A Twitter case study
...in Twitter format:
We launch ZeeVee. John Dvorak tweets "What's this about?" 900 followers flood the website. The #3 traffic referrer that week.
Will expound more in followup post.
...in Twitter format:
We launch ZeeVee. John Dvorak tweets "What's this about?" 900 followers flood the website. The #3 traffic referrer that week.
Will expound more in followup post.
He says powerful taglines – what he calls “powerlines” are largely missing in action in today’s marketing messages. Cone believes this is a mistake because the right words “have the power to awe, inspire, motivate, alienate, subjugate and, in a marketing context, change the buying habits of consumers.”Most of his top 10 favorite taglines hark from an earlier era when they were “the epicenter for all promotional executions:”

Some of my favorite consumer taglines are:
If you believe taglines aren’t that critical for business, think again. They’ve never been more important.Look no further than Dell to validate the importance of taglines. They’ve created so many taglines it’s tough to keep track. Here’s a list of the ones I remember, most of which, if not all, are from this decade:
The microblogging platform, Twitter, remains my Godot. I'm still waiting for someone to show me how it can be a useful PR and marketing tool. To that end, Jeff Jarvis has done a better job than most in making the case in a recent post on his blog.
I'm still not buying it...yet. I'm still in the same camp as Getting To First Base authors, Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo: maybe I'll change my tune in 6 months, but right now Twitter is primarily an ego distillery.
Yet Jarvis' argument that Twitter's cut-to-chase format is ideal for things like real-time political reporting, as well as the interesting new apps being built with its open API, has tempered my skepticism.
Now if someone could only point me to a decent, measurable case study...
Bad news: our deepening intimacy with electronic devices is apparently to blame for our growing apathy toward communing with nature.Eight hours of mind-numbing Super Bowl ads reminded me how true public relations is different from hype.
PR isn’t advertising. I joked about this a couple weeks ago in my “What do you do for work?” blog. Advertising exists to sell. Advertisers can communicate whatever they want (within reason) because they pay for it. They can decide what to say, where to say it and how often they want to repeat themselves. It’s a controlled process. PR is more uncontrolled, but highly personal and believable. Here's an interesting exercise: think of the top five Super Bowl ads you liked, try to remember the advertiser name and reflect on whether any of them motivated you to take action.
PR isn’t best at awareness building. There are lots of ways to build awareness. Advertising does a great job with this. So does direct marketing, events, paid sponsorships, newsletters, RSS feeds and product placements. While PR is excellent at building awareness, its secret sauce is building credibility.
PR isn’t narrow, it’s broad. It’s in the name; PR is all about relationships. Properly practiced, PR takes into account every single stakeholder (or “public” as the PR industry calls it) your organization deals with in its daily life. Employees (your brand ambassadors); local communities; partners; stockholders; local/state/federal government; analysts; consumers; reporters; analysts; customers and prospects.
This morning I heard a crazy radio ad. It was narrated by the owner of an identity theft protection company. His gimmick was revealing his entire social security number on the air. Pretty ballsy, I thought, daring any cyber-thief to try to steal his personal data. And he backs up his service with a million dollar guarantee to boot. I have to admit that the identity theft guy’s ad caught my attention. I’ve been way too promiscuous online, recklessly handing over my personal information to any web service that caught my fancy. The only place my online identity hasn’t been is Heidi Fleiss’ little black book.
So that got me wondering: do ads like these work? Do companies in which the owners have skin in the game come across as credible, or is it just personalized snake oil? Do these ads compel you to buy? I want to know. Vote up or down in the poll below.