Can customers appear out of thin air? That’s what some Starbucks workers are wondering as their corporate overlords have reportedly asked them to serve an additional 20 customers every day, at every store in the United States. How do they find these customers? [More]
hashtags
Get A Golden Bud Light Can, Win A Remote Chance To Win Super Bowl Tickets
By 11.28.16
The premise of the Golden Ticket promotion in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the two movies based on it was simple: there were five pieces of gold-colored paper hidden in chocolate bars all over the world, and the bearers of those tickets would get to visit Willy Wonka’s candy factory. The grown-up version of this promotion involves 37,000 golden-colored cans of beer hidden in cases of Bud Light, but only seven winners. [More]
Attention, Women Born In 1990: You’re Starting To Look Kinda Old
By 2.12.15
You’re really never too young to wear sunscreen and moisturize the skin on your face, but Origins, a “natural” skin care brand owned by Estee Lauder, is trying something interesting. They’re advertising anti-aging skin care products to women in their twenties, apparently hoping to tie the quarter-life crisis phenomenon to our natural fears about mortality and aging. [More]
Reminder: Don’t Post Photos Of Your Paycheck On Social Media If You’d Like To Avoid ID Theft
By 10.29.14
One way to be sure you aren’t sharing your financial information with the entire Internet? Don’t post it on social media by way of a paycheck made out to you. Yes, you should be proud that you’re raking in the dough. But if you want to keep your identity safe, plastering it on the web is not the way to go. [More]
DiGiorno Shows Why You Should Read Twitter Hashtags Before Using Them
By 9.9.14
We’ve discussed before how brands should reconsider the use of Twitter as a promotional tool, since the combination of employees signed in to the wrong account, thoughtless jumping on bandwagons, and followers who know how to take screen shots has damaged a lot of brands. Today’s devastating example of why you should look before employing a hashtag comes from frozen pizza brand DiGiorno, which wandered into a serious Twitter conversation about domestic violence. [More]
Amazon Now Lets You Use Hashtags To Shop On Twitter
By 5.5.14
Because you should apparently never take your eyes off of Twitter, lest you miss the same updates and photos that your friends are also sharing simultaneously on Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else the kids today are all hopped up on, Amazon has launched a new service that lets you add items directly to your Amazon shopping cart with the use of a hashtag. [More]
A Restaurant Photo Booth Station Takes Food Oversharing To A Whole New, Scary Level
By 4.29.14
Currently in my phone I have at least six photos of meals I’ve prepared and/or consumed. And yes, three of those have been posted to social media because I, like many other humans who eat food, sometimes find myself so full of admiration for the stuff, I feel the need to share it. But the idea of a veritable photo booth at a restaurant existing solely for food photos (phodos? phoodos?), well, that’s a bit intense. [More]
Birds Eye Creates “Mashtags” Potato Shapes So You Can Eat The Internet
By 2.18.14
Because it’s just not enough to consume the Internet with your eyes/brain, Birds Eye is trying to get people to eat the darn thing with its new Twitter-themed “Mashtags” potato shapes. Ah yes, potato shapes — the redheaded step children of French fries and tater tots. [More]
Who Is To Blame For Creating Hashtags?
By 10.4.13
Full disclosure: I despise hashtags. They’re visually distracting and over-deployed, to the point where many Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts now look like someone got drunk and passed out on his keyboard’s number pad. Even worse, the jerks in marketing have grabbed hold of the hashtag, desperately slapping a “#” before their brand names, all for the purpose of tracking public sentiment and creating really neat-looking graphs and charts to justify spending more money on hashtag-based marketing. To misappropriate a quote from The Thin Red Line, “This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?” [More]
Facebook Launches Hashtags In Latest Attempt To Keep Up With The #Cool #Kids
By 6.12.13
A few months back all the kids were chatting on the Internets about how like, Facebook wanted to be a lot more like Twitter? And like, the best way to do that might be to use those hashtag thingies? Those rumors turned out to be true, as the #SocialNetwork is rolling along with the tide of progress and learning to use hashtags. [More]
Wendy’s Tells Customers To Tweet At Wrong Username Two Weeks Too Early
By 3.20.13
Barry got a flyer for a cool new social media promotion at Wendy’s. It looks fun and simple enough: just take a picture of your chicken sandwich and tweet it with a specific hashtag. He writes that what should be a simple enough promo became needlessly complicated because of two mistakes on the part of Wendy’s: they handed flyers out two weeks before the actual start date of the promotion, and directed people to the wrong Twitter account. You know, minor details. [More]
Eating Mini-Donuts Is Like Child Murder, Tweets Entenmann's
By 7.6.11
Attention, brands trying to be hip to the “Twitters”: while it can sometimes be good exposure to mention one of the trending words or topics publicized on the right sidebar of the site, make sure that you know what that trending topic is referring to. At minimum, make sure that it doesn’t refer to anything negative or potentially offensive. Such as a highly publicized murder trial. [More]
