Mediaboss Marketing

It started with a Rawr and ended with a roo. But Samsung Canadas latest social media marketing effort has grown into something more than the tiny whimsical exchange that began on Facebook.

On Wednesday, Samsung customer Shane Bennett, who owns a Galaxy smartphone as well as a laptop and LCD TV made by the company, wrote a private message to Samsung Canada on Facebook. On a whim, he asked whether he could get a free upgrade of his phone to the latest model, the S III, not yet in stores.

To sweeten the request, he added, I have attached a picture of a dragon I just drew for you.

The crudely scribbled green monster, which sports a beaver-like tail and an amazing ability to breathe fire despite the fact that his mouth appears to be closed, appeared beneath the message. A helpful sound effect, Rawr was scrawled above the flames.

Samsung Canada has just one online community manager for its Facebook pages, Twitter feed and Google+ profile, so Drew Bomhof did not receive the message until Thursday. His response was to politely deny the request for a free phone, explaining that if they gave them to everyone who asked the company would go under. (Mr. Bromhof, an employee of agency Cheil Canada, noted in an interview that compoarable smarthpones retail in the $800 range.)

That being said, your drawing of the dragon is epic, he wrote in his reply, so were returning the favour. Please find attached a drawing of a kangaroo on a unicycle.

Mr. Bomhof clarified in an interview, redundantly, that he is not an artist.

Despite that, Mr. Bennett was so pleased with the reply that he took to Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the Internet and a widely respected forum where readers vote the best content to the top of the site. Mr. Bennett posted a picture of the message thread, with the dragon and kangaroo, on the site and watched as it was voted up to the front page on Thursday evening.

So that page just got liked, one commenter wrote on the Reddit feed.

As the post was viewed by more people, some were driven back to the companys Facebook wall.

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When social media marketing goes right

24-05-2012 08:55 Awesome Sauce Media social media marketing

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Awesome Sauce Sauce Media Social Marketing - Video

Oracle is acquiring Vitrue, a cloud-based social media marketing campaign creator that enables customers to create, manage and measure social media marketing campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Google+.

Oracle said that Vitrue, combined with Oracles existing sales, service, commerce, social data management and analytics capabilities, will create the most advanced and comprehensive social relationship platform, according to a news release.

Terms of the acquisition of Atlanta-based Vitrue, which is expected to close sometime this summer, were not disclosed.

The Vitrue acquisition news of May 23 follows by one day the announcement by Oracle enterprise software rival SAP of its $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba, which is a provider of cloud-based collaborative commerce applications used primarily in business-to-business environments. While Ariba and Vitrue have different business models, both acquisitions represent efforts by the on-premise software giants to deliver software via the cloud. Vitrue is a software as a service (SaaS) provider.

The combination of Oracle and Vitrue is expected to help organizations develop more meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences, improve their return on investment across multiple channels and social media, and enhance customer service through real-time responsiveness to their communication with companies, Oracle stated.

While social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are popular with Internet users, marketing departments have also realized that they can be an effective way to engage with the millions of members of those social networks and perhaps influence their buying decisions. According to comScore, social media sites now reach 82 percent of the worlds online population. comScore also estimates that the average amount of time people spend on social media sites grew by 35 percent in 2011 and that there are 3.2 million business pages on Facebook.

Already, Vitrue provides social networking services for businesses and manages 1.3 billion social interactions for 500 different brands, including Dr. Pepper, McDonalds, Procter & Gamble, Southwest Airlines and Yahoo.

The worlds greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers," said Reggie Bradford, founder and chief executive officer of Vitrue, in a prepared statement. He added that as part of Oracle, Vitrue can deliver its social media marketing platform to Oracles many enterprise customers.

The array of services Vitrue offers for customers social marketing campaigns include publishing of content to social media sites, managing communities of consumers engaging with the site, and building customizable applications on Facebook to further market to consumers. Other Vitrue services include delivering customized modules for Facebook features, such as Pinterest and Instagram, as well as creating Facebook games and providing deep analytics of the impact of social media engagement using technology from Vitrue and Facebook.

