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Twitter for Marketers

Yesterday, an interesting marketing effort took place on Twitter. Zappos CEO Tony had tweeted that he was going to give away a free pair of shoes to a random follower later in the evening. Pretty straightforward use of Twitter in an attempt to gain more followers, nothing horribly complicated. Things got more interesting a little later when he tweeted the following message:

As soon as this happened this effort went from a "one-to-one" model (individual follower to Zappos) to a "many-to-one" model (networks of people to Zappos). Both models are certainly viable, but I suspect Tony is well aware of Twitter's deep potential in terms of social engagement and interaction. It's great to have an audience of individuals who opt-in and listen to what Zappos has to say, but the real value of Twitter lies in having networks of people talk to each other about Zappos. This is a wonderful example of a company not just taking a new technology/medium/outlet at face value, but actually taking the time to understand what it can really deliver for its brand.

I'm not sure how many followers Tony gained from this effort, but at the time of this post Zappos has 966 - not quite the top 100, but still a respectable number. Seeing that I missed out on this chance to score some free shoes myself (and for my followers!), one suggestion I'd make is to give the news a little more time to bake and get out there to more people. I suppose Twitter is a fast-paced enough medium to support an effort with a window opportunity of just several hours, but I think extending it to a full day or two wouldn't hurt. After all, the lucky winner only had 3 people who happened to be following Zappos at the time of the "drawing."

Luckily, Tony is taking suggestions for next time.

Update: 1,024 followers, and a new effort: lunch with Tony, tour the Zappos office, 2 roundtrip tickets and 2 nights hotel...for a random follower to be announced Monday. Very exciting to see Tony keeping up the momentum. There's also a conversation tracking tool (it's even RSS-friendly), where we can see about 40 pages of Twitter conversations that have taken place so far.

Listen, for the digital messiah speaks!

No intro may do this man justice, but ladies and gentlemen, I give you the messiah of the digital age - Walt Mossberg. Every second of the 8-minute clip below is naked truth as he calls out the inexcusable embarrasment that is the status quo and shows us the promise of a glorious future. (feed readers, if there's one video you click through to see this year, make it this one)

Here are some highlights of Walt's points:

(~1:15) On the current internet video revolution and the challenge to bring video content from the web to the TV set:

"I write off, and I will say this twice, I write off the teeny tiny percentage of geeks that plug computers into their TVs. That's not gonna be how we get there."

Commentary: Home theater PCs (or HTPCs), while fully featured, still require more configuration and upkeep than a set top box. A remote will always be much more familiar and effective than any wireless mouse+keyboard combo. This is why having a set top box for internet video will be more appropriate for the masses than a hacked together, Frankenstein approach.

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(~3:00; watch for the table slam) On old model interstitial advertising shoving 8 minutes of irrelevance per 30 minute TV show down our throats:

"Somebody has to be more creative about it than just stopping the program to show me an ad for something I'm never gonna buy."

Commentary: Talk about being right on the money. Relevance is king. How long must we continue being insulted and relegated as acceptable casualties of selfish media plans trying to sell products for erectile dysfunction and menstruation? The advertising community still needs to do better than trying to talk AT target audiences so irresponsibly, regardless of who else is watching the same programming we are.

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(~4:13) On streaming vs download for videos services:

"Believe me, I know this guy, if Steve Jobs thinks that a streaming service will be the right way to go and sell him a bunch of iPods and Macs he'll turn it on tomorrow."

Commentary: Choices are a good thing. Between ad-free $1.99 downloads and ad-supported streaming solutions such as Hulu.com, content is gradually being freed for users to enjoy. As we've witnessed with the downfall of DRM and the music business, this is undoubtedly also a good sign for consumers.

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(~4:34) On the state of consumer broadband in the United States:

"We really suck at broadband."

