DC Interactive Group’s SmartMarketing Blog

I love visual data. And people are creating new tools to view data visually on the web at an exponential rate. Two former Google programmers, Elad Gil and Othman Laraki, have just launched curious little website called TownMe.

The site is just starting out and there are big plans to add more robust features, but right now the most interesting part is the creative spin they put on U.S. Census data. They layer “heatmaps” on top of a Google maps to show population concentrations. Unfortunately, right now it only works for major metropolitan downtown areas.

Maybe you’re looking for a Cougar. TownMe will plot out the neighborhoods where you are most likely to find their highest concentrations. In Chicago, you’ll find the most on the Near North Side. What about Yuppies? Plot them too. Same goes for Sugar Daddies, Baby Daddies and even people overextending themselves on rent. Until they are able to drill down more targeted metrics it is only a toy but it’s still worth keeping it on your radar.

Google is not about to be outdone by Trulia and Zillow in the real estate search department. On Friday they announced their new upgraded real estate search tool with a YouTube video.

The best thing it does is combine things that Google already does with its new real estate search platform. My favorite feature is the ability to explore neighborhoods with Google Street View. “Walk” around and see the architecture of neighboring buildings, view area businesses and more. Click on any property and, of course, Google links to the real estate broker’s site so that you can quickly see any exterior or interior photos the agent may have taken as well as details about the property.

If you want to move down the block, just slide the map and all of the results will update automatically. It also employs Google’s new Search Layers, which are pretty neat. Now you’re not limited to the top 10 search results. Businesses are now plotted by little red circles. Click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top 10 results still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map. Take it for a spin:

How soon is too soon to open your online Christmas store? Sears and K-Mart have already done it. Complete with some fairly cheesy animations and cloying music that you can see and hear if you click those above links. Notice that they’re bravely using the word “Christmas” instead of the more generic “Holiday.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love Sears. All my power tools and most of my appliances are from there. And the other day when I needed some sandals and they didn’t have what I wanted at my usual shoe store I paused for a moment and thought, “who else has shoes?… Sears!” Yeah, Sears — as if it was a revelation for me that they’d have shoes. And you know what? They did and I bought some. As for K-Mart, I would like to like them. But every time I walk in there they never seem to have what I want. (Sigh.)

Anyway, now that the two companies that deserve each other the most have merged, they’re both opening their Holiday Shops — in July. I can see how they want to start off their Christmas shopping season early. But has it crossed a line?

Everybody has had a bad customer experience at one time or another. It used to be that you’d tell your friends, report a company to the Better Business Bureau or maybe even write a letter to the editor at your local paper and hope it gets published. These days it’s easier than ever to make your voice heard. Whether it’s on a site like Yelp, Angie’s List or just Google comments, people’s voices carry a much longer distance now.

Enter Dave Carroll. Dave is a singer/songwriter and the lead of The Sons of Maxwell, a band I’ve never heard of until this morning. In the spring of 2008 Dave was traveling with his band and had a connecting flight in Chicago. Dave and his band were sitting on the O’Hare tarmac, waiting for the baggage to be loaded. A passenger in front of them, who probably didn’t know who Dave Carroll or The Sons of Maxwell were, looked out the window and shouted out about how there are some United Airlines baggage handlers “throwing guitars” out there! After a year of phone calls and cold shoulders and no restitution, Dave wrote a song…

I first heard about this on WGN radio in Chicago this morning during a promo for the John Williams Show. Williams later linked to the video from his Facebook status feed and I watched it. And I must say, it is one of the most creative and funny ways to get back at a company for busting your Taylor guitar.

Will United Airlines respond to this? Probably not. Will they care that there’s this video out there? Fairly unlikely. Will thousands and thousands of customers and potential customers see and be influenced in some way by it? Absolutely.
What if your company or organization was the one being targeted?

This brings us to one of the most important, and also most overlooked aspects of social media marketing: reputation management. Obviously, in this instance United Airlines clearly should have stepped in long ago and provided better customer service. Some might argue that they didn’t provide any customer service at all. But lets pretend your company has a disgruntled customer and even though your company has acted ethically and quickly, this person still feels the need to spend time creating a blog or YouTube videos about how he feels he was treated unfairly. What will you do?

