Social Media and Back to School

Ah the pleasures of summer...shorts and tank tops, free outdoor concerts, bare feet on dewy grass, lemonade, ice cream and...sales! In August we usually see retailers make their big push for "back to school", but what's different this year is their use of social media in addition to traditional print, TV and online advertising campaigns. Mo Krochmal, journalism professor at Hofstra University and I, inspired by this article, traveled to Herald Square, site of the brand new JCPenney flagship store - its first ever in Manhattan - to cover the story. We wanted to see first hand how big box retailers JCPenney, Staples and OfficeMax are using social media. Facebook fan pages, Twitter and YouTube are big.




Will they be successful? Time will tell, but so far:

JCP Teen on Facebook has doubled its fan size to 17,000 since July 25th, and they're doing a a great job of cross marketing the fan page with a dedicated website where you can actually buy the products, plus they're also running other campaigns linked to concerts and skateboarding.

Staples has a back to school tab on its Facebook page which also links to a matching landing page for shopping. They have a 3 campaigns centered around giving to students in need. The fan base grew by about 4,000 members in the same period but it's hard to tell whether it's all from back to school or just supplies in general because it's all together. I took a quick scan of the latest comments but didn't see any posts from teens, like you see in the JCPenney page.

OfficeMax has no mention of the viral penny prank videos on their website and their Twitter account hasn't been updated frequently, although they do have over 500 followers.

Some points to consider when deciding whether your business should launch a social media campaign:

-Where is your audience? Do they spend time on social networks?

-How can you tie in your other web assets, like your website or blog to the campaign?

-Who will be managing content and moderating the conversations?

-How will you measure success? Is it traffic, sales, engagement?

How are you using social media for your business? Please share!

Samples of My Online Videos for Business

I've talked about the power of online videos before (see "Related Posts" below) and I recently put my money where my mouth is by creating a video for El Museo del Barrio, a museum dedicated to fostering Latin American art. Artists Ruben and Isabel Toledo (he's a talented illustrator and she's designed dresses for the First Lady) offered to teach a class of 10th graders how to paint portraits, and the fruits of their labor were to be auctioned off at El Museo's Gala Benefit last week. I jumped on the bandwagon with my trusted Flip HD Mino videocam and this is what I came up with. All the editing was done with MovieMaker, which is part of the MS Office bundle. It was tons of fun shooting and editing the clip, which is now also featured on El Museo's Facebook page, as well as on YouTube. Take a look and catch the master illustrator in action!



Here's another clip for my client Jennifer Bradford Davis, a fabulous interior designer who created a marvelous table setting for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House Spring Gala at Sotheby's. The tricky part with this shoot was editing with music in the background, but somehow it all worked out. Jennifer looks absolutely beautiful and the table just sparkles.



If you'd like information on how to shoot & edit an online video, or would like me to create one for you, please contact me.

Related posts:

My Favorite Web 2.0 Video Channels

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In this entry on combination exercises they added 5 of Sheryl's videos to go along with the topic of the post. Once you click on the image, a window will pop up with the video. To monetize it further Sheryl is using Google Adsense to ...

My Favorite Web 2.0 Video Channels

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Shoba Purushothaman, the CEO of The NewsMarket, a site makes video press releases available to news organizations as well as bloggers to download for free. So say you're writing a post about Chrome, the new Google browser. To give your story a little more depth you could add the video press release to your piece for your readers to click on. This makes it very easy for bloggers to add professionally produced content to their posts. "New technologies are allowing publishers to get more sophisticated with their content, and there is greater consumer appetite for video," says Shoba. "We're in the business of matching content creators and content consumers", she adds, and to that end they've created a section called the Video Cafe specifically tailored to bloggers. She points out that tech, auto and social causes are their most popular buckets.

After speaking to her I was curious to see what other outlets provided high quality video clips. Whether you want to stay up to date on the latest web 2.0 video tutorials, or you want to add them to your posts to enhance your story and make it more professional, I found an number of sources, which I've listed below. By copying and pasting their html code you can embed the videos on unto your post so your readers don't have to navigate away from you. Here's a little roundup of my favorite web 2.0 channels:

YouTube is of course the end all and be all for video but it can be cumbersome to sort through it all, so I've selected some channels I like:

The Google channel has the latest downloads on, what else, Google products & how-to's.

Check this one on how to use Google Maps...it's super cool:



The CommonCraft channel has the most clear and easy-to-understand tutorials I've seen on the web. Here's one on Twitter in Plain English:



If you're writing about breaking news, YouTube's Associated Press channel has videos on an eclectic mix of topics, including tips on buying stocks (it'll soon be time for some quality bottom fishing, if you have the stomach for it...). The bad news is they're all jumbled up together and there's no categories, but you can search or choose from the 'most viewed' and 'the most discussed'.

Outside of YouTube there's the AllBusiness.com's Video Library. Here's one snippet on Why Search Engine Spiders are Important






TED.com offers a diverse library of videos from their annual conference, which brings together some of the world's most interesting people including Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, etc. Here's a clip on how Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia, one of the most referenced, most highly trafficked sites on the web:





Expert Village has an Internet channel with some useful how-to's. There were a slew of Facebook tutorials on the welcome page, and the one I looked at was well edited and to the point.

Where do you go for quality online video? Please share!

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