You can’t have an event without a Twitter presence. Nothing makes a crowd feel more connected and active than when they can communicate with each other around a common activity. Twitter helps bring random people together at an event through the use of a dedicated hashtag. A successful Twitter campaign can help increase exposure and will leave people talking long after the event is over. With so many events taking place every year, we wanted to create a guide for creating a successful Twitter campaign to make your next event stand out.
Create an account – After all, you can’t create an effective Twitter campaign without a focal point. Create an account and customize it as much as possible. Refer to our SEO and Twitter post to understand how to maximize your Twitter profile.
Establish a hashtag – It’s important to establish a hashtag early. The sooner a hashtag is created, the easier it will be for people talking about the event to start associating themselves with it. We recommend a short four or five character hashtag. The world’s largest comic book convention, San Diego ComiCon, attracts around 400,000 people over a weekend. To keep everyone informed about events and unite the attendees, they use the hashtag #SDCC.
Tweet early and often – Nothing gets people more excited about an event then announcing activities, celebrities attending and special giveaways. It’s good to start tweeting at least 2-3 months before your event. This will allow you to build an audience, tweet teaser announcements and get the hashtag in circulation.
Offline matters – Odds are the first exposure a person will have to an event will be through a printed flyer or newspaper ad. Just like you would put your event’s URL in the advertisement, you should add your Twitter hashtag as well.
Add it to your website – This may seem obvious, but so often events forget to link their Twitter account from their website and even more often never mention the hashtag associated with the event. People are looking for this information, and it can be just as important as directions and ticket prices. After people get the directions and buy the tickets, they want to find out who else will be attending. Having the hashtag on the website will enable attendees to communicate more easily with each other and stay informed.
Live stream from event – Let people know what they missed and give them a reason to attend next year by giving up to the minute Tweets about what’s happening.
Post tweet – After the event is over, keep the good feelings alive by continuing to tweet. Keep your audience informed about changes, new guests and other news associated with your event throughout the year. The more active you are on your Twitter account, the easier it will be to activate people the next time your event rolls around.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.
This American Days, The Duffy Agency is giving you the chance to take home Steve Jobs’ new baby – the one and only iPad.
But what on Earth is American Days, you ask? It’s a three day event in Malmö, Sweden over the 4th of July weekend. The event celebrates some of America’s major cultural contributions including country music performances, Lindy Hop and Swing dancing, and classic muscle car exhibitions. But if you can’t make the event, sadly this contest does not apply to you.
If you can, the rules for entering the contest are simple:
1. Take a picture! Capture an image that expresses what you think of America. The photo must be taken at Jägersro Trav & Galoppbana during American Days, beginning July 2nd at 5 PM and ending July 4th at 5 PM. Only one entry per user.
2. Upload it! “Like” The Duffy Agency’s Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/theduffyagency. Then simply post your photo on the Wall. You have until midnight on Tuesday, July 6th to enter.
3. Get the most “likes”! The photo with the most “likes” will be declared the winner. So make it compelling and get everyone to vote for you before Friday, July 9th at midnight! The winner will be announced the following Monday.
You can learn more about the contest by following the link above to the The Duffy Agency fan page.
There has never been a better time for marketers to directly influence a buyer’s decision. Through mobile apps, businesses can build brand loyalty and add value to the user experience. Smart marketers are now adding simple location-based services to their toolbox.
Location-based apps are the hottest thing going right now. Leading the pack is Foursquare. Foursquare isn’t the first location-based app on the market, nor is it the biggest, but what it does have going for it is that it’s the current media darling. The star of this year’s SXSW, this app is proving it’s not just for letting people know where you like to eat and shop.
The system is simple: you check-in to a location, earn badges for multiple check-ins and score points which, in some instances, can lead to real-world rewards from retailers. Local restaurants and bars have started offering free drinks, appetizers and discounts to the person that checked in the most to their establishment. Now you’re seeing the likes of Bravo, Virgin Airlines and Harvard University taking advantage of app to further reward customers. We searched the web to find examples of companies using this simple app in ingenious ways and found four great examples.
Harvard University has teamed up with Foursquare to create a campus-based game that rewards students who check in to locations with badges and helpful bits of information. The idea is to encourage students to connect with others and explore more of the campus. It’s a brilliant way for freshmen to learn about the university and connect with more people.
