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Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-31

• Set­ting up local­ized lead gen­er­a­tion pro­grams and try­ing to stay warm. Seri­ously win­ter I’m done already. #
• Con­grats on the release @shoe­money even your ini­tial release on sell­ing out will net a tidy 1.18M — well done. #
• Good­bye TD Canada Trust for busi­ness bank­ing hello HSBC. Hope­fully this straight­ens my busi­ness bank­ing night­mares. #
• Hey Zeus. Mac Mail is sync­ing 345647 emails from my accounts. There has to be some­thing wrong with that! #
• A good thread on the cliques of the SEO com­mu­nity, con­fer­ence SEOs and more. My com­ments here: http://dannedelko.com/gid via @seo­moz #
• Once again it’s become exceed­ingly clear I am not a project man­ager #
• Hmm Google Web­mas­ter Tools is down for me, any­one else see­ing this? #
• Amus­ing I got a few vis­its from the Coca Cola Com­pany to my blog read­ing about my Pepsi Cheer Case Study. Almost flat­ter­ing. #
• @monty­loree TD was bru­tal for busi­ness — slow wires, exces­sive fees, tons of trou­ble. HSBC is the way to go. in reply to monty­loree #
• @jakub_zalas Yeah it’s work­ing for me now too, it was stuck in infi­nite redi­rec­tions there for about an hour. Weird. in reply to jakub_zalas #
• Hmmm weird­ness Google Web­mas­ter Tools is redi­rect­ing end­lessly for me http://twitpic.com/102ro2 @google @matt­cutts #
• @toron­tomike Just saw your post on the Pepsi Cheer and I’m 100% with ya, com­mented on your blog — check out my anti pepsi cheer fb group #
• @stephanieg­mack any­time Stephanie — it’s not exactly a case study, more like an edi­to­r­ial case study in reply to stephanieg­mack #
• RT @aaronwall: Not only is Mahalo an SEO con­tent SCRAPER, but they sell SEO ser­vices. http://www.seobook.com/more-proof-jason-calacanis #
• Con­fer­ence call #5 com­ing up — holy smokes how did Fri­day turn into Con­fer­ence Fri­day? #

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Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-24

• The stu­pid­est Inter­net Mar­ket­ing head­line of the week: “Face­book is the new Twit­ter”. Huh? #
• Wade Phillips stay­ing in Dal­las another year. Now he can worry about his job all sea­son go 13–3 then lose in the play­offs AGAIN @thep­ick­zone #
• Stop play­ing defense with your busi­ness in a bad econ­omy. Time to go on the offense. Great advice: http://dannedelko.com/s6d #
• The new ver­sion of Seesmic Desk­top just com­pletely changed it’s UI on me and I’m not lik­ing it at all srsly who does that? #
• Nice tim­ing — maybe we should slap a “For Sale — Cheap” sign on Whistler/Blackcomb http://bit.ly/7VUEge #
• I weep for the IM and SEO indus­try. l33t bl@ckh@t SEO n1nj@s — please you couldn’t redi­rect your way out of a wet paper bag. #
• Forced to use my PC lap­top — Irony: AdAware wants me to install spammy offer soft­ware in order to get AdAware Pro free. #
• A pic­ture that looks like fun on Face­book at 22 could be a career-killer at 32. http://bit.ly/7D14vS #face­book #pri­vacy #
• Stu­pid PPC mis­take of the day: A home energy audi­tor in NJ adver­tises to Cana­di­ans on Adwords. #iwaste­moneyandtime #
• Excel­lent Word­press plu­gin — high qual­ity free stock photo plu­gin for your blog. Check it out http://bit.ly/nshcQ #word­press #wp #blog #

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Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-17

