Etc.

… you give your fans an offer they can’t receive elsewhere.

I’ve published a few articles of late that indicate a few things: Facebook users do not want to be sold to while they are feeding their chickens on Farmville or whacking someone in Mafia Wars. But consumers who become your fan on Facebook do expect something in return.

It looks like woman’s apparel and accessories seller Nine West is going about it the right way. Marketing firm Fluid launched its Fluid Fan Shop app on Nine West’s Facebook page this week , and it allows the merchant’s Facebook fans to shop for select discounted items without leaving the social network. more

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?

Macy’s president/CEO Terry Lundgren said today that there are more than 75,000 fans of his company’s Facebook page. But is that a fair number to use to judge its success?

It’s a huge number for a two-month-old group. But how many of the group’s members really are fans of Macy’s (you don’t need to qualify to join a group), and how is Macy’s using its Facebook page to engage its fans? more

Congratulations to Derek Jeter. He’s now 52nd all-time on Major League Baseball’s hit list. He hit number 2,722 on a rainy Friday night against Baltimore.

But this is why the New York Yankees are marketing geniuses, and its fans are, well, suckers.

The Yankees reminded the world that Derek Jeter - definitely one of the good-guys in baseball history - was about to break Lou Gehrig’s team record for most hits ever. And Yankee fans (many of which, let’s face it, didn’t even know what a baseball was until Derek Jeter was called up from Columbus, or New York again became a baseball dynasty) ate it up as the World’s Greatest Accomplishment. more

Tons of comments on this article I wrote and posted Monday on the Multichannel Merchant site: Twitter Better for Nonsense than Business Sense.

The premise: More than 40% of all tweets are considered “pointless babble.” Twitter may not be all about self-promotion, as the surveyor had thought. Heck, MCM editor Melissa Dowling pointed that out in this post last month.

With the exception of one comment (which may be by someone who has a personal vendetta against Pear Analytics, the company that did the study on Twitter content), everyone brings a valid argument to the table. more

It’s not because they signed Brett Favre, the on-again, off-again NFL journeyman quarterback who has brought his three-ring circus of self importance to Minneapolis. It’s because the Minnesota Vikings are letting the world know via its Website, in many different ways, that the future Hall-of-Famer will be under center this fall.

But as annoying as it is, it may be a very good marketing move for the Vikings… even if it seems the only people other than the team who are thrilled about Favre’s latest un-retirement are the team’s ownership, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and Reebok. more