Category: Blog

Summer is a time for vacations, holidays and travel throughout the world. Many Americans flock to Europe during this time to join the Europeans and experience the beauty and cultures of this part of the world. Our client, Rail Europe, just launched this week the first round of their Scenic Train Trivia Contest which aims to share with people the attractiveness and benefits of European train travel.

Each round of the contest will focus on a different scenic train route in Europe. The plan is to have 8 rounds to start off.  Here’s how it works. Rail Europe will publish a post in their Scenic Train Blog Series on their blog. Each post will include information on the featured train route along with quotes from people that run the route and birds-eye views of the stunning vistas you can see while traveling on the route.

Once you read the post then you are invited to hop on over to the Rail Europe Facebook page and click on the contest tab to enter and answer the trivia question relative to that round.  Each round will be open for entries for a week once the post is published. A random drawing will be held at the end of each round from all those that entered and answered the question correctly. One lucky winner of each round will receive an iPod Touch. The contest is scheduled to launch a new round approximately every two weeks.

The first round features the Swiss beauty of the Bernina Express which makes its way through the valley of Albulatal. The blog post includes an interview with Hans Amacker, Director of Rhaetian Railways’ Bernina Express. Rail Europe asked him to provide a description of his train route which he answered “The line links extremes of climate, along with various cultures and languages and never fails to impress. It includes winding switchback tunnels, the towering viaducts of the valley of Albulatal and, as you cross the Alps via the Bernina Pass, glaciers that look almost close enough to touch”.

You can read more here to find the answer to this round’s trivia question which is ‘How many meters above sea level is the train station of Ospizio Bernina?” It looks like most of our entrants have correctly answered the question so far. It’s not too difficult.

I personally am very excited about this contest because I will be experiencing train travel in Europe in a couple of weeks. My husband and I are taking a two-week vacation and will be using a Rail Europe pass to travel around to various destinations. The Eurail Select Pass we purchased gives us 8 days of rail travel throughout the countries that we will be visiting.

We are starting in Munich, Germany, and then will be traveling on some very scenic routes to Geneva, Switzerland. France is once again included in the pass after pulling out about a year ago, so our next train route will take us to Paris. From there we are flying to Dublin and will be using the Ireland train routes to take us across the county to the west side and flying home from Shannon. I invite you to come back and read my post once I return and see some of my photos. And don’t forget to try your luck at this contest!

Reading is a great summer pastime for both adults and kids. So our clients at Reading Is Fundamental have teamed up with Macy’s to kick off the 11th Annual Be Book Smart campaign to help spark kids’ imaginations this summer with books.

A survey of more than 1,000 parents was conducted by Harris Poll back in April and found that children ages 5-11 spend nearly three times as many hours weekly watching TV or playing video games as they do reading in the summer. Only 17% of these parents say reading is a top summer priority.

This year’s Be Book Smart campaign started on June 18 and runs till the end of this week, July 13. Part of the campaign includes the “Book Smart Summer Photo” Sweepstakes which invites people to submit their #BookSmartSummer photos for a chance to win a $500 Macy’s gift card each week. The photo must includes these three components: 1) The cover of the book 2) A favorite summer spot to read the book, 3) A summer style. The photo can be expressed through a composite image or a single photo with all components.

Participants can submit as many photos as they wish during the sweepstakes period and use these three different methods of entry. First is via Facebook from a Sweepstakes promotion tab off the Reading is Fundamental  Facebook page.  Participants must first “Like” the page in order to access the submission form. Or they have the option of submitting their photos on Twitter and Instagram and including the hashtag, #BookSmartSummer. Upon posting the photo, the participant will receive a notification with a link to the Sweepstakes submission form.

One winner has been randomly selected each week to receive the $500 Macy’s gift card. Only one more weekly drawing is left in the campaign. Here is a photo that was submitted by week #2 winner, Lynn S., from Morristown, NJ. All the entries can be viewed here on the RIF Facebook Sweepstakes page. Currently it looks like over a hundred great photos have been submitted.

