18 Aug Facebook Pushing News Feed Ads; Mountain Dew Gets Hijacked; Panera Post Goes Viral
For my Saturday morning weekly recap, here are three “share worthy” items I came across this week. Headlines are clickable.
Facebook Getting More Aggressive with Newsfeed Ads
Facebook needs more income to pull up their terrible stock price right now. As mobile grows, getting ads into the news feed is key. Facebook has now opened up Promoted Posts (just a few months old) to Friends of Fans. Prior to this, they were only available to your current fans. This is a great way for low budget, ad hoc post promotion. (Here’s a PDF about it that Facebook sent me explaining it better.)
Facebook is also testing allowing Promoted Posts to people with no connection to your page at all. Right now, that’s a very small test, though. Facebook has to proceed carefully here, so they don’t mess up the overall FB experience by cluttering it with too many ads.
Mountain Dew Naming Promo Hijacked by 4Chan
4Chan is the web’s home of pranksters. A brand getting on their radar is not a good thing, as Mountain Dew learned this week. They opened up a promotion to allow fans to name their new soft drink (as they’ve done before), but this time 4Chan decided to play. This is a group that made their leader Time’s “2009 most influential person,” over Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.
Among the most popular names? “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” and “Diabeetus.” Mountain Dew took the promotion down fairly quickly. Probably a good idea. It’s tough to beat 4Chan.
Panera’s Good Deed Gets 600,000 Likes, on a FAN Post No Less
For every Mountain Dew type story, there are just as many stories of brands getting praise on Social Media. Take this story of a young man whose grandmother was dying. She wanted some clam chowder from Panera, but they only make it on Friday. He called Panera, explained, and they made the soup right away.
His story, posted by his mother on the Panera fan page, now has over 630,000 likes and 27,000 comments. Also this week, influential blogger Peter Shankman saw United waive a change fee for a woman in distress. His blog post about her joy was great PR for United. Social media does a great job shining light on the good stories out there, too, which is always gratifying.
