Earlier today our VP of Marketing Michelle Heath wrote a nice post about the Old Spice guy. As promised we have created our own rebuttal to his Orli video. Enjoy!
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
If you haven’t heard about the Old Spice video campaigns you must be either living under a rock or rendered speechless by Isaiah Mustafa’s six-pack, towel wearing bod. Some say he’s a god. I say the campaign is brilliant (and happen to concur with the god-like references). Weiden + Kennedy, P&G’s ad agency, pulled together one of the most integrated and truly buzz worthy social media campaigns of 2010. Their timeliness, randomness, and honest-to-goodness humor has put Old Spice on the map in terms of social media. Instead of us gushing about it, feel free to read the great articles by Mashable and Fast Company. But of course our $0.02 anyway.
As I thought about what worked so well in this campaign, I kept thinking about the 4Ps of marketing and how, in this new social media world, we need a new P. Sure, every successful marketing mix has something to do with product, price, placement and promotion. But what they don’t teach you is what we learned this week about a healthy dash of social media and a heaping helping of a hot guy in a towel.
As marketers, we spend most of our time cooking up clever ways to share our brand with the people we think are most interested – a.k.a. our target audience. Whether it’s chocolates, cars, ShamWows or Forex – there’s a buyer for what we’re selling. They just don’t know it yet.
Brands have to work harder than ever to earn our attention. We’ve all heard the urban legend of the viral video that refused to produce the golden YouTube views and its silent death at the hands of its maker. Tragic. We’ve all seen the Facebook pages that vie for us to like them only to disappoint us and the Twitter streams that offer nothing of value in 140 characters or less. Sigh.
The great thing about the Old Spice campaign is that it took something that’s been around for decades (my grandpa wore it for years) and made it new by starting with fans and followers. It is what every good campaign should do – start with the people and let them build it. It’s something they don’t teach you in school but something I admire in practice. IMHO, People should be the 5th P. Think about it. Social media is all about People. It’s about engaging People in conversations, creating new ideas, forming and sharing opinions and connecting. These are People who may or may not like your brand. But, they know other People. And when they see and hear cool stuff in action, they tell them.
Hats off to W+K for focusing on the People and to Old Spice taking a risk and putting a hot guy in a towel (seriously, thank you.) As a social network, we here at Currensee are empowered by great examples like this one and, because we are a little goofy and love social media, we decided to ask (and by ask I mean, make) one of our interns, appropriately named Orli, respond to one of the commercials. Watch the original commercial here. Our response will be posted momentarily. Happy trading, social media lovers.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
It can sometimes be pretty lonely standing on our soapbox, waving the transparency flag and calling out passersby who get in Jack the FX Trader’s way (StockTwits, are you listening?). Then we heard about FXBees.com through a review on FX Magnates, and we’ll admit, we were curious. Whenever we hear the words “Forex” and “social network” in the same sentence, our ears perk up a bit (see photo of our Currensee Pips, upon hearing about FXBees.com).
Photo by Erik Veland
FXBees.com is fresh to the Forex social scene, so we’ll cut them some slack, but we do have our reservations:
Demo accounts. Demo traders and real traders are the ammonia and bleach of the FX world. In real collaborative trading, every player needs to have something at stake. Want to short the EUR/USD? Well put your money where your mouth is, whether it’s your annual bonus or your lunch money. Any tips or advice from a demo trader should be followed by the disclaimer, “Favorite pairs include Monopoly money and chocolate gold coins.”
Blind ignorance. Sounds like FXBees.com lets you scout out the pseudo-shining stars who may be trading in demo accounts and blindly follow them because you trade similar pairs, but you don’t know what their trading strategy is – Fibonacci, Nonfarm Payroll, or cloud formations?
Currensee members share their trading strategies, years of experience, favorite pairs and techniques so you know who you are “getting into a [trading] bed with,” so to speak. Bragging about your performance in pips by itself doesn’t tell a fellow trader much. That’s why Currensee measures individual member performance against the greater Currensee community and the S&P 500.
One of our feature, the Currensee Social Indicators widget, aggregates the Currensee community’s stance on all the major pairs, allowing members to see where our real Forex traders stand on the NZD/JPY. Whose advice are you going to take – thousands of Forex traders with real money on the table, or the guy “just playing around”?
You already know what we’re all about: real traders, real trades, real time. If we could figure out how to fit it onto a license plate, we’d have them made. In an earlier post, Michelle talked about why we’re having all the fun in this new, democratized Forex market. But with this freedom also comes great responsibility. In a world and a market that is stricken with scams and schemes, we strive everyday to be the voice of Jack (or Jill) the FX Trader who isn’t backed by the big-name banks and attorneys when things turn sour.
FX Magnates sums up the newcomers by saying, “Overall I would say FXBees has promise, but it needs to eliminate demo accounts, and it needs to stress the dangers of blindly following other traders.” We agree on both counts. That’s why Currensee is all about real trades from real traders.
We’re not trying to be harsh on the new kids on the block. In fact, in the spirit of collaboration and transparency, we welcome them to the Forex social media arena. We’ll be watching. Always watching.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Today is Social Media Day. There are no fireworks. No parade. No band. Maybe a couple extra @’s and RT’s, but as I see it, Social Media Day is a pretty big accomplishment for the social community.
