Lindsey’s Daily Deal

By Lindsey Campbell, Captains of Industry

Here’s your Daily Deal:

1. Teenage Boy Harassed on Facebook…By His Mom

I don’t think Lane New, a 16 year old from Little Rock, Arkansas, will be getting “Mom” tattooed on his arm any time soon. According to Tom Parsons of the Huffington Post, Lane’s mother, Denise New, went on his Facebook account, posted her own comments while posing as Lane, changed his password, and wouldn’t let him log back on to his account, all because Lane posted a comment about a girl that didn’t sit well with Mama New.

What’s a teenage boy to do? Yell? Scream? Runaway from home? None of the above. Lane decided to take the grownup approach and filed an official complaint with prosecutors who approved the harassment charge in March. In his complaint, Lane claims his mother “posted things that involve slander and personal facts about my life.” Denise’s defense? “I was only trying to be a good mother.”

If Lane New wins, it could become a landmark case that could potentially change the rights parents have over their children’s social media in the future. To learn more about the case, read Parsons’ article.

2. B430

Do you have a 30th birthday looming? Are you feeling like there are so many things you haven’t done that you wanted to do before you had to check the 30-35 age box? Well, Hallmark has decided to reawaken your lost dreams by launching a new social media-based contest that calls for almost-30-somethings to share what adventures they’re dying to experience before they turn the big 3-0.

Some suggestions that have been submitted are the typical cliché responses you might expect, like “go skydiving” or “climb Everest.” But others are more interesting such as, “get married in Vegas”,“watch a whole series of 24 in 24 hours” and “spend the day speaking only with quotes from your favorite films.”

While I applaud Hallmark in their effort to push people to remember what they want, especially in a time in their lives when they’re probably getting married, starting families, and scrambling to climb the corporate ladder, the prize they’re offering for the best “dream” is bit lame: an Apple iPad. Why not send the winner to go fulfill their dream? Think about it Hallmark. Would you rather head to Vegas and have the time of your life, or get an iPad?

Vegas baby! It’s so money.

3. Media Relations or Public Relations. Either Way, It’s All About Relationships.

On Web Ink Now, David Meerman Scott clears the air once and for all on the difference between media relations and public relations. In his post, Scott defines PR as “how an organization engages with its publics” and MR as “working through journalists to reach your publics.” He goes on to explain that media relations is only a subset of public relations. In fact, there are a lot of ways PR professionals reach their intended audiences without utilizing mainstream media, such as brand journalism, YouTube videos, blog posts, ebooks, Twitter, and the list goes on. At the end of his post, Scott gives a special piece of advice for PR professionals, check out his post to find out what it is.

4. Twitter Succumbs to Advertising’s Super Power: $$$

Twitter has finally decided to join the dark side of the force and has recently announced that they will be launching a new ad platform called “Promoted Tweets.” According to AdRants, Promoted Tweets will “insert ads in search results and relevant streams based on purchased keywords and contextual relevancy.”

Will it be annoying? Probably. The ads will stay on the page longer than a normal tweet would so it’ll get longer exposure. But on the upside, the Promoted Tweets will notify the readers that it is in fact an ad, and will turn yellow when someone rolls over it.

Just goes to show everyone needs to make a buck. Resistance is futile.

5. Hey! You Smell Like 5th Grade!

Have you ever walked by a person or a place and gotten a whiff of your past? Sometimes a smell can take you right back to your Jr. High detention hall, your first kiss, or your worst heartbreak. And according to a recent post by Paul Barsch from MarketingProfs, those olfactory nerves associations aren’t any different for your customers. In fact, a smell can either attract or deter your customers from your company or product. Why? Well, it all has to do with our personal experience with different smells, what our culture’s emotional attachments to smells are, and the context of the smell itself. For example, Barsch explains that the scent of “wintergreen” is commonly associated with medicine in Britain, so it probably wouldn’t be a welcomed flavor for a product such as gum.  Or in Magic Kingdom’s Main Street in Walt Disney World, Imagineers pump the smell of chocolate chip cookies into the air to remind guests of their childhood and being a kid. Overall, when it comes to your product and company, it’s important to consider “smell.” Just make sure your customers associate your brand with a memory that they actually want to remember.

Until tomorrow,

Captain Lindsey