I just happened across a promoted tweet from @Walmart that’s advertising Halloween items: Make us your one-stop shop for an affordable Halloween. And the tweet is promoting “Cups, candy and more.”
Since when are cups coveted, must-have Halloween items? You do need cups for parties, but still. Why didn’t @Walmart’s Twitter manager say “Costumes, candy and more”?
My organization is looking into paying for promotional posts on Facebook and promoted tweets on Twitter, so this observation makes me wonder how other organizations decide which posts are important enough to pay to promote and what kind of decisions are involved in the content of these posts.
Lesson: If you’re going to pay to promote a tweet, make sure that the content of the tweet is pitch perfect. My guess is that many more shoppers are looking for that perfect costume rather than that perfect holiday cup.
Several weeks ago I attended the 2012 Content Marketing World conference in Columbus, Ohio. It was packed full of great information, and for the first time at a conference, I live tweeted from each of the dozen or so talks I attended instead of taking notes on paper. My tweets can speak better (and more quickly) than any blog post can, so for the next several posts, I’ll share my takeaways from the conference, via tweets.
First up: the opening keynote session with Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation and the upcoming CTRL ALT DEL, to be published in spring 2013. His talk was titled “How to Reboot Your Content for a Mobile World.”
(As on Twitter, the earliest tweets are at the bottom.)
In the past less-than 48 hours, my Dec. 2011 post “How to comment with the new Facebook iPad app” has buh-lown up. My blog has gotten almost 1,800 hits, with the majority of folks looking at this post. What’s going on?!
I’m really sorry to say, but I don’t know. My app is working properly (sorry!). Readers have commented that, basically, their Facebook iPad app isn’t allowing them to comment on posts in their newsfeeds. When these users click on “comment” on a post, a box should pop up on the right and you should be allowed to comment. See my photo above.
But for a lot of folks, it seems this box is disappearing before they can comment, and it’s not reappearing when they tap “comment.” It doesn’t seem to be a problem exclusive to different iPad versions. And the smarties that we are, we’ve all checked the App Store to make sure we have the latest edition of the Facebook iPad app, which we do, from April 2, 2012. It also isn’t a problem with wireless keyboards.
Let’s keep discussing this and helping each other figure out a solution! I’ll do my research and you do yours. It looks like Facebook needs to fix a glitch…and from the looks of my blog stats, it needs to be fixed fast!
Related post: FOND MEMORIES: PR OOPSIES OF 2011
PRNews just published a fun story, PR News Hotlist: Top 10 PR Blunders of 2012, Part 1. It was a cringe-worthy journey down memory lane. I hadn’t thought about some of these in a while; everything else is being drowned out by all the Chick-fil-A clucking (ha! sorry) going on.
Lists like this open the discussion about whether social media is PR. Many of these blunders on the list began as social media gaffes, which then created the need for PR. An Olympian tweeting something controversial is way different than Komen revoking financial support of Planned Parenthood. Does it all fall under the PR umbrella?
I can’t wait to see Part 2 of this list, which I know will include one of my favorite PR oopies of this year so far: Spain finds out about their king’s expensive elephant-hunting trip. So, big deal, king’s need vacays. Wellll. He was also the honorary president of World Wildlife Federation of Spain, and the country is in its worst fiscal shape in a long time. It made me laugh every time I heard the story on NPR. Which was often.
abbymalikPR 