Being a little Twitter obsessed here, we couldn’t help but notice that Seesmic released the brand-new Seesmic Look yesterday. Touted as featuring extensive upgrades to the UI, the product is aimed at making social media adoption easier for consumers. As founder Loic Le Meur put it, “We were challenged to reach out to an untapped market – a mainstream audience not familiar with Twitter – [...] (think “Mom” or “Dad”), that heard of Twitter but were never interested, or never had the opportunity to have a positive and friendly experience.”
So how’d they do? We went to Twitter to find out.
VoxTrot Opinion Breakdown of Twitter Conversation
Overall reaction was fairly positive, with about 60% of Tweets praising the design, although a small portion of these (9% of total) felt that the product still lacked key functionality. This mirrored about the feelings of about another quarter of Tweeters who were generally unimpressed or were sticking with arch-rival Tweetdeck. Some users didn’t have a choice in staying put; Seesmic Look isn’t available on Macs, as about 11% of the conversation pointed out.
Seesmic’s done a great job with the release and we’re looking forward to Tweetdeck’s response over the next few months. In the meantime, we’re battening down the social media hatches for Apple’s tablet mystery product reveal next week.
The good folks over at 100 Interviews posted this video shot last month at SXSW — I shared some thoughts about Crimson Hexagon and our unique approach to finding meaning in social media.
They’ve also captured a terrific selection of internet personalities from Chris Brogan (whose Inbound Marketing Summit we’re speaking at later this month) and Gary Vaynerchuk. Check out the site to find bite-sized discussion on everything from SXSW impressions to the future of search.
Hyundai’s been making a big splash recently. This summer it become the world’s 5th largest automaker. Early this month, the company announced the innovative sales promotion of allowing buyers to return their cars if they lose their jobs. And this week, Consumer reports crowned Hyundai’s new entrant into the upscale sedan segment, the Genesis, as their top rated luxury car.
The engineering achievement alone, taking out Toyota’s Lexus as CR’s choice for a lux-ride, is worthy of some major bragging by Hyundai. Somehow, the company’s neglected to mention it on either their blog or Twitter feed.
The reason? They have neither.
Hyundai’s brand could certainly use the help from social media. The Korean manufacturer, previously known for its low-cost sedans, is trying to break into the crowded upscale market at a difficult time. Its competitors have established separate high-end marks with differentiated brands; Toyota has Lexus, Honda/Acura, VW/Audi, Ford/Lincoln (sort of), etc. Shunning convention, and the associated costs of establishing a new brand, Hyundai has launched the acclaimed Genesis under its own name. However, Hyundai’s core brand attribute of value for money may put it at disadvantage against BMW’s performance image or Audi’s aura of refinement.
To convince potential customers that the $36k Genesis is every bit as good as its $45K+ rivals, the company will need more than great reviews and an upcoming Superbowl commercial. Hyundai needs to persuade the public to think of the brand in an entirely new light and manage complex messaging of its luxury vs lower-end products.
Rivals have already established themselves in the social media space. GM has managed its FastLane blog since 2005, with peeks at product development and features from executives. Toyota has been using its Twitter feed to direct users to its blog and combat rumors that it failed to donate to post-9/11 charities. Ford was recently dubbed the ‘Anti-Motrin’ for its effectiveness in utilizing social media to diffuse backlash from legal action against a fan site.
To be sure, Hyundai’s not the last one in the pool. Notably, Honda and Mercedes don’t maintain an official (English-language) social media presence. Eventually they’ll get there, but in the meantime they have an established upmarket brand that Hyundai lacks or, in Honda’s case, a rabid community of enthusiasts. Hyundai will need to build and maintain its grassroots network of evangelists if its going to reap the full benefits of its new ‘halo car.’ A Genesis widget, published back in October, is a positive first step but only underscores the long road to real commitment to the medium.
Hyundai’s newest car has shown it now has the engineering skills and marketing muscle to rattle the established players; it’s time for it to develop the social-media savvy needed to supercharge its brand.