Commentary: I had no idea that Verizon was passing off 768 kilobits per second as "broadband" - which Walt rightfully referred to as "crap." If even 6 - 8 megabit per second cable services are usually no better than 3, with throttling and so-called turbo-boosting practices to further cloud the murky waters, "pity and pathos" are horrible, horrible understatements that need to be addressed by our next president. (It seems as if Walt has given up on our current one.)

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Surprisingly, the highlight of the talk was not that the iPhone will be 3G in 60 days. Walt doesn't seem too excited on the speed and capacity of 3G in the US, which is disappointing since he is such an authority on digital matters. Regardless, it's still a step in the right direction as we further ourselves along this media evolution.

Amen.

Shapely strategy

Here's my theory on the family of place-shifting devices better known as Slingbox. And no, I don't mean its impact on our media consumption habits (that's for another day); today I'm just discussing the shape of these devices. Sans a little extra thought, they would probably have been just vanilla-flavored boxes with right angles at every corner...

Why go trapezoidal? According to David Pogue of the NY Times, the Slingbox "is meant to evoke the shape of a gold ingot." Not sure whether that's official Sling PR, but I think there's a deeper, darker reason underneath the Slingbox's simple guise:

Your Slingbox wants to rule over your AV tower.

That's right, it wants to sit up top. On top of your DVD/Blu-Ray/VHS/LaserDisc players, media receivers, karaoke units, and anything else that was designed oh-so-conveniently for you to stack in whichever order you choose. My gut feeling is that the Slingbox was purposely designed to look just downright awful when placing just about anything else on top of it (a la Wii, PS3, and to a lesser extent the XBOX 360). And even if you don't stack it with your existing equipment, it will defend its roost from anything else you may purchase later.

Do you agree that this is a purposeful design strategy? Or is this just my OCD going into hyperdrive? All things considered, is your product strategy in shape?

Fools!

You can have a trademark color, but a color is not a trademark. Deutsche Telekom, you don't own #ed008c any more than I do (jack squat). It doesn't even matter that I'm not a fan or that it doesn't even look good with this blog's color scheme, but you can't take it away from Engadget or anyone else for that matter.

There are actually a couple other conversations important to this story as well:

1. Brand confusion
Marketers, if you're worried about brand confusion in the marketplace, might I suggest you solve that by innovating your brand instead of gunning down others? It's called differentiating yourself from others for a reason. Differentiating others from yourself...well that's just foolishly impractical and so absolutely fail-ridden that it does little more than serve up heaps and mounds of juicy blogger fodder.

2. State of the blogosphere (don't mess!)
The blogosphere is human; and we all know that humans don't like to be pushed around. (While also comprised of human beings, most corporations are decidedly less so.) We have the power of community, conversation, and sometimes even common sense on our side - meaning we don't have to give up #ed008c. The blogosphere united is a beautiful thing. Testing a united blogosphere, though, paints a much less beautiful (though arguably entertaining) sight of lighting C4 in the face. Bow down, Deutsche Telekom, bow down!

Note: This isn't an April Fool's joke! Writing about a fool is also appropriate on this day, right? :)

The Social Media Life Cycle

Saw this brilliant video about Facebook via AdScam and just had to share...while some lines are a little forced, the video (after the jump) certainly gets the point across in an accurate + humorous fashion.

Our attention spans are just getting shorter and shorter for the larger and larger mass of advertisers/developers/whoevers to fight over. As disappointing as it may be to some - even though Facebook may go at one point, social media is here to stay and there will positively be something else to take its place. It's all a part of what I'd like to call the Social Media Life Cycle, pictured below and presented as a tribute to Kathy Sierra and the Creating Passionate Users blog, which I miss very dearly.

I've placed a few social media names along the graph based on my current perceptions, which you may have feel differently about. But the million dollar question is, with so much attention being focused on getting to critical mass (aka profitability), how should social media fight to keep from sinking down that slope of indifference down and ending up as completely irrelevant?

Cool doesn't stay cool by itself- so as we're cramming our social media with the latest features, functionality, and hype, why not spend a little more time thinking about community, attitude, and charm?