Inspired by all of the fun we had blogging in MGT 209 – Social Media Marketing, Terry Williamson and I (Andrew Blaisdell) have launched our own blog at www.bizsociableblog.com.
We have all seen the remarkable, positive impact social media has had on personal interactions and relationships. The results are not quite as clear-cut, however, regarding the impact social media has had on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer(B2C) relationships. In addition to tracking the growth and progress of the social media marketing industry as a whole, our blog will also focus on the “hot” topics in this area including measuring the ROI for social media, strategies for creating and implementing social media campaigns, analytics, helpful hints, and many, many others.
We would love to have you all as regular readers, collaborators and guest writers. So add us to you RSS feed!
In April 2009, a couple of guys in Scotland put together a video of their friend Danny riding his bike in Edinburgh. It immediately went viral in the bicycling community. This video is a real testament to the power of the internet to spot amazing talent and catapult it into the mainstream.
Even my mom liked it.
Here's a story about it from the Times, London:
...Like the singer Susan Boyle or make-up guru Lauren Luke, Danny MacAskill, 23, has been catapulted into the spotlight by a viral internet campaign with which he is still trying to come to terms eight months after it began. He may cope with death-defying “tail-whips” on his trials bike, but his head is spinning with the speed of his fame.
In April his flatmate Dave Sowerby posted a video he had made of MacAskill’s stunts on an internet biking forum. Overnight it was bumped on to YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 12m times. Within a week, MacAskill was receiving up to 100 offers a day. He was invited on to American television talk shows and bombarded with sponsorship deals. A Korean circus wanted to sign him up.
“It is surreal,” he says when we meet up in Edinburgh, where he has been living for three years. “I never thought I’d be able to make a living riding my bike. So many bizarre things have happened this year, it's impossible to guess what is going to happen next.”
It is 6C outside and MacAskill, who has a broken collarbone and is recovering from food poisoning, is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan of his new sponsor, Red Bull. It is obvious from the outset that he has a cavalier attitude to his own well-being.
The original video took six months to shoot, largely because of the poor weather in Edinburgh last winter. MacAskill was working full-time in Macdonald Cycles and had to grab the occasional lunch hour when the sun was shining and Sowerby was available for filming. Every Edinburgh bollard, tree or wall was assessed as a prop. The resulting film was almost balletic.
“When we finished the film, I had no expectations whatsoever,” he says. “I was doing it for fun. I’d wanted to make something like this for a while, but it was just to document what was going on in Edinburgh.”
Half a dozen friends came to the “premiere” in MacAskill’s Tollcross flat. They watched it a couple of times and switched over to the sitcom Family Guy and forgot about it.
“The next day I woke up to the BBC calling,” he says. “The video was on a specialist biking website originally, but there were enough users to keep bumping it up until it was on the front page of YouTube. It literally happened overnight. For the first couple of weeks, I was doing interviews every day. It was mad.”
MacAskill grew up in a thatched croft in Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, and while he describes his upbringing as “very ordinary”, even by the standards of island childhoods he was given a reckless amount of freedom.
“From an early age I was the person who jumped off the highest part of the tree,” he says. “I’ve used all of my nine lives and more just being a kid. In my garden we had big fishing nets hung from the trees and I could throw myself into them from the top of the tree.”
His father, Peter, runs The Colbost Croft Museum on Skye and the Giant MacAskill Museum, dedicated to Angus MacAskill, the tallest Scotsman ever to have lived. His mother works for a building company and his parents seem to have had a heroic lack of angst about his escapades.
They didn’t endear him to the local constabulary, however, and there were constant run-ins with the Dunvegan policeman. “I got charged twice — once for doing a wheelie passed a parked car on a Sunday,” he says.
MacAskill enjoyed school at Portree High though more for the sport and company than the academic subjects. He left without taking Highers and went to work for Bothy Bikes in Aviemore. By the time the video was made, he was beginning to wonder where his future lay.
