V.nice!
Tweets sent by Rio Ferdinand and Katie Price promoting Snickers are to be formally investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Following complaints, the ASA will look into whether the tweets were in breach of advertising rules by failing to adequately inform the public they were part of a marketing campaign.
When Sky News contacted Snickers earlier this week, a spokesperson said a series of “teaser tweets” had been sent out to “comply with social media regulations” to “ensure Twitter users knew they were enjoying promotional tweets”.
But the ASA will investigate whether it was clear the celebrity was getting paid to advertise the product.
Katie Price also tweeted a picture with a Snickers bar
In a statement the regulator said: “The ASA has launched a formal investigation into tweets by Katie Price and Rio Ferdinand to establish whether Mars’ @SnickersUK#hungry#spon campaign is in breach of the Advertising Codes.
“We are investigating two points: (a) whether it should have been stated in the ‘teaser’ tweets that they were marketing communications and (b) whether the hashtag “#spon” in the final ‘reveal’ tweet made it clear enough that that tweet was a marketing communication.”
More at: http://news.sky.com/home/showbiz-news/article/16157569
@McDonalds
McDonald’sMeet some of the hard-working people dedicated to providing McDs with quality food every day #McDStories http://t.co/BoNIwRJSFrom there, the #McDStories hashtag was born, but probably not in the way McDonald’s was hoping. Negative tweets about the fast food giant began to proliferate, prompting the New York Observer to remark that “some stories are better left untold.” Tweets ranged from tweeting about being high while eating McDonald’s to throwing up the food.
While the hashtag grew steam, McDonald’s also had a back and forth with PETA on Twitter, in which McDonald’s tried to correct some of PETA’s allegations about using mechanically separated white meat.
More at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/mcdstories-twitter-hashtag_n_1223678.html
In what may be a first, Cadbury UK has used Google+ to introduce a new product.
“Remember this moment: the first time Cadbury revealed a new product on Google+,” the brand wrote on its Google+ Page Wednesday afternoon. “The delicious new Dairy Milk Bubbly, available with milk or white bubbles [pictured], will be the first of many we hope!”
About 2,200 people have the brand in their circles.
Cadbury didn’t use Google+ exclusively. The brand also tweeted about it. There is currently no mention of the product introduction on Cadbury UK’s Facebook Page, which has about 77,000 fans.
More at: http://mashable.com/2012/01/11/cadbury-uk-uses-google-for-product-launch/
Let’s consider the news media sector. From a pure quantitative standpoint, Facebook remains a solid referral for news sites as people “Like” and link to stories. But Facebook encourages fly-bys, ie viewers that won’t stay on the site. Twitter’s referrals to news content are of a different nature. Tweets and retweeets usually come from people who have chosen to follow a given individual, a news organisation or a specific subject. The referral is therefore much sharper, more targeted than the impulsive “throw-on-my-Facebook-wall” type.
For what it worth, let’s look at an essay published last Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. Titled Why Can’t Wall Street Handle the Truth, it is written by Mike Mayo, a long-time analyst who made repeated calls to dump bank stocks.
The essay generated 795 Facebook “likes” – which is small for a story that is freely available in the WSJ Social Facebook application:
In the meantime, the same piece (and the mention of Mayo’s book) has been indexed 140,000 times in Google, thanks to only 392 tweets.
Still using the Wall Street Journal as an example, let’s have look at Walt Mossberg’s presence (he is the Journal’s world-famous tech writer). On Facebook, his page has 874 “likes”. On the WSJ Social application, where Mossberg appears as an editor, he has 252 readers and the app has been able to collect a total “23K readers”
Not very compelling.
But, on Twitter, Mossberg has 264,000 followers.
Another key element in Twitter’s favour: the mobile factor. Twitter’s 140-character format turned out to be a killer on smartphones: according to recent ComScore study, about 13.5% of Twitter users are mobile ones, vs 7% for Facebook and 5% for LinkedIn. And the microblogging service is growing faster on mobile (+75% year on year) than LinkedIn (+69%) and Facebook (+50%). That’s the privilege of simplicity and straightforwardness over feature-itis.
More at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/07/twitter-facebook?
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70% of Companies Ignore Customer Complaints on Twitter
Despite increasing numbers of customers using Twitter to publicly complain about brands, the vast majority of companies respond in the exact same way….with the quiet of contempt.
New research from Maritz and Evolve24 of 1,298 Twitter complainants found that only 29% of those tweet gripes were replied to by the companies in question.
This is a direction of duty, in my estimation. As we discussed in The NOW Revolution, brands must look at these new channels as the “social telephone” and ignoring these 140 character cries for help is a flawed decision for two reasons.
First, responding to Twitter complaints can turn lemons into lemonade. The Maritz study found that 83% of the complainants that received a reply liked or loved the fact that the company responded.
Burberry isn’t wasting any time, getting knee-deep in all the social media it can find. Its Spring/Summer 2012 collection will be live-tweeted from the official Twitter account, and using the hashtag #Tweetwalk right before it hits the runway, in what has been dubbed the first ever Tweetwalk Show. Burberry will be taking full advantage of Twitter’s new gallery feature, where 500,000+ followers will be catching the very first glimpse of the collection, before anyone else – and that includes the people who are at the show in London’s Hyde Park.
Twitter isn’t the only social network that’s getting in on Burberry’s fashion firsts. Burberry has over 8 million fans on Facebook, and the entire show will be streamed in HD through the social network, as well as on the company’s own site, viewable on the iPhone and iPad.
Looking across the sharing and clicking habits of the more than 300 million people a month who pass links with a ShareThis button on over a million websites (producing 7 billion pageviews a month), a few things stood out.
Overall, sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is still about twice as big.
When it comes to sharing on the Web, Facebook rules. Facebook accounts for 38 percent of all sharing referral traffic. Email and Twitter tied for second with 17 percent each
Journalists are increasingly turning to social media to verify stories, research has found.
According to the fourth International Study of Journalists study by the Oriella PR Network the use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter are becoming more common in being used to source and verify news stories with 47% of respondents saying they used Twitter and 35% using Facebook when searching for news.
478 journalists from 15 countries responded to the survey, with 42% admitting that they had drawn information from blogs that had not previously visited before for news.
62% also said that PR representatives were used when sourcing stories, while another 59% cited corporate spokespeople as sources.
When it came to validating stories already in progress, one third of respondents said that they used Twitter, a quarter cited Facebook and another quarter said they used Blogs.