During New York Fashion Week, fashion designer Marc Jacobs created a “Fashion Victim” badge. It allowed customers during the week to check-in at any Marc Jacobs store to unlock the badge. Four people who unlocked the badge in New York received passes to attend the Marc Jacobs fashion show.
Shoe phenom Jimmy Choo has established a treasure hunt around London using Foursquare. A pair of Jimmy Choo trainers check-in at a location somewhere in the city and whomever checks-in and says, “I’ve been following you” to the pair of trainers before they leave the location will win a pair of Jimmy Choo training shoes. People can track the trainers through their Foursquare user page and their Twitter profile.
Desperate to stay relevant, The Wall Street Journalhas created special badges that provide interesting facts about New York City and reviews of local business and movies. It’s always great when a print giant like the WSJ embraces new media instead of fighting it like so many other print outlets.
Hopefully you now feel inspired to craft a location-based campaign of your own. Feel free to share any bright ideas.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.
You may be out-ranked, but you can still out-traffic the competition
You pour blood sweat and tears into SEO, clawing your way to the top spot on Google, triumphing over adversity like Rocky climbing stair after stair in Philadelphia. And you still don’t get the clicks.
Like your mother always told you, winning isn’t everything. Being in the top spot in search rankings doesn’t guarantee people will be impressed enough to click your link. It’s likely enough they’ll take a look at the few entries below you and go elsewhere. That’s why your click-through rate (CTR) is the real measure of your SEO success.
Getting that high CTR is all about your meta tag descriptions. These are often neglected since search engines have been ignoring them in their rankings for many, many years. Which doesn’t make much sense as, whether it’s organic search traffic or pay per click, the meta tag is where you pitch your website to surfers, telling them what they’ll find on your page and why it’s worth their time.
Follow the subtle arrow to find the meta tag
But hey, you’ve got the first spot, so you’ll still get most of the traffic right? Actually, you could be missing out on 80% of it. Traffic can vary between 20%-60% of clicks with a brilliant vs. rubbish meta tag description. If we’re talking about tens of thousands of searches, or more, that’s one heck of a lot of missed visits.
Let’s look at an example. Here are the top 5 search results for “international ad agency.” Which one would you click on?
I would go for the second or third entries and skip the other ones entirely since their meta tag descriptions are far from convincing.
Now that you know how important the meta tags are, here are some tips for writing them:
Keep it within 150 letters as that’s all Google will show
Run searches for your keywords and take a look at what competing sites have written to get a better idea of how to make your tags stand out
Be convincing without being misleading - a good CTR doesn’t mean anything if you have a sky high bounce rate
Think of them as ads for your website
One last thought to mull over as you ponder how to handle your meta tags – if you don’t write them yourself, you may be in for some character assassination at the hands of Google. Just look what kind of spin the meta tag below put on an innocent writer, who in the context of the article is actually held in high esteem. Not so much on Google.
The lowdown on Twitter’s new geolocation service and what it can do for you
Long whispered about, Twitter has unveiled its entry into location based services: Twitter Places. In this new geolocation foray, you will be able to tag tweets with the location you happen to be in (much like check-ins on Foursquare and Gowalla) thus creating a Twitter Place. Users can click on said Place and see all the other recent tweets from that location in one stream.
Places is a great addition to Twitter’s functionality, and was an inevitability given the skyrocketing popularity of location based services. And rightly so, they create lots of fun, useful applications. Here are five new possibilities Places has created for Twitter:
1. Follow events in real time from anywhere Say you’re trying to follow the latest news from some major event, like a conference, festival or the World Cup. What you really want is to get updates from people on the ground, not the worldwide chatter flooding hashtags and search words. Twitter Places will make listening only to the people at the event possible for the first time by following a stream of tweets from only that location, whether it be a stadium, conference hall or street corner. This also adds a new level of engagement for anyone organizing events, as they can promote both remote and on location interaction through Places.
2. Reward programs for “check-ins” This was already happening with the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla (which are integrated with Places), but now it’s possible through Twitter itself – the much more popular and market saturated mobile service. This means a company or organization can incentivize Twitter users to visit and tweet from their Twitter Place by rewarding them just for participating, or get creative with scavenger hunts and competitions.