The first step is catching it early. Monitor postings, blog entries, news feeds, comment forms and sites like Twitter constantly. An easy way to do this is through Google Alerts which will send you an e-mail every time a key word or phrase shows up anywhere on the Internet. That alone won’t catch everything but it’s a good start. Then get out there. Present your side of the story, be fair, honest, open and most of all extremely polite and respectful — no matter what was said or what tone was used. The golden rule is this: picture anything you write, either on a website or e-mail, posted everywhere with your picture next to it. If you can’t be proud of your stance then you should just keep quiet. Come back to it when you’re calm. It can be difficult at times, especially if you have a customer who is either just pain wrong, or worse, wrong and belligerent.

Don’t wait until something bad happens to become involved in social media. Having an active and happy online customer base will go a long way to helping you resolve issues. With any luck some of those customers may even stand up and help defend you. Remember, some people just need to be unhappy. Stay on top of the situation and minimize it’s impact before it grows out of control — or into a catchy song complete with a music video.

Okay, so we’ve all heard that the fastest growing age group on Facebook is the 55+ set. If you haven’t, you’re out of the loop. The intriguing part is how shockingly fast it is happening. See the chart below:
In the first six months of this year, the number of Facebook users who are 55+ has grown 513.7%

According to iStrategyLabs, in the first six months of this year, the number of Facebook users age 55 or over has grown a whopping 513.7% — that is up from 950,000 in January to 5.9 million as of the first of this month. Maybe you should read those numbers again. It’s unbelievable. Two years ago no one would have suspected that a social meida site like Facebook would have been able to generate these statistics. Now please don’t misunderstand this phenomenon. Users of all age groups are growing and Facebook already has far more members than some countries.
Is Facebook graying — or worse, going out of style?

Why aren’t more young people, especially the 18-24 year-olds rushing to set up new accounts on Facebook? Furthermore, why does iStrategyLabs report that the number of college and high school students has dropped 20%. Wait… What? Are kids flocking away from Facebook in droves? Well, probably not. BusinessWeek suggests that there may be an error in this part of iStrategyLabs’ data, and I tend to agree. Because iStrategyLabs took the data from people’s profiles (and did not conduct a survey) right after graduation season, the drop likely notes people removing their school affiliations but not incoming freshmen updating. This, along with new privacy settings and the fact that Facebook is phasing out Networks, may help to better explain the data.

In any any case, I’m more interested in the age groups. Maybe the answer is something more simple: maybe 18-24 year olds don’t want their parents keeping track of their lives online and are setting more strict privacy settings — or maybe they’re just staying off the grid entirely. Either way, nothing is forever and the numbers do state something profound is happening.
Why do Boomers have such a large impact on social media?

Boomers affect everything. Facebook is all about making connections with people with whom you’ve lost touch. And what age group has lost touch with more people than the 55+ community? Add that together with the echo from major news outlets, talk radio stations and grandchildren all working hard to explain the concept of social networking — and a user base that is much more savvy about computers than some give credit for, and you’ve got a rising powerful chemical reaction.

Let’s consider one of our clients, Del Webb, a housing and community developer that focuses on adults over 55. One of their main selling points is the fact that they offer so many activities. Their residents aren’t signing up for those activities on a clipboard or corkboard. They’re logging on to their very robust intranet. Boomers are wired.
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?

This data suggests that Boomers are merely playing catchup. Younger people are indeed on Facebook; nobody is leaving and their numbers are steadily rising. Personally, I don’t know many people who aren’t on Facebook. It has almost gotten to the point where I wonder what is wrong with someone if they don’t have or use a Facebook account. It is akin to not having e-mail or a wireless phone.

This exciting new data also opens up some great new opportunities for those who need to market to adults over 55. If you have a product or service that targets older adults you should definitlely include social media with your current adveritising mix. Basically, it means that for marketing purposes, you can now reach just about anyone with Facebook. And that is a beautiful thing.