The Be Book Smart campaign also is inviting customers nationwide to give $3 at any Macy’s register in-store to help provide a book for a child and in return get $10 off a purchase of $30 or more. Macy’s will donate 100 percent of every $3 to RIF.

“We are committed to RIF’s mission of empowering children through literacy and inspiring them to embrace the joy of reading during the summer,” said Martine Reardon, chief marketing officer, Macy’s. “Be Book Smart offers our customers the opportunity to give back to their local community, and thanks to the collective generosity of our customers and associates, we’ve given 10 million books to kids since 2004.”

So only 5 days left! The more people that get involved, the more books that can be given to kids all over the country. So start snapping and shopping!

Here’s a new summertime promotion that we helped kick off  yesterday for Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt who has partnered with Hershey on the Hershey’s Experience Sweepstakes. They are offering a chance to win a family vacation to Hershey’s Chocolate World and Hershey Park Attractions.

Menchie’s is hoping to gain new customers to sign up for their loyalty rewards program, My Smileage. During the Sweepstakes Menchie’s customers will automatically receive an entry into the sweepstakes when they purchase any item at a Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt store and use their registered Menchie’s loyalty card. Participants can also enter online by visiting the Sponsor’s website at www.Menchies.com or by visiting the Menchie’s Facebook page and linking to the Sweepstakes Tab page. Both  are optimized for mobile devices. People are invited to enter once a day by any method of entry.

We set up the Sweepstakes for Menchie’s and again are using the Shortstack Application which we have used for many promotions that we’ve run for clients on their Facebook page. But Shortstack is not just for Facebook anymore. A while ago they introduced a new feature where you can not only install the app on a Facebook tab page, but you can also embed the entry form on any webpage. So in this case we are hosting a separate page online for Menchie’s which they link to from the homepage of their website. Both entry forms are utilizing the same graphics and all entries go into one database, so it allows for only one entry per day per person’s email address regardless of what method they entered from.

Back on June 10, Shortstack announced that they made some huge updates to their platform which they now refer to as their Campaign Builder. ShortStack’s Campaign Builder is platform agnostic which means you can publish Campaigns directly to the web and link to them from anywhere. These campaigns no longer have to be publish on Facebook first. Each Campaign has its own URL, which means that Campaigns can be used as standalone websites, which ShortStack can host. You still have the option to embed them into a website like we are doing with the Menchie’s Sweepstakes and install them to your Facebook Page as well.

Shortstack has stated that these three trends prompted the switch from Facebook-centric apps to web-friendly Campaigns:

1. The continued success of Pinterest, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. Our users’ customers are increasingly using additional social media platforms.

2. A Facebook “Like” isn’t as valuable as it once was. A Cliff Notes version of the old strategy would go something like this: get more Fans because the more you have, the more exposure your brand gets. However, changes to Facebook’s algorithms mean this is no longer the case.

3. The recognition that leads and user data are more valuable than Likes and other similar engagement. The inherent flaw in social media marketing and advertising is that these interactions are, for the most part, anonymous, and provide little to no opportunity for brands to follow up. Leads provide the opportunity to stay in touch with users.

All campaigns are mobile friendly from the start with a “One Campaign for any screen” design philosophy.

So if you want some more details on how to set up a promotion utilizing the Shortstack platform, please feel free to contact me. It’s a great tool and it also includes a great team of support people.

While we have some great summer weather, stop by a Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt store by you and try out their new Chocolate Glazed Toffee Bar flavor!

 

 

Many artists and bands on now on their summer concert tours hitting local venues across the country. One of our clients who is a Boston-based local company has decided to take advantage of this and invest some of their marketing budget towards reaching these fans. They decided to become a sponsor of all the Live Nation concerts taking place in the Boston area this summer season.

