In February, Dr. Christy Ashley and I attended the red carpet event which precedes the Oscars. We were studying what we call “red carpet brands” – those brands that are worn on the red carpet. Many of you have been asking – what did you learn?! We are still analyzing data but I thought you’d like this teaser on our findings. It was produced by social media marketing student, Shay Quigley (you can follow her @shayquig).
When is clever marketing not so clever? Who can know when customers will find content tied to current events relevant and amusing or outright rude?
We advocate for marketers to be relevant to customers in communications and specific offers. Yet, drawing upon some events can create anger and mistrust, as in this week’s actions by American Apparel. You can read more about it here. American Apparel sent out an email blast announcing a 36 hour sale for customers located in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy, noting that customers might want to alleviate the boredom with shopping.
Consumers didn’t take the sale lightly and the backlash took off on Twitter, amplifying the mistake to mammoth proportions.
That’s the thing about social media… just the things you wish could stay quiet can spread like wildfire. Now we’ll see whether American Apparel is equipped with a social media crisis plan.
A key component of market research is analyzing trends, and for companies involved in social media, this includes accessing the history of tweets. In the past, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for search. Today, however, “firms can search tweets back to January 2010 in order to plan marketing campaigns, target influential users, or even try to predict certain events (BBC).”
This technology is being offered for the first time by UK-based company Datasift. Datasift’s marketing manager, Tim Barker, talked to BBC about the new archive they are offering. To get a better idea of how it works, consider the following points:
Not everyone is impressed by the door Datasift is opening by archiving years of previous tweets, though. According to Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, “People have historically used Twitter to communicate with friends and networks in the belief that their tweets will quickly disappear into the ether.”
What do you think about Hosein’s statement? Don’t we run the risk of anything we say on the Internet, (especially on and within social media platforms,) being accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, at any time?
Barker certainly thinks so. “The thing with Twitter is that it was always created to be a public social network – which isn’t the case with Facebook which is more of a blended model,” he told BBC. “Twitter has been public from day one.”
Please share your thoughts below!
This past year brought an increased awareness to the value of social media for marketing. More companies than ever before are now integrating social media into their marketing strategies, but given that the use of social media for marketing is still in its early stages, unfortunate mistakes are bound to occur.
David Amerald, author of the best-selling ‘SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page’, reminded us in his post for Social Media Today earlier this month that along with these mistakes comes great learning opportunities for those of us involved in the field of social media marketing. “We stand alone in the animal kingdom by our ability to learn through inference,” Amerald says.
To provide us with an interactive presentation of the Top 10 Social Media Disasters of 2011, Amerald created a short YouTube video highlighting what the disasters were, who incurred them, and what the lesson learned was. Which of these train wrecks do you remember? Did you see any of them coming before the collision occurred?
If these lessons collaboratively teach us anything, it is that no company can choose to integrate social media for marketing without thoughtful research, planning, and measurement strategies in place prior to launch. Furthermore, no campaign can run on auto-pilot.
Social media marketing is live at every moment of the day, and without efficient monitoring, any campaign will see its share of problems.That being said, the live nature of social media marketing also implies that companies will have to act fast, responding to problems as they arise, and involving a PR mindset every step of the way. But it’s fun, it works, and it’s the direction advertising is going in. If your attitude is to never stop learning from the successes and failures of yourself and others, you’ll do just fine.
As policemen roamed campus during Wednesday’s lock down, many students were concerned.
I’ve had many friends who weren’t at ECU on Wednesday ask me what happened. Why was ECU on lock down? Basically, the story is that two separate calls reported a man with a rifle on 5th Street near the ECU campus. The police identified on video the man in question and it was unclear whether the item protruding from his book bag was a rifle or something else. Acting on the safe side, the lock down was called and a search proceeded. No new information was released outside of the alert that a potentially dangerous incident occurred on 5th Street and that everyone should stay indoors and away from windows.
We are information seekers by nature and with computers, pads, and smart phones readily available, many of us turned to Twitter and Facebook for news regarding this situation. If you’ve ever done the classic communication activity in class, you know that as information passes from one person to another, nuances and accuracy can be lost and misinformation can arise. That’s just what happened on Twitter and Facebook, except it occurred at the speed of light and with greater reach than we would have had in a classic WOM situation.
At various points, reports on Twitter and Facebook claimed that someone had been shot on campus, there were hostages in the Rivers building, that there were evacuations at the Rivers building, and that the gunman was on a city bus holding hostages. Obviously, the reports added to the fear we experienced and with little information being released from official sources, some information – even if that information lacked credibility – seemed better than none.
Many people I know – especially young people – say they don’t watch the news or read the newspaper (even online) anymore. They turn to Twitter and Facebook to get their news. But we have to remember that Twitter and Facebook relies on *crowd-sourced* news – news from citizen journalists, who are not trained to investigate and report the facts responsibly and who are not required to have credible sources for the news they are reporting. The news we get from Twitter and Facebook is no more reliable than the people who are doing the posting.
Social media communication can be useful in difficult times. We’ve seen situations with positive outcomes due to social media WOM. In the case of the ECU lock down, it added to the fear and anxiety those involved felt, and distracted police officials from their ability to do their jobs well as they sought to respond to false reports coming from social media channels.
What’s the answer then? There are so many advantages to the social society we’ve become, and yet clearly Wednesday’s scenario provides a backdrop for the disadvantages to be considered as well. What are your thoughts?
Earlier this semester, my social media marketing class had an etiquette expert, Sharon Justice, come as a guest speaker. I asked her to speak to the class on social media etiquette. Much like email etiquette was once a hot topic, we now have to learn to communicate wisely and appropriately across social media channels – while recognizing what’s personal, what’s professional, and what is part of the blurred overlaps of life.
Sharon’s talk emphasized the need for us to differentiate what’s private from what’s public and she gave the class examples of people posting in social spaces content that they may have thought was private, but was actually public – and the consequences of the posts.
There was an example this week on just this point. Ashton Kutcher (@Aplusk) posted a rant on his disappointment in the choice Penn State made to fire its head coach. Joe Paterno. The Penn State story has been in the headlines this week and the severity and sensitive nature of the case has certainly warranted Penn State’s strong action. Kutcher ranted before knowing the facts and later recounted his rant. Apparently some damage had already been done, as since that time Kutcher has decided to stop tweeting for an indefinite period of time and then to turn over his tweetstream to the communications agency he co-owns.
Kutcher is one of the most followed people in the world with millions following his tweets each day. He tweets on his own life and his opinions on some matters important and some inconsequential. Aside from the disappointment Two and a Half Men fans feel from the loss of quality in that show, he might seem untouchable. But in this case he mouthed off about a private opinion in a public space – and he was wrong.
The lesson? Even if you are Aplusk, private versus public matters.
SOURCE: Mashable.com – Ashton Kutcher to Take a Break from Twitter
Blogger, I have two new crushes. Twitter and Facebook. I’ve been on FB a few years but resisted getting really engaged. I’m new to tweeting, but the crowdsourcing of info-searching has me hooked.
Here’s the problem – I’m microblogging, which has resulted in feeling like I have less to say on the blog. It shouldnt’ really. There’s room for both – I can microblog a thought or insight or link, but could assess, interpret, analyze, and comment on brand-related developments here. I just lack the motivation to blog it up when I’m busy tweeting. And really, one can even comment in-depth on facebook with notes, or on friendfeed.
What’s a blogger to do?