Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Insta-Market-Gramming

As you may know, I've been following a lot of interesting tidbits about how social websites make money off of their users and how companies are using social media to their benefit.

One kind of interesting wrinkle in this has been corporations finding people who are very active in social media and having them become sort of brand ambassadors. Not by wearing their logo, but by giving "insider access" to these people and having them use their social media presence and prowess to show a new side of the company. I wrote about this how this was done for the US Open last summer.

I think this is a pretty cool way for companies to provide unique access and reward people who really love their products or to take nascent individual talent and apply it to their brand.

Well, Business Insider has written an article about 15 Instagrammers who have taken their talents and converted them into some pretty cool work for big companies. The companies range from Nike and Volvo to Johnnie Walker and Samsung. (The article is a bit difficult to follow to be honest since it mixes photos of the individuals with photos they've Instagrammed for the companies)

I see this not just as corporations taking advantage of a potential new marketing stream, I see it as recognition of the way in which media itself has changed to a much more two-way, grassroots thing. Just like the internet has allowed people to connect in so many different ways, I think companies across the world have recognized that their marketing and connections with the customers needs to change.


Friday, March 22, 2013

Is Facebook following you to the supermarket?

Are you paying attention to ads
like these on Facebook?
I've been trying to get back to documenting some of my thoughts and one of the things I keep coming back to is about the engagement that users have on social media sites is turned into something more for the company itself. I wrote before about how Facebook is looking to monetize user engagement on their site and how Facebook gets "mid funnel" users to act on things they see on the site

I read a really interesting article by Farhad Manjoo about the very structured analysis Facebook has done to determine how users are actually responding to ads they see on the site. They may not be clicking the ads, but they seem to definitely making buying decisions based on the ads they see on Facebook? Don't believe me? Well, read the article to learn more:


Facebook Followed You to the Supermarket: Even if you never click on Facebook ads, they are making you buy things.


What do you think? Do you pay much attention to the ads? Even if you don't pay attention, do you at least notice them?