• @JohnF­Moore Thanks John! in reply to JohnF­Moore #
• Text “HAITI” to 45678 if you are in Canada and have Rogers, Bell or Fido to donate $5. Do it. Do it now! #
• @Carib­Con­nect thanks a mil­lion and please spread the world $5 a per­son can help a lot of we all join in! in reply to Carib­Con­nect #
• @NailaJ Thanks Naila Tell every­one you know! in reply to NailaJ #
• @JustinEtheredge Hi Justin, @rleisti says you’re look­ing for some SEO help. I’ve been doing SEO for 8 years. What’s up? #
• @JustinEtheredge dan@honeypotmarketing.com in reply to JustinEtheredge #
• Chi­nese govt hacks GMail, Google hacks back. Good one! http://dannedelko.com/g7d Cyber­wars on the Net will be the bat­tle grounds of WW3 #
• RT @thepickzone: NBA Free Pick 1/15/2010 http://thepickzone.com/free-picks/nba-free-pick-1152010.html #
• RT @hulford: Major sky­scraper boom in Toronto w/ 35 tow­ers going up. Check out what the sky­line will look like in 2013: bhttp://ow.ly/WWPU #
• Google adds fav­i­cons to Google Web­mas­ter Tools. Nifty… #
• Appar­ently I’m a “grey hair” SEO — I am actu­ally start­ing to grey a bit truth be told. #

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Work from Home — Short Task Review

If you’re like me you might have spe­cific require­ments for small tasks for a client or a project at any given time. Now that doesn’t mean I want to hire a num­ber of full time employ­ees (to be hon­est, I can’t afford that and the projects sim­ply don’t require it).

So off an on I am con­stantly look­ing for low cost ways to have a tem­po­rary work­force out there for any num­ber of tasks. It could be some con­tent I need writ­ten, link built, social media men­tions. The list is pretty much end­less and it also causes me some headaches.

It’s tough to find a group of peo­ple out there. I could eas­ily place Craigslist or Kijiji ads but that’s time con­sum­ing and a pain.

That’s why when I ran into Short Task I was pleas­antly sur­prised. The basic idea is this:

• You have some tasks you need per­formed online for a spe­cific project.
• Short Task con­nects you to a mar­ket­place of peo­ple who can com­plete that sim­ple task for you.
• Your work­force will work at home.
• You pay.
• Task is completed.
• Every­one moves on with life.

It’s a cool idea and uber con­ve­nient so I thought I would include a Short Task Review for those of you who have never used it before.

Short Task divides their site up into “Seek­ers” and “Solvers” which is pretty straight for­ward. If I’m a solver I can per­form the tasks that are in their Marketplace.

Once you login into http://shorttask.com you’ll see “Tasks” in the Main Menu. Select that and then you can fil­ter based on Key­words or Amount Offered.

I just checked a few of the tasks and started at $9.00 — I also got a few hits for $15.00 tasks. Not a bad pay­out if you get your­self into a sys­tem and become quick and pro­fi­cient with this. You won’t retire tomor­row but you could make a nice sup­ple­men­tary income from this type of work if you take it seri­ously plus you can work from home.

Hav­ing looked through the Mar­ket­place I’d also sug­gest you stick to the $3.00-$8.00 cat­e­gories. These could be com­pleted rel­a­tively quickly (less than 15 min­utes) if you’re a decently quick writer and are rel­a­tively good with a search engine (so you can find the sites you need to find).

The higher pay­ing cat­e­gories look like they want some pretty in depth research done for $15.00. If you think about it, if you can post a qual­ity com­ment in 10 min­utes for $3.00 you can make $18.00 in one hour eas­ily. Instead of spend­ing that sin­gle hour on one in depth research article.

That’s just a thought though.

From the per­spec­tive of a Seeker, I like it. I can assem­ble a rel­a­tively strong human work force in min­utes by post­ing tasks and hav­ing peo­ple com­plete them for me. If I took $300.00 of a bud­get here and wanted to build some links for instance I could eas­ily post it for $3.00 and would be able to get 100 human edited inbound links.

Neat idea. You should check out Short Task what­ever side of the coin you might be on.

Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-10

• If some­one asks you for com­puter help, pre­tend you’re dumber than a sack of ham­burg­ers. http://dannedelko.com/eua #
• Face­book Cuts Off Access to Profile-Killing Ser­vice — http://bit.ly/8A0m3K RT @anthonystevens4 #
• A look back to how Google Ana­lyt­ics has grown over 2009 — very use­ful! http://dannedelko.com/ga09 #
• Just ran into this while look­ing at some CakePhp appli­ca­tions: http://scratch.mit.edu/ very cool! #
• ESPN is launch­ing a 3D net­work that is a wreck­ing ball of awe­some­ness http://dannedelko.com/3d Who’s get­ting that? I am! #
• Key­word rel­e­vance for dis­play adver­tis­ing gone hor­ri­bly wrong (for some) http://dannedelko.com/rm3 #
• Watch­ing the People’s Choice Awards and won­der­ing why I’m watch­ing the People’s Choice Awards. #
• @car­olyn­global Stephen Harper is play­ing a game with the rules of par­lia­ment and bank­ing on the apa­thy of Cana­di­ans. So Wrong. in reply to car­olyn­global #
• @pmharper Hey douchenoz­zle. Stop play­ing games with par­lia­men­tary pro­to­col, get to work and address issues at hand. #
• Yah I just called the Prime Min­is­ter of Canada @pmharper a douche noz­zle. Call a spade a spade. Track me, I’ll track you. #
• Wow @yahoo your SERPs are full of spam and it appears to be alot worse than before. You need Bing bad. http://dannedelko.com/xxr #
• The Pepsi Cheer — social media gone wrong or when not to do social media http://dannedelko.com/pepsi #
• Lad­brokes refuses to pay out $11,000,000 on snow bet to gam­bler. http://bit.ly/7gPb9d #

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Pepsi Cheer — Social Media Done Wrong

The Pepsi Cheer?

Update April 21, 2010: Looks like I was quoted over at Media.asia in Five things you need to know about: Social media and brands by Andrew Knott. Nice to be ref­er­enced how­ever briefly.

You’re prob­a­bly doing Social Media in your Inter­net Mar­ket­ing mix, most com­pa­nies and mar­keters have jumped on that band­wagon faster than peo­ple become Dal­las Cow­boys fans when they go on a win­ning streak.

To be hon­est, chances are if you’re doing Social Media you are most likely com­pletely wast­ing your time and resources because you’re doing social media badly.

No offense. But the large major­ity of mar­keters sim­ple do not use Social Media the same way they might use other forms of media and advertising.

No ROI (Return On Invest­ment). This can also be mea­sured in Brand terms rather than dol­lar amounts.
No clear and defin­i­tive goals.
No strat­egy.

If you took a few hours, set up a Face­book group, Face­book fan page and Twit­ter feed then sim­ply post to those pro­files then you’re com­pletely wast­ing your time.

Stop.
Stop Now.

Doing Social Media badly is much worse than not doing Social Media at all.

As with every­thing in Mar­ket­ing you need to attach a value, strat­egy and exe­cu­tion plan to each and every pro­gram you put in place. If you don’t then frankly you’re Mar­ket­ing badly.

Case in point.

Let’s pre­tend this didn’t hap­pen, OK?

The Pepsi Cheer was an abysmal fail­ure from a Social Media stand­point and from a Mar­ket­ing stand­point. Here is a good overview from Mar­ket­ing Mag:

Pepsi Seek­ing One Mil­lion Mem­bers for Pepsi Cheer

This cam­paign was the brain child of the Toronto Agency Cap­i­tal C (Yeah that’s right their cor­po­rate web­site is hosted on Type­pad — very edgy).

Before we look at Pepsi’s Social Media Strat­egy results, let’s have a quick look at what they implemented:

On Face­book
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada
http://www.facebook.com/PepsiCanada#/PepsiCanada?v=app_193041964437

Twit­ter
http://twitter.com/PEPSICANADA

and

http://www.pepsi.ca/jointhecheer/default.aspx?bhcp=1

Here’s what Pepsi wanted to do:

1. Cre­ate a con­test to cre­ate a Cheer for Hockey Canada and the 2010 IIHF Mens’s Hockey Cham­pi­onship in Germany.
2. Have the win­ning cheer pro­moted via Social Media, on tele­vi­sion and radio.
3. Have fans at the events use the cheer dur­ing the games to be started by Pepsi employ­ees in the crowd (really bad idea).

The win­ning cheer was an annoy­ing (in my opin­ion) “Eh! Oh-Canada! Go!” which was a cus­tomer sub­mit­ted cheer and was then heav­ily pro­moted through adver­tis­ing medi­ums (all listed above).

Now on a fun­da­men­tal level this idea should have died in a brain­storm­ing ses­sion. You never ever mess with the patri­o­tism of Cana­dian Hockey fans. Here in Canada, Hockey is a big part of people’s sports watch­ing mix and par­tic­u­larly since Canada dom­i­nates Inter­na­tional Hockey (even though we lost in the finals to the US this past year).

