Yahoo has published a blog post touting the success of several social media campaigns it has helped orchestrate.In one launched in October, Yahoo teamed with the William J. Clinton Foundation and Control Room to promote "A Decade of Difference," a concert featuring Lady Gaga, Bono and The Edge, to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of former President Clinton’s charitable foundation.
The concert promotion, via Yahoo's Facebook page resulted in more than 500,000 new "Likes" for Yahoo on Facebook, 64,000 RSVPs to watch the concert live-streamed, and more than 5 million impressions in users’ news feeds about the event.
The concert was live-streamed only on Yahoo, and served up more than 21 million video streams to people in 180 countries across the globe.
Social Media Mishaps
For every successful concert promotion, though, there is the opposite story—a social media campaign mishap. Given the immediate nature of social media, this can happen very easily. Forbes tells of a tweet in particularly bad taste made by the Kenneth Cole brand, made during the uprisings in Egypt earlier this year.
"Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC".
As Forbes pointed out, Kenneth Cole had only about 16,000 followers, but the tweet got worldwide notice, and not in a positive way. "Cole backpedaled immediately and issued a formal response that included this line: 'In hindsight my attempt at humor regarding a nation liberating themselves against oppression was poorly timed and absolutely inappropriate,'" Forbes wrote.
3 in 10 Say Social Media Ads Useless
In the middle of the spectrum can be found the benign social media ads deemed useless by the people they are targeting. This category is larger than many marketers would care to think.
According to a study by Epsilon Targeting, 31% of Americans say they find advertising on social media sites to be either not very or not at all useful.
Facebook Grows as Information Source
The good news is that even though social media sites are not perceived to be highly useful for advertising, a growing number of Americans say they use Facebook to research and review consumer product information: this year, the proportion reached 10%, up from 6% in 2010, according to the study.
Overall, the internet remains an important resource when searching for new products and ideas, with 53% of US consumers using the internet weekly to do so, and 28% claiming to use it daily for those purposes.
