Facebook Friday: It's All in the Numbers

The average U.S. Facebook user spends 7 hours and 46 minutes per month on Facebook. Are you one of them? How about a fan of one of the top five brand pages on Facebook? If it's Coca-Cola, Disney or Starbucks you like, then consider yourself part of the club. Check out today's infographic for more Facebook facts.

Video Post: iPhone 4s Launch Opens Floodgate for Street-Level Marketing

The launch of the iPhone 4s was destined to attract media attention. How did companies like Otterbox and Gazelle.com take advantage of the Apple iPhone 4s hype? Join Steve as he breaks down the "street-level" marketing companies used to promote their product.

Zyrtec Goes Viral with YouTube

Zyrtec is doing something unprecedented in pharmaceutical marketing. They've gone viral.

Harnessing the power and entertainment of social media, Zyrtec has created quite a campaign for this fall allergy season. What's even more interesting is that they've used YouTube as their primary outlet for launching a social media game.

Zyrtec worked with a New York ad agency called JWT to launch the YouTube game, Parks Unleashed, last month. Even though allergy medicine and the gaming world are a new couple, the game is modeled on 30 year-old text-based games that present users with various scenarios where they have to make a choice. The premise of the game is that dogs have stolen their owners' tablets, and hid them all over the park. You must find them by choosing different answers, each leading down a different path. In the end, users have a chance to win an actual Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Tim Nolan, creative director at JWT comments on the decision to use YouTube as the main platform,

“We took this approach to talk to our consumers using media that they already engage in, at a destination they spend their time, leveraging behaviors we know they love.”

And their efforts are paying off. The Zyrtec YouTube Channel now has 2.2 million total views, almost all of which were drawn by the game. The average player spent more than seven minutes playing the game, and some returning players were on for 30 minutes or more.

The campaign was also integrated throughout other brand sites, including an online ad campaign promoting the game, a Yahoo Mail takeover and Facebook display ads. The brand also tagged a TV spot with a prompt to visit their YouTube page, which ran for about a week.

Zyrtec is undoubtedly an innovator in the pharmaceutical social media sphere. They have also proven the often overlooked power of YouTube for gaming. It won't be long now until other pharmaceutical brands jump in.

95% brands of Facebook don't respond to posts

Brand proliferation on Facebook is a fact of online life nowadays. Practically every company out there has a Facebook page, and many spend thousands of dollars in advertising trying to get customers to visit them.

Obviously, the reason for any corporate Facebook page is to elicit some form of engagement with your audience and key customer base.

However, according to a recent survey from Socialbakers, 95% of wall posts from users on brand pages go unanswered. 

It's a staggering statistic, and frankly an egregious error on the companies that are guilty of this. Engagement is the currency that dring ives social media, especially on a brand identity level. Ignoring that engagement is practically like shunning a customer who walks into your store with a handful of cash.

I find it interesting that while these companies spend so much time and money hiring social media teams and creating various SM channels and pages, the basic principles of social engagement get lost in the shuffle.

The takeaway here is that Facebook marketing is more than just creating a page and populating it with content, you also need to monitor and respond to your fans when they engage you.

Free Microsoft phones try to capitalize on iOS and RIM woes

The two biggest stories in the smartphone world right now revolve around RIM and Apple. RIM is suffering from outages for millions of Blackberry users all over the world. Apple, on the other hand, released its massive iOS 5 update yesterday, only to see millions of users experience problems with the update.

Amid all of this drama, Microsoft has been relatively quiet. But in an attempt to capitalize on the frustrations of RIM and Apple users, one Microsoft Evangelist is giving away 25 free Windows phones to people who tweet his Twitter account.

It's an interesting move by Microsoft, and while I doubt they will woo Apple fans away from their iPhones, there is some legitimate growth opportunity with Blackberry users.

The truth is, RIM has garnered as many users as it has due to its heavy presence in the corporate sector. Businesses have used Blackberrys (Blackberries?) as their go-to phone to issue to employees, thus exposing them to the Blackberry ecosystem.

Business that have stuck with RIM will not jump to Apple, due to the proprietary nature of their different devices, not to mention the lack of compatibility with PC services. They also aren't likely to move to Android, because it is so open-source that there is little standardization from phone to phone when compared to other operating systems.

This leaves Microsoft's Windows OS, which is most likely the most-appealing option out of the 4 operating systems. And given the recent struggles of RIM, it wouldn't surprise me to see a few Blackberry users rethink their phone choice.