To see it in action, visit this website and give the application access to your Facebook profile, if you have one.  The app will pull information about your Facebook friends, including their names, pictures and where they live, and then uses their information to populate a Facebook-style social networking page with personalized content and updates relating to the fictional “Nuclear flu” pandemic. The result is creepily realistic-so much so that Discovery includes disclaimers on each page about how the site is a fictional simulation and not based on real events.

For example, the first entry is a video post from one of the participants in the Colony TV show, describing how he and his friends were dropped off in a quarantined “safe zone” by government agents, then left to their own devices. Scrolling down, I could see a comment from my uncle about how scared he was now that emergency rooms in his hometown were closed, plus “Missing” alerts on the side of the page for some of my high school friends.

I thought the campaign was an awesome use of Facebook. It strikes just the right balance between being creepy and engaging.  There is, however, one design flaw that I think is keeping it from being as infectious as it could be.  The website consists of a LONG series of simulated updates that take you from the start of the outbreak through the collapse of American society as we know it. There’s no “Like” or “Share” button to allow you to share the site on Facebook or Twitter until you scroll through all of those updates.

Some diseases actually change the behavior of their hosts to make them more likely to infect others. Have you ever wondered why animals (and people) with rabies suddenly become so fearless and aggressive? It’s actually an adaptation of the rabies virus, which spreads through saliva. Likewise, the nasty little bug that causes toxoplasmosis makes infected mice lose their fear of cats, thus furthering its spread. If you have a strong stomach, see this article for more details and examples.

When you try to create a viral campaign, your goal should be the same- to influence consumer behavior to help your campaign spread further. That means it should be as easy as possible to share, and even people who don’t have 10-15 minutes to scroll through all of those updates should be able to share the campaign on Facebook and Twitter in just a couple of clicks.

I have to say that I agree with Tracy Johnson, a commenter on the Mashable post describing the campaign, who wrote:

“I wish they made the app more obviously “sharable” once you viewed it. I feel like the experience ended after I saw the fake news feed… then because I was curious I went back to see if there was a way to share the information and if you click on the “X number of friends shared this” link there is an option to post to FB or Twitter. If that call to action was a little clearer, this app would rock my world.”

According to Promo Magazine, the company has been active on Facebook for a little bit over a year, and has managed to collect over 29,000 fans on its Facebook page. (Yes, yes, I know that technically we “like” companies on Facebook now, but “likers” just doesn’t work for me.) Their latest advertising campaign, “Taste What People are Talking About,”  encourages word-of-mouth from Facebook fans and others by allowing people to upload their pictures to the “bean board” on Eight O’Clock Coffee’s web site, along with a sentence or two about why they love Eight O’Clock Bean coffee.  In addition to a little bit of internet fame, everyone who participates get a chance to win a free bag of coffee.

Eight O’Clock Coffee also reached out to people in real life, offering free coffee to commuters in Grand Central Station and entering them to win an iPad if they agreed to call a friend and tell them about the coffee.

Promo Magazine interviewed the company’s senior brand manager, Alisa Jacoby, about the promotion and specifically about the company’s use of Facebook:

Promo: What value does Facebook bring to Eight O’Clock Coffee?
Jacoby: The value is leveraging our fans as brand ambassadors to spread the word about our brand. They are really our best advertisement. Word of mouth is a very important piece of marketing a consumer brand and social media really helps us do that. We’ve been grappling with Facebook and I think we took this further by including our fans in our advertising.

Encouraging people to talk about your product is awesome, but your promotions should encourage people to talk about your company on Facebook or Twitter as well as on your own web site. You want the great things they say about your brand to show up where their friends will see them and be influenced. Eight O’ Clock Bean used testimonials from its Facebook fans to seed the Bean Board with content, and the Bean Board has a link to the Facebook fan page,  but other than that there’s no connection between the two. There’s no “like” button on the Bean Board, and nothing on the Facebook page encouraging fans to participate in the promotion, either.

Facebook’s rules for promotions may  have something to do with that, though looking at the rules it seems like they could at least publicize the promotion on Facebook since it’s being hosted off-site. Using existing Facebook fans in the advertising is great, but wouldn’t it be even better to also encourage new Facebook fans to share the love?

