the audience in general. Have we really grown so accustomed to having our voices heard that we insist on stomping our feet until we get our way?

This is our reality.

Some people are just plain spoiled, but most of us have been spoiled by social media. Just like Willy Wonka’s Veruca Salt – we want what we want AND we want it NOW! We want to voice our opinions and have our questions answered. And if we don’t have a platform for doing so, we will make our own!

Just like the desires of the audience forced Lacy to react and shift, the desires of consumers are forcing companies to create platforms for consumer interaction, get engaged in the conversations, or, at the very least, listen to the uproar of the crowds.

Let’s just hope they get it together before their vocal consumers start getting demanding and become as rude as the SXSW keynote attendees.