Social Media

I just published this article about prospecting with Facebook to the Multichannel Merchant site. When I was covering the session at the CognitiveData Summit on Friday, I was gung-ho, ready to try it out. Now I’m not so sure.

From a marketing point of view, using Facebook as a page and then finding prospects on your business rivals’ pages seems like a so-brainer. But as a consumer, I’d be creeped out if, say, McDonald’s liked a comment I made on Burger King’s Facebook page. more

I bought this t-shirt last night from CafePress. It’s one I designed for the foundation I started to honor my brother, a retired firefighter who died unexpectedly in August at the age of 55. Though I have a free CafePress store for the foundation, I designed this one with the soul purpose of wearing it when I play for our office softball team (which wears green) so I can hopefully spread awareness for the cause.

After I checked out, a window popped up asking me if I’d like to tell all my Facebook friends about my purchase. Earlier in the day, I just happened to stumble upon this press release from ShopSocially, which announced the general availability of its social commerce suite Social Connect for online retailers.

Should social shopping start at the checkout? Let’s look at the pros and cons of social shopping. more

I’m sure Jay Weintraub didn’t envision such a turnout when he came up with the idea to host the first-ever tradeshow for flash sale sellers and technology platforms. Heck, he planned for 300 attendees to be at the Daily Deal Summit in New York. Weintraub instead yesterday had a party of about 500.

Daily Deals are kind of a big deal. Social sellers, coupon code aggregaters, deal-providers and local couponers all had a story to tell. To sum everything up, they educated each other on the benefits of new technologies that allow merchants to offer up the most relevant deals at the right time, in the right place and to the right customers.

It’s too bad traditional merchants weren’t there to listen. more

Lisa Gavales, the chief marketing officer at apparel company Express, stood on stage today at a Hyatt in New York City and talked about Twitter. The Express customer is a 20-something, a good demo to engage with tweets. But when she personally took on the task of tweeting with her own handle, she wondered what she had gotten herself into. The fan base was growing and the pressure was mounting from the top down to keep pushing out the tweets. Many of us have been there, haven’t we? For Gavales, it was time to change the game. more

Are you following the tweets about Epsilon’s major email security breach? If you are, be careful what you click on.

I guess if your email address isn’t in the hands of hackers because of the email security breach March 30 at Epsilon, it will be if you click on what may appear to be tweeted articles about the security breaches. Isn’t that what we call “irony?” more

Major League Baseball deserves an “Unlike” for the way its treating its fans on Facebook. It appears MLB has unified its 30 team’s “official Facebook pages” as one (though people from the teams’ front offices may still post as the individual teams).

Case in point - all 30 team’s home pages default to a tab (as they used to be called) promoting ticket sales (until you choose to “Like” them), which is fine. But also, if you “Like” a MLB team’s official Facebook page, you cannot post to its wall, post photos or videos, or basically start up a conversation. more