Mediaboss Marketing

Sara Holland

Jordan Bitterman, Digitas' SVP and social marketing practice lead, spoke with Direct Marketing News about the increasing number of social media request for proposals (RFPs) that agencies are receiving.

Q: What elements do social media RFPs usually entail for agencies?

A: The chronology of social marketing starts with listening, evolves to strategy, and leads to community engagement. Therefore, RFPs align to where the marketer resides. As a result, we see a lot of requests for work in listening and analytics.

Q: To what extent is a social media RFP different from a traditional RFP?

A: They're different but they shouldn't be. Brands are searching for social-specific solutions, but they need holistic marketing solutions of which social plays a driving role. Our preferred RFPs include integrated marketing relationships where our social work becomes the driver of a broader marketing plan. In both social media and traditional RFP cases, we must showcase our problem-solving capabilities and the partners we work with to solve them.

Q: What are some challenges that you face when responding to a social media RFP?

A: There's no one social-specific challenge for RFPs; no matter what the subject area, each RFP comes with its own set of unique requirements and considerations. We're always looking for the best way to show our depth of experience and what that could accomplish for the prospective client.

Q: Do clients have unrealistic requests due to a lack of understanding of social media?

A: Nothing we've seen in an RFP has been misinformed. However, the social category, much like digital, is moving so fast that certain elements of RFPs might not be as relevant once the business moves forward. For instance, an agency's opinion on a specific partner might demonstrate their knowledge and relationships in the space, but may not be the solution that the agency or client wants to work with a few months later.

Read the rest here:
Agencies see uptick in social RFPs

Woobox, a two-year old social marketing platform, recently added support for Apples Passbook in its coupons app. The integration lets businesses create Passbook coupons using its system, and can even require customers to perform some sort of social action before gaining access to the coupon. For example, they may have to like the brand on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. But the company has also just added another feature which could really spur Passbook adoption at the small business level: support for Passbook coupons over SMS.

This feature is an option within the current Passbook coupon creation process Woobox just introduced last week. It means that businesses can advertise to customers to text a particular number in order to immediately receive a mobile coupon thats then stored directly in their Apple Passbook app. And most importantly, it means that businesses of all sizes can get onboard with Passbook, even if they dont have point-of-sale equipment capable of scanning QR codes, like the big-brand Passbook early adopters (Walgreens, Target, airlines, etc.) do.

I was able to test the system this morning, and it was incredibly easy to use. To those who say Passbook still has its kinks to work out, this is a drop-dead simple solution. In my test, I simply texted the word crunch to the phone number provided and immediately received a text back with a link to the coupon. All that I had to do was tap the link and the Passbook coupon appeared.

From there, you can tap the blue Add button to save the coupon to your Passbook app, if you choose. Of course, if a customer was planning to use the coupon immediately, that step isnt necessary they could just launch the coupon and show it to the cashier at point-of-sale without storing it for later use (as would be appropriate for one-time use coupons, for example).

Whats really clever about the Passbook couponing system that Woobox has created are the various configuration options that let businesses optionally create restrictions and other steps users must perform before theyre allowed access to the coupon. In this case, instead of the SMS-sentlink directly opening the Passbook coupon on the iPhones screen, it would direct the customer to an offer web page where they might have to take some other action, like become a Facebook fan of the business, follow them on Twitter, or tweet the offer to their Twitter followers, for example.

The businesses can also restrict the coupons to one per customer, configure them for one-time use, limit the total number of coupons that can be generated, and set expiration dates during the coupon creation process. The system supports the use of coupon codes as an alternative to scanning the QR code. QR code scanning is supported the business can use any scanning app to do so but its not integrated with point-of-sale systems. Instead, the scan will display whether a coupon has been redeemed. According to Woobox founder George DeCarlo, businesses are more likely to have a system that supports coupon codes in place already, which is why this method makes more sense.

The demand just isnt there [for POS integration using QR codes], because theres very low-tech simple solutions that they can use, he says. With Woobox, businesses can either download a list of coupon codes that Woobox generates for them, or they can upload a list of their own coupon codes to print on the vouchers. Weve had some big brand restaurant chainsexport out a list of codes from their point-of-sale system because they may not be set up to scan a QR code on a pass. But they can use the code thats on the front of the pass and type that into the POS and validate that coupon as legitimate, he says.

Woobox, for those unfamiliar, works with over a million brands that use its apps, primarily on Facebook. It has worked with Starbucks, Sams Club, Nordstrom, Warner Bros., Wendys, A&P, Quiznos, Jiffy Lube, Cold Stone Creamery, and many others, including small, mom-and-pop businesses. It offers coupon apps, sweepstakes apps, static HTML tab apps for Facebook, Pinterest apps (including a new Pin to Win app), and more. The company now sees over a quarter of a billion Facebook page app visits per month, to give you an idea of scale.

In other words, Woobox has the reach to begin making something like SMS to Apple Passbook a thing.

