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Context Optional: Social network application development and social media strategy: Facebook Applications, Facebook Pages, Facebook Connect, and the iPhone
October Newsletter
November 6th, 2009
September Newsletter
August 28th, 2009Context’s Social Marketing Newsletter
September 1, 2009 Brought to you by Context Optional
| Our newsletter seems to have taken the summer off, but we certainly haven’t.
Thanks for staying updated as Context Optional continues to grow with social media world. We are always building on our full fledged campaigns and are integrating as much creativity and functionality into them as possible. Here’s the run-down of this month’s accomplishments: (Drumroll please) After more than 10,000 entries over a two weeks and over 500,000 ratings, a winner was announced for the Microsoft Bing Photo contest . Jeremy Somers’ photo of Australian lightening appeared on the Bing homepage for 24 hours on August 3. Further work with Microsoft added a comic strip slider for Bing Cashback’s Back to School Deals on Bing’s Facebook page. Context Optional also added a practical and exciting “Ask and Expert” tab to Toyota Prius’s Facebook page and designed and implemented a Facebook page for Safeway. Do you frequently forget your friends’ birthdays? Well, now there’s an app on Facebook that will remind you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up and also allows you to send your friends gifts! All of this is possible with the new Samsung Birthday Calendar. You will never forget a birthday again. Over the next few weeks we’ll be launching some of our largest campaigns yet, so stay tuned! InsightsSurviving the Social Media Sphere as a BrandIn a previous post, I explained how brands can provide a positive experience for their consumers through social media. The post lists several “must-dos” in order to maintain a productive presence. It is essential that brands don’t get bogged down by numbers of fans or followers. Pave your own path that leads to brand development. If this is a focus, followers or subscribers will come. Blame Canada: Changes in Policy and PrivacyIt was recently announced that Facebook is making significant changes in the ways application developers have access to Facebook user data. According to PCWorld and InsideFacebook, Facebook is changing the privacy features over the next year as a result of a meeting with the Canadian government. The meeting included recommendations from Canada regarding the distribution and acquiring of information by Facebook applications. In response, Facebook will increase the publicity of its privacy features and tighten privacy controls. So, how does this affect application developers? PressSydney Morning Herald: Aussie’s lightning photo becomes the face of BingThe Bing Photo contest went off with a hitch. Jeremy Somers’ dramatic image of a lightning strike cracking through the Sydney skyline was taken during a summer storm and was announced as the winner of Bing’s “summer themed” competition. onCloud Computing: Joyent announces Virtual Appliance for MySQL Database in the Cloud, 3X Faster than Amazon EC2Context Optional was featured in IT News Online and onCloud Computing regarding the new Joyent launch of virtual appliance for MYSQL. There is additional detail in the full article.
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In this issue
In The News
Pass it onIf you know someone who may be interested in receiving this newsletter, please direct them to the handy signup form on our news page. Become a FanDo you like Context Optional? Become a fan! Join us on Context Optional’s Facebook page or follow us on Twitter |
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.
©2009 Context Optional, 625 Market St Fl 14, San Francisco 94105.
July Newsletter
July 6th, 2009Context’s Social Marketing Newsletter
July 6, 2009 Brought to you by Context Optional
| Hi there, welcome to Context Optional’s monthly newsletter. Thank you for continuing to subscribe.
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. |
In this issue
In The News
Pass it onIf you know someone who may be interested in receiving this newsletter, please direct them to the handy signup form on our main webpage. Become a FanDo you like Context Optional? Become a fan! Join us on Context Optional’s Facebook page |
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.
©2009 Context Optional, 625 Market St Fl 14, San Francisco 94105.
May Newsletter
May 27th, 2009Context’s Social Marketing Newsletter
May 27, 2009 Brought to you by Context Optional
| Hi there, welcome to Context Optional’s May newsletter.
Social media continues to change at a rapid pace. We’re seeing an evolution not only on the social media sites themselves, but a spread of social connectivity beyond the walled gardens of the networks. In the past month, we launched Target’s Bullseye Gives on Facebook, with media driving to the site from all over the web. MTV placed themselves both on and off Facebook for the MTV Movie Awards with an integrated application running not only on their Facebook page, but also on Flixster and IMDB too. Bravo’s Supermodel Touchup resided on Bravo’s site but used Facebook connect to distribute photos to one’s social network, and the Exectweets application brought a cultivated Twitter feed to the iPhone. During the next month we’ll be launching even more programs across both social networks and the greater web, so stay tuned! InsightsCampaigns in social media should be thought of as long-term strategies, not as fire-and-forget impression and branding initiatives. The most successful social media campaigns are those than run over a period of months or years, not just two-day roadblocks designed to get the word out and raise awareness. According to a recent article on TechCrunch, under new FTC guidelines “Even Citizen Journalists Must Disclose Paid Endorsements.” This is fairly big news in the social media space and something that we don’t feel has received enough attention. PressRetail chain Target already gives 5 percent of its income to charity. For the next couple weeks, they are going to be allocating those funds – which come out to $3 million every week – to charities selected by Facebook users. The company has launched the “Bullseye Gives” campaign on Facebook, which is essentially a voting application connected to the brand’s existing Facebook page. On it, users select which of ten charities they’d like to see funds allocated to. Money will then be given out based on percentages, so if 10 percent of users vote for Salvation Army, that organization will receive 10 percent of the total donations. In these hard times, you can’t blame people for turning to blatant sycophancy. Try it! Sometimes it works, but it always gives you a good gauge for how much your dignity is worth in the free market. Anyway, ExecTweets is a Microsoft-backed venture to collect and aggregate tweets from power players in a variety of industries. Now it’s got an iPhone app, which lets you peek the minds of various Twitter-inclined bigwigs, organized by industry, topic or popularity. Ah, the upside of social media. And there is plenty of upside – especially for brands – which explains why so many have embraced this digital space, venue, vehicle, what have you, to get in on the conversation. And this is a conversation that brands hope will help strengthen the relationship between their customers and them and boost their bottom lines. But, as with any relationship, the dynamic between brands and consumers is not all handholding and doling out compliments. The same voice social media provides to consumer advocates is also there for any person or persons with a bone to pick or a grudge against your product or brand. How you deal with a social media “enemy” could mean the difference between creating a loyal customer for life and a public relations nightmare that can quickly snowball. |
In this issue
EventsWe’ll be speaking at Ypulse’s Youth Marketing Mashup in San Francisco, June 1-2. If you’re attending, please be sure and say hello. In The News
Pass it onIf you know someone who may be interested in receiving this newsletter, please direct them to the handy signup form on our main webpage. Become a FanDo you like Context Optional? Become a fan! Join us on Context Optional’s Facebook page. |
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.
©2009 Context Optional, 625 Market St Fl 14, San Francisco 94105.
