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5 Amazing Social Media Marketing Videos and Infographics

Sometimes, a picture (or a video) really is worth a thousand words-especially when it comes to understanding how the rise of social media is changing the marketing landscape. Whether you need to convince someone else of the importance of investing in social media marketing or you need a little convincing yourself, these pictures and videos make the case better than a top-notch lawyer could.

Sholz and Friends: A Dramatic Shift in Marketing Reality

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality” – aka “A short history of marketing” … from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

This short video illustrates how marketing has changed over the years, becoming more challenging and complex as marketers strive to make themselves heard above the noise and the Internet makes it easy for customers to share their opinion of a brand with many people at the same time in a just a few clicks.

Social Media Revolution (from the Socialnomics blog)

This video is definitely one of the best presentations out there today that discusses the incredible impact of social media. Eric Qualman of Socialnomics uses a series of striking statistics to make the case that social media is not a fad-instead, it is the most significant cultural shift since the Industrial Revolution.

Word of Mouth Visualized (via the Melodies in Marketing blog)

How much impact can one customer’s experience have on your brand? The infographic above gives you an idea, and remember, with social media, this can all happen in the blink of an eye.

Of course, while customer anger and frustration can spread like a wildfire over the Internet, so can promotions, offers and positive experiences. Marketing campaigns that include social media are a powerful way to sow the seeds of brand awareness and attract exponential numbers of new customers.

Chain Reaction and Social Network Ripple Effect (via laurelpapworth.com)

A nice illustration of the “ripple effect” produced as your message spreads throughout different social networks via social media.

A Day In The Life Of the Internet (via OnlineEducation.net)

Created by Online Education

This infographic does a marvelous job of showing just how much information is distributed on the web each and every day.

Do you have a favorite infographic or video that deals with social media or viral marketing? Share it in the comments!

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Pizza Hut Uses Twitter for Valentine’s Day Promotion

Earlier this month, we took a look at Macy’s “Sweetest Tweets” promotion, which offered Twitter users a chance to win diamond jewelry if they tweeted short love notes with the #sweetesttweets hashtag attached.

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?

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Girl Scouts Training The Next Generation of Social Media Marketers

The Girl Scouts’ marketing approach used to revolve around cute little girls in uniforms peddling cookies door-to-door, mixed with a healthy dose of peer pressure from your co-workers with children.

However, this year, the Girl Scouts’ marketing tactics have gone high-tech, incorporating email, text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook. According to the Contra Costa Times, Northern California Girl Scouts are being encouraged to send out text messages to potential customers, saying things like “Ur a txt away from gr8 cookies!”

The article quotes Monique Lazzarini, the leader of Troop 30313, a troop of 4th and 5th graders, who said that “With the technology era and the different ways to communicate, we decided as a troop to capitalize on those technologies.”

It’s not just individual troops embracing social media, either. The organization released a video on Youtube called “What can a cookie do?” to help spread awareness of the programs that the cookie sales fund. In the three weeks since it was posted, the video has attracted 32,790 views.

In an article on DailyFinance.com, Girl Scouts of the USA CMO Laurel Richie explained why the Girl Scouts decided to create a viral video:

“We’re anxious to see how it works because it lets us get our message out in a cost-effective way,” Laurel Richie, chief marketing officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA, says. She also hopes the video will help engender trust among those viewing the ad. “There’s a greater engagement when a video is passed onto you, because it has the implicit endorsement of the person who passes it on,” Richie says.

The end of the video features a call-to-action that directs viewers to a website where they can find a place to buy Girl Scout cookies.

So, what’s next? Will there be a social media marketing badge? Considering how many non-profits and humanitarian organizations have been using social media to good effect, it wouldn’t be surprising.

The Girl Scouts of America are using social media and text messaging to get the word about their cookies-shouldn’t you be using them as well? Dukky makes it a breeze to integrate social media and mobile marketing into your next campaign. With a unique print, email, social media and mobile marketing platform that encourages social sharing, we can help you create a viral campaign that increases customer response by 8 times.

With that, I’ll leave you to consider what an 8-fold increase in customer response rate would mean to you. I’ve got to go get my Thin Mint fix!