It also seems like they’re missing an opportunity to encourage word-of-mouth by not allowing people to share the coupons on their web page via email and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Still, all of that aside, Eight O’clock Coffee’s campaign is commendable for encouraging word of mouth from its Facebook fan base.  Too many companies focus almost exclusively on obtaining Facebook fans, but have no idea what to do with them once they have them.

• How to integrate social media into campaigns? (Dukky does this seamlessly- Check)
• Viral Sharing is exponential, but how do my campaigns gain that kind of reach? (No problem…Dukky takes care of this too- Check, Check!)
• Who are my Brand Evangelizers in my campaign???? (And on to our proudest feature- we can identify your top influencers and brand evangelizers in every campaign)

Check out the presentation below from White Cloud Marketing, www.whitecloudmarketing.com, about their recent campaign success. Great job to White Cloud for taking the lead in this industry shift and bringing their customers the answers and greatest potential responses.

Last week, Pizza Hut decided to jump on the “sweetest tweets” bandwagon with its “Sweetest Tweets with the Sweetest Treats to Celebrate Valentine’s Day” contest, offering free dessert sticks to the Twitter users who tweeted the best pick-up lines in 140-characters or less, using the hashtag #iluvPH.

The promotion runs through Valentine’s Day, with winners to be announced Monday, February 15. If your cheesy pickup line happens to win the contest and snag you a date with the girl of your dreams, you can go into diabetic shock together with a free order of Pizza Hut’s Hershey’s chocolate dunkers.

So, what inspired Pizza Hut to seek out and reward the cheesiest, gooiest pick-up lines? The St. Louis Food blog spoke to Sarah Rosanova, a PR representative for Pizza Hut, who explained that “It’s just a fun way that we can engage our followers on Twitter, and everyone loves sharing cheesy pick-up lines.”

But did the contest actually engage Pizza Hut’s Twitter followers? Despite some media attention, a press release, and coverage on Mashable, according to What the Hashtag, by 10:18pm Eastern on the last day of the contest, there were only 243 tweets containing the hashtag. Many people entered the contest more than once.

Even considering that it ran longer, Macy’s promotion seems to have beemuch more successful, with 1,614 tweets at last count.

The good news is that if you entered, there’s a pretty good chance that you won those chocolate-covered dessert sticks. I can’t help but wonder whether their response would have been better if they’d given away a more popular menu item, like a pizza or even cheesesticks.

The contest did yield some interesting responses-although if the contestants actually use these pick-up lines in real-life, I’m afraid they may be eating chocolate-covered pizza dough alone. Here are a few of the worst offenders:

“Are you free tonight, or is it going to cost me?”

“I can see my force is strong with you.” Okay, this one might work at a sci-fi/fantasy convention.

“Baby, let’s eat a whole Meat Lover’s pizza together and then you take care of me all night with Alka-Seltzer and TUMS.”

Of course, this promotion does illustrate how important social media has become as a marketing tool, even if it’s hard to be sure what will end up going viral ahead of time.  Dukky’s software can help you integrate social media into your direct marketing campaigns-increasing their reach and making it easy for them to go viral.  With our platform, customers can share your offer via email and via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

We offer an easy and effective method to integrate social media into your existing marketing campaigns. The success of your promotion won’t depend on whether you attract the attention of the “right people” on Twitter or whether your hashtag makes Twitter’s trending topics. Instead, you’ll watch your  response rates soar as your recipients share your offer with friends and family via whatever social network is most comfortable for them.

What do you think of Pizza Hut’s Valentine’s Day promotion? If you were designing it, would you have done anything differently?

The rising popularity of Social Networks have opened up to marketers an entirely new arena to pursue. In a recent study by Nielson Group they found , two-thirds of the world’s internet population visits a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet usage time, according to a study by Nielson group.¹ As new dynamics in this industry are emerging, the basic questions as to how to effectively merge traditional marketing mediums with social networks has not been answered……until now.

Consider this:

You are sending a traditional marketing email to your database (2,500 records).  This means the absolute maximum reach potential of your campaign will be those 2,500 customers.

With the integration of social sharing into your email marketing campaign you are not just gaining access to your current customer database, but you are now gaining access to your Customer’s Friend List. Whether their friends on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, integrating this simple step into your marketing mediums will expand your reach exponentially.