It never occurred to him that the future would involve flying to Lisbon to make a Volkswagen advertisement. The shoot entailed him jumping his bike from a thin ledge, 25ft up, on to another building. On the first two takes, the back wheel slipped, leaving him in danger of crashing to the ground.
He wears only a helmet for safety and gloves for grips when cycling. In the past he has broken both wrists. “Once you learn something, you don’t need the guards,” he says. “I’ve smashed eight helmets and they were potentially lethal crashes. There’s not that much up there, but it is still worth keeping it intact.”
These days he is booked up months in advance. It’s not unusual for him to be asked to do demos in 10 countries in a day. The only reason he has time to do interviews now is because he has broken his collarbone, an injury made worse by him tripping over a kerb back in Edinburgh. He required an operation to pin the collarbone. “Sometimes you spend so long on the bike, you forget how to walk,” he says.
It means MacAskill won’t be able to ride with The Clan for their appearance on Children in Need. Instead, they will do the demo and MacAskill will have to talk.
He is slowly coming to terms with his new profile. He turned down an invitation to appear on the Ellen DeGeneres show in New York largely because they wanted him to dress up as DeGeneres. When an invitation to ride at the Homecoming Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park came in, he rejected it in favour of a commitment he made at Balerno gala day. He has, however, made a video for the Mancunian band, Doves, and a much-viewed television commercial for S1 Jobs.
MacAskill would love to go back and make a promotional video of Skye to promote the island, ideally featuring the local bobby.
“I love Scotland to bits,” he says. “But I am thinking of moving to Europe. What I do now is much more international. For filming you need good weather.” He stops himself, suddenly aware of the bizarreness of his circumstances. “It’s so strange going from the dungeon in Macdonald Cycles to this.”
Realistically, MacAskill has probably no more than another decade doing stunts. Then he has a vague idea of setting up a bike shop. “I don’t make plans,” he says. “I just want to have the most fun, go to the coolest places and maybe encourage more kids into cycling.”
It will be interesting to see whether, despite the pressures of fame, he keeps his wheels in the air and his feet on the ground.
Google offered to buy groupon for $6 billion. I can't imagine looking at groupon's future earnings potential and thinking it's greater than $6 billion. Sure they are the largest local online coupon retailer with 35 million users and $500 million dollars in revenue this year, but they don't really offer a competitive advantage over anyone else.
From SFgate.com:
Google Inc.'s offer to buy daily-deal site Groupon Inc. has been spurned by the Chicago startup, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The proposed acquisition fell through amid hesitation by Groupon's founders, said the person, who requested anonymity because the talks are private. The company will decide whether to sell shares in an initial public offering next year, the person said. Talks could resume if both sides overcome their differences.
Google had offered $6 billion, including incentives that would be paid to Groupon's managers if performance targets were met, people familiar with the matter had said this week. Groupon would have helped its new owner expand in the $133 billion U.S. local-ad market and lessen its reliance on search.
"Clearly Google wants to get into the local space and Groupon was one way," said Aaron Kessler, an analyst at ThinkEquity LLC in San Francisco who has a "buy" rating on Google and doesn't own it. "I don't think from a Google perspective that if they miss out, that there's not other ways to get into local."
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt had been willing to pay almost twice the $3.2 billion he spent on DoubleClick Inc., his next-most expensive target, to add features and repel a threat from such rivals as Facebook Inc. Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for Google, said the Mountain View company doesn't comment on rumor or speculation. Julie Mossler, a Groupon spokeswoman, also declined to comment.
Google, which boasts $33.4 billion in cash and marketable securities, had initially offered $3.5 billion to $4 billion to buy Groupon, a person familiar with the matter has said. The startup, which was also contemplating raising new venture funding, held out, eliciting a sweetened offer from Google, the person said.
The Chicago Tribune initially reported Groupon's rejection.
Groupon's allure has rubbed off on look-alike coupon sites. Amazon.com Inc. said Thursday it invested $175 million in LivingSocial.com, another provider of daily online deals.
