Badges, check, Social accounts and handles, check

Facebook group, check. Twitter account, check. Youtube channel, check.

Slapping badges from the above sites on the Website, check. Ads on Facebook, check. Ads on Youtube, check. Ads on other sites, check. Now what?

Engage!

Using all the social networks, bloging n’ microbloging is not meant to be for showing the face, but to have a sort of dialogue and conversation with people(you can’t take them as customers).

Observing some of the campaigns lately I was excited to see all sort of badges on one of the campaigns for an event. So out of my excitement I started following event’s Twitter account, became a Fan on their Facebook page, subscribed to their YouTube channel and waited for the fun to start. Ten days before the event I started seeing Ad Banners on various websites and mainly on Google Network. Okay, no fun. No updates. So I moved my expectations to the day of the event. I’m at the event, checking Tweets, none, oh they post a link to a press release. Facebook fan page full of fans’ questions and answered by other fans. Youtube channel showing videos of last year’s event.

The event was such a success. But was the campaign? Worth noting that the so-called “Social Media Campaign” was ran by what they call “an emerging top-notch Social Media House”. So it’s all about badges? And tossing some names n’ buzzwords?

Everyone knows it, but do we really engage? Or what is engagement really? (check @jassim’s some two years old article on it)

Yes, it’s all about experimenting with the new toys n’ mediums. Yes, outcomes do not come fast but fact is a brief sarcastic tweet of mine from yesterday: I noticed something of rather high value, whoever can spell “social media” is a field expert from day 1 of its existence. hah?

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Domains of Branding

How much could your brand suffer if it didn’t own the domain name that reads its name? Obviously the number is out of reach. What brought my attention back to this issue is by dialing Showtime.com. It’s a domain name with an automated landing page at Network Solutions. I’ve never dialed Showtime, I’ve always been taken by a link to apparently Showtime Arabia instead.

A quick look at the whois records of the domain name, it reads that Showtime Tours Incorporated, a company in GB owns the domain name since 2003. But then again this website is down.

Now the interesting part, the website showtime.com has a ranking of 157,224 on Alexa and according to Compete Rank it has 64,427 U.S visitors a month. Now you might think 64K ain’t that a big deal? Okay, how about 64K showtime seekers/followers who have to either click/search/type elsewhere and get frustrated till they find the domain name that actually takes them to their beloved cable network Showtime?

Now I wouldn’t say Showtime couldn’t effort the price, that’d be underestimating their size, uninformed marketers? That wouldn’t be true either, in all the cases, that’s a miss!

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