Strategy in Social Media

It seems the key to Social media is creating a strategy, and then making a company-wide decision to manage and stick to the strategy for the long haul. As was said in the lecture, once a company makes the decision to enter into a form of social media, they must stick with it. It could be disastrous if you were to create buzz about your brand online, then drop the updates altogether.

Once a company has made the commitment and entered into a form of social media the strategy comes into play. Like we read in Scott’s book the purpose of social media from a brand perspective is not to market to consumers, but instead to create a relationship. The key to an effective strategy then for a brand into enter into a conversation with their target demographic and manage the message to keep it succinct across all forms of social media and media.

In my experience the biggest hurdle was to maintain internal interest in social media. About a year ago, Fandotech put together our blog, joined Twitter, Facebook and placed multiple videos on YouTube. All steps in the right direction. However, the plan was to post content on the blog written by internal technical staff, and then the marketing department would continue to update Facebook and Twitter. Within six months, interest waned and management was scrambling to get a weekly blog post; over time staff changes resulted in fewer Tweets and Facebook updates.

Twitter is a Celebrity Cash Cow

Thought this was an interesting article: Charlie Sheen on Twitter.

Apparently Twitter is quite a money maker for celebrities. Kim Kardashian gets $25,000 per Tweet. One of her recent tweets for Armani (which netted her $25k) drove 40,000 hits to their website in 24 hours. While it does drive hits to the website, the article mentions that they have no data on how much product was actually sold. In addition I would assume that as companies branch into this it will become more difficult to keep a handle on brand image. The article gives a good example of 50 Cent tweeting about a penny stock. Imagine a celebrity Tweets about your product, then goes out drunk driving and ends up killing someone…

So again were back to the value question. How much value is there in PR and marketing in social media?

I Would Rather Lick Your Shoe!

The new Miracle Whip ad is pretty good. They lead is with quite a few saying how much they love Miracle Whip, then they cut to a guy that says,"I would rather lick your shoe." Then they show a few people saying how much they hate it.

The commercial ultimately ends with the statement that Miracle Whip isn't for everybody.

While it is a memorable commercial I 'm not sure it will boost sales in and of itself. Is the goal for it to go viral and just keep MW in everyone's mind? If you search YouTube for Miracle Whip you will see extreme videos with quite a few hits. People rubbing Miracle Whip on each other, etc. Interesting stuff.

Teens, Young Adults, and Me

Interesting article here: Link to Article that Harlan posted. The article states that teens are only choosing to friend a brand in 6% of the cases and that young adults (18-24) are choosing to do this only 12% of the time.

 Is this a generational or maturation effect? I would be more inclined to choose the generational effect. Teens of today grew up in the digital world and for this reason have already built the barriers needed to control the influx of media through their selective filtering. What I've found with anything that I've friended that's even close to a brand is that they spam my smart phone constantly. I recently "friended" the New England Patriots and now receive every update about every small happening within Patriot world.

Would I want Coca-Cola to spam me two or three times a day in an effort to market to their 'friends'? Not really and I don't see myself wanting that even in 10 or even 20 years.

AOL and the Huffington Post

AOL is betting on an acquisition as a play to drive hits through free media. AOL paid $315 million for the Huffington Post, this represents a huge payday for Arianna Huffington, who owns a significant stake in the Post.

The Huffington Post is yet another in a long list of specialist websites that AOL has acquired recently. Huffington is by far the largest and could serve to bring a very large audience of news readers to AOL.

Arianna Huffington explains the merger this way, "By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform."

So the real question is, will AOL truly leverage this and its other recent acquisitions into a viable patchwork of online content? Or will it simply write off yet another huge loss a year or two from now?

Social Media ROI

How do you calculate ROI for marketing dollars invested in social media? The author explains the process like this:

1. Describe the possible investment
2. Sketch out the rationalze
3. Develop a marketing/sales funnel
4. Hypothesize how the initiative might work through the tunnel, resulting in an estimated range of dollars produced.
5. Share ROI information with decision makers
6. As the initiative progresses, assess how well the step 4 hypotheses is supported by reality

The alternative to this approach is to use the "gut feel" method used by as many as two thirds of top managers. What I find interesting is that this six step "process" is doing little more than applying a process to the "gut feel" method, with a single exception. Step 6 calls for a reality check to ensure that ROI is what was expected so the initiative can be quelled if not working.

The single best take-away from this article is the point that now is the time that marketing departments should be experimenting with the different forms of social media to build meaningful metrics that may be used in the future to determine what should be invested in social media.

Transparent Marketing

I thought it interesting to write a little piece on Domino's Pizza and their somewhat recent (early 2010) transparent marketing campaign. Domino's realized in early 2010 that their pizza tastes like garbage, had for a while and they were seemingly the last to know.

Domino's posted a loss of $67 million in 1991. By 1996, through sweeping changes, Domino's was back on track with earnings over $50 million on revenues of $2.8 billion. For the next decade or so Domino's slowly lost market share to Pizza Hut and Papa John's.

So in early 2010 Domino's took on a transparent marketing strategy to tell everyone how bad their pizza is and how they're working to make it better.

This is a good example of shifting your marketing away from purely an advertising strategy to more of a marketing and public relations strategy.