The proliferation of social media and an increased demand by consumers to engage with brands across multiple social channels is driving chief marketing officers to look for an integrated social marketing platform, said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for product development at Oracle.

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Oracle Buys Vitrue to Add Cloud Social Marketing to App Portfolio

Marketo yesterday launched Marketo Social Marketing, a suite of products to make every marketing campaign inherently social.

The suite's first offerings, Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions, include a new collection of social campaign applications, such as video sharing, voting, sweepstakes and referrals. The products are tightly integrated with the company's marketing automation platform, so marketers can add a word-of-mouth marketing lift to every campaign, track the impact of individuals' sharing through social channels, and nurture relationships with the most influential customers.

Marketo Social Boost's features include a Facebook Page builder, voting and polling applications, video and event-triggered sharing, social comments, and ratings.

Marketo Social Promotions allows users to deploy customer referrals, sweepstakes, contests, and "flash deals" that enable them to not only reach their prospective customers in social channels but also reach all of their prospects' friends. Because it's completely integrated with Marketo Lead Management, marketers can include social promotion in multichannel campaigns, and then capture and manage resulting sales leads.

"As more companies evolve their marketing campaigns to leverage the potential and reach of the social Web, they require more powerful collaboration and revenue management tools to understand the true value of social engagement," said Denise Terry, director of social media at RingCentral, in a statement. "Marketo's Revenue Performance Management platform has helped us optimize our marketing program investments for several years, so we're thrilled to see the capabilities extend to our social campaigns through integration with Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotion."

With Marketo Social Marketing, marketers can now collect detailed information about which prospects are sharing their content and campaigns, and use lead scoring techniques to determine who has the largest social reach and who generated the most referrals. This rich social data enables companies to identify these influencers' impact on their business. Then, businesses can use lead nurturing to engage these important influencers on a large scale.

Both Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions are fully integrated with Marketo's Lead Management and Revenue Cycle Analytics products. As a result, every social campaign can take advantage of Marketo's strengths in email marketing, landing pages, lead nurturing, and lead scoring campaigns. New prospects and influencers identified in social channels become part of the customers' strategic lead database, fully unified with prospects found using traditional channels.

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Marketo Introduces Integrated Solution for Social Marketing Automation

Social media is taking over as the recognized way to spread the word about your brand and its products. Today it is essential to have an online component to your marketing efforts and sites like Facebook and Twitter are some the hottest spaces available. The wine industry has been one of the fields to take the most advantage of the new platforms. In fact, wineries have an online presence rivaling anything they have ever tried before.

A slide show available from Slideshare.net, featuring research by ABLE social media marketing has provided us with some interesting details about how prominent social marketing has become in the wine industry and the amazing results the efforts have yielded.

To get things rolling take a look a this chart revealing how many wineries are on Twitter and Facebook. The study focused on France and the United States, but I am limiting my discussion to the United States only for now.

Heres the same information for Fickr and YouTube:

Half of the wineries form the survey have more than 500 fans on Facebook and well over a third have at least 500 followers on Twitter. The survey creators wondered what contributed to wineries having many fans. The answer? Almost half of them have dedicated marketing managers that create and promote advertising on social media platforms.

About 30% are using Facebook ads for promotion and 47% of them say the ads actually do attract business. 28% of the wineries report that Twitter helped draw in some new business. Both platforms scored in the mid 60% range for engaging customers in a winery brand. Facebook ads resulted in people visiting the winery in 58% of cases and Twitter did the same in 45% of the cases.

So we can see that social media is having a dramatic impact on wine drinkers. Almost three quarters of wineries say they plan to have more activity on social media platforms and the half that currently has no presence on Facebook says they do plan on breaking into social media in 2012.

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How Social Media Revolutionized Wine Marketing & Sales