The Belton Blog

Are Your Customers Celebrities?

The CMA (Canadian Marketing Association) calls it moving from pop culture to peep culture in a recent article. Peep culture allows anyone to become a celebrity in their own world.

Are your customers celebrities? Not a traditional celebrity with a physical entourage, network tv show, movie deals, daily tabloid stories or anything in that realm. A customer celebrity exists within a niche, they may have a few hundred people who hang off every blog post, tweet or facebook status. They may talk about fishing gear, make-up or cars, maybe just where they're going on Saturday night.

Do you know who these customer celebrities are? Do they talk about your brand in the social world?

Human Tetris

Remember all those hours spent placing different shaped groups of blocks as they started moving faster and faster with no end in sight? (Sorry...flashback) Try it with groups of people and a video camera. This is pretty amazing when you think of the time, effort, and coordination that had to go into playing Tetris with people. It would be great if this could be made into a team building activity. Anyone want to give it a shot?

Social Media in Plain English

A nice way to explain social media using cartoons and ice cream. Explaining how social media opens up the world for more choices, innovation, communication, and flavors. It also shows how finding a niche can create a great amount of success and listening to you customers can greatly improve your business. 

WolframAlpha : A Knowledge Engine.

Ever wonder what happened on a certain date? Or want way more nutritional information on a cookie then you'll ever need, broken down ten different ways? 

Check out WolframAlpha, it brands itself as a computational knowledge engine and it's just that. Backed by a great community and laid out in an easy to read manner, WolframAlpha is addictive to say the least but also a great resource for that nagging question that wont leave your mind until you answer it. 

Twittering Toaster Tweets Tasty Toast Talk

  "Toasting.

  Toast is done.

  Toasting.

  Toast is done."

And so goes the very zen-like tweeting of "/mytoaster," day in and day out.

We truly live in a connected world when people's toasters are updating their own Twitter page. I can't wait until my fridge tweets that my milk has gone sour.

See for yourself.

Check out the Wired article here. 

You Kin' Do It.

I would like to just take a second and recognize Dunkin' Donuts for making some great waves in social media. For those of you who don't already know, back in October 2008 DD started their work on Twitter, receiving customer concerns, responding to compliments and of course talking about great promotions such as today's Iced Coffee day. They seem to have someone that is dedicated to engaging their customers with this relatively new form of communication. We all may want to take note and follow DD on twitter to see how social media can be used to engage a customer on personal and professional level.

Weathering a Twitterstorm

  Over the last few days a storm broke out in the social  networking world leaving both Amazon and Domino's caught out in the rain.

 For Domino's it was two employees disgustingly messing around with someones food and posting it on Youtube. Amazon experienced a categorization error that created a storm of negative press on Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs.

 Abbey Klaassen at Advertising Age writes a great article on how to weather a "Twitterstorm" here.

Bank Does U Turn on Fees

Students fed up by the HSBC bank and a new policy about service charges didn't sit well with a few thousand students. The students fought back via Facebook. The full article can be found on this BBC post.

Calculating The Value of Starbucks Brand Fanatics

Sure you’ve heard about FaceBook but what does Social Media really mean to the bottom line of your business? Check out this interesting post about calculating the value of Starbucks Brand fanatics from Peter at ConsumerGeneratedMedia.Com.  I think you’ll agree the real value is in word of mouth and loyalty of your best customers; however, today’s technology can amplify loyalty faster than old school word of mouth as we know it. Now that’s Hot!