Somebody Needs To Tell Notre Dame That There’s No ROI On Twitter!

As a life long Notre Dame fan, I was ecstatic when the time ran out and we were still standing undefeated. It’s been a very long 20+ years since the Golden Domers have made a trek to be a part of a national championship game. And being that I live in South Florida could it get any better for me that the game is here in my back yard? Sweet.

So what does this have to do with marketing, advertising or social media? Everything. You see, any fan that has been waiting decades for the return to prominence of Notre Dame like I have, and there’s millions of us, were going crazy last night.

Friends were calling, Twitter was buzzing and early this morning we all started making our plans and looking to buy tickets, t-shirts, banners, hats and everything else we could get our hands on that was emblazoned with the Notre Dame logo.

And then it popped up. Right there on Twitter, for all of us wannabe leprechaun’s to see. Someone, maybe Notre Dame, maybe a vendor, but someone with their wits about them somehow owned the top of Twitter and featured Notre Dame gear.

Now since Notre Dame has been trending world-wide for about 12 hours now, do you think maybe, just possibly, a few pieces of merchandise were sold? You bet your ass somebody pocketed some serious coin and more importantly, touched a ton of people for future re-marketing.

While Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musberger were readying their post-game analysis, somebody was already on it preparing to take millions of dollars of orders. That is the power of #socialtv. That is the power of real-time marketing. That is realizing a serious ROI on Twitter.

People are spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercials and completely missing the boat on how a simple social media campaign executed in real-time can reap some serious benefits. Both in actual cash and affinity.

So it makes me wonder. What was a company like say Party city doing to capitalize on the Notre Dame buzz. Surely a company that sells party supplies for sports teams was all over this. I mean, can you imagine a bigger party for Notre Dame football fans?

We’ve been waiting for over 2 decades for a return to the national spotlight and a chance to play for a national championship. Now we are standing on the doorstep of glory.

So let’s go to party city and first check if they actually sell Notre Dame stuff. Hmmm..nothing on the home page.

Let’s do a quick search. yep, they do sell some Notre Dame stuff. You have to hunt for it, but it’s there.

Perhaps the webmaster was off for the Holiday weekend. It’s not like anyone would expect them to be updating their site in real time or anything…

Let’s check Twitter…hmmm…not a single mention.

I guess the copywriters didn’t have a chance to script out any automated Tweets.

On to Facebook. That’s probably where will find the conversation…hmm..nothing there either. Well, guess the people at Party City must be Notre Dame haters as well. What a shame.

I guess it’s back to Twitter for my shopping.  Who ever says there’s no ROI on Twitter doesn’t really understand the power of Twitter and the importance of real-time marketing

In today’s day and age, it makes you shake your head and wonder why doesn’t it?