The cheers Cana­di­ans have been using for years are pretty pop­u­lar and there was never a need to add a new one to the mix when it was clearly a very shal­low cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing initiative.

Their bru­tal social media imple­men­ta­tion also caused them more brand dam­age than had they done absolutely noth­ing. Pepsi and their agency failed to remem­ber one key com­po­nent of Social Media.

It’s a con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple. Peo­ple can (and should talk back).

The Pepsi Cheer Gone Wrong

This is exactly what peo­ple did and it wasn’t pretty.

Let’s look at some very basic stats:

Pepsi’s Face­book Fan Page: 134,926 Fans
Pepsi Canada’s Twit­ter Pro­file: 1034 Followers

Basic Neg­a­tive Results

Pepsi — I Don’t need yer damn cheer
231 mem­bers
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=259956356825

The” Eh! Oh! Canada Go!” chant is a national embar­rass­ment
64,762 Mem­bers
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=217528662837

Twit­ter Search for Pepsi Cheer
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer

I’ll actu­ally run a rep­u­ta­tion report for this later in the week and add this to an over­all case study, since this is such a bla­tantly bad idea.

Let’s have a quick look at why I’m say­ing this was not only a bad Mar­ket­ing idea but it was a fail­ure from a Social media perspective:

1. Pepsi struck a chord with a national sport and national pride. Basi­cally say­ing “You’re doing it wrong Canada”. Bad idea.
2. Pepsi bla­tantly pro­moted them­selves over sim­ply pro­mot­ing cheer­ing for the team.
3. Replac­ing the cheer was unnec­es­sary. There are a num­ber of cheer Pepsi could have latched onto and pro­moted. This likely would have gone over well.
4. Their social media pro­files sim­ply ignored any back­lash except for a few ref­er­ences to cheer­ing “any cheer you want”. Too lit­tle too late.
5. The Pepsi Canada Twit­ter stream did lit­tle to engage any­one talk­ing on Twit­ter except for pos­i­tive feed­back and inane Re-Tweets about their promotion.
6. The Pepsi Canada Twit­ter stream was hardly used but it was still there. Hey Pepsi Mar­ket­ing Team — here’s a tip. Don’t use it if you’re going to use it badly.
7. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pepsi+cheer has far more neg­a­tive sen­ti­ments than neu­tral or pos­i­tive ones. Clearly Pepsi made a mis­take here since they’re ignor­ing the fans they tried to approach. Oops that only serves to piss peo­ple off.
8. The neg­a­tive groups on Face­book almost out­num­ber the Fans of the Pepsi Cheer Fan Page. As a side note there is a decent set of sign up forms and calls to action on inter­nal tabs of the fan page but there appears to be lit­tle focus to the fan page. They would have been bet­ter off to have par­tic­i­pated in other Fan Pages (exam­ple: Hockey Canada) than to try to become the hub of Hockey Fans.

The Pepsi Cheer clearly annoying.

This is just the begin­ning of this fiasco for Pepsi in my hum­ble opin­ion. They’ll be deal­ing with the back­lash for quite some­time. Par­tic­u­larly since they appear to be stay­ing the course on the same bad Social Media Strategy.

Another dumb move.

The key take aways here:

If you are going to do Social Media prop­erly then do it prop­erly and think about what you are doing, devote resources, a strat­egy and team to it.

If you think you need to have a pres­ence on Social Net­works just for the sake of being there, then you’re dead wrong.

If you are going to do a half assed job of Social Media Mar­ket­ing then do your­self a favour and don’t do it at all.

Addi­tional References

Junior Hockey Chant Falls Flat — Van­cou­ver Sun

Tra­di­tional Cheers Given Vocal Sup­port — Star Phoenix

Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-03

• Well that’s a nice lit­tle present from Google for New Year’s — http://dannedelko.com is now PR6 I guess I’m impor­tant? Nawww. #

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Internet Marketing Tweet Digest 2010-01-03

• Well that’s a nice lit­tle present from Google for New Year’s — http://dannedelko.com is now PR6 I guess I’m impor­tant? Nawww. #

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Copyright © 2008 Dan Nedelko : Internet Marketer · Dan Nedelko is the founder of Honeypot Marketing an Internet Marketing firm located in Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia · If you can't find what you are looking for please have a look at our Internet Marketing and SEO Resources.