Came across Twitchboard on today’s ReadWriteWeb post on The Rise of Cloud Agents. Twitchboard goes after the problem many web users are encountering: Humans just don’t scale. You sign up for a bunch of online services (my toolbar is littered with them) and then you have to remember you have them, use them, and, in an ideal world, integrate them.
Services like Ping.fm do a terrific job helping you publish across multiple platforms, like updating your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn statuses all at once. But Twitchboard takes it a level further by automating the interactions of these social web services.
More from ReadWriteWeb:
Blogger Chris Arkenberg says Twitchboard is a part of the “emerging class of cloud agents.” These cloud agents, as he describes them, will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. He envisions that soon we’ll have many of these cloud agents, swarming around us, working on our behalf, helping to parse the data flowing in and providing us with the information that we need, separated from the noise.
The Apple app store not too long ago passed 300 million downloads, and yesterday we learned that even the lowly iFart is earning over $10,000 every day. The problem is not that there too few useful or amusing applications, but how to manage all the resulting data and their interactions. I, for one, welcome our new cloud agent overlords.
Less than 6 weeks ago, Pepsi was grabbing attention in the blogosphere with leaks of their new branding. The company followed up by sending the new cans to 25 of the blogging elite and soliciting feedback on Friendfeed. Reaction to both the logo and the campaign was somewhatmixed, but Pepsi deserves credit for adopting a direct and fresh style to generate buzz beyond the tired milieu of the insider blog or vanilla social network presence.
The company’s in the spotlight once again after publishing ads for Pepsi Max in a German magazine featuring a black-humor take on the suicide of a personified calorie. The (suspiciously crisp) images of the ads have been inciting a fiery backlash centered around the fact that most people don’t find suicide all that funny (surprise!). Recall GM’s 2007 Superbowl spot, which showed an assembly robot throwing itself off a bridge, was withdrawn amid public criticism. Pepsi’s already pulled the ad but the question remains: what the devil are they up to?
Pepsi is a Fortune 100 company with a colossal marketing engine. Having bought twospots in last year’s Superbowl, they surely were aware of GM’s snafu. For me to believe that their publishing a highly controversial advertisement in a single magazine in Düsseldorf is some kind of fluke requires excessive suspension of disbelief. Yet, by publishing on such a small scale and then quickly retracting, Pepsi has achieved the corporate equivalent of plausible deniability.
Normally this type of ‘gaffe’ is a challenge to a brand’s reputation. I think there are still a few dents in the Kevlar over at Motrin marketing, and they were making light of baby slings, not suicide. But what’s left to criticize Pepsi® for? The ads have been withdrawn, there’s no real physical evidence to speak of, and the ads’ short reach diminishes perceived accountability. I’ve noticed that while many commenters lambaste the subject matter, there is surprisingly little bile toward Pepsi for choosing to employ it.
So Pepsi has managed once again to initiate massive word of mouth interest in their brand at nearly zero cost. They’re clearly gained a tolerance for risk and I can’t wait to see what’s next in Pepsi’s special ops marketing campaign. I just wonder in their quest to stir up buzz they’ll end up poking the beehive just a little too hard.
Joel Spolsky writes an excellent post on anecdote, pointing out how compelling vignettes are often strung together and used to support conclusions. As a marketer I’m a big believer in the power of the story, but the oft-quoted “the plural of anecdote is not data” (long, indeterminate attribution here) definitely applies to brand and opinion monitoring. The most obvious problem is that anecdotes are not systematically selected; they’re selected as supporting points while other, conflicting anecdotes are inadvertently or deliberately ignored.
For those selling opinion monitoring into the large organizations, it’s a balancing act between providing the core, statistically valid analysis of the data, while “storytelling” with enough of the vivid anecdote for the client to hear the customer’s voice and engage. While opinion percentages are revelatory, an incident like Motrin Moms (summary from AdAge) tends to speed the adoption cycle dramatically.
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Came across 
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