Creative Passion

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Posts by Creative Passion

Loyalty via Foursquare!

Foursquare has built-in loy­alty for any place to track. Amazing that more com­pa­nies haven’t taken advan­tage of it yet.

For those of you that don’t know what Foursquare is, its an appli­ca­tion that can be down­loaded to your smart­phone and you can use it to “check in” to dif­fer­ent loca­tions of places you are in. Foursquare aims to encour­age peo­ple to explore their neigh­bor­hoods and then reward peo­ple for doing so. For exam­ple, if you check in to a loca­tion the most, you become that location’s “Mayor”.

Starbucks has part­nered up with Foursquare to allow their vis­i­tors to work towards a Starbucks Badge for fre­quent­ing their loca­tions. Those who attain this badge will get other types of rewards from Starbucks as well.

Foursquare has even got a spe­cial part of their site for busi­nesses to ref­er­ence in order to use their app to encour­age cus­tomer loy­alty now! One great exam­ple is that they Mayor of the loca­tion can get some­thing for free!

Check it out: Starbucks and Foursquare

Check it out: Foursquare for Businesses

Contest vs. Free Labour

What is the line between “Fan-Based Contest” and just get­ting your fans to do work for you?

I’m all for viral mar­ket­ing, let­ting fans have a piece of the “inven­tion” pie and so on. When I read the title of this arti­cle, I thought it was a cool idea and was inter­ested to see how it was done and how its pan­ning out. While pop­u­lar­ity for the con­test seems to be work­ing, the promo work done for the con­test by the fans is less than stel­lar to say the least.

Its seems Mountain Dew didn’t even allow the fans to help cre­ate the flavours. It started with 7 sam­ple flavours. Narrowed down to 3 from there. Fans were then divided into “Nations” that were given the task to do every­thing to pro­mote thse flavours includ­ing work­ing with Mountain Dew’s exist­ing agen­cies to cre­ate online pro­mos. They were also tasked to go on a cross-country road trip to pro­mote their given flavour. I won­der if these peo­ple were paid for their time and if, cre­atively, these are the ads that Mountain Dew would have wanted had this been done as an inter­nal cam­paign rather than a “contest”.

Bears the ugly head of Spec Work…

Check it out: Mountain Dew Releases 3 Fan-Created Flavors

Facebook Becoming a Virtual E-Mall

Facebook to become the next Ebay??
.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….…

Now any­one can have a store on Facebook. But that’s not really the news. A new func­tion­al­ity that allows store­fronts to offer spe­cial pric­ing to users who become fans of the page or “Like” the page will add a whole new online incen­tive to hav­ing a Facebook store­front. Is this a pre­ma­ture step for Facebook? Will legal­i­ties start to come full-force on them? It took Ebay years to per­fect their method, but still, there are sites like Craig’s List and Kijiji that leave the respon­si­bil­ity to those using it. Some have already started using this offer­ing from Facebook. Seeing how well things like Virtual Gifting and using real funds with some Facebook games, per­haps they are right on track with where they need to be!

Check it out: Facebook E-Commerce App Payvment Allows Retailers To Use Coupons To Attract Fans

The Last Advertising Agency on Earth

A look into the future by Saatchi & Saatchi

A very humor­ous (true?) look into the future of adver­tis­ing com­ing from one of the big wigs in adver­tis­ing them­selves. It seems like it should be funny, but its a lit­tle sad and true all at the same time…

Check it out: The Last Advertising Agency on Earth

Do Facebook Moderators Need PR Lessons?

Nestle has become a tar­get of the moment — but does it make us won­der now if Facebook Moderators need PR lessons???

It just makes me won­der if “Facebook Moderator” will soon become an actu­ally trained posi­tion in a com­pany rather than just see­ing who has time to respond and keep an eye on the company’s Facebook Fan page? I’ve seen down­hill inci­dents like this now with Nestle as well as Zip Car which both ended up need­ing dam­age con­trol because of what some­one at the given com­pany posted or responded on the social net­work­ing site. While this was a defen­sive tac­tic that even the PR rep agreed with (uphold­ing the brand stan­dards and keep­ing the com­pany out of a neg­a­tive light), she did say that it was worded very poorly and in bad taste. Companies that decide to have a Facebook page should care­fully select who mod­er­ates it and make sure that it would be the same per­son that they would hap­pily present to a room full of mil­lions of poten­tial buy­ers, because essen­tially that’s what the indi­vid­ual is doing.

Check it out: Nestle to Facebook Fans: Consider Yourself Embraced