Basement Technologies is that company. They have been providing basement waterproofing and foundation repairs for over 45 years. They go by the name of 1-800-Busy-Dog and promote their toll free number at all the events that they attend. You could find them in the past at Red Sox Games at Fenway Park or Celtic Games at the TD Garden. This summer music season you can find at the the Xfinity Center (formerly Comcast Center) in Mansfield, MA and the Blue Hills Bank Pavilion in Boston, MA at various concerts happening up till early September.

They wanted to make their Live Nation sponsorship really pay off, so we are assisting them with running a mobile marketing campaign. The 1-800-Busy-Dog Summer Souvenir Sweepstakes invites attendees of these events to text the keyword, BusyDog, to a shortcode for a chance to win a prize package consisting of merchandise item(s) related to that Event’s performing artist(s) or venue. There is also a mobile optimized entry form that they can enter instead if they choose not to use the text entry method.

We are working again with our mobile partner, Signal Engage,  and utilizing their platform to run each of these sweepstakes promotions. The platform is scheduled to start a new sweepstakes on each day of an Event and end it by 8:30 pm that evening. It automatically draws a winner at that time and notifies the winner by sending them a text message back to the mobile phone number they used to enter. The winner at that event then needs to visit the 1-800-Busy-Dog tent in the venue by 9 pm, show their winner message on their phone, and receive their prize.

All of the people that enter each of the sweepstakes are also being opted in to a 1-800 Busy Dog SMS list in which they agree to receive up to 2 text messages maximum per month from Busy Dog. All entrants can unsubscribe at any time. Busy Dog would like to send out messages to them during times of heavy rain to remind people of the services they offer.

The platform we are using from Signal Engage not only allows for text and online entry, but also may include a Sponsor’s Facebook page as well. We’ve run some other promotions for clients with this platform that have included all three methods of entry. The company Signal recently was acquired by another Chicago-based firm call BrightTag. They just recently announced that BrightTag is adopting the Signal name and the Signal product is now called Signal Engage.

We’re glad to have been one of the early customers of Signal and have helped them get their business to this stage. I look forward to our continued business relationship and introducing many more of our clients to their products. So far the folks at 1-800-Busy Dog have been happy with the results of the program and by the end of the summer they should be able to communicate via text message with a good number of local homeowners.

Everywhere you look right now it seems you see and read something related to the 2014 World Cup. I recently came across some stats that compared the number of people worldwide that watched the 2014 Super Bowl vs. the final match of the last World Cup in 2010 and it was 111.5 million vs. 909.6 million. This did surprise me on how big a difference there really is. So since I normally dedicate quite a few weeks of blog posts to the Super Bowl, I thought I should at least write one on the World Cup.

It’s not just TV viewers that are bigger either. According to Adobe Social they came up with this interesting infographic and claim that the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil will be the most social sporting event ever. It will most likey tally more social media mentions than the 2014 Winter Olympic Games or Super Bowl XLVIII. Adobe Social studied more than 69 million social mentions from Facebook, Google Plus, Reddit, Twitter, Dailymotion, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, vKontakte, Disqus, Foursquare, Metacafe, WordPress, YouTube, and blogs to determine this.

Twitter has published an entire article explaining how to follow the #WorldCup action online. It also created this short video posted on YouTube called #WorldCup on Twitter: Love every second.

eMarketer just released these stats in which Facebook tied with SMS for the top way US smartphone users following the FIFA World Cup planned to communicate with others about the games while watching.

The major World Cup Sponsors appear to all be big into hashtags this year. Visa is a worldwide partner or the World Cup Brazil. They have launched a huge integrated campaign which includes television, print, digital, social, mobile and local tournament elements. Kevin Burke, global chief marketing officer for Visa says. “It underscores our brand platform of ‘Everywhere you want to be. We know people want to be at the World Cup, and we want to help them get there.”

Visa has created a portal, www.worldcup.visa.com, where fans can engage in various content. The site shows off 90-second sharable films (which employ the same format and soundtrack) created by 32 filmmakers showing off how their country celebrates the World Cup. It also includes a “tele-transporter” through which fans can insert their faces into a series of World Cup-themed videos that can then be shared across social networks.

