The 2009 Engagement Awards!

Starbucks social media team (of only 6) take the Gold.

Starbucks is the number 1 brand at engaging with consumers across social meda. This is according to research carried out by Wetpaint and The Altimeter Group who have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media. The research was small scale - but was based on the world’s 100 most valuable brands – these are brands that are widely acknowledged for setting the standards in marketing as measured by BusinessWeek / Interbrand "Best Global Brands 2008" rankings.

The Wetpaint/Altimeter Group:

"evaluated how well they are engaging their consumers using social media and, even more importantly, how that engagement correlates with their most important financial metrics: revenue and profit".


The Top Ten

From the official report showcasing the full 100 brands - here - you can see a common trend showing how the top placed brands have much larger integrated campaigns across a number of social media channels with Starbucks, Dell and Google all having a presence on 11 different channels.

Personally I am a big fan of Nike and have been very impressed with their use of digital. They have a great Facebook fan page that is updated regularly to 438,285 fans. Their virals have been particularly impressive over the years - you may remember the Kobe Bryant jump over a speeding Aston Martin (3.3m YouTube views).

They also have Nike+, a genius idea where amateur runners can track how far they have run. They can then race against friends or just monitor progress by uploading their data collected through their Nike+ sensor and wrist band. However I still believe there is more to come from Nike, hopefully through competitions aswell as campaigns that encourage higher levels of consumer participation with the brand.

Major brands signing up to CoTweet

Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Microsoft are amongst a host of major brands signing up to 'CoTweet', a new company offering services to manage brands on Twitter.

(image via revolutionmagazine.com)

CoTweet has announced mega brands like Ford, Whole Foods and others has signed up to its CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Programme.

Customers pay $1,500 a month for the programme's service which includes providing analytics of how far Twitter messages are reaching, click-through rates on links and can report on different message types, such as direct messages, replies and mentions, as well as the most active users.

Companies get access to a number of tools as well as an account manager to provide feedback and analysis, product support and training. CoTweet has a partnership with bit.ly, the URL shortening site, to provide analytics to the brands.

Jesse Engle, chief executive of CoTweet, said:

"Companies must monitor their brands, provide customer service and measure the impact of outbound marketing".

CoTweet earlier in the year managed to raise $1.1 million in funding from a number of key investors.

UK chart stars looking for social networking site sponsors

A new website set up to market girl group, The Saturdays new album seeks fashion retailers to sponsor the individual band members (Una, Mollie, Frankie, Vanessa and Rochelle) pages.
Fans will be able to click through the sponsored pages to fashion retailers with transactional sites where they can find clothing that will help them dress in the style of the band.

The social networking site is the first of its kind for record label Polydor and has been designed by digital creative agency Clusta.

Fans sign up and create their own profiles, following this they will be able to add concerts they plan to attend to their calendar and leave comments and reviews. They can also make friends with other fans and upload related content.

The individual band member pages will hold personal diary entries.

Aaron Bogucki, Senior digital campaign manager for Polydor says:

"The girls were already really proactive in providing content for their site and getting involved in social media.... With the success of the first album we wanted to make sure our digital strategy led the launch of the second so we decided to launch a fan networking site".


The article where I sourced this news in MarketingWeek doesn't say how much interaction there will be between the girls and their fans. I have a feeling that the band will post diary entries and fans will comment and interact with fellow fans on the website. Brands, actors (Verne Troyer) and now Popstars have seen social media as an opportunity to form closer relationships with the public/fans.

I believe if this is going to work then Popstars etc. can't just make a half-arsed attempt by just setting up a site and posting content. The most successful sites will be the ones who interact with the fans and make them feel special and valued in doing so. As I said I do not know if The Saturdays are planning on doing this, but if they do then they are more likely to see a far more positive response.

The new album titled 'Wordshaker' will be released on 12th October.

Mercedes allocates half of its UK marketing budget to digital

Mercedes-Benz has announced that it will allocate 50% of its marketing budget to digital media.

Mercedes VP for brand communications, Anders Sundt Jensen, said the dynamics of the UK market and the advanced consumer behaviour in the UK meant the automotive brand was already allocating half of its budget to digital, way ahead of other European countries where the company was far from allocating anywhere near even 40%.

He said the key to success is due to online specialists already based within the company.

“We don’t have normal marketers just doing online ads, or just putting our TV ads online,” Jensen said. “For example, we have a whole department at our headquarters in Germany just doing digital marketing.”

This is certainly a major step forward for digital media as a preferred medium as it currently take only a small piece of the budgeting pie considered to traditional media within most businesses today. Having said that its (digital media) influence is increasing steadily due to the rise of social media and consumers online presence.

It will certainly be exciting to see what sort of ideas and campaigns Mercedes digital department comes up in the next few months whilst having this large budget to work with.

Reformed Burberry to explore social media

Burberry, the famous British luxury fashion brand has announced their plans for a social network website to be available next month. The reason behind the website named artofthetrench.com, is to offer consumers a stronger brand experience. Artofthetrench.com will feature users sending in pictures of themselves wearing the famous Burberry trenchcoats. Burberry currently has over 660,000 fans on Facebook, more than any other luxury brand, and this is seen as an encouraging sign for CEO, Angela Ahrendts.

"These might not even be customers yet. Or they may be a customer for a bottle of fragrance or for eyewear," she said.

"But these are the customers who need the brand experience, who need to feel the brand. That word-of-mouth spreads through their social networks and continues to be a positive conversation [about Burberry] . . . that is so powerful."

Burberry has been working to overcome an image problem in recent years and have made significant steps to do so. The brand has in the past been associated with football hooliganism and 'chavs'. It was forced to dump Kate Moss in 2005 after after the supermodel was pictured allegedly snorting cocaine. However, now Burberry has generated a buzz of real excitement around it leading up to London Fashion Week.

I believe that the social network will have some fairly minimal levels of success. I think that simply asking people to send in pictures of themselves in Burberry clothing is not a strong enough incentive to become actively involved with the website for a meaningful length of time. Also because Burberry has a large number of fans does not necessarily mean that they all own Burberry products. They could just admire their work.

If Burberry can come up with a stronger mixture of content and added incentives then I'm sure they will have greater success with this approach.