SOM Marketingberatung is wishing you a Happy New Year 2010!

© iQoncept - Fotolia.com

© iQoncept - Fotolia.com


We wish you all the best for the new year.
May your wishes come true, your ventures be successful and above all, you and your family stay healthy.
Let’s look forward to the new year as one which not only brings new challenges but also new opportunities.
Let’s use them!

Yours Sincerely

SOM Marketingberatung

and for all you fireworks lovers, here is a special one:

A Business Case for Social Media by Steve Latham

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Entega bringt mich ins Stadion der 05er

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Screenshot der Entega.de

Screenshot der Entega.de

Wer kennt sie nicht die unzähligen Gewinnspiele die im Rahmen von Mircosites, Webspecials und Co. versuchen User für eine Marke zu gewinnen. Ich denke jeder hat schon mal mitgemacht. Während nur wenige wirklich etwas gewinnen, so gewinnt der Veranstalter immer eines: Adressen oder sogenannte Leads. Sehr oft aber werden diese Gewinnspiele von den Usern schlichtweg ignoriert. Woran es liegt? Missverständliche Teilnahmebedingungen, wenig ansprechendes Design, unattraktive Preise, idiotische Gewinnspielfragen, kompliziertes Anmeldeverfahren, zu zeitaufwendige Schritte,… die Liste ist lang. Und an Premiumkunden, deren Zeit eh knapp bemessen ist, kommt man selten ran, zumal diese mit einer CD, einem Handy,… nicht zu ködern sind.
Es besteht also durchaus die Gefahr nur die „gewinnspielgeilen, zahlungsschwachen Kundengruppen“ zu erreichen, was die Leads wiederum entwertet.

Aber wie komme ich eigentlich auf das Thema? In meinem Falle hat mir ein Freund über Facebook einen Link gepostet der zu einem Gewinnspiel von Entega und Mainz 05 führte. Als neuer Hauptsponsor und mein persönlicher Stromanbieter also eine durchaus seriöse Sache. Und noch einmal deutlich attraktiver dadurch, dass mich ein guter Freund darauf aufmerksam gemacht hat und die Aktion gelobt hat. Ein klassicher Fall von Word of Mouth bzw. Empfehlungsmarketing in seiner vertrauenswürdigsten Form: Freunde. In Zeiten digitaler Informationsflut vielleicht sogar der effizienteste Weg der Vermarktung.

Anyways, die Gewinnspielseite sah sympathisch aus, war nett gemacht und übersichtlich. Die Gewinnspielfrage war einfach (vielleicht zu einfach) aber hatte einen Bezug zum Verein. Die Teilnahmebedingungen waren leicht verständlich, es wurden keine unnützen Fragen gestellt und man bekam eine Meldung, dass die Teilnahme erfolgreich war. Der Preis: 2 Freikarten zu einem Mainz 05 Spiel. Das Ergebnis: Eine persönliche Email, dass ich gewonnen habe! Sogar per sms bekam ich direkt von der betreuenden Agentur noch weitere Details – absolut professionelll und serviceorientiert.  Eine vielleicht bleibende Assoziation mit Entega als Stromanbieter? Die Karten lagen heute wie vereinbart zur Abholung bereit, an einer seperaten Kasse ohne großen Andrang. Die Plätze waren in der dritten Reihe, seitlich neben / hinter dem Tor. Was will man mehr. Das Spiel war in Ordnung, Kollege Lehmann aus Stuttgart hat mit seinen Aktionen dem Spiel die Krone aufgesetzt, was aber auch dazu führte, dass es letzlich zu einem Unentschieden gereicht hat und Mainz in der Hinrunde zu Hause ungeschlagen bleibt.

Website des FSV Mainz 05

Website des FSV Mainz 05

Was hat die Aktion gebracht? Nun, da ich bereits Kunde der Entega bin, würde ich es unter Loyalisierung verbuchen. Bisher nehme ich die Entega als sehr sympathischen Vereinssponsor war, und der Gewinn der Karten dürfte das noch verstärkt haben. Mein Freundeskreis weiß nun, dass ich das Spiel gesehen habe, dass die Karten über die Entega kamen, dass Entega Sponsor ist, und dass ich Entega gut finde. What more can you want? Ja, vielleicht, dass der Gewinner darüber auch noch twittert oder in facebook darüber schreibt. Ich jedenfalls habe kein Problem damit:

Danke Entega

Danke Entega

Entega_facebook

Entega sponsert Mainz 05 Karten

Quellen:
www.mainz05.de
www.entega.de

HOW TO: Manage Successful Social Media Promotions

Ben Straley is the CEO of Meteor Solutions, provider of the leading word-of-mouth analytics and optimization platform that enables marketers to measure, manage, and monetize earned media.

