Context’s Social Marketing Newsletter
July 6, 2009 Brought to you by Context Optional
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As social media marketing continues to grow, we’ve grown with it. Small applications have evolved into full-fledged campaigns, and siloed initiatives have been scrapped in favor of cross-media programs. Our work has scaled along with the space, and we’re proud to announce the past month’s activity. As part of Microsoft’s Bing launch, we released a Bing-A-Thon tool bar on Hulu, which allowed users to share their favorite Bing-A-Thon moments on both Facebook and Twitter in real time. We also released the Bing Photo contest, and the Bing Photo sharing application on Facebook. Further work with Microsoft added a number of quizzes for Zune and IE8, including the: nineties rock band quiz, rocker chick quiz, and the eighties rock icon quiz. We kept up the school spirit with the NCAA’s trading card application, and shared the luck with Clinique’s wall sticker program. As our work has increasingly focused on presence development and management, we also released updates to the pages of Nivea, HP, HP Home, HP Students, and Kohl’s. Over the next few weeks we’ll be launching some of our largest campaigns yet, so stay tuned! InsightsIn a previous post, I described how social media can provide millions of unearned impressions for brands. In this post, I’d like to show how Target did just that as part of its Bullseye Gives campaign. To raise awareness of its charitable programs, Target wanted to give stakeholders the ability to decide how the company would divide $3 million between ten national charities. Context worked with Target and AKQA to build an interactive voting application on Taret’s Facebook page that allowed users to vote for their favorite charity once per day. Diving traffic both within Facebook and from external sites, a media buy kept new users coming to the page. The application’s viral elements, specifically the news feed items, gave Target a huge lift, leveraging their media buy with social advocacy. With Twitter becoming a household name used around the world, it’s no wonder businesses are working double-time to develop their “Twitter Brand” and “Twitter Marketing Plan.” Twitter originally started out as a site seemingly created for friends to share what they were doing in short updates. It has now evolved into a huge marketing tool for companies to easily reach their consumers for free. Because of this newfound freedom when reaching out to consumers, there are many ways companies can both build and break relationships. Here is a list Twitter Best Practices when establishing your brand on Twitter: PressIt may sound kind of silly, but when I talk to people outside of the tech world about Bing, the first thing brought up is usually how they like the pictures. And now Microsoft has created a contest on Facebook to let one user get their own picture featured on Bing. The Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest is asking Facebook users to submit their best summer vacation photos. The community will then vote on them, and the winner will get its day in the sun, so to speak, on Monday, August 3 — appearing to the millions who visit Bing on that day. Context Optional was featured in Inside Facebook’s Best & Worst Facebook Marketing Report – as a Best! We were included for our work on Travel Channel Kidnap, the most popular branded application on Facebook. There is additional detail in the full report. The results are in, and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital is the winner of the Target Corporation’s “Bullseye Gives” contest on Facebook, in which 10 charities vied for votes from the social network’s users. St. Jude’s, founded by the late actor Danny Thomas, garnered 26.6 percent of the 291,399 votes cast and won $797,123. Coming in a close second with 26.5 percent of the votes was the American Red Cross, which won $793,942 from the company, which gave away a total of $3 million. Contests are fast becoming an additional means for charities to raise money, but Target, too, found benefits. More than 97,000 new fans joined the retailer’s Facebook page during the contest, and daily views of its page increased by 4,800 percent. |
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About Context
Context Optional is the leading provider of scalable solutions for brand marketing across social networks. Context Optional offers a full suite of social marketing services including social media ad optimization, licensed branded applications, brand page management and promotion, and custom viral application development. Context has delivered measurable marketing results for many of the world’s leading brands.
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