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Macy’s Uses Twitter To Sweeten Valentine’s Day Promotion

Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. However, this year, saving money is a big concern for consumers, and coming right after Christmas, they may be less willing to make major purchases for Valentine’s Day than in previous years.

To combat this new frugal streak, marketers are becoming more creative and relying on technology to keep customers engaged and encourage them to make purchases. For example, this year Macy’s is hosting its first promotional contest through Twitter.

The Sweetest Tweets contest, which officially kicked off on February 1st, encourages consumers to interact with the brand on Twitter by tweeting short love notes (less than 140 characters) and attaching the #sweetesttweets hashtag. The winning Romeo or Juliet gets a three-stone diamond ring.

As Martine Reardon, Macy’s executive vice president of Marketing, explained to the New York Times, “Twitter happens to be where people are today, so we thought it would be fun to feature it in the campaign.” The hope is that the promotion will go viral, keeping customers thinking of Macy’s as they head out to do their Valentine’s Day shopping.

Despite the Valentine’s Day theme, Reardon also claimed in a press release that the contest is not limited to couples, saying “Valentine’s Day is all about expressing love and devotion to friends and family. There isn’t a better way to express those emotions than connecting with the people in your life in fun, unique and modern ways. The Sweetest Tweets can be about a declaration of love or about thanking your loved ones for always being there. The possibilities are endless.”

So, how are people responding to the contest? Tracking the hashtag at WhattheHashtag.com, we see that today, 5 days after the contest started, 1,014 people have tweeted the hashtag. The contest appears to be picking up steam, too, with more and more people tweeting it every day.

Unfortunately, not all of those Tweets are legit. The contest seems to have fallen victim to hashtag abuse, and the most active Twitter user to tweet the hashtag today is merely attaching it to random tweets and tweets about other contests. Still, it’s a good start, and the momentum is building.

But will the contest attract shoppers to Macy’s stores? That’s the million-dollar question, and we won’t know until after the holiday.

Dukky can help you harness the power of social media for your Valentine’s Day promotion by enabling you to quickly and easily create viral promotions that can be shared via email, SMS and social media.

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Einstein Bros Bagels Makes Waves Distributing Coupons Via Facebook

Einstein Bros Bagels made waves last week by distributing coupons for a free bagel and schmear to people who became fans of the brand’s Facebook page. According to this article on Fast Company, the pr0motion gained the company over 331,000 fans in 3 days. Currently, that number stands at 374,0898.

This is the first time an advertiser has distributed digital coupons for free products via Facebook. Was it, as Convince and Convert’s Jay Baer asked his Twitter followers, a “good promotion or pointless?”

The coupon promotion was definitely successful in terms of gaining attention and gaining fans on Facebook, but as Fast Company reminds us,”Numbers don’t mean everything, though–how many times have you followed and retweeted a company on Twitter during a contest just to turn around and unfollow them when it ends?”

The end goal of any social media promotion is not gaining fans and followers, it’s gaining customers. The promotion is now over, and while it’s a little bit early to say for sure how successful it has been at increasing customer loyalty, the indications so far are, to say the least, encouraging.

In addition to adding fans, the promotion encouraged food bloggers to review Einstein’s Bros bagels, with generally positive reviews. For example, Grub Grade reviewed the restaurant’s Double Chocolate Chip Bagel, spurred on by “a free coupon — courtesy of the restaurant’s new and dare-I-say swanky Facebook page.”

Despite some hiccups with the coupon campaign noted on the Facebook page’s discussion board, people seem happy with both the promotion and the bagels (at least, based on a totally unscientific survey of the Facebook page, Google and a couple of pages of tweets). Einstein Bros fans also seem engaged, starting discussions with the brand and responding to questions.

I think this promotion is a great use of social media to build awareness, and Facebook is an amazing vehicle for creating viral promotions like this. But, at the end of the day, it’s all about the bagels. Before you give your product away for free, you have to make sure it’s worth paying for!

As long as Einstein Bros continues to impress its customers with the quality of its bagels, the Facebook promotion will be a success, as first-time customers lured in by the free coupons are converted to regulars. If people don’t like the bagels enough to come back, they just wasted at least $840,000 worth of free bagels. Fortunately, most people seem to dig the bagels.

If you have a product that’s worth giving away, Dukky can help you create your own viral campaign quickly and easily. With Dukky, you can allow your customers to consumers to share your offer through their email, mobile and social networks, including Facebook.

