Social Media Winner

Social Media Winner of the Week – Walt Disney Pictures

I don’t think a whole lot about my Klout score until an enterprising company offers me something special because of it. Not too long ago, I was approached by Fox to spread the word about a new show they were launching called “Lone Star”. I wasn’t particularly interested based on the premise, so I didn’t follow up/accept. The show lasted two episodes, I think.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Disney inviting me to attend a free advance screening of “Tangled”, which is set for release on November 24th. It’s a 3D animated comedy based on the story of Rapunzel. This is more my speed, frankly, so I readily accepted and I took my two older daughters (they are 9.5 and 4.5 years old).

We arrived about 10-15 minutes before the scheduled screening time of 7:30pm. I saw a gigantic line wrapping halfway around the building, and I was concerned. As we were walking up, I asked someone if that was the line for “Tangled”, even though I already knew that it had to be. My heart dropped a little bit. I was worried about disappointing my little girls, since I didn’t see how everyone in that line could possibly fit into an average theater.

We took our place at the end of the line, and it began to move….slowly. I noticed that most of the people around me were holding large passes. Was I supposed to have these? Maybe I should have gone to the box office first. Ugh. Someone mentioned that they were hoping to get a seat, but if not, it was no big deal to them. It was a big deal to me, since there was no talk of limited seating on the email or info I had received, and I had two girls who were stoked about seeing this movie.

As we approached the corner for the final straightaway to get to the actual door, a guy came around to the crowd and said this:

“If you received an email from Disney giving you front-of-line access, please come see me.”

Could it be?

I walked a few feet over to him, and I mentioned that I had received an email from Disney, but I didn’t know if it granted us special access or not.

“What’s your name, sir?”

I responded.

“Yes, you’re on the VIP list. Come with me, please. You’re in the special reserved section of the theater.”

Um….awesome?

I gathered my daughters and our hands were stamped, then we were whisked inside, leaving a couple hundred folks outside looking bewildered.

The sole complaint about the evening was the fact that I was forced to return to my car before the movie, since I had an iPhone with me and it has a built-in camera. I think this could have been more clear in the instructions.

We all loved the movie, and I’ll write a separate review on one or more of my blogs sometime soon. It’s definitely worth seeing, and a few scenes were laugh-out-loud funny. The animation was lush and beautifully rendered. I was impressed.

They’re supposed to be mailing me a kit of “Tangled” goodies sometime soon, too, including a t-shirt, etc. It didn’t ask for a shirt size, so I’ll be interested to see what they send now. 🙂 I think I’m supposed to include this rather official sounding disclosure, which is the truth, too:

I was given a free product or sample because I’m a Klout influencer. I was under no obligation to receive the sample or talk about this company. I get no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

Congratulations to Disney Pictures! You are the 210 Consulting Social Media Winner of the Week. I have little doubt that your efforts will help “Tangled” to be a big-time success through the holidays.

Social Media Winner of the Week: BlogTalkRadio!

Social Media Winner

Keeping our series on social media winners we come across, today I wanted to share about a great story that happened to me recently. As many of you know, I participate in an online radio show called Social Media Edge with Ken Cook, Jason Crouch, & Mike Mueller. The show airs every Tuesday at noon and we have been blessed with some really awesome guests in the past. I have been actively participating in the show now for well over a year. We broadcast online at BlogTalkRadio every week.

During our last broadcast, I had several people in the chatroom complaining about the ads that kept running on the screen. These ads would take over the sound of the broadcast and you would miss important parts on topics we were discussing. Since I normally call into the show instead of just listening online, I didn’t know what they were really talking about. Then later on that same day I was listening to a friend on a different broadcast on BlogTalkRadio.

The person being interviewed has a soft voice so I had to crank up the volume on my computer to hear. Now one thing that you must understand is this. Since I work in my home office all day long, I like to have music playing at louder than normal volumes. To accomplish this, I have connected my computer up to it’s own home theater. Might be a little overkill, but I love it. So I had the volume for this particular broadcast maxed out to be able to hear the guest.

All of a sudden music started blaring and almost made blood come out of my eardrums from the loudness as a commercial for Tide Detergent started playing. I immediately searched for a mute or pause button and after about 7 seconds I could quiet the ad. In my frustration, I sent out a tweet to @blogtalkradio saying the following:

Hey @blogtalkradio the auto player ads on the radio shows is really annoying. It interrupts the show! Please fix it!less than a minute ago via TweetDeckJeremy Blanton
jb140

To which the promptly replied:

@jb140 Hi Jeremy, Thanks for ur feedback. Would it be possible to have a quick convo with you about your experience? Can u DM us with a #?less than a minute ago via CoTweetblogtalkradio
blogtalkradio

I sent them my contact info and within minutes my phone rang. I had an awesome conversation with Amy and she apologized for the inconvenience as well as asked if she could help with anything else. She was beyond friendly and helpful. She even gave me her skype ID to contact her if we had any other issues in the future.

Paying attention to what consumers are saying about your business is vital. You need to constantly be monitoring what consumers are saying both positively and negatively. More importantly, you need to have someone handling the social media aspect of your company that can make you a winner and not a loser. In this example, BlogTalkRadio has done very well by having Amy handle their social media monitoring and because of that has won our Social Media Winner of the Week award!

Social Media Winner of the Week! New Regular Feature at 210 Consulting

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Winner

Not too long ago, during an episode of our weekly radio program, “Social Media Edge“, I came up with an idea that I thought had merit and have since implemented. Each week, we name a Social Media Winner and Loser of the Week. Some weeks, I have trouble coming up with one or the other, but it’s a fun segment. Jeremy thought it would be a great idea to have the same thing here on our company blog, and this is the first installment. So, without further ado….

Our Social Media Winner of the Week is Shareaholic, which is responsible for the WordPress plugin known as SexyBookmarks. It’s the thing that looks like this at the bottom of each of our posts and enables our readers to spread our content to their networks:

You’ve probably seen examples of this on blogs across the internet at this point. According to their site, they have nearly 500,000 downloads so far!

So, how did they manage to win this (rather prestigious) new award?

1. They listened.

2. After listening, they acted.

Here’s the scoop:

Jeremy reviewed SexyBookmarks in this post recently. He mentioned how much we both like the plugin, but he also suggested an improvement:

SexyBookmarks needs to fix:

The one thing that really annoys me when I am setting up this plugin for a client is that the most popular list is really not the most popular sites for here in the USA. The one that really blows my mind is that Facebook, the social media 800 LB gorilla is not chosen when you click most popular. I wish that they could at least add Facebook and a few others onto that list.

He quickly received this comment from Jay at Shareaholic:

But that’s not all!

Shareaholic also saw Jeremy’s tweet to someone wherein he said that we install SexyBookmarks on every site we build for our clients here at 210 Consulting. They noticed, and they retweeted this. Kudos to them for paying attention, unlike SO MANY companies out there.

Big congratulations to Shareaholic for being on top of your game and for winning our inaugural prize.

Keep an eye out here on our blog for future installments. We’re also not afraid to post the “Losers of the Week” (or month, or year), so that should make for some interesting future reading.

Thanks for stopping by!