Social Media is gaining momentum in the business space and this is indeed a very strategic acquisition for LinkedIn simply because it has always been a professional networking platform.
SlideShare has been an app available through the LinkedIn interface for quite some time. Bringing the service in-house is only going to strengthen the alliance.
In a world of social CRM, where professionals in any department inside an organization are mining social networks for signals, content and messages from their clients, prospects, partners, and employees, a repository of content and a socialized inbox (Rapportive, a Gmail plugin, which LinkedIn acquired in February), clearly point to the future.
“Phone launches have become ever more competitive with an incredible amount of pressure to prove successful within the first few weeks. If Samsung wanted to make an impact with the launch of Galaxy SII, they needed something that was globally relevant, highly engaging and easily scalable across dozens of local markets,” explains Kristen Kelly, VP global business director of Starcom.
“Mobile games and Angry Birds were that opportunity. We knew that our target audience used social games far more often than they watched prime-time television shows, and as the number one mobile game in the world, a partnership with Angry Birds would offer us meaningful access to their over 50 million unique active fans. In addition to the custom Galaxy level, we created an online area for users with never before seen images, online video and a contest where users could enter to score highly coveted Angry Birds’ merchandise, as well as bragging rights to those fans who secured the exclusive ‘Golden Egg.’”
The Partnership
Starcom collaborated with Rovio to create the Galaxy SII level, with Samsung getting unrestricted access to the beloved Angry Birds characters. Rather than just a badged level, Starcom worked with Rovio and Enrich Mobile to offer a much more compelling, integrated experience and incidentally, the first ever Angry Birds level to be played in zero gravity.
The Angry Birds characters were used in mobile rich media units and video strategically placed throughout the Angry Birds mobile game. Samsung ran more than 14,000,000 rich media impressions within the Angry Birds game mainly in Europe, Asia and Australia, driving users through to a Samsung-owned mobile landing page, which acted as the hub of the campaign.
Getting potential players through to the “hub” was of course, just the start. The landing pages on both web and mobile allowed Angry Bird users to watch a video showing them how to unlock the “Golden Egg.”
Crucially Rovio designed the gameplay so that the virtual prize, the aforementioned Golden Egg, would be almost impossible to find without watching the video, being told virally via social media, by friends or via message boards.
The news spread quickly, creating a viral buzz for the weird, spacey level and of course, the Samsung Galaxy SII. Starcom reports a high click-through rate to the Samsung SII product pages from the hub, and a high number of competition entrants keen to win Angry Birds merchandise. This campaign had thousands of entries, says Starcom, all of whom Samsung can now communicate with directly.
Justin Lello, CEO of Enrich Mobile, describes the campaign as “seamless to the user in the publisher environment.”
“The Angry Birds/Samsung Galaxy SII campaign was a classic demonstration of how an integrated sponsorship campaign created positive viral buzz from devoted Angry Birds fans around a very slick Samsung owned environment and game play,” says Lello.
“Through this integrated approach, users build positive relationships with brands and in turn an exponential earned return unobtainable through standard display media.”
Results
Users have spent more than 12,800,000 minutes engaging with the Samsung branded level. It can be seen as an example of how modern agencies can execute an integrated marketing campaign.
“The development of an ownable Golden Egg Galaxy level, combined with targeted mobile rich across technology and entertainment environments, delivered an incredible response to the campaign — more than 1.6 million game plays and average of eight minutes of engagement per user,” reports Kelly.
“As the level itself was playable globally, the organic seeding and earned online buzz led to game plays from all corners of the globe. Starcom recognized the power of leveraging paid, owned and earned, and negotiated with Rovio to broadcast a message to their Angry Birds Facebook Fan page about the promotion — to 4MM+ fans.”
“We also broadcast the message on Samsung’s Facebook page as well. This active approach to harmonizing the effects of paid, owned and earned, established the success of the Galaxy SII launch. Galaxy SII is already Samsung’s best ever selling phone with more than five million handsets sold in just three months.”
Stumble upon this interesting article on how Google is NOW indexing the Facebook comments…a new beginning for Social Media?
Add-on commenting systems like Facebook Comments enhance the user experience, but can make it harder for search engines to index content. Most third party commenting systems leverage javascript to display information and add bells and whistles. However, Labnol.org reported that now Facebook Comments are being crawled (and ranking) in Google’s SERPs effectively breaking the mold for third party commenting systems and rankings:
Facebook Comments can be displayed in a few different formats, XFBML (Xtended FaceBook Markup Language) and HTML5. While the report references that Google is crawling comments embedded in an iframe, that specific functionality has been is no longer supported for Facebook comments.We performed some tests and can confirm that many of the comments are in fact showing up for articles. Here’s a search for a comment on the Raven blog that uses an XFBML implementation of Facebook Comments:
So look for Facebook Comments showing up in Google results.
Assuming that there is a link between economic outlook and price sensitivity, the key takeaways for digital marketers are that when marketing to consumers between the ages of 18 and 49, deep price discounts are less important than when marketing to consumers over the age of 50.
This makes sense as it has direct correlation with buying habits…the impulsive buying habits v/s the thoughtful approach towards buying. It is quite reasonable too if you are coming up with discounts for the consumer of the age group over 50. This also gets highlighted due to the level of financial stability and independence.
A better understanding of customers and how their economic viewpoint changes over time is only the first step to becoming a well-informed digital marketer.
Group buying has reached mainstream adoption:
According to Experian Hitwise Demographics for the four weeks ending Jan. 29, 2011, the largest age-bin for visitors to Groupon.com are those Internet users over the age of 55 (37.5 percent).
This is in direct relation with purchasing habits. The more secured and thoughtful approach towards purchasing makes it reasonable for people of this age group to do a group buying.
Email is the driving force behind group buying:
While group coupon sites have often been characterized as the Web 2.0 of online shopping, social networking sites are not the driving force fueling their growth; that distinction belongs to email.
In analyzing the upstream traffic to a Website, or a category of sites, it is possible to visualize the “tipping point” of that site or category by looking at visits from social networks versus visits from another source such as search or Web-based email services.
During the very early phases of social buying, back in November 2009, visits to group coupon sites came predominately from social networks (49 percent) versus email (9 percent).
By the summer of 2010, social buying sites experienced a tipping point in source traffic, with email services assuming the role of traffic leader. Since most group coupon offers are driven by a daily deal delivered to consumers’ inboxes, the fact that email services account for more than 17 percent of traffic to the category is not surprising.
How well do you understand the target customer for your products and services?
How have market conditions affected purchase drivers for your target customers?
Have you found the right balance between competing on price versus relying on brand loyalty?
Are you leaving money on the table by focusing too heavily on discounting?
Experian Marketing Services
Let your customer guide you
While Joe Kennedy’s old adage still holds that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” in the digital world, to be successful, the tough also need to get smarter by understanding their customers and how external forces such as economic turmoil alter purchasing behavior.
We will be talking about Consumer Insight in the coming few days. The facts and figures have been taken from “Experian Marketing Services” and further analysis of these facts has been done here.
Starcom collaborated with Rovio to create the Galaxy SII level, with Samsung getting unrestricted access to the beloved Angry Birds characters. Rather than just a badged level, Starcom worked with Rovio and Enrich Mobile to offer a much more compelling, integrated experience and incidentally, the first ever Angry Birds level to be played in zero gravity.
We performed some tests and can confirm that many of the comments are in fact showing up for articles. Here’s a search for a comment on the 
