update

New Facebook Ticker is Invasion of Privacy

Facebook launched their newest update this week with lots of fanfare. Not ready to comment yet on functionality and changes made, but want to address the apparent glaring invasion of privacy issue with their new Ticker broadcast function and ability of users to Opt out of it.

Since the update, just about every action you make on Facebook is streamed in Ticker form on the upper right portion of other users screens. Haven’t been able to confirm yet if this is only limited to Friends etc or goes beyond this. However to be honest, there is a difference between simply sharing the content you post to broadcasting your every activity streaming in real time.

Read more

A Quiet Night Under the Arches

I know it has been a fortnight or more since I’ve posted, but I wanted to get back to the blog and talk about the multitude of activities going on at McDonald’s USA.

I am now 7 months in to my new role and feel I’ve gotten my sea legs on the massive and ever rolling ship that is McDonald’s. So what is going on?

TONS.

If you live under a rock, you might not know that the Mc Rib is back. Through a careful mix of pre-seeding and launch activities, we’ve been able to generate a HUGE amount of chatter about the national return of my personal favorite menu item…that is if you count Wall Street Journal, Colbert, John Stewart, USA Today, Google Trends, Yahoo Hot News and a few hundred millions other traditional and social media posts a big deal.

McRib turned in to a trending topic on Twitter (before our promoted trend) on Google and Yahoo (twice). Oh, and Bill Clinton also talked about how excited he was about it.

McRib was also our first test of promoted Tweets and Trends. Yes, there were some negative tweets, but there were nothing compared to the huge majority of fans showing uber excited about the return of McRib. Fortune had a great write up on this subject:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/17/why-it-doesn’t-mcmatter-if-you-dont-like-the-mcrib/

Beyond McRib, we had a great pilot program with Farmville. Great meaning engagement of many millions more than expected.

Our Facebook places launch is raising $50,000 for charity and our virtual hands program is kicking in another $10,000.

Once things settle down, I hope to post more about each program.

Rick Wion

How to do Twitter in 15 minutes a day

“Twitter users are the most influential consumers online,” concludes Exact Target in the research report Subscribers, Fans, and Followers. When I was with Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, recently in Indianapolis, he told me there were over 160 million registered Twitter accounts. It’s safe to say, Twitter is growing in importance as a part of one’s marketing mix. The challenge is, how to find the time to “do” Twitter. Here’s how you can do Twitter in 15 minutes a day or less.

Growing your network

  • Use search.twitter.com or Google to find 5 leaders in your industry and follow them on Twitter
  • Follow back every real person who follows you
  • Follow 5 people who participated in a tweet chat discussing your topic. Here’s a mega list of Twitter tweet chats.

Growing your relationships

  • Scan your @mentions and reply to every human who addresses a tweet to you
  • Scan your direct messages and reply to any that don’t look like auto-generated messages. Nearly 99% of all my incoming direct messages are auto-generated. Many people call them “junk mail,” and nearly everyone calls them spam. No doubt you’ll come up with your own vocabulary to describe them.

Growing your influence

  • Scan your “home” stream of tweets posted by people you follow to find relevant content for your followers and retweet it.
  • Share 4-5 links to other relevant content around the web (blog posts, news articles, research, polls, surveys, etc.). You can use your RSS aggregator (I’m using Google Reader at the moment) to “harvest” relevant content to share via Twitter.
  • If you write a blog, share a link to a recent post. Twitter readers may give you grief if all you do is share your own content, but if they know you’re also sharing other valuable, relevant content with them, they’ll be glad to see your content, too.

While’s there’s much, much more to leveraging the power of Twitter, if you’ll follow the outline above, you can get started in Twitter right away without it consuming too much time. Over the next few days, I’ll share more ideas to help you use Twitter to expand your online presence, and yes, to add Twitter as a meaningful part of your sales system.

Trey Pennington