Mondelez, maker of snacks including Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers, set up a the #PassTheLove website. It includes an instant win game for chances for fans to win 1,500 prizes that consist of “Soccer in Box” kits containing commemorative soccer balls, goals, and Mondelēz Snacks. After a fan plays the Instant Win Game, they can follow the links and instructions to participate in the Pass the Love Contest. Fans were invited to submit a photo and an essay (not to exceed 140 characters) that describe what they love about soccer. The photo could be uploaded from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram or directly from a computer desktop, or submitted through Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #passthelove.

The contest submission period has ended and the judges are now determining the top 10 finalists. Once determined, those finalists will be contacted and each will be sent a camcorder Finalist prize. Each Finalist will then be required to use the camcorder to create a short video that describes how he/she experiences the sport of soccer.

Beginning on July 16 through July 31, the public will be invited to vote for their favorite video. The Finalist whose video receives the most votes will be deemed the Grand Prize winner and receive a soccer game experience hosted in their community. The Grand Prize winner will be the MVP at that event which includes transportation, an autographed jersey, $10,00 in spending cash and $5,500 to cover taxes. Total value of the prize is $24,000. The nine other Finalists will each receive a $10,000 cash prize.

Now that team USA has won it’s first match against Guana, the US fans appear to be very excited about the games. This should help to make sure this is the most social sporting event ever. John Brooks has become a star overnight and his #daretodream has become a reality. Go U-S-A!

June is the month known as the time for “Dads, Grads, and Brides”.  I do love this month. The days are long, the gardens are all in bloom and we still have the whole summer to look forward to. However, this June I am not invited to any weddings (went to one in early April that was really fun). I also am not attending any high school graduation parties…most of the kids we know are now college grads. But I can still celebrate dads!

I was born in the Bronx and lived there the first five years on my life. My dad would take me to ball games at Yankee Stadium as I was his first child. My dad loves the sport of baseball, but he never was a Yankee fan. In fact he hates the Yankees and instead has always been a Boston Red Sox fan. So like father like daughter, I was raised as a Red Sox fan from the Bronx!

Now the guys I work with are both Yankee fans which causes some banter in the office about the games. So when one of our clients, Brookstone, came to us with this Father’s Day promotion they wanted our assistance with, my colleague Matt said that I just had to write about this on the blog. So here it is.

In case you weren’t aware, Brookstone is the “Official Father’s Day Store of the Boston Red Sox”. They are currently running a Father’s Day Sweepstakes offering a chance to win the ultimate Father’s Day gift: A Brookstone massage chair and four Green Monster seats at the Red Sox June 15th Father’s Day game.  Unfortunately for me though the sweepstakes is only open to fans in New England! They can enter at www.redsox.com/Brookstone up until June 11. Brookstone is also promoting it on their Facebook page. The online entry form has an optional field to enter your mobile phone number to receive text messages & updates from redsox.com and MLB.com.

I have been lucky enough to sit in Green Monster seats at Fenway Park a couple of seasons back. Another client of our was a sponsor of the games that year and gave me a couple of tickets. Sitting up there I said to my husband, Do they really hit the ball up here? Of course as soon as I said that David Ortiz hit one just a couple of seats to our right.

My dad now lives down south in the Myrtle Beach area, so we haven’t been to a game together in awhile. I keep trying to get him to visit “Up North” by offering to get us a couple of tickets, but he hasn’t taken me up the offer yet. Instead we talk on the phone each weekend and we discuss how good or how bad those Red Sox are doing. Last year they came from last place to end up in first place. This year is looking like they may end up back in last place again. But we’ll see. The season is still young.

Happy Father’s day to my dad, my husband and to all the dads out there this year. Don’t forget to wish them a special day on June 15th!