With holiday shopping in full swing, social shopping is already making a big impact. Data from Hitwise shows that downstream traffic to the Retail 500 coming from both Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) increased 36% and 15% respectively on Thanksgiving from the previous day. Downstream traffic to retailers grew again on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as many retailers promoted sales through fan pages and tweets.

This data is very encouraging for marketers, but a social media campaign must still be managed correctly for maximum ROI. Here are some tips on how brands can best engage their customers by offering what everyone now looks to social media for – a bargain.
New Strategies to Turn Buzz Into Buy

new strategy imageOther recent research confirms the fact that people are increasingly turning to social networks to get deals on products and services. Razorfish found that the primary drivers of “friending” or “following” a brand were promotions and discounts. Over one-third of social network users and 44 percent of Twitter users engaged with a brand through discount promotions. This is good news for marketers, but the stats also pose challenges to the way marketing programs and advertising budgets will be structured in the future.

Brands have long spent big money on commercials, media placements, direct mail, and more. With most of these methods, there is little way to measure the impact on your bottom line. You either get lucky with a surge in sales after your campaign, or it didn’t work. Either way, success or failure was impossible to measure.

If done right, social marketing is a fantastic way to get the best of all worlds from a campaign – wide-scale and targeted distribution of your offer, for free. But to get it right, marketers have to step lightly. If you’re too pushy with too many promotions, your followers will feel “marketed at” or “spammed.” If you don’t offer good enough deals, your customers may become frustrated and stop following you. After all, they don’t really want to be your friend. They want bargains. Here are some steps for getting social media promotions right.

1. What Are People Saying About Your Brand?

Find out what people are saying about your brand, why they are saying it, and who they are saying it to. You have to do more than just get a vague reading on brand buzz. Track the actual pass-along of your brand’s social content via tweets, blog posts, Facebook postings, etc. to see which content is driving the most sharing on which sites. You can use social media traffic tracking software to do this.

Tracking this word-of-mouth buzz is crucial to formulating the right marketing messages and promotions. You must deliver relevant social deals that resonate with people’s interests.

2. Create a Social Promotion

social imageOnce you figure out what people want using the tracking methods above, go ahead and give it to them. For example, you might find that everyone loved your last 20% promotion – it was shared to hundreds of thousands of people via social sites and email – but that the most frequent negative comment was that shipping costs were too high. In your next promotion, offer free shipping.

Or, you may find that there was a huge surge in Twitter searches, blog comments, and Facebook updates about your brand’s winter boots during a snowstorm. This is a great opportunity to immediately put out a social promotion for 20% off boot purchases for one day only via Twitter, Facebook, and/or your company blog.

Have fun with your social promotions. Unlike paid search ads and other media buys, you don’t have to plan and budget for them. Instead, just try one or two out and see what happens.

3. Did It Work?

Figure out whether your promotion worked, and what bottom line impact it had on sales and profits. Go back to your social media tracking and measurement tool and find out how much your promotion was shared, what increase it caused in traffic to your website, and what direct impact it had on conversion. You might want to compare two different promotions run during a similar time frame to see which worked better and why.

For example, did a 50% Off promotion drive more sharing, visits, or conversions than a Two-For-One? In addition to doing simple “A/B” tests, compare results for promotions like these against the data from your regular marketing analytics platform to see whether your social media promotions are performing better or worse than traditional paid marketing campaigns. Social promotions almost always perform better than paid media ads in terms of conversion, but paid ads may drive a higher volume of traffic to your site.

Lastly, do an ROI analysis of your social media promotions to find out their real impact on bottom line profits.

Conclusion

Social media promotions are here to stay. Make sure you use the social channel to deliver “exclusive” deals that make your friends and followers feel special. They’ll thank you by making purchases.

Article originally published on mashable.com:
HOW TO: Manage Successful Social Media Promotions

Posted using ShareThis

Chateauneuf-du Pape @ ALDI

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Ja da schau her!