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In 2010, Marketers to Follow Consumers Online, Focusing On Social Media

Last month, we saw a couple of interesting surveys released that help paint a picture of what 2010 will look like for marketers. First, consider the results of this report by Nielsen, which shows consumers moving online in droves to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, in December of 2009, consumers worldwide spent an average of over 5 1/2 hours on social networking sites, up 82% from an average of 3 hours in December of 2008.

Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in 2009, growing from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. However, despite Twitter’s amazing growth spurt last year, the more accessible Facebook is still the most popular social networking destination.

These statistics show that more and more, social networking sites are becoming online homes for consumers. Plus, with more and more people connecting to the mobile internet, consumers are increasingly able to take their online homes with them into the real world. The bottom line is that your company needs to be online too, interacting with your customers where they live.

Statistics like these make it hard to brush off social media as “just another trend,” and in 2010 marketers will be spending an increasing amount of time and energy connecting to consumers via social media. For example, according to a study released in January by Alterian, 66% of marketers plan to increase spending on social media marketing efforts this year.

Where will the additional money come from? 40% of marketers who planned to increase spending on social media in 2010 planned to pay for it by shifting at least 1/5 of their direct marketing budgets toward social media.

In an article on DMNews, Bob Barker (VP of corporate marketing at Alterian, not the former game show host), said that the results of the survey indicated “an increasing professionalism in marketing. We are getting to the phase of ‘yes, we can’ in social marketing. We can listen to customers on social media and engage with them in an interesting way on social media.”

None of this means that direct marketing is becoming irrelevant, however. For example, as we noted last week, direct mail can still be extremely effective, and companies that have discontinued direct mail campaigns completely have noticed their sales suffering as a result.

The key to successful marketing in 2010 is to integrate direct marketing, mobile marketing and social media to reach out to customers both in the physical world and in the virtual worlds where they increasingly spend their free time.

Dukky makes it easy to incorporate social and mobile media into direct response campaigns. With our platform, customers can share your offer via email, mobile and social media networks, so that when you reach out to one customer, you could potentially be reaching hundreds.

Plus, we’ll hook you up with what Alterian says almost 2/3 of marketers are still missing-analytics. Find out how your campaigns are performing in real-time, and see who your most influential customers are.

See how we can increase your response rates by 8 times more than traditional marketing.

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Using Social Media to Defend “Who Dat”

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, the Super Bowl is happening in a little over a week, and the Saints are playing for the first time ever. However, in the middle of what should be a season of celebration, the NFL has managed to stir up some controversy by laying claim to “Who Dat,” the iconic phrase that Saints fans use to cheer on their team.

It all started earlier this week, when New Orleans vendors, including Storyville and Fleurty Girl, were issued injunctions ordering them to quit selling T-shirts emblazoned with the “Who Dat” slogan.

The NFL is insisting it owns the rights to the phrase, but many fans disagree, claiming that since it was started by the fans, it belongs to the fans and the people of New Orleans. They’ve stepped up to defend the merchants involved and to try to get the NFL to reconsider its stance-and social media has played a big part in helping the movement go viral.

That’s not surprising- The Saints have a large number of social media-savvy fans, and #whodat is a popular hashtag on game nights on Twitter. In fact, one of the shirts that Fleurty Girl owner Lauren Thom was ordered to stop selling was inspired by the hashtag and said simply “#whodat.” She told Nola.com that the shirt was “designed to unify the Who Dat Nation, not within a tweet, but through a shirt.”

News of the NFL’s move spread quickly via Twitter and Facebook, inspiring Facebook groups like The NFL Can Kiss Who Dat Ass and Defend Who Dat, status updates, and the #defendwhodat hashtag on Twitter.

The story has now been picked up by the national media. Both Senator David Vitter and his Democratic contender, Charlie Melancon, have issued online petitions requesting that the NFL back down. According to the Wall Street Journal, Melancon used email and Twitter to gather 1,800 signatures in just an hour and a half!