Founded by Andrew Mason in 2008, Groupon has attracted 35 million users in more than 300 global markets by offering steep discounts on such items as mani-pedis, hotel stays and bike tune-ups. The company keeps part of the revenue raised by the coupons and its sales may top $500 million this year, two people familiar with the matter have said.
Google could have used Groupon to gather data on consumers as they interact around the time of a purchase, and then use that information to hone other products, including ads, said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities Group.
"Locally focused e-commerce transaction data tied to one's Google account could be used to improve personalization of other Google features as well as improve ad targeting," Schachter, who rates the stock an "outperform," wrote in a research note.
However, regulators would probably have scrutinized the planned acquisition of Groupon to ensure it doesn't harm consumers.
"People are going to be concerned about what happens when you link Groupon's daily-deal services to Google search," said Dan Wall, an antitrust lawyer and partner at Latham & Watkins in San Francisco. "It is very easy to imagine that competitors to Groupon will find it very difficult to get oxygen if there's a link between Groupon and Google."
According to this article http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/money/20101126/driveon26_st.art.htm?loc=interstitialskip the very drivers the Ford Fiesta targets through Social Media would rather connect with friends through Social Media than drive to visit them in person. This begs the question of whether the gains in marketing efficacy offered by Social Media outweigh the obsolescent effect Social Media has on vehicles as a product. I'm thinking it will since the obsolescent effect will be mitigated by the fact that the best part of visiting friends when you are the age of the target demo is getting out of your parents house which will most likely still require a car. Any thoughts???
Here is a really interesting (and scary) article about a business that figured out how harassing its customers could lead to higher profits (and it is all driven by social media). Essentially, what one guy figured out, is that negative reviews have two effects on his business: First, they reduce sales a bit, since people who find the negative reviews are less likely to shop at his online store. However, they also have a positive effect: the more people complain about his store, and link back to it, the higher it appears on the Google rankings. Sadly, the second effect is larger than the first, so this business owner purposely harasses some of his customers (to an unimaginable degree) purely to get them to write negative reviews.
A couple of weeks ago we discussed ethics in class, and how it is important to consider more than just profits when making business decisions. Clearly this guy skipped his class on ethics. I hope you guys remember that class when you rejoin the business world.
Seeing Malcolm's earlier post, "Rady Social Media Marketing: Social Payment," inspired me to actually try the idea out. I downloaded the book by the developer of the "Pay with a Tweet" app, amusingly entitled "Oh My God What Happened And What Should I Do" - unsurprisingly, the price was a tweet. It's actually not a bad book. I was going to blog about it on my personal blog, but since I'm going through a massive PHP upgrade right now that will probably take all weekend, I want to share a particular page I really liked called "Live the Media." It boils down to this well-trod point: there are 1001 free tools out there for you to experiment with. If you want to understand social media, you can't ask someone to do it for you, you have to try things yourself.
This point is probably obvious. Nevertheless, I understand a lot more about Twitter than I did 8 weeks ago. I think one of our unfortunate tendencies is to dismiss social media as "a waste of time." But think back to your shop class, when you made your first little wooden puzzle or doodad or whatever. That puzzle/doodad was, of course, entirely worthless and is probably now sawdust. But in making it, you learned how to use a bandsaw. So was the process of making the puzzle/doodad a waste of time just because the end product didn't add any value to your life? For a lot of us in this class, I think this is a metaphor worth considering.
Luxury auto manufacturer Porsche will be celebrating its one millionth Facebook fan by carving the names of fans who sign up through the social network onto a special (and probably very unattractive) Porsche model to be displayed in the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, Germany.
Porsche has some pretty intense online outreach (A Porsche Family Tree! A Porsche Google Chrome theme!), but for most people (myself included) “Liking” that Porsche on Facebook is the closest we’re going to get to a Porsche in real life.
So here’s to hoping the company has an even better surprise planned for its relatively modest 3,305 Twitter followers.
