In response to declining footfall and sales BestBuy have adopted a interesting Twitter strategy to take their in-store expertise online. Quoted In a recent Bloomberg article, BestBuy CMO Brian Judge said,
“The old paradigm is you open your doors and hope someone comes in. In the new world, you can go out and find people that are talking about technology and what they’re interested in buying, and be generous with your knowledge”
There are a few companies out there with such an amassed popularity that, unless you lived in the Brazilian rain forest with nothing but a loin cloth to cover your unmentionables, you can’t help but recognise them. Google is perhaps the biggest. But could Microsoft Bing – the big M’s own search engine – be about to challenge Google’s authority? Recent figures released suggest the answer could be yes.
I’ve always been obsessed with viral marketing. It’s a dark art (like so many online practices) but when the pieces of the puzzle fall into place it can be a beautiful thing. And yes, that’s a journalist describing advertising as beautiful.
Odd as it might seem, I love virals. But before I tell you why, I need to clear up the definition of ‘viral’.
Twitter ground to a halt last Friday but you can’t blame it on the Sunshine, Moonlight, Good Times or the Boogie! No, it fell over and started body popping ‘Fail whales’ all over the place due to one thing – the passing of the King of Pop. The whole world awoke on Friday to the shocking news that Michael Jackson had passed away and for a short time at least, took the internet with him!
Did any of you see the case of HabitatUK and Twitter this week? The furniture retailer was adding keywords (aka hashtags) to their tweets to ensure that its messages were coming up in the hot topics on the microblogging site. Don’t get us wrong here, we don’t condone their ‘abuse’ of the system, but we do embrace the attempt by the furniture store to use social networking.