The effort seems to be having an effect-NOLA.com reports that the NFL has backed down slightly, allowing that ” T-shirts and items with ‘Who Dat’ and a fleur-de-lis logo unlike the one owned by the Saints are allowed as long as they are not advertised as being Saints or NFL paraphernalia” and that “Who Dat’ shirts being sold at the Fleurty Girl shop on Oak Street would be acceptable as long as the shop removes advertising referring to the Saints.”

See how powerful Twitter and Facebook can be?

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Super Bowl Advertisers Using Social Media To Get More For Their Money

At around $3.01 million for a 30-second commercial, Super Bowl ads are not cheap. This year, as the Saints face the Colts, advertisers will be using social media to try to get a little bit more for their money.

For example, while Pepsi has decided to forgo advertising during the Super Bowl altogether this year in favor of a social media-based philanthropic campaign, Pepsi’s arch-nemesis Coca-Cola is trying to have it both ways, premiering 2 commercials during the game and incorporating social media and charity via a Facebook promotion.

Coke’s Facebook promotion lets fans give virtual Coca-Cola-themed “gifts” to their friends on the site. In return for giving a gift, Coke gives you a sneak peak of one of the commercials and donates $1.00 to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

According to the New York Times’ Media Decoder Blog, by 2:00pm Eastern yesterday, Coca-Cola Facebook fans had already given away more than 2,500 gifts.

According to this article by the New York Times’ Stuart Elliott, other Super Bowl advertisers are hoping that their ads will go viral on YouTube, which has a channel, the Super Bowl Ad Blitz channel, dedicated solely to Super Bowl commercials.

A survey conducted by Venables Bell & Partners found that viewers are likely to go online to see the commercials again and to share them with friends and family: 41% of respondents said that they would watch the commercials online after the game, and 26% planned to pass on their favorites.

As Kathy O’Brien, vice president for personal care at the Unilever United States office, explained to the New York Times, “That’s the way you have to go to market now. The Super Bowl is an element of a complete, 360-degree campaign.”

That goes for direct marketing, too, where integrating traditional direct mail and email marketing with social media and mobile marketing can also help you get more bang for your buck.

That’s why Dukky makes it easy to begin integrating print, email, social media and mobile. With our platform, it’s easy to powerful campaigns that combine all of the above elements to improve response rates by up to 8 times!

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Finding Red Balloons

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of ARPANet, the progenitor of the Internet that we know, love and can’t live without, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided to play a game: They scattered 10 red weather balloons in locations across the country, and challenged people to use the Internet to find them. The winner would receive $40,000 cash.

Just 9 hours after the contest started, a team of researchers from MIT took the prize. How did they manage to find the balloons so quickly? By harnessing the power of social networking and viral collaboration.

Here’s what they did: they offered to share the prize money with people who helped them find the balloons. People who found a balloon and told the MIT team where it was would get $2,000 for themselves and $2,000 donated to charity. The person that referred them would get a $1000 for themselves and $1,000 for charity. In turn, the person that referred that person would get $500 for themselves and $500 for charity, and so on down the line.

News of the contest quickly went viral, spreading like wildfire through a variety of channels that included social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Riley Crane, the researcher who headed the project, sees a variety of potential applications for real-world situations that require information to be distributed quickly, such as disaster response (we’ve all seen the impact that social media has had on marshaling resources for Haiti) and finding missing children. But the kind of response that the MIT team generated is also a marketer’s dream. So, what can we learn from it?

Probably the single most important lesson for marketers is that if you want something to go viral, people need an incentive to share it. For example, on Dr. Crane’s website, an article about the contest quotes Toshiba Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT:

“What was most rewarding about this was how we demonstrated the enormous potential of human networking. It was great that we won the contest, but more significantly, this exercise showed how building the proper incentives into a viral collaboration can quickly harness a large population to work together to address broad societal needs. It has helped us better understand how information spreads and why people cooperate.”

Of course, in most cases we can’t offer the type of large cash rewards that got people excited about the MIT team’s project. But that’s okay-while cash may be one of the best motivators, it’s not the only incentive that makes people want to share. People share content for free all the time for a variety of reasons: because it makes them laugh, because it tugs on their heartstrings, because it makes them appear smarter, cooler or “in-the-know.”

At Dukky, our promotions can be shared easily via e-mail and social media, harnessing people’s natural desire to impress other people and make them happy by sharing discounts and promotions.

What incentive are you providing your customers to spread the word about you?

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