KFC, the fried chicken restaurant franchise founded by Colonel Sanders, has fully embraced social media activity. And it’s paying big dividends. A study by Ogilvy found that consumers who were exposed exclusively to social media ads for KFC were seven times more likely to spend more than the average consumer. Read →
The 20-year-old rock band Pearl Jam has fans all over the world and what better way to energize them than a worldwide online and offline scavenger hunt? The goal of this social media contest (launched via Twitter): be the first to discover which Pearl Jam songs were chosen for the soundtrack of “Pearl Jam Twenty,” an upcoming documentary film about the group. Read →
For its light-hearted Tweets over the years, Naked Pizza has always been one of our favorite foodies to follow. The New Orleans-based chain known for its all-natural ingredients has achieved striking results from its social media strategy, including prompting around 8,000 investment inquiries. Read →
One year ago, CNET hired Nathan Bransford as social media manager to revitalize the brand’s social media efforts. The result of his one-man endeavor? A 6X increase in audience on Twitter and Facebook. CNET increased its Facebook likes from 69,000 to 428,000 (up 520%), while its Twitter followers grew from 24,000 to 105,000 (a 338% gain). Here’s how he did it. Read →
Smart marketers know that one of the major advantages of social media in business is its ability to build deep two-way communication. That’s taken to heart at Whole Foods Market, where just 5% of the tweets are promotional and 10% content-based. The rest – a whopping 85% – are responses to customers. Read →
Radio Shack, Unilever, Country Music Television and Zuji Australia are some of the more than 600 companies that Twitter says it has partnered with in its rapidly growing advertising business. In a recent report for eMarketer, social media analyst Kimberly Maul examine how those four brands fared with some of their test marketing efforts. Read →
After managing its social media presence from its Seattle headquarters, outdoor retailer REI has decided to try a different approach. This week REI is assigning Twitter handles and tweeting duties to local staff in the 53 markets in which it has a presence. That hasn’t been the corporate norm in America up to this point. Most companies seem to prefer tighter control over the corporate brand, building situation rooms, dashboards and SWAT teams at headquarters to take charge of sending and responding to Tweets… Read →
John Green is a best-selling author of young adult fiction with plenty of fans: 1.1 million Twitter followers, 61,714 Facebook friends, and 525,676 YouTube subscribers. And those fans went crazy when he used a YouTube video to announce the title of his next book and then promised in a tweet to autograph every single copy ordered in advance of publication.
So what if it’s not scheduled to come out until next May? That certainly didn’t deter his fans and followers, who within hours made “The Fault in Our Stars” the No. 1 book on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. (A week later it’s only fallen to No. 12 on Amazon). Read →
Purchasing a home used to be an isolating experience, but many of today’s homebuyers want to make it a very social event. To help them, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate created an iPhone app called the Home Selection Assistant. Using GPS, it pinpoints the location of all the homes you’re viewing and seamlessly uploads photos you take with the iPhone to your Facebook page to make the home search a shared event with your friends. “Consumers are buying lifestyle and community over just buying a house – they want their friends’ opinions and they want to share information,” says Sherry Chris, President and CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, in a recent conversation with The Realtime Report. Read →
When a killer tornado hit Joplin, Missouri last month, Jenna Petroff found out about it via Twitter. The Public Relations & Social Media Manager for the Hardee’s chain of restaurants had been holed up working in her St. Louis office and was off the grid to avoid interruptions until she logged onto Twitter.
What really caught her attention was a tweet searching for information about a missing young man who worked at a Hardee’s restaurant in Joplin. Seeing that and learning from Twitter and other sources about the destruction, Petroff and others at Hardee leapt into action. Read →