The first campaign was by Squarespace. They asked people to use the hash tag #squarespace in their tweets. People could do this randomly and were encouraged to do it as often as possible. Squarespace would select a lucky winner every day and give that person a gift voucher for the Apple Store.

The second campaign was by Moonfruit. It was a similar campaign where, during a week, people could enter a competition to win one Apple MacBook Pro each day. People were automatically entered into the competition if they used the hash tag #moonfruit in their tweets and again, people were stimulated to do it as often as possible.

These brands have succeeded in getting their brand names into the social media space, but it’s been done in a dubious way. Moreover, they haven’t performed any true form of consumer engagement, which just means that they let people flood Twitter with their brand name without any proper context.

Don’t use social media as a cheap promotional tool. Use social media to genuine build relationships.

Circuit City basically dominated the stock market—beating average performance by 22 times at its height—for a 15+ year period. However, one of the key traits of a “great” company is that it’s able to withstand setbacks, whether personnel-wise, economic or other. This hasn’t been the case with Circuit City as it closed its doors last week after filing for bankruptcy in late 2008. This obviously baffled me and I’ve tried to find answers to how this happened. In the end, it boiled down to losing the competitive advantage:

• Their branding model didn’t work anymore. The goal of Circuit City was to become the best at service, selection, savings and satisfaction. However, other market players had mastered one or multiple of these categories in a better way than Circuit City: Best Buy (service and selection), WalMart (savings) and Amazon.com (satisfaction). As a result, Circuit City failed to gain a competitive edge.
• Circuit City had a tradition of paying their employees well and training them to deliver the best possible service, but cost cutting procedures led to stripping sales commissions from sales staff and eventually to layoffs of these well-paid and knowledgeable employees. This also hurt their competitive advantage.
• The economic recession wasn’t a key driver but it does magnify the effects and was strong enough to push Circuit City over the edge.

In essence, Circuit City destroyed its business by destroying the underlying foundation on which it was built and failing to reinvent itself.