I kind of equate Social Media Day to Earth Day. Every day should be about taking care of our planet. Recycling, being as green as we can, conserving our precious resources, but it’s just not that way. Most people don’t think about the Earth with every bottle of water they throw away or every gas-guzzler they drive. So, Earth Day becomes the event or reminder that it’s important.
Seeing as we are a Forex trading social network, every day here at Currensee is social media day. We spend much of our time talking with our fans on Facebook, retweeting our followers on Twitter, discussing hot topics with the members of our social network and participating in discussions on Linked In. The good news is that it’s ingrained in what we do. We don’t need a special day to remind us. It’s just how we do things around here.
So I ask you, on this Social Media Day, what are you doing to be social? How are you building your social network or your social brand? Would love to hear from you.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
I equate retail Forex trading to growing up in today’s world. Think about it. You’re 17 or 18 years old. You grow up on the internet. The new Internet. Not the AOL, you’ve got mail, under construction, dial-up Internet. The new, open source, 2.0 social web where you can connect with friends all over the world, sharing pictures, ideas and information from any coffee shop or handheld device. Online Forex trading has the personality of a 17-year-old, but has been stuck in the grey pinstriped suit of a middle-aged guy.
I did time at all the big banks and brokers back when there was no such thing as retail Forex trading. The big guys only cared about the institutional money. That’s where all the currency bean-counting happened. It wasn’t about how many pips a trade made – it was all about hedging, managing risk and speculating. Who’s counting individual pips when you’re trading billions of dollars each day? They had sprawling trading desks staffed with phones and Bloomberg terminals and wing-tipped shoe wearing guys in suspenders. We all know how that ended up.
Fast forward to the 21st century. There was a crash. And a burn. People were looking for a new way to make a dollar. Cynical about the stock market and eager to try their hand at something new, online Forex trading came onto the scene. Retail brokers scrambled to add it on to their “other asset classes” offering and tried to make a go of it. In the background, business types all over the world started to see the opportunity to build Forex trading systems that any ordinary trader could use. As these online brokers started to crop up, so did the social web. Now, anyone could learn about Forex. Even your average Joe.
“….Just as the advent of the internet has removed the physical barrier to Forex, social media is steadily removing the perceptual barrier, and all accompanying stigmatisms to boot. The ability to collaborate trading strategies and market predictions while tapping the overall global knowledge base, are all advantages social media is bringing to the table for online trading firms. Social media established the infrastructure necessary for a truly global online Forex community that could eventually lead to a virtual collective trading block, matching (and potentially dwarfing) the trading power and influence of those major institutions we mentioned earlier, when it comes to driving market shift.”
It’s really about the old versus the new. The old Forex market was closed, isolated and scam-infested. It was a 1-to-1 trading experience between a trader and a broker. The new Forex market is all about embracing the larger social trend to foster trust, transparency, community and knowledge-sharing between many Forex traders and many Forex businesses. Brokers, online communities, news and education websites are all here to serve the millions of Forex traders who wake up every day ready to trade.
The social dish is the Forex game-changer. Imagine the possibilities when you start as a social financial services company, rather than trying to bolt on a bunch of social features to your big old corporate infrastructure. Just try to get that approved by Compliance. The face of Forex has come a long way, baby, and feels more like “the 25 to 35 year old male with long hair, jeans, and some extra cash to burn on the side (thanks for that quote, Ayelet).” Some guys have all the fun.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
In response to demand of traders we’ve just implemented connectivity between Currensee and Twitter allowing traders to automatically Tweet their positions. The way the service works is that once you link your Twitter account you can chose which one of your brokers accounts you’d like to Tweet and we are automatically Tweeting on your behalf whenever you open or close a position. Since Currensee is the only platform that is connected in real time to more than 50 brokers the moment you execute the order we would Tweet on your behalf in real time. For those who are running business via Twitter we’ve also added the ability to Tweet only when positions are closed and thus attract customers.
One great service that can be along side with Currensee’s functionality is StockTwits and since we see the great value for our traders delivering the transparency we strive to into StockTwits we’ve implemented our Tweets using the same format that will be picked by StockTwits allowing traders for the first time to really Tweet what they do in their live accounts.
Currensee members who link their Twitter account are also going to be awarded 5 Currensee Bucks.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
The January issue of e-Forex magazine landed on our desks with a satisfying thud last week, and we’re just getting around to reading this article “Social networking helping to get retail FX traders together” in which Heather McLean interviews our own CEO Dave Lemont among others. In case you’re not a subscriber to e-Forex magazine, we’ve pulled a few choice quotes.
The article opens with a quote by Kellie Durazo of FX V-room, “I think there’s always been a desire within forex trading for a community, for a place where you can learn trading techniques, share information with fellow traders andlearn about what’s happening in the industry.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
There’s a lot of good discussion of both sponsored and independent communities, including this quote by Dave:
The forums, such as Forex Factory and FX Street, provide information and education, but it’s difficult for a trader to know who to trust. Currensee provides transparency; traders can see the real trades, performance and strategies of other traders, connect with traders with similar trade strategies and learn new ideas through collaboration. Traders want to understand what makes one trader more succesful than another. This learning can only be discovered through collaboration via real trades and performance data.
