Flying Colours
Many people (mostly women, although some men joined in to keep it interesting) were/are updating their ‘facebook status’ with a colour – apparently for a cause.
The only mission the ‘campaign’ accomplished was a generate a whole lot of curiosity to a question, that turned out to be colours of a womens bra. A friend of mine took it to another level with her status reading ‘white with blood stains’ – which made me wonder “What’s for dinner?”.
The point being – how effective are these viral campaigns on social networking sites? This one for example did make everyone search the trend to find out that it was meant to generate ”Breast cancer awareness’. Honestly though, how many of the people who participated were not already aware of breast cancer?
The fad spread and quick but what needs to be measured is its true effectiveness – did it translate to real research on the subject, or make people go for a check up?
If only, all those who had updated their status, told us if they passed the check-up with flying colours.
Spam mail
Everyday the mailbox fills up with piles of junk and ‘spam’ mail. A consequence of ‘reply to all’ or just poor design.
While replies to one mail are threaded together and form a neat cascade in Gmail, similar features needs to be integrated into mails from facebook, even better would be a pop-up (in facebook) that’s ask whether you want notifications about additional activity against any status/pic you have responded to.
For office mail spam I guess common sense should work:
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Impact through social networking clusters
When using any social network friends, acquaintances and small businesses bank on each ‘tweet’ /’status update’ to further a impression and attitude towards their brand.
Small business and startups understand that the ‘fan’ on a social network only has their word to rely on and hence are always on their best behaviour.
Businesses market and sell in virtual clusters, the ‘facebook cluster’, the ‘twitter cluster’ etc. , where each update is calculated and designed to have an impact.
When advertisements reach the target audience through consent and are more interactive, it makes you wonder where all the irrelevant pop-ups disappeared.
News coverage – social networking leading the race?
I ‘heard’ the news, long before it was aired on Television or published on online news channels.
My source was not reliable, but the news did turn out to be true. I saw the news flashing on Twitter and Facebook. People awaiting confirmation from news media on Michael Jackson’s death had numerous – almost ‘live’- status changes.
This got me thinking, was it the timing when I logged in to the networking site or was there more to the way I first heard the news?
I did a little investigation and this is what I found.
Word of mouth still the most effective means to transmit information, eh!