3. Get recommendations on the spot Having trouble deciding what to order off the menu at a new restaurant? Or what shoes to buy at the mall? Or whether you should get a 6 shot iced venti with 2/3 half-caf and 2 1/2 pump sugar-free cinnamon dolce, or a 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel? Check out what other visitors to your location have had to say and you might find some golden advice.
4. Twitter apps move into the geolocation dimension Third party apps have always been a fundamental part of Twitter and its success, so you can expect a wave of new apps utilizing Places in creative ways. This makes the timing of Places’ release interesting from a business standpoint, as Twitter announced just a few weeks ago that they will start taking a cut of the profits from 3rd parties. So if you’re a company looking to cash in on Twitter’s new API, Twitter might come knocking, wanting to cash in on your profits.
5. A new level of gauging user sentiment Analyzing Twitter has been unearthing some brilliant insights into people’s attitudes and behavior. Places should allow for even more specific and refined research, which is good news for online savvy businesses, as well as consumers who have yet another way to talk back to companies and give them their two cents.
Those were just some of my initial thoughts. I’d love to hear any ideas you have for using Twitter Places, leave a comment if you have any epiphanies.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
The very best social media tools for getting the most out of the 2010 World Cup
When the World Cup rolled into Germany in 2006, YouTube was in its infancy, the iPhone didn’t exist and no one knew what a Twitter was. Things have changed a bit these past few years.
Starting today, we will witness the crashing together of two behemoths: the world’s grandest sporting event and the world’s vast social networks. Prepare to have your Facebook, Twitter and every other kind of feed experience a noticeable shift in focus for the next three weeks as every football fan gets the chance to become a global sports reporter without leaving their living room.
There are loads of options for following the 64 games in painstaking detail, but we’ve sorted through them all and put together the top tools that deliver everything you need.
There are lots of great apps dedicated to the World Cup, but ESPN’s is the cream of the crop and the only one you really need. You’ve got the full schedule, you can select which teams you want to follow to stay updated on breaking news, and stats and bios of every player for every team. You can even get a history lesson in the major events of tournaments past and interact with other fans by posting comments from within the app. If you’re willing to dole out $8, you gain access to radio broadcasts of every game, letting you follow matches no matter what you’re pretending to do at work. And to think a few years ago I was happy with cutting tournament brackets out of the newspaper.
Sure you can try to follow cluttered, hectic hashtags (like #wc2010 or #worldcup), but Twitter has done you a favor and created a World Cup headquarters themselves. They’ve done a great job of it, too. On the homepage, you’ve got a flow of the top tweets, which is superior to hashtags because it doesn’t just pull in the latest World Cup tweets, but uses an algorithm to select the most interesting ones. You can also see what matches are coming up and jump to a page for tweets about each particular game where you can easily follow and join in the banter. On the flip slide, the constant flow of information on Twitter is guaranteed to contain spoilers, so if you’re recording games to watch later, it’s probably best to abandon Twitter for a while.
Visa has put together a great solution for following your favorite teams via Facebook. When you choose to follow teams and matches, you can invite friends to an event page where your customized group shares comments and media. And of course you’ve got the full day-by-day schedule with live updates, as well as a video of the “worldwide goal cheer.” As an expat the event function is particularly appealing, as it’s a great way for me to root for the (former) home team with friends despite the distance.
When they aren’t busy filing ridiculous lawsuits, FIFA (sponsored by McDonalds) is running one of the best fantasy tournaments. You’ve got 140 credits in the bank and all the players in the tournament to choose from. Put your squad together and compete for your piece of the glory.
Do a little competing of your own with this fun football trivia app. In a creative twist on the regular old trivia contest, with this app you take the role of a team on the road to World Cup glory, advancing as you get questions right. It’s the perfect way to overcome halftime boredom and learn a thing or two about the tournament at the same time.
If you’ve got any other favorites that you’re horrified I missed, give a shout below.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
We are emotional creatures. Like it or not, raw emotion affects how we judge things intellectually. Businesses and admen have known and played on this since well before the days of Don Draper. With social media, our emotions are played on in a whole different way when it comes to dealing with corporate image issues. Letting people vent their spleen through channels like Twitter to a large degree defuses people’s anger and bitterness. After all, haven’t you ever been upset and felt better just by talking about the problem? The problem doesn’t go anywhere, but the talking lets off most of the steam.