Now that Facebook has evolved more into an advertising platform for brands this means that the reasons for running a contest or sweepstakes promotion on Facebook have also changed. Businesses can’t reach their “fans” as easy or “free” as they used to. So a question being asked now is, do these types of promotions still work on Facebook? Yes, they can if you clearly define what you want to get out of them.

When brands first started out building their Facebook pages their main objective was to acquire fans. They wanted a way to drive people to their page and Like it to become a fan. I would tell clients that if they wanted to just grow their fans, along with their database, sweepstakes were the way to go. You could create a simple sweepstakes offer with a Like-gate attached to it so that visitors to your page would have to Like it first in order to access the entry form. So this was a great way to build up a fan base.

Once you had a fairly good number of Facebook fans, the next step was to post engaging and interesting content on a regular basis so that your brand posts would appear in all your fans news feeds. Well that has changed now that Facebook states that your posts will only reach a very tiny percentage of your fans. So what good is it to have all these fans? That has been a big topic of discussion with some brands stating they’re now going to stop using Facebook all together.

Today, if you want to use Facebook promotions, you first should decide what type of Facebook promotion will work for you. With a sweepstakes people are filing out an entry form, which means you can build up your database with their names, email addresses, and other information that you requested. This will allow you to send the participants emails when you have new product or promotional information to share.

Keep in mind that now more people are accessing their Facebook account from a mobile device vs a computer, so it may not be a good idea to use a Like-Gate anymore. When you require someone to Like the page to enter, they must first sign into Facebook from their mobile device so that the application knows if they are or are not a fan already. This adds an extra step and may deter some from entering altogether.

A contest,  vs. a sweepstakes, may be the best choice for you since contests are a great way to create buzz and increase engagement from fans and key customers while building brand awareness. The most popular type of contests today require some type of user-generated content to be submitted such as a photo, video, essay, recipe, or design. Submissions are then judged or evaluated based on the contest theme and judging criteria and in some cases open for public voting. If you run a contest that invites participants to submit a photo or video you increase the chances that they will share their submission with their friends and family on Facebook.

With a contest you most likely will receive fewer entries then from just a random-draw sweepstakes since you are asking people to do some work. However, if your goal is to reinforce a brand or attributes of a product or service, contests are the better tactic since the content submitted usually includes your brand. It also encourages others to share and help spread the word for you.

Either way if you decide to run a sweepstakes or a contest on Facebook you should follow these best practices:

#1. Include a relevant prize. The best prizes help to showcase your own products or services which should be relevant to your audience. While iPads are still popular prizes, they don’t relate to most brands and they tend to get overlooked because they are too common. Make sure the prize is relevant to the amount of effort you’re asking of participants.  A $100 value prize may be fine for a simple sweepstakes entry, but not if you’re asking someone to create a video submission. Keep in mind that our Federal government requires that anyone who receives a prize valued at $600 or more must receive a 1099 form and claim it when they file their taxes.

#2. Keep it simple.  Don’t ask for more information then you need on the entry form.  Include a “Login with Facebook” button that automatically fills in the name field for the user. This speeds up the registration process and helps to eliminate duplicate entries. When asking for contest submissions, keep in mind the technical level of your audience. It’s much easier to upload a photo of yourself that to create a video.

#3. Follow Facebook Promotion Guidelines. Facebook updated their guidelines last year to allow business pages to run promotions on their page vs. an application. However,  you still can not administer a promotion on a personal Timeline. This means that you can’t collect entries, including additional entries, for having users post on a personal page. You will be in violation of the Facebook policy if you encourage sharing to gain entries. Also,  Facebook has always insisted on clearly stating that Facebook is not sponsoring the promotion. The best way to do this is to include it in your official rules.

#4. Post Official Rules. Any contest or sweepstakes promotion that’s launched on Facebook must include a set of written rules specific to that promotion. Besides the Facebook promotion guidelines you need to have your own rules that basically is a contract between you, the Sponsor, and the general public. These can be especially useful for example in a contest that allows public voting when fraudulent votes are suspected, or when a winner questions what is and is not included in the prize they have won.  Utilizing a company like ours that specializes in sweepstakes and contest administration to draft your rules so that they are compliant within all the U.S. states is recommended.

