DISQUS

JV · 2 months ago

Sounds like another spot.
It's fun, modern, sells a few different products (shoes, social media, hardware, family).
If an agency can become a production company, why can't a prodco start pitching creative directly to clients? There used to be lines but since those are blurred anymore, why not?

Joe DiSanto · 2 months ago

I read this and laughed....it seemed like a nice story at first. But then I pictured some marketing person at zappos receiving an alert from their blog scanner software that someone mentioned zappos somewhere, and saw it as the opportunity they had been waiting for to make a "personal" connection with a customer. Im not sure if I should be impressed by fact that companies take that kind of approach to get a parent to buy their kids shoes, or creeped out a little. And I ask this in the most non-cynical way possible? I think zappos has a great website and service.

jsepoch · 2 months ago

hi joe, thanks for commenting.

it may be true, zappos is scouring the net to look for these type of
mentions to make a personal connection to consumers to buy their
stuff. it's called capitalism. but, i give them credit for spending
time and money to reach consumers and even more credit for actually
listening.

zappos is at least trying to make connection. and yes, it's to their
benefit but it's a lot more than i can say for most of the clients i
work with. they give as little as possible and ask for a lot in return
i.e. my loyalty and my money.

i appreciate a corporation that shows a little heart. in the end, if
you do it consistently i think it stops being a marketing gimmick and
starts becoming culture.

Phyllis Koenig · 2 months ago

the cynical of us will believe that some drone stuck in the word "daughter" from a grabbed bite - just a computer speaking to a computer. I'd like to believe it's real. plus i kinda feel a shoe collection in your near future...

evanlabb · 2 months ago

@jsepoch I think you underestimate the number of companies who are deeply engaged in this kind of social strategy. Zappos, like hundreds of other companies today have marketing teams dedicated to this effort. They have protocols in place for how to interact, which cover everything from who can respond, what types of questions/comments can be addressed and how (if at all) you blend personal and business in this social space. A whole host of tools exist to to track corporate mentions (like Twitter's search API and now Google's Social Search).
For my money the real question is how does this scale? How/when do you get to a place where you can effectively have the same or more impact on your target audience?
Or perhaps it doesn't. In the broadcast world the metrics are reach and frequency. That's how media is planned and bought, right? Perhaps in this social world the metrics need to take into account the quality of the interaction instead of frequency. And finally, if you took your $50mm media buy and applied it to the social graph would you just be trading one medium (broadcast) that we can't measure for another (social)?

jsepoch · 2 months ago

For the record I never said I underestimated the number of companies engaging in social media. Obviously there are quite a few but not enough. Almost everyone who read this story or I relayed it to was surprised. Their wasn't one example of someone saying to me, "Something similar happened to me when..." The technology is unquestionably there to communicate and quantify those interactions. The problem is the lack of will or understanding on behalf of consumer based businesses.

You may a great point about will this be able to work on a large scale for a company the size of Coke or a corporation like P&G. These are the issue we are facing. Part if is making the financial commitment to find out. Taking a meaningful percentage of those 50 million media buys and allocating them towards social media. My guess is the ones that do will grow and those that won't will recede. It is why I wrote that story. It was as much a sweet anecdote about my daughter as it was a cautionary tale for our industry.