Internet hoaxes within social media feeds dupe millions

I guess it started back in the 1960's with the "Paul is dead" hoax surrounding Paul McCartney's death. Probably earlier frankly, but the concept of a hoax was tougher and more isolated pre-internet days.

Today, the internet hoax is a daily occurrence. In fact in the past week, I've seen fake death announcements for both Willie Nelson and James Earl Jones. Both are alive and well as of my writing this post. It is such a regular occurrence now that The Washington Post has a digital culture critic, Caitlin Dewey that does a weekly column titled "What was fake on the Internet this week". I highly recommend the column, as it keeps me up to speed on just how gullible people are plus it is pretty clever and well written. 

The scary thing about these scams and hoaxes is the alarming amount of people that get their news solely from their social media feeds, especially Facebook. Real news outlets, such as the Washington Post fact check and sift through the garbage to report on the facts. Online outlets like the Business Standard News (B-S News) continue to hook people on these fake news stories and make money. 

The James Earl Jones story is a great example. The Facebook feed, if anyone would bother to click on it links to a display that reads "you got owned!" Problem is, thousands (millions?) of people never click. They just go about their day thinking that the voice of Darth Vadar, Mufassah and CNN is dead. 

Legit news sites have to do a better job of marketing themselves as the reliable, trustworthy source for news and information. Fighting the social media feed of 'news' is the next battle for consumer's time, and it is a battle that most news outlets are losing.

Social media outlets, especially Facebook have been given by default an extremely important task of informing the population. I would say that they are failing so far, allowing bogus claims to seemingly dominate the platform because of the share-ability factor and click through rates these often get. It is a fine line, trying not to sensor information, but there has to be a responsibility to promote factual and reliable content. 

In the meantime, news outlets online need to work on creating confidence in their product by the general public. Educating the general public on what to look for in terms of if the source is leg it or not needs to also happen. Facebook can help on that if they wish, and hopefully they will.  

How legacy media can position itself to compliment SEO campaigns

In my early days of advertising sales for a newspaper, one of our biggest competitors was yellow pages. There were multiple books competing in a relatively small market. In fact, I worked at a newspaper that even started its own yellow pages product.

Clearly times have changed for yellow pages. They are doing so much more that an annual directory; a directory that is likely to go away in many markets. Honestly, I'm not sure where my phone books are at my house.

Yellow pages are offer a wide variety of services to help them survive. Among them, yellow pages offer SEO, SEM, text clubs, mobile advertising, web hosting, online directories, and...oh yeah yellow page ads!

Selling against the yellow pages was an important training session. I hired consultants to help sell against yellow pages, with some level of success. The key was pretty simple:  sell top of mind awareness (TOMA) campaigns to businesses that would run at a high frequency in the local newspaper. That way if consumers were reaching for a phone book because of a need, they would turn to the white pages and that directory instead of the yellow pages and the ads.

It wasn't rocket science, but it worked. The percentage of referrals to yellow pages for event their best categories was very small, while newspaper readership was strong (and it still is!). As I read an article about the importance of SEO, I started thinking about that old tried and true strategy.

Barry Feldman's from feldmancreative.com writes about the importance of SEO. I don't diminish the importance of SEO by suggesting reps sell against it. While I would sell against it, I would prefer actually sell it as a solution to a customer, and in fact my current company does.

I do think that legacy media like newspapers need to get back to TOMA selling as either a way to combat SEO or to compliment it if you are offering it to customers. The same principle applies to SEO that did with yellow pages. Run high frequency campaigns so that when that go to Google to search, they are searching you specifically instead of your industry type.  A specific search is the same as getting the consumer to look your contact info up in the white pages directory instead of being exposed to the open market through yellow pages.

Marketing win for Arby's for their handling of The Daily Show with finale TV spot and social media posts

Kudos to Arby's for making the best of a bad situation and turning it around into a win for their marketing team and their brand. Arby's Restaurants have been the butt of numerous jokes and jabs at the hands of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart.

The finale for Jon Stewart's run on The Daily Show is coming soon, and Comedy Central's working on selling out the available inventory. Estimates are the :30 spots are going for $230k each which is a nice boost from the typical $46.2k per spot earlier this year.

Arby's is buying a spot on the show, despite hundreds of lampoons by the writers of the satire show. The TV spot from Arby's features a collage of the comments made by Stewart with the tune "Thank You For Being A Friend" playing in the background. "Not sure why, but we'll miss you" is on the screen as the commercial ends.

This isn't the first time the Arby's marketing department has gained free publicity and positive brand awareness off of The Daily Show. When Stewart announced he was leaving The Daily Show, the Twitter feed for Arby's offered him a job. That message was retweeted over 2,000 times.