Broadstreet Blog

Diet Coke turns 30 this year, and everybody is talking about it!

On July 29th the brand launched an excellent marketing campaign, using a FREE marketing tool, twitter, to get its loyal customers fighting for a chance to win free Diet Coke for a year.

A competition via @DietCokeUS asked consumers and fans to tweet the love through birthday wishes, haikus, finishing sentences, etc. and hashtag it #DietCokeBday. The winners received a year’s supply of Diet Coke and a surprise 30 second party with the DC Crew.

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I've had my iMac for probably 3 years now, and I have to say I'm still not really a "Mac Person" like so many are.  I love how reliable it is, but a lot of things annoy me about it-- why can't I make a window larger by dragging the top left corner? , for example. 

And so my screen saver is whatever I selected the first time I setup my Mac.  It scans all the photos on my computer and displays them as a slideshow, and it's always fun to watch it, but occasionally I see a photo I would like find and email or post on Facebook.  I don't have a good way to find a photo like that. 

One way I do that, though, is to use the iPhoto "Faces" feature, which lets you tag photos (like you do on Facebook), and then it goes out and tries to find photos of that same person.    Here's what it looks like on the Faces home page:

 

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Happy 4th of July to everyone.  I'm going to try to consistently blog.   It takes discipline of which I have very little.  I've been meaning for some time to try switching to Bing.  Why?  Because some people say it's better and I've heard some interesting things.

The thing I heard about that I like was showing me organic search results with a right sidebar that shows what my friends have said about the topic recently.  When I started using Bing, it had an animation come up and tell me about that right sidebar, but then it turned it off.  So I needed to learn how to turn it back on.

I googled, "Why is Bing better than Google", and within a click or two I saw an ad or a link for "Google Graveyard" which turned out to be anti-Google propoganda put out by Microsoft

How did I so quickly get directed to TNW (The Next Web).  It was a cute, friendly blog about a person who built a "Graveyard of cancelled Google products by a helpful Microsoft employee."   All good fun, I'm sure.

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So you want to create your own background image for your twitter account, but don’t know where to start. Been there!

What’s the right size? Should it be a gradient, a photo, a logo, etc.? Should it have words? How do you avoid it looking perfect on a small screen, but screwed up on big screen, or vice versa?

Well we have a few helpful tips for you based on our experience!

 

1) Setting up the main background

I was lead to believe that the image should be 2560 x 1600 (about 35 x 22 inches).. WAY too big!  Then I read somewhere that recommended about 14.5 x 11 inches, still not right! After making my own measurements based on the inaccuracy of the first images, I came to the conclusion:

Perfect image size: 1700 x 900

That’s about 24” wide by 12” tall. It gives enough breathing room for large-screen monitors, showing up perfectly on both my large screen pc at home and my small screened MacBook.

We want to keep the main background simple. If you have too much going on, your image is likely to go over 800K and you won’t be able to upload it to Twitter.

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“Will it blend?” is a marketing campaign started in 2004 by BlendTec that Mike Mooney brought to our attention during the Broadstreet Bridges conference. It is “the best case study with viral marketing,” Mooney says.

With a $50 budget, George Wright bought a lab coat and basic necessities to film short youtube videos of BlendTec’s CEO Tom Dickson crushing various objects in their blenders.

“Blenders aren’t cool. Blending crazy stuff is.” – Mike Mooney

It is an amazing story of how a business can utilize the web as an inexpensive, easy and successful marketing tool. Within 5 days Mooneys says BlendTec had 6,000,000 views on youtube. Today they have 188,000,000 views of the video series and their sales increased by 1,000%.

Did you get that? BlendTec’s sales have increased by 1,000%.

These industrial blenders are now costing from $300-$400.

When it comes to viral marketing, you have to use imagination, creativity, and you have to dream big because the sky’s the limit.

Watch our video from the Broadstreet Bridges conference to hear Mike Mooney talking.

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Following up on a February promise, Facebook has organized page administrators into five different levels of permission.   The five different levels are as follows:

Insights Analyst.  This person can view insights and do nothing else.

Advertiser.  This person can view insights and create ads.

Moderator.  In addition to viewing insights and creating ads, the Moderator can also send messages as the page and respond/delete comments.

Content Creator.  This person has all the power of a Moderator and can also create posts as the page, edit the page and add applications.

Manager.  This person can do all of the above and can manage admin roles.

Note:  All admins start out as managers by default.  After that, roles can be assigned and power limited.

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I'll be teaching a session of "Hello Drupal" for the Open IT Lab at IT-Ology in Columbia, next Saturday, March 17, 2012, 9:30 - noon.     If you've never been to IT-Ology, you should definitely check it out.  It is a state of the art high tech training facility. 

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Yesterday I told you that you should get a Google+ page.  I told you I decided my customers need a Google+ page.  They are kicking and screaming, but I am taking them there anyway.

Today, I'll tell you why.

I set up a Google+ page for Dry Clean Delivery Inc. yesterday afternoon, and around 8:00 this morning, I posted a link to them on my personal Google+ page, mentioning their name in my post and linking to their spanking new Google+ page.

By 8:41, a stranger had posted on my comment with a question.

At 12:30 pm, I Googled "dry clean delivery, charlotte." In the search results, Dry Clean Delivery Inc. was the first paid link.  There were two more paid links. 

The very first UNPAID organic search result, was Dry Clean Delivery Inc.

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After great reluctance, I’ve decided that our customers need to get on Google+.   Yes, they are already far too busy.  No, they don’t have time for more social media.  Yet I think it’s crucial they do this.

Google is the #1 search engine.  YouTube is the #2 search engine.  YouTube is owned by Google.   Like it or not, Google will favor itself in searches.  Google+ results have already been indexed faster and higher than other search results.  Also, if you type a + in front of a search word, Google knows that you want to focus on Google+ for your search.  That means finding your Google+ page will be easier for a customer than finding your Face book page.

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QR codes are not seeing the rate of success I expected when they first hit the scene. I'm not surprised to see businesses using them poorly, however I am surprised to see a large group of people who still don't know what a QR code is.

QR codes are basically square images that, when scanned with a smart phone, will take you directly to a web page with information you are seeking at that point. QR codes should be helpful and rewarding to the customer while building brand awareness and revenue for the business.

I have been increasingly frustrated at the amount of QR codes being used improperly. It takes a little time to use a QR code and a person should be rewarded for the effort. Using the QR code takes a few minutes - you have to dig out the phone, slowly focus and take the photo of the code, then wait for your phone to get to the website. When you finally arrive, if the destination is disappointing, you probably won't want to bother with a QR code in the future, thus giving the QR codes a bad rap and tossing the baby out with the bathwater as grandma used to say.

From my experience, here are some good and bad uses of the QR code.

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