Bubble Starting to Swell?
Big news this week was that LinkedIn went public. LinkedIn started trading at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) this week and announced an initial public offering of 7,840,000 shares of common stock at a price to the public of $45.00 per share. The company has been valued at $11bn. Many find this figure enourmasly high in relation to LinkedIn’s turnover in 2010 - $243m. This number might seem high but as a nice article in the English Indepenent today points out, when it is compared to the supermarket chain Sainsburys:
“To give you an idea of what these companies might really be worth, LinkedIn’s value at the end of its first day of trading was roughly equal to the value of Sainsbury’s. The British supermarket chain had sales of almost £23bn last year. LinkedIn managed just over £150m.”
The article makes some really interesting points about the new Dotcom bubble and its heavy reliance on social media and is certainly worth a read. See it here.
PlayStation’s PR Faux Pas
“Sony has confirmed that user data—names, email addresses, home addresses, passwords, and possibly even credit card information—has been compromised in the “illegal and unauthorized intrusion” that occurred between April 17 and April 19 and has resulted in the worldwide PSN outage, which is now in its sixth day.”
Its sixth day? And only now they admit fault? Wow. In this social media age where every little mistake you make is visible within a matter of minutes, six days later they admit a lapse in security.
I can’t help but wonder with a little disaster recovery social media efforts they could have made this huge issue a little softer to handle for their customers. By informing the customers as soon as it happened that it had happened, these gamers they could have gotten to work changing their passwords, getting onto their credit card companies etc to feel a little more secure, instead of confusing millions of gamers by taking down the PlayStation Network (PSN) without explanation. Would have made a difference? I think if it was me, I would feel a lot better knowing the company was not trying to bury their head in the sand.
As far as I can see, the only explaination PlayStation gave to their gamers was this quite unapologetic blog post by the company’s senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold on the 26th of April (nearly 10 days after the incident) and before that a less than helpful blog post on the 21st of April that read:
“We’re aware certain functions of PlayStation Network are down. We will report back here as soon as we can with more information”.
Their twitter and facebook accounts were very quiet on the matter and it seems a lot of tweet queries went unanswered.
One users bank seemed to know more about the matter than PlayStation did:
Social Media Monitoring Tools Infographic
Another lovely interesting infographic here. Oneforty surveyed 150 social media professionals to learn about what their main concerns were when it came to social media monitoring and came up with this very useful infographic. (Source: The Wall Blog)
Lion King (Full Movie)
Need this on my blog.
Everyone needs this on their blog. Everyone.
(via psychology2010)
Social Media Not Gonna Kill The Old Bird
I read a small piece in this month’s Marketing.ie magazine titled Social Media Unlikely to ‘Kill Off’ Traditional Tools. It came as no shock among all the articles I’ve been reading lately about how we need to be careful to not over value social media and if we keep on this path, we’ll cause another bubble to burst just like those “savvy” investors in 2000. To this extent, I have to agree. Social media has enormous potential to do wonderful things for marketers. Most notably Facebook providing a segmentation dream for targeted advertisements. But in all fairness, we still have to remember that we are also someone’s target audience, and how often do you click on a facebook ad? I know the numbers speak for themselves, facebook advertising is magnificent, but we do need to keep ourselves grounded and not get carried away.
Which brings me back to the marketing.ie article (I try to stay on topic, swearsies!). I agree with the some aspects. Yes social media wont make traditional methods of advertising unnecessary. And yes fans and followers can sometimes be high maintenance with the “hey, why wasn’t I included in that tweet” mentality. But the article and Mark Little, who’s seminar speech the article is based upon go a tad too far in my opinion in belittling (pardon the pun) social media’s influence. So far as to say that “viral has no value”. OK. Maybe making a video with the sole purpose to go viral may not have an effect on immediate sales. But surely the awareness and engagement alone which can be achieved are enough to justify some sort of value no? Yes me thinks.
Whenever I write a piece like this, I always like to remember that as well as a marketer, I’m also a potential customer, and if I find myself pleased by a brand’s or organisation’s marketing efforts, be they online or offline, well then I think why wouldn’t any other potential customer? And if and when I find myself being swayed by creative and fun viral ads and social media efforts, why won’t lots and lots of other people be swayed too? Viral videos may not have an immediate visible effect on a company’s balance sheet, but I think it’s value is not to be diminished on this fact alone.
Rant over. What do you guys think about viral’s value and social media’s effectiveness as a stand-alone marketing tool?
A nice video about social media in Ireland put together by Dublin based PR firm Edelman. It’s interesting so see our own stats in relation to social media use and content consumption. Any thoughts?
This Week’s Bits and Bobs
Blogging is dead?
Scott Monty last week wrote a great article about the yearly “blogging is dead” claim. He notes that each year, some influential news outlet or blog has a piece on how blogging is decreasing and that it marks its eventual and evident decline. This year he draws attention to a New York Times piece.
He also makes some probable observations about the future of content consumption, which was described in the New York Times article.
“…finding that there’s a great disparity in how different generation consume content and that the older we get, the more likely we are to spend time on longer form content.
Where will this lead us? Are we doomed to sound bites, tweets and trite self-absorbed updates for the foreseeable future? Do we need to force-fit blogs to become more snack-sized as we Tumblrize the world?
For the marketers among us, we need to be prepared for all eventualities in this scenario. Which means the need to cater to the attention-starved while still supporting more in-depth content that conveys a deeper meaning with more context. For example, this would mean creating catchy headlines and could entice views of blog posts or videos. It would also mean creating shareable and embeddable pieces of content within those other formats - content that can live on its own and effectively convey your message.”
What do you think about the future of our content quality and consumption?
Mobile Marketing needs Creativity
Staying on the topic of content consumption, the Huffington Post this week reported that News Consumption via Mobile Reaches Nearly Half for Financial Times. This got me thinking about the opportunites that this presents for marketers. We know the trends, they’ve been outlined in nearly every digital publication or blog, and mobile is one of them. Which means creative mobile marketing campaigns is a trend for us marketers to keep up with.
Earlier this week, Mashable highlighted 5 Innovative mobile marketing campaigns which noted the effectivess of such campaigns if used well, sometimes more effective than search. The targeting possibilities are great because consumers are “out in the real world and are open to suggestions about where to go next”. These campaigns were so successful because they took advantage of the growth in mobile Apps and other rising trends like location based marketing and the consumer’s love of sharing online, competitions, QR codes and mobile games.
I can’t wait to see more or these bad boys! What creative and exciting mobile marketing campaigns have you seen?
Give me an iPad 2! I think…
I’ll admit it. I sat with my face in my laptop, refreshing the page every 30 seconds, laughing with the comments as if I was there. Yes. I’m obsessed with Apple and I was glued to one of the many live blogs of the event waiting to see both Steve Jobs, and the new iPad specs.
Now, I have a Macbook Pro, and an iPhone and I know that I most certainly don’t need an iPad 2. But man, I really really want one. I actually have a physical reaction when I pick one up and drool over it in an Apple store. Goosebumps and what not. Yep, I most probably have a problem.
But now, I’m starting to think (telling myself I wont buy one but I know I will) is the iPad 2 really that much better than the competitor tablets? The Samsung Galaxy tab in particular. One thing the iPad really lacks is Flash support, but I’m still on the sidelines (swayed more easily towards iPad 2 of course).
The redundant thing is, is that I know this post is useless and I’ll probably go out and buy one as soon as I can afford one, but I’d love some of your thoughts on the matter none the less…
