BMW steps up to the Social Media plate

BMW comes out with its new sporty, and smaller coupe and is relying heavily on
Internet advertising for its introduction. Smart choice, since the market for this car will be younger and less affluent than the current BMW lover. Advertising like this is sure to attract the target market.

The campaign tries to reassure potential buyers that the 1-series model is still a “pure BMW” despite being smaller and less expensive. Collaborating agencies for these ads are Austin's own GSD&M, which is part of the Omnicom Group, and Dotglu in New York, part of the Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners division of MDC Partners.

What's so great about this campaign is that almost half the spending for the campaign is going to be devoted to online media comparing to the usual 1 percent to 15 percent of the total ad budgets of other BMW models. Just in case you're wondering, this campaigns budget is about $15 to $25 million.

Now you'll be able to send personally designed virtual cars to you friends on Facebook. You can also send cars on virtual road trip from one profile to another and send car keys to eachother. I know, a bit ridiculous but this will get the name out there, which ultimately shows to be effective. Since Facebookers aren't shy about expressing their angry opinions about overload of advertisements, BMW is really working to make this fun and entertaining. Other elements include buying dominant positions, known as take-overs, on the home pages of msn.com and yahoo.com and posting video clips on YouTube and developing a microsite devoted to the 1-Series.

NY Times reports that "The campaign is indicative of efforts by mainstream marketers to alter their media mixes as consumers change their media habits." A recent survey by PQ Media projected that by 2012, advertisers will increase spending by 82 percent from 2008 in areas like search-engine marketing, online video and e-mail messages.


The goal has become “to give people a reason to engage with or participate in your advertising,” said Patrick McKenna, manager for marketing communications at BMW of North America in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.

Basically, BMW is having fun with this and trying to experience new things for a new market. They realize that the 20-somethings and 30-somethings demand controlling their brand experience.

Political blogging

My group podcast decided to go with the whole political blogging theme since the subject was very present and very new. The amount of social media tactics we've seen in this election is truly amazing and deserves to be noted.

While doing this project, I specifically focused on John McCain’s Presidential Campaign. I found that his site has a blog that is probably the most successful of any of its other social media strategies. They regularly blog, although it’s nothing much compared to Barack Obama’s blog. Rather the blog be used as a tool in getting the Republican’s message out about the campaign, it is more of an after thought to report on nomination wins. A couple unique things on the blog is readers can rate the blog posts as well as leave comments to each post. Digg and Delicious are on each of the blog posts. Also, the blog allows for posts to be emailed to friends. Search Marketing Gurus, a blog that includes a group of professional search marketers, points out some unused options of McCain’s blog, including the tags feature. Most recent posts have no tags which makes it difficult to categorize the posts. Another fault in John McCain’s blog is that it doesn’t allow for a reader to subscribe to the entire blog through RSS feeds but only to five separate issues such as Health, Economy, Spending, Campaign, and Iraq but one cannot tell what posts are included in each issue because the posts aren’t visibly categorized.

John McCain’s presidential committee started off early last year showing high expectations for social media usage within its campaign, but has since dropped the ball somewhat on promoting the five social media strategies they launched. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Veoh, and Yahoo! Answers are online projects the committee uses to actively interact with Americans and in turn, voters can engage with John McCain and learn about issues. National eCampaign Director Christian Ferry says, "People are fed up with politics as usual and Facebook and MySpace are giving them the opportunity to organize and influence the process in ways that could not have been imagined during John McCain's last campaign for President”. Although his committee recognizes the advantages of social media, they have done little to show they truly understand these sites by not playing on their key opportunities. The website doesn’t offer an easy way to locate the campaign’s social media strategies and the initiatives they’ve taken seem to be a result of “jumping on the band wagon”.

Search Engine Optimization for McCain’s campaign is somewhat successful. The official website ranks #1 in Google and Yahoo! for “John McCain” but not in Live nor in Ask. The Splash page was removed early this year and has since done little to improve SEO. As far as social networking sites, there isn’t a direct link to his Facebook page from his website, but one must physically search for John McCain once signed into the network. McCain has a personal social network called McCainSpace similar to Barack Obama’s but a major problem with this network is that it doesn’t reach out to intergrate with other social networks. It is a gated area for the McCain community that doesn’t spread the campaign’s message. Two video channels were created on YouTube and Veoh to host the same videos available at John McCain.com. In addition to these outlets, Yahoo! Answers initiates discussion with Americans about wasteful spending.

It's great to see that our politicians are trying to reach out to us in ways that make it easier and more enjoyable to get involved. Although the fact that all of this content is on the internet can make the elections even more of a popularity contest than in past years.

"Tools of the Trade"

Paul Gillin discusses in the chapter titled “Tools of the Trade”, the necessary use of products and services that alert you when the media is talking about any topic. If he hasn’t yet convinced you to become a part of the blogosphere, he at least stresses the importance for a business marketer to know what is being said about him/her, a company, or product.

Gillin points out that some of these tracking services can cost a pretty penny but luckily, monitoring engines such as Google Alerts, Ask.com, and Yahoo! provide these services free. You can specify any topics for regular searches. An e-mail is sent to you when new results appear that informs you of the mention of your name, your company’s name, or a product name. People want to hear what the world is saying about them to better prepare themselves in case something such as a blog swarm occurs. Our class has seen first hand how these alert systems can be useful for big, bad, important CEO’s. Within an hour of posting about the new Jawbone viral ads on her blog, Christina Timms had a rather long comment from the CEO of Digital Axle. (See here and here) Most likely, this quick response was made possible by Bruce’s Google Alert or some other alert system that showed his name, Digital Axle’s name, and Jawbone all tagged. Because of the controversy with his firm's relation to the ad, he probably receives alerts on all of those names so that he can know what's being said and can quickly respond.

Gillin notes that familiarizing yourself with the advanced search features of any engine you choose to use is a good idea because many make searches even more specific and easier. In Yahoo!’s search engine a command called “linkdomain” gives a list of links to the page or domain that you specify and also allows you to choose one particular website to search.

Searching blogs is different because of the RSS feeds that bloggers use to show their blog was updated. The RSS feeds are monitored in blog-specific searches but are less effective when it comes to filtering the results of a specific search. Opinmind.com is really interesting. It classifies your search results by bias, which means the tone of a blog post is analyzed to display whether the opinion of the post is for or against the searched topic. Basically, you can separate the mean people from the nice ones by having Opinmind.com show if someone was trash-talking you, or praising you. Technorati is also a good tool to measure the popularity in blogosphere to determine how influential a bad post or good post will be for your search.

Podcasts also sometimes require different search engines due to the difficulty in indexing the content. Podscope.com and Podzinger.com are two that list podcasts that mention a specific search term. You can further use their services to listen to the exact segment in the podcast where your term is spoken.