Starbucks Social Media Campaign

Starbucks has developed an interesting online marketing technique to engage their customers in an interactive online tool. My Starbucks Idea is a platform for people to post ideas about new products they think would work for Starbucks, and people can vote on cool ideas they would like to see.

This is an interesting concept. Why pay marketers 6 figures a year to come up with new products when you could just ask the people who actually BUY the products. The objective being just that, people who buy the products would know more about what they want. Genius.

People are their marketing technique and the premise being that social media can allow anyone from anywhere with an amazing idea to share it with the world. An Starbucks actually puts them into action.

The most recent idea, mini Starbucks re loadable cards that fit on your key chain. Yes those handy little cards was a Starbucks customer's idea.



This is social media (FREE) marketing at its finest.
If you want to know more about this unique idea including some drawbacks check out these blogs:

Chef Deaf Jeff
Zofia
Rachael
Auravelia (rhymes with Australia)
Anna Banana

Social Media Scam Spreads Like Wildfires

If you haven't heard about the new social media application Formspring, you soon will.

Formspring is a site that allows anonymous users to ask questions about people you may be interested in. The questions range from what is your favourite colour to what are your life's ambitions. Users can post questions under the guise of anonymity. You have the choice to publish your answers to certain questions, or ignore them.



Recently, Formspring came under fire after a press release spread wildly across the Internet that the two creators were conspiring to sell your private information to other Internet sources. The press release came from the Associated Press, a seemingly credible source.






The scam was a scam. This story not only proved to be completely untrue but proof that anybody can post anything and people WILL believe it. It probed people to question the legitimacy of the sites they use and the applications they choose to divulge their information and at the same time proving that just because a credible name is attached doesn't make it true (sound familiar? Wikipedia's source credibility is questioned constantly)

Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
Does this make you less likely to post your personal information to these 'harmless' sites?

Formspring me! But don't ask me questions you wouldn't want to know.