While the perception of social media is still of a place where the kids are having all the fun, the big story is actually about what’s happening with the older generations. While the under 30 crowd has plateaued, the over 30s are going hog wild for this social networking thing. The percentage of 30-somethings engaged in social media has doubled since 2007 and nearly tripled among the 40+ and 50+ age groups. Ad Week has the scoop.
Worlds are colliding, George.
Weird news seems to have a habit of coming in bunches. Like our collective brainwaves end up buzzing about the same things all at once without our even knowing it.
Today’s odd topic appears to be, well, um… bras.
Ad Age brought us this nugget of social media/user-generated content about innovative and, dare I say, zany bra maker Uniglo.
And now, CNN, never one to be outdone, is on the trail (Wolf Blitzer is standing outside of a Victoria’s Secret in a suburban mall in Ohio, reporting to you live).
Awesome side-note: A Victoria’s Secret PR flak has given the world this gem of corporate spin:
“We do not put formaldehyde in our bras.”
(more…)
Courtney and I are roaming the halls of the Omaha Hilton looking for lunch at the AMA Brand World conference. Heard some good case studies from Leslie Bradshaw of New Media Strategies, a company that uses brand monitoring to inform and develop new media campaigns. A quick highlight– NMS was promoting War of the Worlds, targeting ladies who love Tom Cruise and show up for any of his movies. In the middle of the campaign he did the sofa-jumping maneuver on Oprah and the ladies who loved him realized he was freaky and started blogging about it. NMS needed to change course asap and realized by monitoring online conversations that sci-fi and special effects lovers didn’t care how crazy Tom was as long as the effects were awesome. They arranged exclusives for some key bloggers with Spielberg, released special footage, etc. etc. The movie posters even changed from featuring Tom to featuring a creepy sci-fi hand holding the globe. The movie still debuted @ #1 and brought in $500 million. Nice.
And now it’s time for over-dressed salad and lukewarm chicken.
Adam Sarner, an analyst with Gartner market research firm, has written an interesting article on social media and the failure many businesses may go through if entering into a social media campaign. Now, normally I like to play devil’s advocate, being from a research background as well; however, I don’t know if I can drink the kool-aid on this one. Have a read and make up your mind.
I’m watching the VP debates and checking in with Twitter to get reactions from my friends and the general Twitter public, and I got an error that said “Twitter is over capacity.” Granted, Twitter is notorious for technical issues. But we all have a voice, and lots of people are using it by micro-blogging about events taking place in real time through this tool. When have you ever been able to gauge reactions of the (relatively) early-adopting public as events are happening? It’s powerful. It’s addictive. And with comments like “I think Palin just winked at me and called me a maverick,” doggone it, it’s just a heck-of-a-lot of fun.
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