With the simple theory of multiplication, your reach has the potential to double, triple, and beyond by accessing your customer’s friends, who also have the potential to share with their friends.

New Maximum Reach:   Exponential

Cost increase:   $0

Being able to integrate sharing on Social Networks into an email marketing campaign allows the retailer to reach customers at an unprecedented rate. Traditional Email Marketing doesn’t create communication between the retailer and customer, however, with Dukky’s Software integrated into a Traditional Email Campaign, the customer is engaged, leading to higher redemptions.

Three powerful things occur from Sharing on Social Networks:

1. 1. Company Awareness Increases
2. 2. Customer Base is expanded
3. 3. Friend-to-Friend Sharing is more powerful than Company to Customer sharing.

Local Companies

Bra Genie, a specialty bra-fitting salon, was looking for a way to promote their Holiday Specials and Offers to their customers and surrounding area. With no online shopping options on their website, all marketing goals are to increase in-store traffic. Their traditional medium, email marketing, was not generating the response they wanted or needed.

Campaign Objective: Increase store traffic for Holiday Sales

After the simple addition of Dukky’s Software to their email marketing, they saw a 19.27% response to their email marketing campaign with Dukky. Better than any other response before.

Dukky Analytics reported:

Email Database:   5,274 Records

Emails Opened:    2,056

Response Clicks:      709

Social Sharing: 44

Response from Social: 253 (from 44 of Response Clicks that shared)

Total Response: 1,104 (19.27%)

The Dukky Platform used Bra Genies compelling offer for “10% off the Next Purchase” to drive customers to a custom micro site.  From there, customers were taken through a survey and card activation process. This process was vital, not just to gather information about Bra Genie’s customers, but because the time invested created a psychological commitment between Bra Genie and the customer further reinforcing the end goal: Redemption.

Bra Genie was able to gather valuable data from their customers to help with future  marketing campaigns. They were able to gather Purchase Intent for that offer, gain information on if they should add an online store to their website, and hear from their customers about adding more products to their store and which ones were most desired.

Customers were then given the opportunity to receive an additional offer by sharing the offer with friends on any social network. Bra Genie reported 44 customers shared the coupons on social networks resulting in 253 additional responses from social sharing.

The 253 responses as a result of Social Sharing, increased the total response by 25%.

The proof is in the numbers.  As a result of the one-week campaign, Bra Genie was provided with real time data stats on their campaign through Dukky’s Analytics Platform. As customers responded and shared the offers, Bra Genie was able to learn about their customers, monitor the new customers from Social Sharing and respond to capitalize on those responses.

Thanks to Dukky, Bra Genie, a locally owned company, will never advertise the same again. But Dukky isn’t just for local companies.

WEB BASED RETAILERS

CanadaFlowers.com is a family-run flower shop located in Southern Ontario. They have developed a strong web presence over the past 5 years with Online Marketing, but were ready to take their company to the next level. Equipped with Dukky’s technology, an email promotion was sent out to customers in their database promoting a 3-week special offer campaign.

Campaign Objective: Increase Online Presence

The Process: An email offer for $5 off your next flower order equipped with a PURL (Personalized Url) was sent to 3,202 customers in an email promotion. The email promotion personally addressed the customer and provided a link for them to click on to activate their offer. PURL Example: www.canadaflowersoffer.com/johnsmith

Results: Canada Flowers had a 26.10% total response rate from their email campaign  with a total of 1096 responses coming from Emails and Sharing.  Of the total responses, 367 were the results of adding Sharing to their campaign resulting in 385 of their total hits.

Conversion: The campaign results in 230 conversions, a 7.14 % conversion rate.

The results from this campaign compared to previous periods, grew 450%.

Increase Traffic, Increase Rankings

As a result of an increase in traffic to their website, the email campaign had a dramatic effect on the organic rankings of the website’s standing with search engines. Canadaflowers.com increased from a ranking of 131 to 8 for searches for flowers. Dukky’s software drove traffic to the site, which had a powerful domino effect on the continual marketing of the company reaching beyond the campaign dates.

It’s all about Conversion

The goal of every marketing campaign is ultimately to turn your advertising dollars into revenue. Until now, no other marketing mediums provided the means to track and engage customers in order to maximize a retailers customer base through sharing on social networks. Dukky’s cutting edge software is leading the way in the industry to establish a new normal for conversion.