Jetzt gibts bei ALDI schon Chateauneuf-du Pape Rotwein!
Und dann noch via Bannerkampagne angepriesen!

Aldi Banner

Aldi Banner


Zwei große Namen aus völlig verschiedener Herkunft.
Der eine ein großer französischer Rotwein, der für gute Qualität steht und aus dem beschaulichen gleichnamigen Örtchen im südlichen Rhonetal entstammt.
Der andere der größte deutsche Discounter, der nach wie vor die Preisführerschaft in Sachen Lebensmittel für sich beansprucht und im deutschen Weinmarkt den größten Marktanteil innehat. Fast die Hälfte aller in Deutschland gekauften Weine werden über Discounter vertrieben. Aldi hat hierbei mit etwa 20% den größten Anteil. Man fragt sich angesichts dieser Zahlen, wie die fest im Sortiment verankerten Weine produziert werden bzw. wie man es schafft die ungeheure Nachfrage nach ein und demselben Produkt konstant zu befriedigen. Ich denke hier kann man Abschied nehmen von den idyllischen Weinbergen, aus deren Lese jedes Jahr eine andere Menge besten Weines auf mühsame Art und Weise produziert wird und erst nach unterschiedlicher Reifezeit in den Handel kommt oder gar direkt vertrieben wird. Nein, bei günstigen Discountweinen sprechen wir nicht von ein paar ha Rebfläche und vielleicht ein paar tausend Flaschen Ertrag. Alleine wenn man sich die Nachfrageseite und die stets aufgefüllten Regale ansieht, erkennt man, dass diese Weine anders hergestellt werden müssen und eventuell nicht aus einem sondern vielleicht vielen Weinbergen, vielleicht auch außerhalb Deutschlands stammen müssen. Zugegeben, manche Aldi-Weine sind wirklich nicht schlecht, aber die Hintergründe der günstigen Massenweine interessieren mich doch.
Umso erstaunlicher ist es dann immer wieder auch bekannte Weine im Sortiment von Aldi zu finden. Chateauneuf-du Pape hat sicherlich einen exzellenten Ruf. Wieso landet dieser Wein dann bei Aldi?
Ich denke ich sollte da sich mein knappes Wissen langsam aber sicher dem Ende neigt vielleicht einmal jemanden konsultieren der sich mit diesen Themen auskennt. Um einerseits Aldis Weine nicht zu Unrecht schlecht zu machen und zum anderen um mehr über Chateauneuf-du Pape zu erfahren. Ein Weingourmet muss her….

Und der Kenner hat gesprochen! Ein Wein dieser Herkunft kostet bei guter Qualität in der Regel gut das Dreifache. Somit dürfte es sich hier um weniger gut Abfüllungen oder Überschüsse handeln. Der Vorteil für Aldi liegt in der Anziehungskraft der starken Marke. So könnte es gelingen neue Käufer in die Märkte zu locken, die Aldi bisher als wenig relevant erachtet haben, markenbewusste Premiumshopper, die sich das vermeintliche Schnäppchen nicht entgehen lassen wollen und bei der Gelegenheit vielleicht auch andere Aldi Produkte einmal testen. Auch stellt sich die Frage ob ein guter billiger Wein am Ende vielleicht besser ist als ein Wein geringerer Qualität aus gutem Hause.
Letztendlich zählt für Discountshopper weniger das Renomme als vielmehr der Geschmack und das subjektive Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis

Quellen:
Screenshot: n-tv.de 08.12.2009
Banner: ALDI Süd

Have you ever used your printer in a way like this?

Using modern ways of marketing will bring you much more customers you intend. You don’t believe? Have you already seen the new „commercial“ of HP?

Pete Cashmore: 10 Web trends to watch in 2010

Editor’s note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

(CNN) — As 2009 draws to a close, the Web’s attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?

While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:

Real-time ramps up

Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what „Web 2.0“ was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive … it’s a sense of living in the now.

But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that’s inevitable — cargo cults abound). It’s a combination of factors, from the always-connected nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a Google search.

Why wait until you get home to post a restaurant review, asks consumer trends tracker Trendwatching, when scores of iPhone apps let you post feedback as soon as you finish dessert? Why wonder about the name of that song, when humming into your phone handset will garner an instant answer from Midomi?

