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Twittering As a Full-Time Job |
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Update: Pizza Hut announced today that its former "Twintern" now has the official title of "Tweetologist," and now holds a full-time position. From the announcement:
For more than a month, Alexa Robinson - Pizza Hut's former summer "Twintern" who was hired as an intern to keep up with Pizza Hut fans through @pizzahut on Twitter - has been working without a job title. After extending a full-time job offer to Alexa, Pizza Hut turned to its Twitter fan base for creative suggestions for her new title. Now, thanks to the help of the loyal followers of @pizzahut, Alexa is finally ready to order her new business cards.
"As the new Tweetologist, I want to thank everyone who I have met through Twitter," said Alexa. "It was a lot of fun to see our fans and followers think outside the box, and I can't wait to display my new title on my business card, loud and proud."
Original Article: Pizza and social media seem to have a relationship destined for headlines lately. You've probably read about the Domino's YouTube video fiasco. Now on a more positive note, it's Pizza Hut and Twitter.
Pizza Hut is looking to hire an intern specifically for Twittering. This is news because - how many mainstream companies have you heard of hiring someone specifically for Twittering - not even social media in general - just Twittering.
Stephanie Clifford at the New York Times describes the purpose of the "Twintern" (intern using Twitter...I don't claim responsibility for the term) job:
To attend advertising shoots, product meetings and other corporate events. “They’ll be our social media journalist, chronicling in 140 characters or less what’s going on at Pizza Hut,” said Bob Kraut, the vice president for marketing communications at the company. The Twintern must also play social-media defense, monitoring Twitter for any mentions of the brand and alerting superiors whenever anything negative about the Hut is being said.
There is a full description on Yum's (Pizza Hut's parent company) site. According to that, the twinternship allows for many hands-on opportunities like:
- Collect and share insights and experiences while working for Pizza Hut through social and interactive media: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, New and emerging media
- Twintern will be given unprecedented access to marketing meetings, brainstorm sessions, ad shoots and special events
- Monitor social media for pop culture news, off-the-wall stories or anything else quirky and fun that he or she thinks would be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fans.
- Chronicle experience through video; edit and post to selected media
- Conduct media outreach for PR programs
- Assist with execution of national PR programs
It is unclear whether or not Yum has similar intentions for brands like Long John Silver's, A&W, Taco Bell, etc. The fact that pizza is commonly ordered online (and the Domino's incident no doubt) probably plays a direct role in why Pizza Hut is doing this.
"The major pizza chains now do 20% to 30% of their business online, but they want that figure to climb a lot higher, to 50%," says Emily Bryson York with AdAge. "Getting there will take some doing, but the journey offers lessons for other marketers also seeking to build their business online: Know your customers, make it easy and offer incentives."
Very true. Twitter can prove to be a remarkable tool for online reputation management. And as we've discussed at WebProNews repeatedly, there are tons of opportunities for marketers. Though keeping on the ethical side of online marketing is likely to be in the best interest of your business and your online reputation.
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Using Social Media For Political Campaigns |
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There are a whole host of strategies that go into managing a major presidential campaign, from using social media to spread a message to developing analytics.
(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)
Dan Siroker, former Deputy New Media Director, Obama Presidential Transition and Founder of CarrotSticks spoke about his work on the campaign.
Dan-Siroker
Siroker was the head of the Obama analytics team during the campaign. He shares some social media stats about the candidates.
Facebook friends: Obama 2.4 million, McCain 600,000
YouTube: Obama 90 million, McCain 20 million
Unique visitors: 50 million for Obama and 30 million for McCain
When it came to money McCain raised $201 million and Obama raised $656 million. Obama raised over $500 million online and $156 million offline.
Lesson 1: Define quantifiable success
Success can be broken down by looking at CPC, website sign up rate, email sign up, and money raised per recipient.
Lesson 2:Question assumptions
He tried different variations on buttons and media (sign up vs. join us now; media, family picture, change video, other images and videos). Siroker said they did various tests with Google Website Optimizer and utilized the data.
Lesson 3:Divide and conquer
He talks about the different donation buttons they experimented with such as Donate Now, Please Donate, Why Donate and Donate and Get a gift.
Lesson 4:Take advantage of circumstances
As an example Siroker shows a clip of Sarah Palin being critical of Obama's community organizer position. The campaign used the clip in an email to supporters and raised $10 million.
Lesson 5:Turn customers into evangelists
Siroker says you can use all this as a business model. Supporters of the campaign were connected and easy to share. He calls it social affiliate marketing.
WebProNews Reporter/Anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.
Related Articles:
> Social Networks Don't Waste Time, People Do.
> Facebook Receives 1/4 Of US Page Views?
>Google Wave Simplified: How It Basically Works
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Facebook Giving Users More Privacy Controls |
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Facebook is rolling out new features today to allow users to have more control over how they share content with others.
Users will be able to control who sees each individual piece of content they post. Facebook's new Publisher Privacy Control will allow people to select a privacy setting for every post they make at the time they create it. By making selections in a drop-down menu, users will be able to control what they want to share with friends, family and co-workers.