Continue reading here:
Social Marketing Platform Woobox Lets Businesses Send Apple Passbook Coupons Via SMS

Government censorship isnt confined to the religious hotbeds of the Eastern Hemisphere: Googles top executive in Brazil was just released from custody after YouTube refused to take down a video critical of a local candidate. The recently freed Fabio Jose Silva Coelho is set for an undetermined court hearing after YouTube did not remove a salacious video allegedly revealing details of a mayoral candidate demanding her lover get an abortion. Since 1965, Brazil bans content that offend the dignity or decorum of the electoral process. Google is appealing the decision that ordered the removal of the video on YouTube because, as a platform, Google is not responsible for the content posted to its site, the company reports.

Brazil has also sided with a few Middle-Eastern and Asian nations in demanding that Google take down an offensive anti-Islamicvideo responsible for deadly riots around the world. Google agreed to censor the video in a few countries, such as Egypt and Libya, but not take it off the site and is (apparently) not taking it down in Brazil either.

The struggle highlights the growing struggle between self-expression, sovereignty, and the pervasiveness of technology.

[Via The Hill, Via Reuters]

Link:
Censorship In The Americas: Google Brazil Chief Just Released From Custody

In this Jan. 28, 2011 file photo, the exterior view of LinkedIn headquarters is shown in Mountain View, Calif.

Associated Press

With the growth of social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, as well as lesser-known sites Upspring, PerfectBusiness and Cofoundr professional networking with the use of social media as a recruitment tool is becoming more prominent.

Most employee recruiters 92 percent currently use, or plan to use, social media and networking sites for job recruiting this year, according to the Jobvite 2012 Social Recruitment Survey. This is a 3 percent increase from 2011 and 10 percent increase from 2010.

The most-used social media site, when it comes to recruitment and hiring, is LinkedIn: 89 percent of U.S. businesses have made a hire through it, compared to Facebook at 26 percent and Twitter at 15 percent.

"Social media, on the whole, is becoming a medium for work as well as play," as quoted in a report, "The Impact of Social Media," in 2011 from Nigel Wright Recruitment, a U.K.-based search firm with international influence to help connect highly qualified job candidates with businesses.

The report emphasizes how social networking is changing the nature of recruitment and how "essentially, companies and recruiters need to be where their candidates are in order to engage them in the recruitment process."

Finding someone to hire is becoming less labor intensive, and for those seeking jobs, "what used to take a tremendous amount of legwork on the part of the candidate can now be done through a quick search on the web," Chirag Nangia, CEO of Reppify said in a Q&A for Forbes.com. Reppify is a San Francisco-based business that helps companies find people to hire with the use of social media data.

Though applying and hiring can take place simply by sitting behind a computer, there are still things both parties have to do for the Internet, and specifically social media, to be an effective tool in job recruitment.

Chirag offers three recommendations to job seekers when it comes to their social media: Keep professional profiles up to date and complete, engage in online communities reflecting topics the candidate is passionate about, and network with professional connections on LinkedIn.

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Social media as job recruitment tool, up in 2012

Social-networking sites grew from 9 percent to 19 percent as a source for news in the last two years, but only 3 percent of respondents say they regularly get news from Twitter.

The Internet is continuing to erode TV, radio, and newspapers as the source of news for Americans. According to thelatest Pew Research Center surveycovering the changing news landscape,the proliferation of mobile devices and social networks is accelerating the shift to online news consumption.In the survey, 39 percent said that they got their news online, up from 33 percent two years ago.

Only TV surpasses online as a news source today. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, one-third watched some TV news, down from 49 percent in 2006.Among those under 30, only 13 percent read a digital or print newspaper, while 33 percent viewed news on a social network and 34 percent saw some news on TV.

A majority of those surveyed (64 percent) said they preferred news sources that didn't espouse a specific point of view, while 26 percent wanted news from sources sharing their political viewpoint.Yahoo, Google, CNN, local news, and MSN were the top five online news sources named among the respondents.

Social-networking sites as a source for news grew from 9 percent to 19 percent in the last two years. Among the social-networking sites, 13 percent of respondents got some news from Twitter, and Twitter users are avid consumers of news.Only 9 percent of the Twitter users said they tweeted or retweeted regularly, which was a similar active user percentage to other social-networking sites.

However, only 3 percent of those surveyed overall said that they regularly get news from Twitter, up from 2 percent in 2010. The percentage of the public that sees news on social-networking sites such as Facebook, Google+, or Twitter increased from 29 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2012.

The 18- to 24-year-old demographic consumes the least amount of news, which is not unexpected, with e-mailing, texting, and using social networks ranking as their top activities, according to the survey. Overall, 41 percent of those surveyed use social-networking sites.

News coming out of the nation's capitol was not among the top news subjects among younger people. Just 43 percent said they followed news from Washington, D.C., very or fairly closely, and 57 percent said they don't follow it too closely or not at all.

Pew Research Center's biennial news consumption survey was fielded May 9 through June 3, 2012, among 3,003 adults.

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Pew study: News consumption increasing via mobile, social media