Wow! You’ve got to check out what Graco is doing online. Graco’s robust Social Networking presence is a great example of how businesses, especially businesses in highly regulated industries, can effectively surround their audience with a consistent online message. What I really like is the consistency of their message. They are amplifying their “Ready for the Road Ahead” campaign throughout.
Check out this post from Ignite Social Media (link). And the following slide show from the Blog Council (Link).
Graco Blog: http://blog.gracobaby.com/
Graco on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ReadyForTheRoadAhead
Graco on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gracogettogethers/
Graco on Twitter: http://twitter.com/GracoBaby
It’s interesting that Graco has no Facebook presence yet. I would have thought this was a natural for them.
There are a lot of great insights here on how major brands can embrace Social Networking in a meaningful way that engages their target consumers. We’ll keep an eye on Graco and see how they develop these strategies moving forward.
SpongeBob on the iPhone
Nickelodeon working with the development shop Mobui has launched a SpongeBob iPhone Ap. More Nick character aps are in development. Check out the press release here (link) and a Mashable post here (link). This ap quickly rose to the top 10 iPhone ap list with over 3000 downloads per day.
I’ve been keeping an eye on iPhone aps mostly because I’d like to do one but haven’t found a way to justify it. As iPhone sales continue to grow the users will start to include the target audience I’m after. I’m wondering why Nick went with this — I’d guess that after 10 years on the air SpongeBob has a pretty large audience of 20 year old that are now carrying around iPhones. But that doesn’t explain why Nick will soon be releasing Dora and iCarly aps. Another thought is that the dev shop was building Advergames for AddictingGames.com and Shockwave.com so why not tweak the code a bit and get an iPhone version.
The big picture here is that all phones will be iPhone or iPhone knock offs within 3 years. Unfortunately, they will probably all have their own development code (unless Android takes off). So there will be huge opportunities in reaching the mobile consumer through aps but they will be costly to develop across phone platforms.
Thoughts:
