A Series of Small Things
Random Thoughts on Building Venture-Backed Companies in the Midwest
How to hire a head of marketing
11.12.12 by Dov
Filling out a young company’s management team is often one of the most difficult tasks we face as board members. In my opinion, that’s doubly so on the sales and marketing side.
With that said, Derek Singleton of Software Advice, has written a nice piece providing some good tips for early-stage companies thinking about hiring a head of marketing.
A whopper of a social media mistake
1.30.12 by Dov
McDonald’s apparently got a big fail on their recent attempt to get Twitter users to share their stories about all the great times they’ve had at the restaurant. Instead, they got a bunch of people sharing stories about bad food, restaurant cleanliness (or lack thereof), and flatulence.
When the tweets started to go negative, the golden arches pulled the campaign (though pulling the hashtag is another story). At this point, searching for #McDstories on twitter turns up almost entirely tweets about the failure of the campaign, so it seems to me that they missed a great opportunity here.
Was letting the campaign continue doing serious harm to the brand? How many billions have been served now? There were a total of 73,000 mentions of McDonald’s on Twitter the day the promotion ran. And only about 1,600 included the #McDstories tag. And some portion of those were presumably positive or neutral (for example, one tweet I saw described seeing a toddler dive off of a table at the restaurant – not happy, but not a negative reflection on McDonald’s). So, maybe 1,000 people in the world were writing bad things about McDonald’s that day. I’m guessing the number of people per day who tell their friends about their bad experiences at McDonald’s (or any large brand, not to pick on them) is orders of magnitude larger than that.
Why not take advantage of the social engagement by interacting with those with negative experiences? Promise to fix things. Ask for advice. Apologize. Send coupons. I suspect the social media press would have spun the story a completely different way, and McDonald’s wouldn’t now find themselves buried under bad #McDstories press.
Am I using this right?
6.21.11 by Dov
Who thinks this is useful?
Meta? Yes. Useful? No.
From my perspective, I think people have gone overboard with QR codes. I actually saw a billboard over the interstate the other day with a QR code and a message to the effect of “drive safely, use this QR code instead of typing in the URL”. Seriously? Like pulling out my phone, running the QR code app and getting it to focus on a billboard while driving (let’s say) 55 miles an hour is safer than typing a URL (not that I’m recommending that) or even just trying to remember it for later?
New media is great and all, but some common sense would make it go a lot further.
At what point does this become scary?
5.26.11 by Dov
So, now Google will know everything we buy offline, too? Perhaps we crossed the line of giving up all of our privacy a long time ago and I just didn’t notice, but this is starting to creep me out a bit.
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