Using Dukky’s Spider PURLS, retailers can 1) Engage customers, 2) Encourage social interaction, 3) Promote Business Offers and Specials, 4) Gather highly valuable information, and 4) Track each step of the process. From the moment the email is sent, received, shared, and until redemption occurs, the Dukky Analytics platform allows you to watch your reach increase. Reach maximization leads to increased conversion, which ultimately generates higher profits.

Dukky’s Software was designed with two things in mind: Conversion and Results

Social Networks integrated into current Email Marketing Campaigns result in exponential potential.

SOURCES: 1) “Global Faces and Networked Places.” Nielson Study Group. March 2009

The rising popularity of Social Networks has opened to marketers an entirely new arena to pursue. In a recent study by Nielson Group they found, Two-thirds of the world’s internet population visits a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet usage time.1 As new dynamics in this industry are emerging, the basic questions as to how to effectively merge traditional marketing mediums with social networks has not been answered……until now that is.

Let’s look at the numbers:

You are sending a traditional direct mail advertisement to a database (10,000 records). This means the absolute maximum reach potential of your campaign will be those 10,000 customers who may or may not be interested in your campaign.
Maximum Reach: 10,000

Normal Response rates for Direct Mail Marketing are between 1-3%

Consider this… with the integration of social sharing into your direct mail marketing campaign you are not just gaining access to your current customer database, but you are now gaining access through your existing marketing strategy to an entire new segment of the market- your Customer’s Friend List. Whether their friends on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, integrating this simple step into your marketing mediums will expand your reach exponentially.

With the simple theory of multiplication, your reach has the potential to double, triple, and beyond by accessing your customer’s friends, who are engaged to respond.

New Maximum Reach: Exponential
Cost increase: $0

Social Networks add powerful benefits to traditional direct mail campaigns
1. Company Awareness Increases
2. Customer base is identified & expanded
3. Friend-to-Friend Sharing on social networks is more powerful than Company to Customer sharing.

With the release of Dukky’s Software, Direct Mail Marketing has been revolutionized and taken to the next level.

CAFE’ EXPRESS

Café Express is a Texas owned local restaurant chain with 17 locations spreading from Houston to Dallas. With a Direct Mail Marketing strategy, they were focused on growing awareness in the Dallas area, and promoting their breakfast menu. Having already gained success during lunchtime, they were looking to expand their breakfast customers. After some research, they discovered most people were not aware they served breakfast, which led them to their need for a successful direct mail campaign.

Campaign Goal: Grow Awareness & Promote Breakfast Traffic

With standard response rates of 1-2% being insufficient to the response they wanted, Café’ Express brought in Dukky to manage their entire campaign with desired results of 10-15%. Dukky developed all creative, target list, web infrastructure and managed printing and mail fulfillment.

Process: A special offer was mailed on a postcard size piece of direct mail with a detachable card displaying the Cafe Express offer. Each card was labeled with the homeowner’s name and with a PURL (Personalized URL) was mailed to 20,000 recipients in the surrounding area offering a free Breakfast upon activation of the card online through the owner’s PURL.

PURL Example: www.freeAMexpress.com/johnsmith

Poll: Customer’s were brought through a fast survey process in order to activate their offer, gathering Café Express’ highly valuable information for future marketing. Recipients were asked:

• How often do you eat out for breakfast?
• What items do you prefer to eat for breakfast?
• What do you look for when you eat out for breakfast?
• How often do you eat Café Express?

Overall Campaign Results: The campaign reached a total response rate of 23.64%, with almost 40% generated through Social Sharing. Most customers shared their offer on Facebook and Twitter, with the greatest amount of incoming customers coming from Shares on Twitter.

Results

Total Response: 4,728                 23.64%

From Mail:                                         2,941                  62.20%

From Social:                                      1,787                  37.80%

Activations:                                  3,677                   18.39%

From Mail:                                       2,282                   62.06%

From Social:                                     1,395                    37.94%

Networks Shared On:               650                                %

Facebook:                                           510                      78.46%

Twitter:                                                126                       19.38%

Other:                                                       14                        2.96%

Redemptions:                          1,500                         7.50%

It’s all about Conversion

Dukky’s cutting edge software is leading the way in the industry to establish a new normal for conversion. The goal of every marketing campaign is ultimately to turn your advertising dollars into revenue. Until now, no other marketing mediums provided the means to track and engage customers in order to maximize a retailers customer base through sharing on social networks.

