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Flash sales: flash of brilliance or a flash in the pan?

Flash sales, mystery boxes, group coupons, the thrill of buying at a moment’s notice or getting unexpected delights by mail have all been in the marketing spotlight within the last year. 

However, unless you take the time to carefully craft your flash sale campaign, it can go down like a lead balloon, leaving customers unimpressed and apathetic.

Here are a few examples of such sites, as well as an analysis of what they did right, and wrong. Study their successes, sidestep their mistakes, and learn from them to apply their lessons to your own campaigns.

Seven interesting approaches to blog comments. Which is best?

Whether comments are made on a blog, or spread across the social web, every business wants customers to make a (positive) noise about them.

But while they are great for increasing engagement, comments come with problems of their own.

In a week which has seen YouTube finally take steps to clean out the well of eternal torment that it uses as a comment section, and Popular Science is doing away with the chatter altogether, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at the various systems in place around the web designed to keep us talking… 

iBeacons: what are they and why should marketers care?

Amid all the hullabaloo about multi-coloured iPhones and problems with iOS 7, it was easy to miss the fact that Apple has also unveiled iBeacons.

iBeacons are a very interesting feature of iOS 7 as the technology is a step forward in location-based marketing and payments and may finally move us beyond the need for QR codes and NFC.

However Apple barely mentioned the technology at its WWDC event back in June, so there has been a lot of confusion and conflicting information about what iBeacons are and what they can be used for.

To find out more, I spoke to several mobile experts to find out what iBeacons are and why they’re important for marketers…

Island Records and Time Out launch NFC campaigns

After looking at the pros and cons of NFC (near field communication), it’s clear there’s a place for tapping to enjoy content as well as to pay for products.

However, the customer’s willingness to tap a poster with their phone is dependent on how well many initial NFC campaigns are carried out. Some clunky efforts, with terrible landing pages and insufficient incentives have risked putting users off for good.

This is changing as brands start to use the technology in better surroundings and to better purpose. A mall is the perfect environment to encourage users to tap with their friends.

To that end, from this week, shoppers can “turn on, tap and enjoy” content and competitions at Westfield shopping centres in London through CBS Outdoor digital pods, which use Proxama’s TapPoint NFC platform.

How Whole Foods Market uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

For the latest post looking at how major brands use social networks I’ve decided to nominate Whole Foods Market.

For those who aren’t aware of the brand, Whole Foods is an increasingly popular natural and organic food store with nearly 300 locations in North America and the UK.

Social media has been an essential part of the brand’s success, so it’s a great case study for other brands to try and learn from.

This post follows on from similar articles focusing on major brands including Walmart, Macy’s, Kroger, Starbucks and Nike…

New Twitter stats: talking is way more popular than sharing links

I thought I’d share a recent study into Twitter usage habits, conducted by Carolin Gerlitz and Bernhard Rieder. I missed this back in May, when it was first released, so apologies if you’ve already seen it.

The findings are significantly different to an older study from 2010 by a Microsoft team (Boyd, Golder and Lotan). This may be due to a different – arguably more robust – sampling method, using the Twitter Streaming API. Or, it may be that usage habits have evolved in the intervening three years. 

The full research is available here. It is a rather dense read, though a rewarding one. For those of you with TL;DR syndrome I have extracted some highlights.

M-commerce accounts for all online growth as desktop sales plateau: report

Mobile devices now account for all online sales growth as the amount of sales through desktop computers has plateaued, according to a new report.

Though total online retail has averaged around 15% growth since Q1 2011 figures excluding mobile have actually seen a steady decline before flat-lining in Q2 2013.

This is the first time that IMRG and Capgemini have reported separate statistics for mobile sales, with the data also showing that 23% of all online retail sales in Q2 2013 came from mobile devices.

Using Vine and Instagram for product video

Instagram has added video capability to its iPhone and Android apps to let its users create 15-second videos and share them on Instagram or other social networks, while Twitter recently introduced Vine, its app for helping people create and share six-second videos.

For merchants, the heightened popularity of videos, and online users’ excitement about making and sharing them, means that the time is right for shareable product videos.

#Vine Challenge: can you do better than us? Win a Festival of Marketing pass! #FoM13

How would you like to be plastered over the Econsultancy blog and win a Festival of Marketing pass or a ticket to the wrap party?

We’re giving you the chance to make a vine referencing the upcoming Festival of Marketing and win a ticket to the whole festival (worth £495) or the Marketing Frenzy party at Fabric in London.

Read on for the rules and get vining!

If you don’t know about the festival (where’ve you been?) check out the main events and the Fringe and Frenzy on the Festival of Marketing website.

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