This morning as I began my work week, my inbox like many others was littered with advertisements from dozens of companies making me aware of their Cyber Monday sales. One that really caught my eye was from AT&T. They are running various smart phones this Monday at various times for only one cent. I thought to myself that this was pretty cool and wanted to share this with my social media buddies. Also, as we have recently been sharing over in our photo blog, various social media marketing efforts of corporations both large and small. So, I have been scanning every piece of advertising that I come across lately,looking to see if they are integrating social media marketing into their email marketing, print & TV advertising.
As I scrolled down to the bottom of the ad for AT&T I saw buttons to share on Facebook, LinkedIn & Yahoo Buzz. Glad they have the ability for me to share on Facebook. That’s a good place to have your stuff shared as there are now over 500 million users and most people have at least 100 connections there. LinkedIn? Ok, I guess that would also be a good place to have your stuff shared since there is a good sized network there although I am not sure that the content would be relevant to what people use LinkedIn for. The third icon for Yahoo Buzz? I mean, I have heard of it, but I don’t have an account and have only ever heard one person mention it before. What blew my mind and where I think AT&T really missed the ball is that they left off a button for Twitter!
According to TechCrunch, Twitter has over 190 million users. Not adding the ability for someone to share easily on Twitter is a major marketing blunder by someone. For me, Twitter is by far my largest group of connections with 6,710 followers of my personal Twitter account @jb140. It is also by far my fastest growing group. In comparison, our Facebook Page, has only 1,390 fans. Missing twitter in an online advertisement where you are including social media platforms is a major failure in my opinion. Whoever designed this advertisement at AT&T either doesn’t understand social media fully, had a major brain fart, or just didn’t want to take the time to incorporate it into the advertisement for cyber Monday thinking it wasn’t worth the time or money to implement. The same holds true for the entire editorial staff that missed this oversight. Maybe AT&T thinks that twitter isn’t that important, but my guess is more likely one of the first three options.
So when you are setting up your next online marketing campaign to send out to thousands of people, make sure if you are including social media, to include all the major connections. For me, I would have loved to share this special on Twitter. Unfortunately this option wasn’t available easy, so I didn’t.
It kills me when I see things like “Find us on Facebook”. Don’t make me work!
If this was me I would have shown the Facebook and Twitter Icons and of course both would be linked.
It blows my mind when they do those type of things. Have you seen the
various ones in our media section? 90% of them make you do the work!