Look out, too, for real-time collaboration: Google Wave launched earlier this year, resulting in both excitement and confusion. A crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki, Wave is a platform for getting things done together. Web users, however, remain baffled. In 2010, Wave’s utility will become more apparent.

Location, location, location

Fueled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones, location-sharing services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude are suddenly in vogue.

As I ruminated in this column two weeks ago, Foursquare and its ilk may become the breakout services of the year … provided they’re not crushed by the addition of location-based features to Twitter and Facebook.

What’s clear is that location is not about any singular service; rather, it’s a new layer of the Web. Soon, our whereabouts may optionally be appended to every Tweet, blog comment, photo or video we post.

Augmented reality

It’s yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009.

Enabled by GPS, mapping data from the likes of Google and the accelerometer technology in modern phones, AR involves overlaying data on your environment; imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and Wikipedia entries about the sights you see.

When using Layar, for instance, the picture from your phone’s video camera is overlaid with bubbles of information from Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Search and Twitter. The challenge for such services is to prove their utility: They have the „cool factor,“ but can they be truly useful?

Content ‚curation‘

The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: „Information overload“ has become an increasingly common complaint.

In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.

In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.

Meanwhile, Google’s Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.

Professional „curation“ has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields? I explored this possibility in a CNN article last month titled „Twitter lists and real-time journalism“ .

Cloud computing

Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there’s no doubt this transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere („the cloud“), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables collaboration with distributed teams.

The cloud movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 with the launch of „Office Web Apps,“ free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote released in tandem with Microsoft Office 2010.

Next year will also see the launch of Google’s Chrome OS, a free, Web-centric operating system that forces us to ask: How many desktop applications do we really need?

Internet TV and movies

Is 2010 the year the majority of our television starts coming to us via the Internet? There’s certainly more activity here than at any other time: Among the early-adopter set, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and Netflix’s Roku box lead the field.

Hulu in particular has sustained remarkable growth this year, while the movie studios are getting on board with the launch of Epix, a Hulu for films.

Convergence conundrum

The outlook for devices in 2010 appears somewhat contradictory: While the convergence trend continues apace and many of our gadgets are folded into the smartphones we carry around every day, we’re seeing a converse trend in which task-specific devices gain popularity.

GPS device maker TomTom recently introduced a $100 iPhone app that removes the need to buy a TomTom hardware device. Google then one-upped the company by releasing free turn-by-turn directions on devices running its Android operating system. Garmin and TomTom beware: Standalone GPS devices may meet their demise in 2010.

Also on the endangered gadgets list: Flip video cameras, which PC World declared dead upon the launch of the iPhone 3G S. Meanwhile, Apple executives say the iPhone is cannibalizing the iPod: Why carry two devices when you only need one?

Paradoxically, the e-book reader is seeing traction as a single-use device. With hard-to-read, power-hungry laptop screens proving impractical for reading, and smartphone screens proving too small, the Kindle and its competitors are gaining buzz.

However, I’d argue that the e-book reader is a fad: Carrying an extra device is never desirable, and the major factor preventing convergence is the lack of superior screen technology. Flexible, expanding low-power screens on cell phones might tip the balance.

The real power of Amazon’s Kindle is its ease of use: a virtual bookstore so simple that it does for books what Apple’s iTunes did for music. The devices will converge, but the „app store“ model for books will persist across all devices. The technology won’t be with us in 2010, however.

Social gaming

There’s little risk of social gaming proving a bad bet in 2010 — Zynga’s FarmVille game on Facebook now counts more active users than Twitter, claims a Facebook executive. Meanwhile, rival Playfish was recently acquired by Electronic Arts in a deal valued at up to $400 million.

Of growing interest in 2010, however, will be the virtual currencies these games have spawned: In the allegedly unmonetizable world of social media, virtual buying and selling may be the route to riches for some social media sites — a concept I outlined in this column under the title „Is Facebook the future of micropayments?“

Mobile payments

I’d wager that 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market. While much of Asia has embraced the technology, the U.S., in particular, has lagged. There’s reason for optimism in 2010, however: From PayPalX to Amazon’s mobile payments platform for developers, the big players are seizing the mobile payments opportunity.

Meanwhile, newcomer Square, founded by the creator of Twitter, began its rollout this week to much early-adopter excitement: The company enables merchants to accept payments via Apple’s iPhone.

Fame abundance, privacy scarcity

Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We’re all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.

