“Skechers USA Inc. will pay $40 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that the footwear company made unfounded claims that its Shape-ups shoes would help people lose weight and strengthen their butt, leg and stomach muscles. Kardashian, Burke and other celebrities endorsed the shoes in Skechers ads.  (USA Today, May 17, 2012)

This case provides a current example of deceptive advertising.

GM offers one answer to that question in  “GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Pay Off” (Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2012, non-subscribers click here).  A case study reported by NPR found equally dubious results – “Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook.  How’d It Do?” (Planet Money Blog, May 16, 2012).

Any in-class discussion should distinguish between the various ways brands can use Facebook.  Marketers can create a Facebook fan page and invite customers to “like” the page.  After liking the page, posts to that page appear in that person’s news feed.  The cost to the marketer is to create the page and keep it up — but there is no media cost.  There is also no revenue to Facebook, so the firm has developed other types of advertising. In theory and probably some time in the future, Facebook knows so much about users (through elaborate analysis of likes, posts, photos, the user’s network, etc.) that it can target customers.

Ask students if they ever click on Facebook ads?  Ask if they have “Liked” any brands — and if they read the brands’ posts in their news feed?   What messages appeal to them?  Why?  What can Facebook offer advertisers?  The articles I posted above tend to discount the role of advertising in brand building.  These questions are also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Getting back to the question in the headline:  well, the jury is still out.  Certainly a lot of investors buying Facebook stock are hoping that the company finds a formula to make it work.

You could assign this reading to your students and then ask them: 1) Which brand is doing a better job with its digital strategy?  2) Who is (are) the target market(s) for each brand’s social media?  3)  What else would you suggest to improve each brand’s social media blend?  We have asked those questions over at Learn the 4 Ps.

Social media is a fast-changing landscape — and with everything else we cover in our marketing classes it can be a challenge to keep up.  This graphic will give you a quick tour of the various tools if you only need to understand the basics.  It might work well when you cover promotion objectives to provide a tool to discuss how a few of the tools work to achieve each objective.

This provides a nice B2B example when you talk about segmentation and targeting, media or advertising.  The business model also could be used as an example of an alternative pricing model for software.

The ideas in the book and interview have relevance for our students, so we also posted this at Learn the 4 Ps.

This article might be useful to provide some current data on social media usage when you cover that in class and/or if you like to give special attention to entrepreneurship or small business.

As we look to the future and how this data might be used, I found this Wall Street Journal article “The Benefits of Data Talking to Data” (April 2, 2012) insightful with some useful marketing examples.