The Deets

I dug a bit more into Target Rounders (first post here) - Target Corp’s undercover Word of Mouth Marketing operation - and found a few nuggets:

Application Process

The application form at TargetRounders.com is EXTENSIVE. They ask college students for tons of personal information: name, address, date of birth, gender, URLs to their profiles on every social networking site (facebook, myspace, friendster, etc),

And questions to help determine how influential they may be: how many online friends they have, number of IM buddies, numbers stored in their mobile phones, how many people they invite to parties.

Then they find out what their applicants may be willing to do for Target:

If you were selected for the Target Rounders which of the following activities would you most like to participate in?

-Give out samples to friends and classmates
-Forward offers to friends with IM, email, messaging and social networking sites
-Product feedback and reviews
-Graphic design
-Research panels and surveys
-Talk to new people about Target
-Report to Target on the latest trends

Is the applicant an influencer? Here’s how they try to find out:

How would you describe yourself in your circle of friends?
-I decide what we’re going to do. Period.
-I’m usually the one that turns them on to cool new stuff.
-I usually keep more to myself
-I’m a team player and I’ll be up for whatever my friends want to do.

Here’s an example discussion from the Target Rounders Facebook group where a few Rounders discuss the best way to promote free mint samples they’ve been sent:

Their privacy policy states that they may “share” user data with other divisions of Target and companies outside of Target. Of course, it also looks like they copy/pasted the privacy policy from Target.com, so it’s not clear that any work was put into making it applicable to Target Rounders.

Related Word of Mouth Marketing Programs

The firm running the Target’s Rounders campaign is New York based marketing firm, Drillteam. They run similar campaigns for Virgin Mobile (Insiders), and the Microsoft Zune (Masters). Their motto is, “Collaborating with Young Adults to Build Brands.”

Time to Open a 2nd Flank in the Battle for Coolness?

Personally, I’d like to see Target start a sister program for Target Rounders called Target Sharpeners. Target Sharpeners would work to make sure the Target brand isn’t associated with uncool people.

First, stores would give plain bags rather than bags with Target logos to uncool Target shoppers (homeless, disabled, overweight, old people).

Second, they’d identify influential losers and steer them toward competitor’s stores by intersecting them in front of Target stores and offering them Wal-Mart gift certificates if they’d immediately leave the property.

There’s more than one way to build brands, ya know.

Target has a team of “cool kids” called Target Rounders who earn points for talking about how cool Target is to their friends on Facebook. The quote below comes from a letter sent from Target to Rounder Rosie Siman before she decided to go public about the program after she grew uncomfortable with their tactics:

Target Update

Your mission: try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder. We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops (and the shower, and on the bus…). However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group! So keep it like a secret!

I haven’t heard anything about this locally.

Be careful with aggressive Facebook marketing strategies. Does Target really need to run covert PR operations to get people to like them?

via Andy Sernovitz

According to Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, while speaking at a recent conference on start-ups:

VentureBeat » Start-up advice for entrepreneurs, from Y Combinator Startup School

He stepped on the stage wearing his trademark Adidas sandals (he bought ten pairs before they were discontinued).

“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise.

“Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face. “Why are most chess masters under 30?” he asked. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.” In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, “I only own a mattress.” Later: “Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”

At 33, I’m apparently much too old to work for Facebook.

This one’s for Quinn.

This dude is REALLY dedicated to his Facebook account:

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.