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The personal homepage of Michael Morisy, technology journalist.

Topic “marketing”

The VALUE of Pay-per-Tweet and Twitter contests - and their hidden cost

Submitted by michael morisy on Wed, 2009-06-17 05:29

Brian Morrissey, an editor at AdWeek and, since I joined the service, one of my favorite Twittering journalists (not to mention his homonymical last name to mine!), tackled shortcut-taking Twitter contests in a blog post of his own last week, and unsurprisingly he does a better job than yours truly, when I wrote about the ethics of Pay-per-Tweet and Twitter contests.

Morrissey pretty quickly outlines how much these somewhat tacky contests can save over traditional marketing campaigns, as well as the potential hidden costs (using as a case study the Squarespace iPhone "giveaway"):

Is this effective? I'm not sure. No matter what, it's pretty low cost -- the 30 phones will cost it under $10,000 with no media or creative costs to speak of. It's clear that Twitter will need to crack down on this kind of hashtag gaming (hello, #spymaster) for people to become trending topics. This kind of thing, to me, quickly becomes spam.

$10,000 for absurd amounts of reach, even if it's low-impact reach, is every advertiser's dream. Having worked at an advertising boutique for a few weeks one winter break, I can tell you those numbers blow billboards, radio, and almost all traditional creative out of the water by such a margin it's not even funny.

But how do you qualify the loss of brand equity associated with annoying customers with such a blatant attention grab? Already, one of Morrissey's readers has posted a Mea Culpa for responding to the hash tag scheme.

Follow Brian Morrissey on Twitter. While you're at it, follow me too; I'm much more letter efficient.

More on social marketing:

The ethics of Pay-per-tweet, Twitter contests, and word-of-mouth marketing

Submitted by michael morisy on Fri, 2009-06-05 20:59

BostonTweet & @Sayagle are giving away 2 dozen Sweet Cupcakes (2 $36 gift cards)! RT to enter - drawing on 6/4 http://bit.ly/ibCHl

--BostonTweet

Seeing more and more sweepstakes offers on Facebook and MySpace lately, and almost all of these sweepstakes comes with the same "cost": Get a chance at a prize X if, and only if, you log yourself as a loyal follower, friend, or fan, virally spreading on the contest to your RealLife™ friends.

There's nothing wrong with these contests per se, unless you factor in how obnoxious and sort of slimy it is for your friends to try and capitalize on your friendship by begging you to sign up for offer X. I recently started receiving Facebook messages with just such a request, and couldn't help but feeling like ...

Read the whole entry here

My first panel

Submitted by michael morisy on Sat, 2008-11-15 14:29

Photo courtesy of Duncan Hayre, Cornell Club of Boston

Well, my first panel went off without a serious hitch Thursday night, for which I'm eternally grateful to both panelists, Rich Miner of Google and Duncan Perry of Treedia, and particularly to even chairperson Julie Son who basically pulled the whole thing together, twice, and made sure things ran without a hitch.

Rich and Duncan had a great dynamic, parrying questions between them with largely similar views on what the future of mobile marketing held: More targeted, more interactive, with lots of experimentation on the way.

Both said a key was to provide value and not annoy your customers, which might seem basic but is oftentimes overlooked in practice. Rich said Google was largely holding back on map ads, for example, while they experimented with a way to make them useful.

The crowd of about 50 people, a mix of Cornell alums and Boston Googlers, was great: Lots of audience questions, and lots of mingling afterwards. Interestingly, few of the questions had anything to do with marketing, but the panelists and audience seemed happy to delve into the greater world of mobile so it worked well.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to set up my video camera, so as far as I know there is no recording for posterity. Given Google's somewhat Big Brother-ish NDA everyone signed going in (the only thing that got somewhat low marks on the panel evaluations), maybe it's just as well.

Event pictures, etc.:

Marketers Demand Ad Audits

Submitted by michael morisy on Fri, 2006-08-11 08:41

MediaPost reports that a consortium of eight major advertisers have created a standard for auditing online ad clicks ... and intend to enforce it.

From the article:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2004 issued ad measurement guidelines setting specific rules for when and how an ad impression is counted, as well as procedures for the auditing and certification process. Last spring, the IAB also announced guidelines for broadband video commercials, stating that a video ad should not be counted as displayed until its buffered stream has begun.

Newspapers, especially those that try to handle their own advertising, should take note, says one exec:

Kimberly-Clark's Santeler noted that smaller online publishers need to be on board too. "We can get pretty vertical with our branding, so major publishers may not be the sites we choose to use," he said.

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