By simply adding Dukky’s PURLS to a traditional direct mail advertisements retailers can 1) Engage customers, 2) Encourage social interaction, 3) Promote Business Offers and Specials, 4) Gather highly valuable information, and 5) Track each step of the process.

How does it work?

A compelling offer equipped with a PURL will be sent to your customer driving them to a custom microsite for card activation. Through a quick, survey process, they will be guided to activate their card and receive the offer. They are then given the opportunity through Dukky’s “one click” broadcast to share the offer with friends on up to 233 social networks! Dukky’s platform captures valuable information during the process: a growing customized database of interested customers with accurate demographic information and intelligent feedback from your customers.

Reach maximization leads to increased conversion, which ultimately generates higher profits. Dukky’s software was designed with two things in mind: Conversion and Results.

The company mailed out 40,000 postcards to people who had booked trips from the company before. Each postcard had a picture of the last destination that the customer visited with Backroads, plus 3 pictures of other destinations that their travel history indicated they might be interested in visiting in the future.

In a case study of the campaign on the Chief Marketer blog,  Massimo Prioreschi, vice president of sales and marketing, explained why the PURLs were such an important part of the strategy:

“Basically, we were trying to elicit a bit of an emotional response from them based on their experiences. If they can remember what they’ve done in the past and we can rekindle those memories, then they have a greater chance of traveling with us again. The variable print portion and the PURLs are important for that.”

The results of the campaign were quite impressive: the initial mailing, in March, generated conversion and response rates better than 12%, according to the Chief Marketer blog. That’s twice what Backroads was accustomed to based on previous mailings!

Also, in another  case study of the campaign on DM News ,  Prioeschi said that the company noticed  “100% lift in response of clicks through to the PURL and browsing, and 50% increase in sales over generic postcard.”

Looking for an easy way to incorporate PURLS into your next campaign? At Dukky, our unique multi-channel toolkit can help you harness the power of PURLs in just a few clicks.  Even better, our platform also allows you to further increase the reach of your campaign by making offers shareable through email and social media. Get the scoop on the solutions we offer here.

The application takes full advantage of Facebook’s ability to distribute content virally, enabling users to share their “matches” via Facebook, Twitter or by posting a link on their website or blog. Of course, you can also invite your friends to play, too.

When the application was launched, Coke Zero didn’t have enough pictures on file to match anybody, so users had to wait until December to see who their Facebook doppelgangers are. This seems to have frustrated some early users of the app, at least if the comments on this Mashable article are any indication.

Even now, the application leaves something to be desired when it comes to accuracy. I tried it out and got a match that looks nothing like me, while the reporter who wrote this New York Times article found that “the matches didn’t look like doppelgangers — they seemed to be based on the position of the face in the photo, and things like the shape of lips, chin and eyes. “

Of course, the real question is, as always, “Is it working?” Is the Facebook app helping Coke Zero get its message out? So, far, according to the New York Times, the data has been encouraging but inconclusive:

More than 288,000 people have installed the application, and the average time spent on cokezero.com (Coca-Cola does not have access to time spent on the Facebook version) for the week of Dec. 7, the most recent week available, was more than five and a half minutes. That time is “comparatively high relative to other programs,” Ms. Cronin said.

Unfortunately, the average rating that Facebook users gave the app was 2.1 out of 5 stars. That seems to indicate that a significant number of users didn’t feel like that average five and a half minutes was time well-spent.

In the New York Times, Linda Cronin, director of media and interactive communications for Coca-Cola, said that she felt the campaign has been a success so far: “Internally, we call it a worldwide social experiment to see how this is doing, what does it do for our brand-health measures. We feel like it’s creating the buzz that we want.”

The facial profiling idea is neat, but it takes more than just a cool concept to create a successful social media campaign. Ideally, you want to create something of value that your fans will want to share with others. When I tested it, the app seemed buggy and slow, and when I went to the official Coke Zero Facial Profiler page, I found others echoing my complaints. It seems like less-than-optimal user experience may be a bit of an obstacle for Coke Zero’s new app.

