Here’s the too-much-to-cover Friday Wal-Mart roundup.
* BBCAmerican weighs in with his entries for my contest from last night:
In my opinion, the walmart.com user is not as sophisticated as the average user for amazon.com, bn.com, circuitcity.com or any other online retailer. Obviously they were going to have to employ people to re-write what they wrote. And then couldn’t resist “improving†the reviews.
Click on the post to get to his examples. I particularly recommend the ones for the $538 Emerson HDTV. Some reviewers absolutely gush about it while others complain that it died almost instantly. Either buying an Emerson TV is like playing Russian Roulette or Wal-Mart is planting fake reviews. Which do you think is more likely with respect to a $538 TV?
* Did you know that Wal-Mart has now become a top exporter from America? This is in a story at Bloomberg.com:
Wal-Mart sends such iconic American brands as chocolate kisses from Pennsylvania-based Hershey Co., and Head & Shoulders shampoo from Procter & Gamble Co. of Cincinnati. It ships Spam from Hormel Foods Corp. in Austin, Minnesota. Spam’s 70-year history includes a role as humanitarian aid during World War II.
They build out TVs, computers and appliances. We send them fake meat. No wonder our trade deficit is so awful.
* You’ve probably read about Wal-Mart and Facebook by now. [We can't cover everything here, can we?] But did you see this?:
[H]ere is actually an Anti-Walmart group on Facebook (actually one big, and two small groups). Combined they number about 1600 members. That’s a lot more than about a 100 Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match group members. Actually, at the time of writing this post, that’s 16:1 in favor of the anti-Walmart group.
Is Wal-Mart’s Facebook campaign backfiring? Judging by the numbers so far it seems it is.
I wouldn’t say the campaign is backfiring. Wal-Mart was social poison to the youth of today long before the Facebook idea came along.
Thanks for the link!
I wouldn’t say the campaign is backfiring. Wal-Mart was social poison to the youth of today long before the Facebook idea came along.
True, Wal-Mart is a brand set much stronger and deeper within the minds of consumers. The fact is, however, that they may have neglected to do deeper research on the Facebook environment before launching their campaign. Social networks are very hard terrains for PR & marketing campaigns, especially for “old” brands, with plenty of history behind them. Their campaign by itself may do alright, but the corresponding buzz on Facebook may turn out to be far from what they wanted. This should be followed. I will try to make this a small case-study later, but I’ll need some Wal-Mart data in order to be able to give a more precise analysis.
[...] We all know about the boats and boats and boats full of cheap plastic crap Wal-Mart brings into the country, but as Jonathan noted yesteday, Wal-Mart is now numbered among the top 100 exporters in the United States; and it’s exporting meat. [...]