I’ve been seeing this happen with British Petroleum (BP) on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably heard of BPGlobalPR. Nope, that isn’t BP’s official PR presence on Twitter, it’s a satirical account started by one enterprising comedian shortly after the gushing oil pipeline catastrophe struck.
The Tweeter calls himself Terry and has chosen to remain anonymous despite being contacted by major news outlets who want the inside scoop on how this rogue account has chalked up 140,000 followers. Compare that to the just 12,000 of the real BP account, which actually does provide regular informative updates on the crisis. If you add up the retweets and news stories, the scathing tweets by the fake BP representative have reached millions of people eager to point and laugh at the oil giant.
Though secretive about his identity, the LA Times did get a quote from “Terry,” all the while refusing to break character, about why he’s doing this: "Companies screw up and then they hire folks like me to come in to make it look like they're doing something while they figure out how to make money again," the fake public relations representative wrote. "BP is doing everything we can to save our reputation and hopefully salvage some oil out of all this. We're making a ton of shirts and commercials about how we care, and I cleaned an ugly bird yesterday." For more great quotes, check out the interview with “Terry” on ABC News (never mind the scary monster voice).
Yes, it is an inspiring case of how social media lets a regular Joe go toe-to-toe with a mega-corporation. It’s hardly surprising that satire is successful on Twitter, it’s easier to pack a lot of sting into 140 characters than it is genuine dialogue or detailed explanation. But despite it being a fitting way to stick it to the man, BP may be the one benefiting the most from this Twitter parody. Don’t you feel less angry and anxious to do something after having a laugh at the jokes? It is still an infuriating travesty, but the heated malice toward BP is somewhat tempered, they become more bumbling than evil. BP could well have filed a complaint with Twitter, but they must have realized that would only create more negative PR and instead let people blow off steam. It may be the one good call BP has made in all of this.
Regardless of whether it’s disarming us or not (on the plus side, Terry is selling oil spill T-shirts and giving the proceeds to charity), some of the tweets are just great jokes. Here are my 5 favorite tweets from the rogue BP Twitter account so far:
What effect do you see the mock BP Twitter account having? Let us know below.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
Recent efforts show that marketing success with this new tech is well within reach
The challenge of using new technology in marketing is numbing yourself to the novelty of it and finding a genuinely good idea. And though most fail, a few succeed brilliantly. We’ve been looking to use augmented reality in an upcoming project and did some research to see what has already been done. What we found were some amazing applications that solve the target’s needs, while wowing them with shiny things at the same time.
Here are the best campaigns we’ve come across and why they were a success. Maybe they’ll inspire you to come up with some brilliant applications of your own that you didn’t even realize were possible.
Slap a virtual watch on your wrist So you’re thinking of dropping a chunk of change on a new watch, but not quite convinced it will look as dashing on your wrist as you imagine. Why not try on a digital model first? Tissot is betting you’ll want to take their new range for a test drive. It starts with a paper watch you cut out from their magazine ads (you can also download it from the site). You put the paper watch around your wrist, go to the Tissot site to download the software and hold it up to your webcam. You then see a 3D model wrapped around your wrist. You can cycle through the new range and even test out some the watches’ features. It’s extremely cool, has drawn loads of media attention and fills the need of potential buyers to try out a watch before buying beautifully.
The dude is unsettlingly devoid of emotion, but the watch is nifty
Take a BMW for a spin on your desktop (the wooden one) They could have just gone with creating a nifty 3D pop-up model (like Mini did), but for the Z4, BMW kicked it up a notch and created art. Or rather, they let you create art. Using a simple printout, a Z4 pops onto your desk and you can drive it around, leaving colorful tire tracks in your wake. When your street art is complete, you can save and share it via YouTube or Facebook with one click, thus expanding the campaign's footprint and making it spread organically simply by virtue of being fun and drawing fans more intimately into the BMW experience.
Such pretty donuts. Mmmmm....donuts.
Explore the 3D world on your tongue Since augmented reality springs to life just by using a simple pattern, you can slip it into almost anything. Even the tongue of your shoe. Adidas has created a 3D city (complete with the Death Star) that springs to life when you go to their website and hold the shoe up to your webcam. You can then navigate the city and play games using the shoe as a controller. It’s pretty dang cool and adds a unique selling point for their sneakers in an overcrowded market. The brilliance of the idea is that it adds a whole new digital dimension into the product itself, instead of creating a one-off gimmick that’s glanced at and forgotten. This way, the 3D world is always on the tip of your tongue. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
3D city! Storm troopers! Lasers! Overstimulation!
Enroll in alien police academy The film District 9 used a highly interactive augmented reality app to spread awareness and deepen fans’ experience of the sci-fi world. By visiting the website for Multi National United, the fictional government organization in charge of policing Earth’s alien inhabitants, you can go through an augmented reality training simulation on how to deal with day-to-day tasks, like non-human arrest and shooting at monsters. The campaign is a clever take on the film world and adds depth to the story, increasing viewers immersion and extending engagement beyond the cinema.
Working for the man is fun when they give you a machine gun.
Get your own mud soccer cheerleader In the most ambitious campaign I came across, UK brand Dairy Crest have set up an elaborate mud soccer contest. In order to win a slot for you and 5 friends in the Frijj Swamp Soccer World Cup 2010, complete with your own Swamp Soccerettes cheering your team on, users hold up a Frijj bottle in front of their webcam to enter a real-time environment. Oh, and a swamp soccerette crawls out of the bottle and does a cheer for you. The campaign cleverly capitalizes on the World Cup fever among its target and encourages them to get involved in a footie tournament of their own while their blood is boiling for some action. Plus, it’s so quirky you can’t resist seeking out more info to see if it’s real.
The connection between mud and milk is left mysteriously unsaid
Inspired yet? If so, check out this article for some great practical tips on creating an augmented reality campaign before you get started. And if you’ve seen any other great augmented reality campaigns, share them in the comments section below.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
We have officially crossed over into adulthood (well, adolescence anyway) with our blog post total hitting triple digits with this very post.
Our first 100 posts have been a constant learning experience. Reflecting back on our ups and downs, hindsight reveals what has and hasn’t worked for us in connecting with web surfers.
Here are 5 blogging tips for creating relevant content and getting people to read it.
Exploit unexpected traffic sources We’ve had a couple of surprisingly effective sources that almost always give us a slew of hits with each post. One of these is StumbleUpon, which by itself has delivered hundreds of hits within a few hours of publishing posts. We’re still not sure why some posts take off while others fizzle, but consistently working with StumbleUpon has paid off, and we’ve had a similar experience with Reddit. We’ve also gotten consistent search engine traffic from unexpected keywords. Track closely where readers are coming from and play up what’s working.
Stay on top of current events This is pretty obvious, but don’t underestimate just how much traffic trending topics can generate. Your blog’s focus may not be on breaking news (ours isn’t), but big things will happen every now and then in your field and it’s a good idea to capitalize on them. Some of our biggest traffic days were thanks to quick responses to breaking events (like the launch of Apple’s iPad) thus adding to our overall reader base. Just keep in mind how short the window is on these topics – it may only be a day or two. The internet has a very short attention span.
Don’t neglect SEO for your blog With their frequently updated content and high flexibility, blogs are SEO gold mines. You can easily write posts on the fly about hot topics that are generating hoards of searches, you have a lot of great content to share with others to get in-links and have an ideal place to create in-links to your other web properties or sites you want to share link power with. All theses things can be difficult to manage with your main website, especially if its content is pretty locked in place. If you don’t have a blog, SEO is a great reason to start one.
Make yourself useful Advice lists have been a big hit for us. Sure, breaking news and offering opinions on topics our readers care about has gotten surges of traffic, but those posts haven’t had the engagement or consistent performance of our specific advice pieces. A mixture of both is ideal as you don’t want to get monotonous, but always bear in mind people have limited time to surf blogs and will only stop to read something they know will give them something back for their time. Be highly critical in your editorial process.
Create a schedule and stick to it The frequency of your posts is vital for both search engine ranking and keeping your blog top of mind in readers. It may seem against the nature of a blog to create a rigid structure for posting, but for all you busy bees it’s probably the only realistic way to make sure you’ve got content going up on a regular basis over the long term. We couldn’t have kept on as consistently as we have without giving ourselves hard deadlines.
Check back to bask in the wisdom we’ve gained in our 1,000th post special. Shouldn’t take too long. To commemorate our 100 post landmark, here’s a list of our 5 most popular articles so far. Check out the good stuff you may have missed.
Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.