2009 will be known as the year that Social Media Marketing went mainstream. According to eMarketer and Deloitte, 17% of consumers will be using social media this holiday shopping season, 27% of online shoppers will seek gift hints and 45% will “use social networks to research items, compare prices and look for offers.”

Now that the holiday season is in full swing and online shopping has become ubiquitous, many retailers are jumping into sales promotion via social media to capitalize, and Toys”R”Us is one of the most aggressive. Given a few false starts with their e-commerce web site in the mid-90’s, it is obvious that Toys”R”Us wants to get Social Media right the first time out. While Toys”R”Us has a healthy Twitter presence of almost 20,000 followers, Toys”R”Us‘ 400,000 Friends on Facebook is twenty times that number, and the page is growing by tens of thousands each day. In fact, according to All Facebook, Toys”R”Us is currently the fastest growing brand on the social network and the growth shows no signs of slowing, at least during this holiday season.

In an economic climate where consumers are on Social Networks instead of TV or in the stores, and are looking for deals for the holiday season, the company has limited the visibility of some Facebook Page tabs to only fans, thereby stimulating Facebook users to join the group.

A smart move – obviously this has been a large factor in the company getting to 400,000 fans. Becoming a fan enables you to view the company’s Twitter stream, view all circulars from the store (including one with 35 pages of Black Friday deals before they are released to the general public,) and access specials, including “mystery deals”

Toys”R”Us has also embedded their entire 80 page Big Book toy catalog as a part of their Page, along with including redeemable coupons, links to the “Shaq Give Back” charity and Toys”R”Us You Tube videos.

Summary: It’s an extremely great effort. Toys”R”Us obviously drew virtually all of the content for the Facebook page, and this means that their cost (aside from driving new fans to the page) was minimal.

Social Media Marketers now have ample case studies to prove that Social Media Marketing works: Starbucks. Ford. Intuit. Dell. And now ToysRUs, with 400,000 followers at a cost of probably less than $100 K (my guess.)

I can’t wait to hear Toys R Us results – I’d venture a guess that this vehicle will show a huge return compared to the company’s other ad buys.

Company: ToysRUs

Location: Wayne, NJ

CEO: Gerald L. Storch

What do Zhu Zhu Pets do? Well, they squeak and make noise, run around the floor or a little fake hamster cage, and make “tooth-brushing” and “toilet-flushing”sounds when they go into their little “bathrooms.” They can also drive little hamster cars around.

How did a robotic hamster that basically just runs around the floor and chirps become the most requested toy of the year? The success of Zhu Zhu Pets is even more unexpected when you consider that the toy doesn’t have a major toy company or the power of a popular TV show or movie behind it.

To jump-start demand for Zsu Zsu Pets, Cepia, the company behind the toys, used a series of clever marketing strategies to get the word out about Zhu Zhu Pets both online and off. Let’s take a look at what made it so successful:

• Giveaways: They began by releasing the toys exclusively in Phoenix, distributing them to children’s hospitals and even giving them away at a Arizona Diamondbacks game.

• Social media: Social media also played a part in the toys’ success. For example, according to this post on Social Media Today, Cepia provided free hamsters and accessories to influential Phoenix-area “mommy bloggers,” who hosted “hamster parties” to let kids get a sneak peak at them. This not only got people in Phoenix interested in the robotic furballs, it also helped get people talking online and created anticipation for the Zhu Zhu Pets’ national launch. Mommy bloggers and who received the faux rodents uploaded videos of their kids playing with the toy hamsters on YouTube.

• Scarcity: From there, a national launch and traditional TV commercials combined with a hamster shortage to help get convince adults and kids alike that they needed these toys. Soon, the critters, which usually retail for around $10 without accessories, were disappearing from toy store shelves overnight, and the resulting scarcity only increased the demand. People started selling Zhu Zhu Pets on Amazon and Ebay for 4 to 5 times the suggested retail price.

Theirs was an approach that defied the traditional toy launch leading up to Christmas. But their atypical approach using grassroots, social media and viral distribution is spelling serious profits. If only Cepia could get them to reproduce like real hamsters!