It goes without saying that the Currensee team believes strongly in the power of collaboration and transparency – that’s why we built Currensee and our ground-breaking Forex social indicators. We hope that more and more Forex traders take advantage of the plethora of social tools to reach out and engage with the community. The more we interact, the more we can learn to become better traders. Thanks to the team at e-Forex for devoting some ink to this topic.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
I love to see partners, like IBFX, putting social media to work for Forex traders. Today, IBFX announced a pretty cool new Facebook app that they’ll be showcasing at the Traders Expo in Las Vegas later this week.
According to the press release, “Available through the Interbank FX Facebook page, this new application will facilitate Micro Mini Challenge participants to connect with Interbank FX and their fellow traders through Facebook—allowing winners to tag and share their photos and winning certificates.”
The Facebook app is a great idea. Why? Well, Facebook is all about leveraging your social graph, an intricate map of how people are related (socially, that is). People typically connect with other people on Facebook based on a common thread. For some it might be friends they went to high school with, others might be family dispersed all over the world, still others business groups and colleages. That’s the power of a social graph. It can combine all of these different people based on how they’re related. These IBFX traders all have a few things in common – 1) they’re Forex traders 2) they won this contest and 3) they use Facebook. The idea of giving these traders a fun and unique way to communicate and collaborate is what makes social media such an exciting strategy for brokers and financial firms alike.
“Our Micro Mini Challenge is a fun way for traders to engage in friendly competition,” said Marilyn McDonald, Vice President of Customer Experience at Interbank FX. “We at Interbank see the growing trend for traders to incorporate social media into their trading strategies, and we’re excited to facilitate a social connection between our Micro Mini Challenge participants and our Facebook page.”
We are excited to have hundreds of Forex traders and members as Currensee fans on Facebook and an integration with Facebook in the Currensee dashboard. It’s an exciting way to connect with other Forex traders and we give the new IBFX app two thumbs up.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
TechCrunch reported today about an interesting new iPhone app they came across in the App Store. It’s an official app made by the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), the American stock exchange. In the words of TechCrunch writer, MG Siegler, “That itself is interesting, but perhaps even more interesting is a key functionality of the app is to highlight tweets about various NASDAQ stocks.”
The app is called NASDAQ Portfolio Manager and, according to TechCrunch, it’s pretty slick. In addition to providing all the real-time quotes and data you’d expect, it also has some pretty cool charting features and, IMHO, the most interesting part of the whole app is that it has a special view that integrates all the latest tweets about that stock, coming in from StockTwits. If you don’t know about StockTwits and you’re a Forex trader, you need to check it out. The service is organized in “streams” and they recently launched a Forex stream, where you can see all the latest Forex tweets. A Forex tweet is denoted with $Currency pair (i.e. $USDJPY), and what’s even cooler is that you can sort the Forex stream by pair. Say you’re only interested in tweets about USD/JPY, click on the pair and just see that stream. We use StockTwits with our @Currensee Twitter stream to connect with influential Forex traders from around the world. Many new Currensee members find us on Twitter and connect with other Twitter members on Currensee.
This new NASDAQ app shows the innovation that comes when you blend social data with traditional data. The ability to look at a chart and a price and blend that with what other people are doing right now provides unique new insights and gives traders new decision-making tools. It’s reinforcing to see an institution like NASDAQ push the limits on data. I’m happy to be in such good company. :)
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
We spend a lot of time here at Currensee explaining what we do to other people. Traders, analysts, bloggers, journalists – all somewhat normal people with a common interest in Forex. When we describe Currensee, we talk about being a Forex trading social network. When you say “social network,” it’s hard not to mention the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter (there I go again). That’s why I find it fascinating that there aren’t any other Forex-specific social networks out there and, believe me, I’ve looked.
Perhaps they are masked as forums like Forex Factory and the many other gathering places for Forex traders to converse. Or maybe they are happening in slices of general-purpose social networks, like the StockTweets Forex stream or certain Forex Facebook pages. But, as an avid social networker, when I look at the forums and online chatrooms, I don’t see a social network. I see a place where people create avatars and usernames and talk at each other, for the most part. The challenge is that you often don’t really know who FXPrincess or N00b2Forex are, the conversation is often very one-way and it’s not helping me grow my network of real Forex people. This brings me back to my question.
If chat rooms, message boards, and forums appear to be relics of the early web, why hasn’t Forex evolved with the rise of social media and social networks? If you’re out there, Forex social networks, please raise your hands.
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Be sure to read the full risk disclosure before trading Forex. Please note that Forex trading involves significant risk of loss. It is not suitable for all investors and you should make sure you understand the risks involved before trading. Performance, strategies and charts shown are not necessarily predictive of any particular result. And, as always, past performance is no indication of future results.
Currensee is the first social network for forex traders. We bring Forex traders from around the world together to make trading decisions in real time using live trading data.
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