AJ Vaynerchuk

Story Background

I am taking a New Media and PR class this semester. Our final project was to make a video for a contest hosted by Jabra. These videos would be counted as a grade and also entered into the actual contest.

The point

The winner of this contest gets $2500! Nice chunk of change eh? How does Jabra determined the winner? Video views! We have been encouraged to Blog, Twitter, Facebook, and spread the word in anyway we want.

This is where you come in

I have convinced my group that we can lock up the win with your help! Rather than split the winnings 4 ways, we are going to subtract $500 for you! On top of that, I am going to take my cut ($500) and give it to you too! That’s a total of $1000.

How you can help!

Visit this page and watch the video titled, “Life without Jabra.” Jabra stipulates that we send all viewers to the link above, rather than the direct link, so sorry for the inconvenience! Also any way you can spread the word to family and friends will ensure that we can do this!

How you can win!

After you watch the video join the PleaseDressMe Main newsletter (and any other newsletter you’d like to join!). I will be picking a select number of winners from this email list.

How many winners should I pick?

Let me know in the comments!

TweetBomb is an interesting little meme that is going on over at Twitter right now. The basic concept is simple, everyday at 3:33pm EST, the tweetbomb twitter account informs all of its followers who today’s victim is. To bomb the victim, you simply need to send that individual a @reply with no message. Here is an example.

Yesterday I happened to be the latest “victim.” I throw quotes around victim since being a victim of the tweetbomb simply means you get tons of @replies, and in turn a nice amount of new followers. Personally I received around 150 @replies, and 40 new followers. Follow TweetBomb to join in on the fun! Here are a few screen shots that I took during the bombing:

Backstory:

My brother Gary and I decided that if the Jets were to beat the Patriots last week we wouldn’t shave until their next loss. So here is the status update!

If the Jets beat the Titans tomorrow, look for a similar update next week! *Crosses fingers*

Here is a quick little story highlighting why Twitter can be a great asset for most businesses:

Story starts off with this tweet:

I have been using the food delivery service foodler for a few months now and have had nothing but great experiences. The service makes ordering food SUPER easy, and that is obviously something that is worth while for me. A few days after that tweet I received an @reply from a competitor of Foodlers:

Grubhub did a great job of using Twitter Search to track tweets regarding their competitors. Instead of being sneaky and inauthentic, the company sent me a tweet from the company account with a nice message regarding their service. I went ahead and checked out the website and decided to give it a shot today. That right there just gave Grubhub business they would have never had before, and took away business that Foodler should have received. On top of that, Grubhub gave itself the opportunity to gain and “steal” a customer.

Unfortunately for Grubhub, their product was inferior. I don’t want to portray the service as being terrible, because it isn’t, but it just wasn’t on the same level as Foodler. The minimum order price was consistently higher than Foodlers, and the delivery time from this one order was nearly 45 minutes longer than my average Foodler order. On top of that, the personal account settings on Foodler outclass Grubhub’s.

So what did we learn here?

Grubhub did a wonderful job utilizing Twitter in a way that could have earned them a new customer. The problem was that their product wasn’t good enough to close the deal. If you are a company using Twitter in this manner, make sure your product is as good as you can make it. There are plenty of ways to improve GrubHub, and if the company were to implement some of these improvements, they can utilize Twitter even more so.

The following is a quick summary of an experience I just had regarding my site PleaseDressMe. If you are going to approach website owners / content owners with your service, DO NOT do anything listed below.

I received a Gchat request from someone I didn’t know. I accepted it just in case it was someone I actually did know.

The individual started off with “Thanks for accepting my chat request.” - That’s fine.

Then the individual states, “I can’t remember where i saw you first but it must have been linked to a cool application. Do you have an application for social networks?” - Really? You couldn’t take 5 seconds to figure out who I am and what my company is about?

A few minutes later the individual writes, “I see that you have a facebook app, have you made one for OpenSocial?” - Actually there is no PleaseDressMe Facebook application… yet

The individual then responds with: “Ok, when you have a facebook app, you should add it to company XYZ” - Well that was clearly a quick, well calculated pitch.

Please, please, please, please don’t follow this model. If you are going to approach someone with a business proposal of sorts take the time to know who they are, what their website is about, and how you can actually help them. The individual who approached me did no preparation, and offered no reason as to why their site would actually benefit me. I had no idea what the site was and why I should invest my time into it.