 #5. Don’t forget to promote your promotion.  You can plan and launch the best promotion in the history of your company, but if you don’t get the word out about it, then it will be set-up to fail.  Promote it on all your social sites, not just Facebook, and include links back to your Facebook page or the Facebook application. Include these links on your website, in your newsletter, emails, Twitter, blog, Google+, etc., and on any printed materials such as ads, point of sale, direct mail and collateral.  Just remember that you need to include abbreviated rules on all printed pieces and communicate where the full set of rules are posted. This may also be the time to consider running some ads on Facebook to highlight the promotion. Keep them simple and include an eye-catching image.

Once your promotion is over, review all the data you’ve collected and use it to plan for your next one. One of the recommended practices I tell clients is to make sure you follow up with the winners in a timely manner and let them know how and when they will receive their prize. You don’t want a winner posting negative comments all over their social networks about a lack of communication and not getting their prize. I’ve seen that happen in cases where the promotion was a huge success up till that point.

Let me know if you if you’d like any more information on running these promotions on Facebook or other social networks. It’s hard to keep up with the rules and regulations of each platform along with new ones. Feel free to share some of your experiences here as well. What has worked for you and what hasn’t?

Consumers are getting more comfortable using mobile devices to shop and not just for m-commerce sales, but for in-store shopping as well according, to some recent studies.

An April study from Deloitte highlighted in this article from eMarketer found that 22% of mobile users were more likely to visit a store after browsing on their devices, while 19% said they were less likely to do so. Deloitte also found that 19% of last year’s in-store purchases were influenced by the use of mobile devices. This research found that the use of mobile devices before or during in-store shopping trips influenced or helped to convert approximately $593 billion in US in-store retail sales in 2013—or 19% of total brick-and-mortar sales—compared with $159 billion in 2012.

Omni-Channel Marketing, or also referred to as Shopper Marketing, is not some new trend in marketing, but like consumers (shoppers) it is constantly evolving. Combine that with the increasing number of platforms businesses can utilize to connect with their consumers, it has become quite a challenge for marketers to send effective and meaningful messages. Therefore, it is more important than ever today for brands to communicate one simple message across all platforms in order to make their message more effective and influential.

Next month the Brand Activation Association (BAA) is hosting the Marketing to the Omni-Channel Shopper Marketing Conference which will include presentations from some top brands and retailers reviewing how they filter through all the digital clutter and prioritize the pieces that are most important them.

Laura Gordon, VP, Marketing and Brand Innovation for 7-Eleven products and services in the US and Canada is one of those presenters. She will be the Day 2 Opening Keynote Speaker at the Conference in New York on June 5th. In an preview interview Laura stated “Mobile is the channel that is most critical for the on-the-go 7-Eleven customer. We have begun to invest in mobile via smart phone but there are many mobile networks that our guests participate in today, including a few that are right in our store. We are actively working to test and learn in many mobile channels in order to better adapt our understanding of the new path to purchase”.

Another presenter, Mike Messersmith, Senior Director of Shopper and Experiential Marketing at Chobani, says “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” Mike uses insights and analytics to drive his ideas and includes hard numbers in their marketing campaign, however he believes “it’s what you do differently with the data that will set you apart”. Linda Crowder, Senior Director of Peapod Interactive and a BAA Board Member will be speaking on Day 1 of the Conference, June 4th. Linda believes that “the best channel is the channel(s) that is the most relevant to the ultimate shoppers. The successful organization is going to have to develop the feedback loops that allow them to be as current with the shopper ‘s life as the shopper.”

If you’re interested in learning more on the Omni-Channel Shopper Marketing Conference taking place June 4-5 at the Highline Hotel in New York City you can check out this video promo the BAA created.