We’re seeing the ongoing voluntary erosion of privacy through public sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices.

The incredible efficiency of Web-based communication and our Google-fueled appetite to know everything about everything (or everyone) right now are combining to make Tiger Woods the canary in the privacy coal mine. Expect personal privacy — or rather its continued erosion — to be a hot media topic of 2010.

more by Pete Cashmore at www.mashable.com

Article originally published under: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html

10 Black Friday Secrets Retailers Don't Want You to Know

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By Mike Elgan
published on internetnews.com
November 16, 2007

They don’t call the day after Thanksgiving „Black Friday“ for nothing. It’s all about launching the megastores „into the black“ – into profitability. They profit not by offering goods at a loss, but by using ultra-low prices to lure you into their stores, where they can employ dirty tricks to make money.
But with my secrets, and some smart planning, you can make „Black Friday“ profitable for yourself, not the store.

Here are the 10 things they don’t want you to know:

1: Most Black Friday deals are leaked early online. Check sites that post leaked Black Friday ads and info, and give yourself an advantage over the masses. The four best sites are: bfads.net, blackfriday.gottadeal.com, blackfridayads.com, and blackfriday.info. Some of these sites will optionally send you an e-mail whenever they post a new ad or new information. (So will Wal-mart’s „Secret Section.“) Some have cell phone versions of the site for referring while in-store.

2: Many Black Friday deals are bait-and-switch scams. They may sell you a very cheap product with a very expensive warranty, or use a given price, but add software, accessories or other over-priced add-ons as a required but unadvertised part of the purchase. You’ll find out about this only at the register. If the price at the register is significantly higher than advertised for any reason, ask to speak to a supervisor and insist on the advertised price. If they still refuse, threaten to write a letter to the attorney general.

3: Get the best price without hassles by knowing price-match and return policies. Many stores offer price-match guarantees (if a competitor offers a lower price, they’ll match it). Increasingly, Black Friday sales are exempt from all this. Others have a return policy that, in effect, is a price-match guarantee for the store itself (if they drop the price, the difference is later refunded to you if you ask for it). If you know which product you want to buy, and can find a store with a price-match guarantee that honors Black Friday prices, buy it! When Black Friday rolls around, you can go looking for the best price, and not have to worry about whether the store is out of stock. If a store is willing to refund the difference between its own normal price and its Black Friday price, buy it early for the same reason.

4: Beat the system by shopping in teams. Stores rely on a long list of tricks, from limited sale hours to low inventories in order to lure you into the stores without giving you the time to comparison shop for the product you want at the best possible price. Have one team member in each store when it opens, each with a list of what everyone wants to buy. Use Joopz.com to set up broadcast SMS. Each team member finds every product on the list, then broadcasts pricing. The person at the store with the lowest price for each item buys it.

5: Use your cell phone browser to check competing deals, and also product quality. You can also use standard sites like BizRate.com, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.com to check just how good prices are. Sometimes Black Friday prices can be beat online anytime.

6: Some Black Friday promos are designed to unload loser products. Products that are obsolete, unpopular, damaged or returned are prime candidates for Black Friday sales. Make sure you narrow your list of products, so you don’t end up buying something you don’t really want.

7: Shop early. Very early. Many stores will open at midnight this year. Many open as early as 5 am. Find out in advance what time each store opens, so you can plan accordingly.

8: Some of the best deals are advertised only on Thanksgiving — or even on Black Friday itself. Make sure you get all the local newspaper on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

9: Some Black Friday deals are actually buyable online. Others are buyable only online, or have prices that actually beat in-store prices. Start checking prices on Thanksgiving. Check Web sites again very early Black Friday morning, and shop there first — then go to the stores only if you have to. Still other stores let you order items online the day before, and pick them up on Black Friday.

10: Plan ahead to think clearly. Bring food, wear comfortable shoes, and leave the kids at home (kids can influence impulse buying or convince you to leave early). Stay focused, and don’t let yourself be caught up in the frenzy.

Black Friday is a zero-sum game. Either the store wins, or you do. Use these tips to beat the stores at their own game.

In addition to writing for Datamation, where this column first appeared, Mike Elgan is a technology writer and former editor of Windows Magazine. He can be reached at mike.elgan+datamation@gmail.com or his blog: http://therawfeed.com.

Article published at InternetNews.com
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