Contemporary Business 14th Edition by Louis Boone, David Kurtz

تمرين 5

The Pepsi Refresh Project: Viral Marketing PepsiCo recently launched the Pepsi Refresh Project, a year-long initiative in which consumers were invited to submit short videos of ideas that would benefit their communities. Pepsi accepted 1,000 videos each month and posted them online so that visitors to the Web site could vote on them. At the end of each month, Pepsi awarded grants of varying amounts to the winning projects, with the company giving away a total of $20 million over the year. Instead of advertising the project in a costly slot during the Super Bowl, Pepsi announced that it would not be doing so and instead posted a video on the Web. The video quickly went viral (spreading quickly through the process of Internet sharing), with visits to the Refresh Web site soaring an astonishing 800 percent after the Super Bowl in February and staying consistent.Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized Internet marketing. Facebook has roughly 300 million members worldwide. Twitter claims to log 50 million tweets per day. According to Pepsi's CEO, Indra Nooyi, the company is investing one-third of its marketing budget in social media. Marketing the project on the Web had advantages and disadvantages. Traffic to the Web site seemed to drop during the first three weeks of each month, then spike during the last week in the final round of voting, so announcing winners every month was an advantage. Also, people hoping to win grants set up their own local social media campaigns using Facebook and Twitter, thus generating more publicity for the project. However, as time went on, these contestants and some celebrity contestants became the sources of most of the publicity.SEO (search-engine optimization) firms watched the campaign closely to monitor its successes and to spot features that could be improved for future campaigns.
-If you have a Facebook page, how would you use it to market either your own business or a cause that inspires you?