Today Amazon introduced #AmazonCart, a new hashtag that lets Twitter users add potential purchases to their Amazon shopping cart with a tweet.
The new feature requires you to connect your Twitter account to Amazon. Then, when you see someone tweet out a link to an Amazon product, you can simply reply with the #AmazonCart hashtag (#AmazonBasket in the UK), and the linked product will appear in your online shopping cart.
Unfortunately, #AmazonCart doesn’t actually simplify the buying process. It’s mostly a way to bookmark an item you want to purchase later. You still have to log in to Amazon to complete the purchase; using the hashtag doesn't commit you to an impulse buy. And since Twitter is public, anyone can see what you’ve added to your shopping cart.
While this sort of deal might seem to bring Twitter one step closer to pulling in the e-commerce big bucks, the social network doesn’t actually make any money from sales that started with #AmazonCart, as Recode notes.
It's also not clear that similar deals have done much for Twitter in the past. American Express and Starbucks have both tried to get customers to use Twitter hashtags and spend money. Neither program has really taken off. While Starbucksboasted about $180,000 in sales in the first three months of the #tweetacoffee campaign, a cursory Twitter search shows just a handful of tweets in the last few weeks.
Google Wallet is coming to Glass soon. According to a source close to the company, Google is currently testing a way for Glass users to send money to their friends through Wallet by simply using their voices to ask Glass to “send money.” The company is testing this service internally right now, but chances are it will launch to all Glass users in the near future.
To install the Wallet service on their devices, Glass users currently have to be signed in to a computer on Google’s corporate network. From there, they can install the Wallet glassware, and after setting the service up from there, they are ready to send money from Glass.
Given that Google has also rolled out a similar feature for Gmail users, it’s not a huge surprise that the company would also want to bring the ability to send money from Glass. The use cases, after all, are pretty much identical. Imagine you’re at a restaurant and you want to send your share of the bill to a friend. You simply ask Glass to “send money,” swipe through the interface a few times and you’re done (that’s assuming your friends let you wear your Glass while having dinner with you, of course).
By default, Google takes a 2.9 percent fee for these Wallet transactions or 30 cents — whichever is higher.
Jerry Daykin: global digital director at Aegis Dentsu Network and former European social marketing manager at Mondelez
Brands that promote content people don't want to see will provoke a negative response, writes former Mondelez Europe social marketing manager Jerry Daykin.
More content is posted to social networks than anyone could ever consume. Facebook applies its "Edgerank" algorithm to try to "surface" relevant content; while unfiltered platforms like Twitter effectively use "Timerank", showing only the most recent. On some you compete on engagement, on others on timeliness, but nowhere will all your followers see everything you post.
It’s easy to criticise Facebook for cunningly decreasing the organic reach of Pages and asking brands to pay more, but it’s no coincidence this decline was matched by a steady increase in the amount being published. The more content there is, the less people see of any one piece, whether limited by an algorithm or simply hidden by newer updates.
Worrying what percentage of followers we reach has become an industry obsession, alongside rumours that those fans may be fake, and that all the young people have moved to something new. Never mind that most brands don’t truly have a business-significant number of fans in the first place, or that they aren’t close to reaching all the youth that definitely is still present.
Social is no longer about a few thousand fans, it can reach tens of millions in a rich, engaging way. For businesses that work at scale, this means, at last, that it deserves meaningful investment.
More fundamentally, though, this focus on fans stands at odds with the penetration objectives of much major marketing investment. This is especially true for big FMCG brands needing to reach millions of disloyal consumers. While paying to reach an already "earned" audience may feel unfair, the introduction of promoted posts to go far beyond this actually represents a quiet revolution in the value that mass marketers can get from social platforms.
Previously, we built competition tabs to persuade people to follow us, so we might then communicate our messages to them. Now we can put our content in front of a carefully targeted, and potentially vast, audience whenever we need to. Social is no longer about a few thousand fans, it can reach tens of millions in a rich, engaging way. For businesses that work at scale, this means, at last, that it deserves meaningful investment.
This newfound scalability has driven business results comparable to TV for Mondelez. It’s no surprise, then, that it coincides with the announcements of its global social partnership with Facebook, adding to an existing one with Twitter as well as innovative trials of Google’s +Post format.
There is, of course, a rich creative challenge in producing content that can engage millions of consumers when they do see it, and that’s at the heart of Mondelez’s "Storytelling at Scale" approach. With great scale comes great responsibility, and brands that promote content people don’t want to see will only get an even bigger negative response to it.
