What do $1 Razors and the Chicago Cubs Winning the World Series Have in Common?…

Great marketing campaigns!  Two totally separate online marketing campaigns have gone viral today, and both for very different reasons.  The first is from Dollar Shave Club which is out to take down the cabal that is Gillette.  By offerring $1 razor blades delivered to your doorstep each month, you can save hundreds of dollars over paying Gillette $8-10 a razor.  Not the most sexy business, but when you watch their online video campaign, you may change your opinion.

I am not a Chicago Cubs fan, but the misery that my North-side Chicago friends experience each summer tells me that the Cubs winning the World Series would be as big a deal as when the Red Sox won in 2004 after an 86 year wait.  Leave it to MLB The Show to come up with a video showing what it would be like for the Cubs and the city of Chicago to end their 103 year drought.  The game is so realistic that it is hard to tell fact from fiction.

LinkedIn Advertising Controversy

LinkedIn made changes to start using your picture in advertising on their network.  After getting inundated with negative feedback LinkedIn announced they were going to turn off this feature.

Ads With Images:

Ads Without Images:

Users can turn off LinkedIn’s ability to use your name or photo in advertising by following these steps:

1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.

2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account”.

3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising”.

4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”.

This was an interesting move by LinkedIn.  I treat my LinkedIn profile seriously because it is a view of my professional life.  I have my CV on there, as well as using it for keeping track of business contacts.  LinkedIn is not for friends, it is for my professional life.  I don’t want potential partners or customers seeing that I endorse something that I don’t approve of.

I am glad LinkedIn acted quickly today to remove this functionality, but the bait and switch of privacy among social networks is tricky.  I dealt with this a bunch when I worked on AIM, and for the most part aired on the side of caution, but we definitely had our own versions of this happen to us.

How the Social Media World Reacted to Super Bowl Ads

How the Social Media World Reacted to Super Bowl Ads [STATS].

We provided some insights into the aftermath of the Super Bowl ads.  We saw huge increase (3000%) in shares in posts mentioning Pepsi Max, but Groupon was much smaller.  While search may have indicated who the winner was going to be, clearly social can indicated who the advertising winners were.

atshare