Fanminder Blog

Love this new program, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

This fall, customers using Target-branded credit cards will a get 5% discount on every purchase at its stores. Gauging by the results of an eight-month test Target recently concluded in Kansas City, the company expects the program to drive a 1% to 2% nationwide increase in sales at stores open at least a year by luring shoppers to its stores more frequently to take advantage of the savings.

“A 5% discount every day on every transaction is unique in the retail world and has the power to drive profitable sales to Target,” said Terry Scully, president of Target Financial Services.

In addition to leading to meaningful sales gains, some Wall Street analysts think Target’s credit-card rewards program will be a powerful low-price hook that competitors would have trouble matching. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in particular, has a larger base of lower-income shoppers who would be hard-pressed to qualify for a credit card.

“I think it is one of the most innovative programs to come along in retail in a long time,” said Colin McGranahan, a retail analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein LLC. “Five percent off prices that are already discounted and are almost at parity with Wal-Mart is a good deal,” he added.

One of the hallmarks of social media is content:  creating it, sharing it and engaging with it.

The best content in social media inspires, informs, educates or entertains(and if you’re really lucky, it does all four!).  But how do you create content that goes viral?

What follows are seven strategies you can employ to help your content succeed.

The idea for this post came from Jay Baer’s excellent article on creating reusable social media content, which defined how companies can generate more value by repurposing existing content.

Content Creation Is Easier Than Ever

With the growing number of social media tools coming online each day, creating content is easier than ever. You can grab a bunch of pictures from your camera and create an Animoto slideshow in just a few steps. You can also upload these pictures to Facebook and Twitter using sites like Twitpic or Tweetphoto. By adding captions and explanations, you help those in your network share the experience with you.

Will They Notice if You Create It?

Similarly, it’s reasonably easy to get started with blogging.  The challenge is, even though content is easy to produce (and a lot of people are actively creating it), how do you create powerful content that actually gets attention?

The answer to this lies at the intersection of neuroscience, individual psychology and group dynamics. Here’s a bit more detail.

1. The Cocktail Party Phenomenon. In terms of neuroscience, there are a few concepts you need to know. The first is the reticular activating system (RAS). The RAS is one of the structures in the brain responsible for orientation and attention. Most commonly, the RAS is associated with the concept of selective attention, which means that we naturally orient to information or ideas that we are invested in.

An example of the RAS at work would be in a crowded room where you can’t hear much of anything, but you suddenly turn to someone who has just used your name in conversation. As our names are one thing we are clearly interested and invested in, we naturally focus more fully when someone mentions us.

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A lot of online retailers have been rushing into using Social Media as the next big marketing thing and yes it is showing some promise.

A recent study by Compete which evaluated online shopping trends, unearthed some interesting findings about the use of Social Media and online shopping, especially about Facebook and Twitter.

According to the Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study, consumers have been slow to embrace social media as a shopping resource.

Social networking sites were ranked as the least used online shopping resource.

Sixty percent of all consumers surveyed said that they do not use social networking sites while shopping online.

When questioned further, an even larger percentage said that they never visit retailer pages on Facebook or follow retailers on Twitter. I think the rather telling finding about the above graphic is the continuing importance of email and search engines for consumers in promoting the online retailer as shown by

• Retailer emails as never being used at only 24%  (so they are used regularly 76% of the time)
• Search engines as never being used at only 8% (meaning that 92% of the time the consumer is using search for starting their shopping experience)

In the study, shoppers overwhelmingly said that they visit retailer Facebook pages and Twitter feeds in order to learn about promotions and sales.  Many retailers now offer Facebook Fans exclusivediscounts and coupon codes for online and in store purchases.

Read the Full Article and See Data

A brand crisis is like a natural disaster in many ways – not everyone will experience it, but one must prepare for it.

News stories with a negative connotation are bound to be sensationalised, especially on microblogging sites with low character limits. News headlines are shortened to keep the juiciest (and often inaccurate) parts which then spreads across the web like a catastrophic flood through the click of a mouse.

Here are some tips to manage your brand crisis more effectively on social media through the use of a hypothetical example.

An established toy company with a social media presence (Facebook, Twitter and a blog) has mistakenly manufactured toy racing cars with a trace of a chemical compound that causes a skin rash in children.

React quickly and truthfully.

Unlike traditional media, bad news appears on social media channels within hours, even minutes, of the news breaking. Your company’s Facebook and Twitter pages would probably be littered with flak from unhappy parents within days.

The key is to respond quickly. Within hours, craft a status update that address the general sentiment of the crowd – apologise to the affected public and assure them that the issue is being rectified. Any delays will eat away at the trust between the company and all stakeholders involved.

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Recent changes at Facebook and Twitter suggest that the two social media platforms are beginning to favor marketing professionals more than they did in the past. For purists, of course, who believe that social media tools should be the domain of personal connections, this isn’t being seen as a positive development. For the platforms themselves, however, enhanced marketing tools – either out now or announced and forthcoming – are the key to their longevity.

Between f8 and Chirp, there was no shortage of corporate blog posts and press releases announcing strategic changes, new features and plans for the future. In both cases, there was a clear trend toward bolstering the businesses, and the implications were that social media marketers would soon get the tools they need to increase visibility and advance their messages.

Over the past few months, fan pages on Facebook gave way to “liking,” and word has leaked that Twitter has a handful of companies beta testing commercial accounts. It’s clear that new features are falling into the social media marketing space – and there’s a good reason for it. The implicit partnership that emerges between social media platforms and third-party marketers, intentional or not, solves some significant problems for social media companies hungry for growth along all important metrics, including revenue.

Here are five reasons why social media companies need to make it easier for marketers to engage their audiences via their platforms:

1. More Room to Grow. Both Facebook and Twitter are growing rapidly, and hopes of continued aggressive new user growth have to be taken with a grain of salt. Facebook is about to announce 500 million, with Twitter above 100 million. In order to counteract a possible slowdown in registrations, both companies need to find ways to generate more traffic from existing users (obvious) and see if they can find new users where fewer and fewer exist. Opening up the platforms to commercial/corporate users addresses the latter concern, as every business becomes a potential user, along with the individuals in that business.

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