To help users with the changes, Facebook is offering a Transition Tool. The tool will start with a message that explains the changes and will then let users update their settings. Users will have the option of keeping their old settings or accept recommendations from Facebook.
"One of our primary goals is to consistently improve Facebook and expand what our users can do through the site, and that includes providing them with new tools to help control their information," said Chris Cox, Vice President of Product Management.
"The features we're announcing today aren't the end point, but are simply the latest step in our iterative process. Great suggestions helped us get here, and we look forward to the feedback that will help us develop the next innovation in privacy and user control."
Facebook said the changes will not impact advertising programs and that it has never shared personal information with advertisers except at the direction and control of a user
Related Articles:
> Facebook Forms Board For Online Safety
>Facebook Cracks 350 Million Users, Adjusts Privacy Settings
>Nearly Half Of Consumers Would Recommend A Product On Facebook
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New APIs Should Help MySpace Stay Relevant |
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MySpace has announced a new set of APIs. These include APIs for real-time streaming, status and mood commenting, open search, photo uploading, and an updated version of the post to/share API.
"MySpace sees huge value in real-time data and believes sharing it will mature the socialization of content on the Web," said MySpace COO Mike Jones. "MySpace is building the next-generation content distribution platform and is opening up our floodgate of public data for developers to make compelling real-time experiences around the Web."
The Real-Time Stream API allows the full MySpace activity stream to be pushed to third party sites in real-time. It is already being used by Google, OneRiot, and GroovyCorp.
"MySpace made it really easy to integrate public MySpace data into our search engine," said Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. "With access to this real-time data, we’re offering more comprehensive and meaningful search results to our users."
"MySpace users are making a huge contribution to the realtime, social web by sharing millions of links with their friends each day," said Peggs. "We're delighted to have access to that information through the MySpace Real-Time Stream API."
We've already seen what Google is doing:
The Status and Mood Commenting API lets third party sites use MySpace status and mood updates and allows people to comment from those sites. Comments then appear in the user's MySpace activity stream, and users can interact with that stream without leaving the third party site.
The Open Search API allows third party sites to include public MySpace profile information in search results. Users can search for people by name, profile type (such as musician, celebrity, comedian) or email address and filter search results by gender, age and location.
The Photo Upload API lets users upload photos to MySpace from third party sites or MySpace Apps. It also enables creation of public or private photo albums.
The updated version of the Post To/Share on MySpace API allows for the sharing of content from third party sites with a MySpace user's friends. When a user posts content from another site, it goes directly to his/her MySpace activity stream, creating a link back to the third party site.
MySpace is even going so far as to host a " developer challenge " competition starting January 4 to encourage developers to come up with some cool apps utilizing the APIs. Developers will have the chance to win cash prizes and promotion on MySpace.
These MySpace APIs could go a long way in keeping MySpace relevant in the era of Facebook and Twitter. Frankly, they are long overdue. The APIs mean that there can be a lot more useful apps implementing more functionality with MySpace. That means more ways users can keep using it. This and MySpace's acquisition of imeem could be huge for the future of the social network.
Do you think MySpace is helping its future with its recent announcements? Comment here.
Related Articles:
> MySpace Buys imeem, Rolls it Into MySpace Music
> Showtime For Real-Time With Google
> MySpace Upgrades Users' Mobile Experience
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Media Tactics For Ranking In Real-Time Search |
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The advent of real-time search has led to the need for real-time search engine optimization (SEO).
(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)
Brent Payne, SEO Director, Tribune, said the recent news about Tiger Woods drove over 1.5 million visits to its site in a single day.
The Tribune uses Google Hot Trends to follow and cover breaking news. Google Hot Trends is very powerful for breaking news.
"Majority of results today are still yesterday's news," said Payne. Google's top results don't focus on user intent. Stories that have a longer shelf life don't stay in Google News. Google doesn't follow the same URL for the same length of time, so updating a top story doesn't help.
Topher Kohan, SEO Manager, CNN, talked about Google supporting Yahoo SearchMonkey/RFDa and Facebook Share.
SearchMonkey allows users to customize how results appear in Yahoo SERPs. CNN added RFDa to video on test sites and saw a 35 percent increase in the number of indexed videos in Google Search video. In addition, there was a 22 percent increase in videos showing up for targeted keywords.
Kohan added Facebook Share to test sites and a small set of videos on CNN. There was a 12 percent increase in test site videos in the Google index and a 47 percent increase in video being shared and viewed on Facebook. Traffic from video on Facebook increased 32 percent.
Google and Yahoo are working on an open sources set of standard markup to use on videos and interactive content. Kohan believes it is the future SEO for video.
Rochelle Sanchirico, Senior Director of Acquisition Marketing, Washington Post Digital, said to find SEO partners within your organization.
Ideal SEO partners are people who access such as senior developers, content creators and senior web editors. Other SEO partners to consider are traffic owners and brand managers along with a CTO, CIO or GM.
Everyone needs to have aligned goals and you should create accountability on a daily basis.
Find evangelists and rally the masses by focusing on value points. "Don't underestimate the power of branding," said Sanchirico.
WebProNews Reporter/Anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.
Related Articles:
> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More For Google/Bing Rankings
> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?
> Yahoo Showing Tweets For News Results
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