In a recent AdWeek article, author Anthony Crupi talks about how NBC has already sold most of its Super Bowl spots for $3.5 million each – up from Fox’s $3 million price last year. While he points to the ever-growing popularity of the game and the commercials that surround it, Crupi fails to mention the most obvious explanation for the 17 percent increase: the powerful multiplier effect of social media and social networking.
As recently as just two years ago we were all okay being marketed to. Passively. And in nothing like real-time. No longer. Technological changes, specifically in mobile devices and social media, have driven a rapid evolution of our marketing culture. Today, in addition to up-to-the-second information, consumers expect sincere two-way communication between themselves and the businesses and organizations with which they would like to have relationships. Owned media – websites, social sites, stores, etc. – must now take the strategic point, ahead of traditional advertising and public relations, in branding and promotions. It’s all very exciting. But the time and resource demands of real-time engagement through owned media is stressing – and often breaking – established marketing budgets, protocols … and relationships. To meet the challenges and take advantage of the incredible communication opportunities now available, Media Logic created Zeitgeist & Coffee, a real-time marketing collaboration and management platform.
Cost Plus World Market, a retail and online marketplace for international gifts, home accents and foods launched its Facebook presence in November and already boasts more than 258,000 fans. In an environment where 9 out of 10 companies feel that they are doing a poor job using social media, what has World Market tapped into that others may be missing? Here’s our analysis.
In our recent review of metrics on social media, we were struck by the huge disparity in fan base and followers between retailers, even within the same category. Some large retailers command hundreds of thousands of fans – even millions – while others, of competitive stature and digital presence, have only a few thousand. Not only that, the rate of fan growth varies greatly as well. Why?
Careening out of the canyon of confusion that was 2010 we come face-to-face with an alien marketing landscape of “owned media,” “geo-location” and “real-time.” What do these strange terms mean? What do they demand of marketers in retail? Are we facing another year of social media-driven craziness? To calm everybody down, we enlisted a few of the youngest Media Logicians to help us with our predictions for retail marketing in 2011 (see our predictions in plain text below).