SEO Werkt!

Residents of the little town of Bethel, Alaska were the victims of an elaborate hoax last month when someone (the culprit is still at large) posted fake fliers around town announcing that a Taco Bell would be opening.  When it turned out that a Taco Bell wasn’t actually opening in the small Alaskan town, residents were understandably disappointed (I mean, who doesn’t love tacos?!).
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I saw a YouTube advertisement for the fast food restaurant, Wendy’s, where they were promoting the use of the Twitter hashtag #upgradeyourmeal (click that for your own real time search). Running over to Twitter to see what they were getting for responses, I saw the sampling above.

Do any of those look like loyal Wendy’s diners to you? Do any of those tweets make the restaurant proud? Will this earn the restaurant any more buyers?

When I see this, I wonder just how it was sold. I wonder what was promised. I wonder what the agency said to the client.

Hey, Sometimes It Works

When I searched on #doritoslocostacos, the new hashtag to accompany the Taco Bell sensation of a Doritos-flavored taco shelled taco, I saw a lot more love and praise.

Why? My gut (pun intended) tells me that Taco Bell has more of a fan base than Wendy’s, and that Taco Bell might be a slightly better natural demographic fit. But what if it isn’t? Maybe Taco Bell’s agency spent more money and got a bunch of people to tweet some nice words. Maybe this is a pay-per-tweet project or another kind of “word of mouth augmentation” campaign (read as “not necessarily trustworthy”).

And Is This Really Moving The Needle?

Wendy’s wants you to “#upgradeyourmeal.” Is a trip to Wendy’s an upgrade? I like their chili a great deal. I like their Frosty. I sometimes eat their other products. No part of my mindset while there is “upgrade.” Is it for you?

I don’t normally write posts that complain about a marketing methodology, but I guess I’m just asking whether this is what we think these tools were built to accomplish. If I’m some VP of marketing at Wendy’s, who sold this to me, and why did I think it was okay? What metrics did I ask to see?

And are you selling this? How’s that working for you?

Are Love and Trust the Missing Ingredients?

I am willing to believe that people love Taco Bell. Not all of us. But I think they have a fan following. I think they have people who choose that brand of fast food over any other type. I’m fairly sure people trust Taco Bell to deliver on a certain kind of experience, however you choose to view that.

Has Wendy’s earned that? And if not, how will they get it back?

Food for thought. Yep. I said it.

Warning: The crux of this post surrounds the word “shit.” It’s not used to be vulgar or profane, but to show what consumers are saying about brands online. If the word offends you, please move on. If you don’t and it still offends you, you were warned.

Talking with the folks at NetBase in preparation for Friday’s 11 for ’11 Webinar (see below), we came up with a fun little experiment to see A) How good NetBase is at really distinguishing between very similar phrases with very different meanings and B) Which brands are winning and losing in the online sentiment race … at least within these very small parameters.

There’s a major definition difference between saying something is “shit” versus saying something is “the shit.” They are, in fact, polar opposites. But having a text analytics or online research tool that can automatically decipher which is which is tricky. We put NetBase to the task and found that it not only worked, but there are some brands out there that could use some help getting their online audiences to add the word “the” to the phrase.

Here are the brands that lost in the online battle of who is “shit” versus who is “the shit:”

Notice how dominant Blackberry is in being called “shit.” Odd also that all the major phone carriers are there. Maybe it’s not the phone carriers themselves, but just the technology in general that sucks.

Now here are the brands that “won” because they were called “the shit:”

My only questions as interpret this data are A) McDonald’s? Really? And B) I’m thinking Taco Bell might be listed because it gives you “the shits.” So we may need to go decipher the data a bit. Then again, White Castle didn’t make it, so maybe I’m wrong. Heh.

Silly as it might be, these are potentially interesting bits of data for brands to have. So even though we focused on a little bawdy language today, know that there are online tools out there, like NetBase, that can help your company find and distinguish between the two.

As for the webinar, the last (11th) in the series is this Friday, (11/11 at 11 a.m PT, even), the NetBase gang thought it would be fun to have me do a webinar on my book. If you haven’t had the opportunity to hear my stories from the book talk, please join us! NetBase is giving away several copies of the book during the webinar, so just being an attendee gives you a chance to win.

Register for the webinar on the NetBase website and then block your calendar off for this Friday, Nov. 11 at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET for some good fun.

See you Friday!