Grandparents, co-workers, children, students, friends, and families all join in on the Starbucks holiday experience with the simple purchase of a Starbucks beverage in the famed red cup. Although a simple change in packaging, this tribute to the holiday season brings customers from far and wide to get the first picture with their Starbucks red cups. Some even suggest that the cup is the start of their holiday season. Starbucks has truly differentiated itself by positioning themselves as a part of the holiday season rather than “just a coffee.” More distinctly, Starbucks has done an incredible job of leveraging the offline success of the red cups through a well planned online campaign based on the red cups and the experiences associated with them through the holidays.

For instance, Starbucks created numerous websites devoted distinctly to the red cups, such as itsredagain.com in 2006, distinctly for the purpose of building hype before the launch of the cups on Nov.1. Additionally, this year in the UK Starbucks launched “The Red Cup Challenge” encouraging participants to “earn points for their city through daily challenges including word searches and trivia, creative challenges including a town post card, and sharing on Facebook and

Twitter[1].” As well, this year Starbucks truly took consumer behavior into consideration with their red cup car guerrilla marketingcampaign. By sticking red cups to the tops of cars with magnets and randomly allowing them to roam the city streets, when a kind citizen would stop the car to remind the driver of their coffee mind-slip, the driver would award the individual with a $5 gift card. Starbucks then leveraged this offline campaign into an online marketing strategy through YouTube videos, Twitter, and Facebook content.

Year after year Starbucks builds on their holiday campaign by launching more YouTube videos, contests, Twitter contests, and most recently the holiday cup app launched last year devoted to animating the holiday cup experience. A true pioneer in building the online and offline bridge, Starbucks is well versed in bringing the magic of marketing to an object as simple as a red cup.

Approximately 27 million pieces of content is published daily with almost 60% of content-sharing messages mentioning a brand or product name[1]. Although companies are making a strong effort to communicate with their consumers regarding product and service offerings, not enough of an effort has been made to strictly listen to what the consumers have to say about the company, industry, and associated trends. At times, businesses become overwhelmed by the amount of content published regarding their business or market and block themselves off from understanding what their consumers are trying to communicate. Content monitoring and auditing tools have been created for the distinct purpose of addressing this problem by making content management easy, simple, and most importantly manageable.

Primarily, local company Hootsuite has created an integrated social media dashboard for individuals and businesses alike to manage their social strategies by aggregating numerous social pages such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., all on one platform.

With a clear layout, Hootsuite enables the user to keep track of numerous profiles at once as well as post similar content to various profiles all through one organized base.

Although Hootsuite is a free online service offering, a Pro version enables social media managers to engage on even more social profiles than an average user. Moreover, a key feature of Hootsuite allows users to pre-schedule tweets and posts, hence making sharing online content more regular and consistent. However, it is vital to not overly pre-schedule posted content as the information that is shared becomes somewhat robotic and not engaging for the online community. In addition, tools such as Google Plus allow individuals to be notified when content is shared regarding key words such as company name, industry, or selected words that the individual themselves selects. Therefore, keeping a tab on what is shared in the broader online community becomes a part of the monitoring process for individuals and businesses alike.

A key list of analysis tools to become a “modern-day inspector:”

1. Hootsuite: Social aggregation dashboard
2. Google Alerts: Notifications on key words
3. Wildfire: Brand comparisons online
4. Social Mention: Social media search engine
5. Google Reader: RSS feed aggregator
6. Blog Pulse: Blog communication tracker