Alan Choi's Blog

After reading an article about “Four ways to market your blog” written by a blogger – Jen Williams, it has inspired me to think about a leading question “there are countless youtube videos and blogs being uploaded online everyday, how do one of those stand out and become a hot topic of the day or even of the year?”

I totally agree that there are many ways to market your blog and video, for example: making regular post, creating traffic building, linking out and acting response, are good ways to advertise your blog. There are many successful cases have been found online by following the steps these days like youtube celebrities – nigahiga. At first, he posted some general funny videos which are trying to target the large market(basically joke that everyone can understand). Once he found out that his videos are mostly watched by younger generation (especially Asian), he started to post more video about daily life or random college life that teenagers are experiencing. After receiving good feedback from many viewers on youtube, he started doing daily post about himself and doing a great deal of videos with other youtube celebrities, trying to develop himself as a brand. As he gets more popular, he tries to put more advertisements in his videos (how all the money come). In order to create a successful blog or video to communicate with potential customers/audiences, the first thing is to make quality or funny video or blog to capture people’s attractions and create rumors. It is all about planning the “hook” to attract people and target the right group of audiences.

“New media marketing is a relatively new concept used by businesses in developing an online community, which allows satisfied customers to congregate and extol the virtues of a particular brand.” from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media_marketing). Nowadays, marketing has become easier in a sense that there are more media channels that company can spread there news and reach to more people. On the other hand, marketing has become harder because each person has received more information these days, it is hard for company to think of something to stand out in the marketing campaign.

As I am thinking about start to write blog everyday and attract some “fans”, I have researched some information in order to stand out among all the bloggers. Here is a funny video made by “nigahiga”, teaching how to be a youtube celebrity, I guess I will follow some of his recommendations(?) Maybe. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWENaab1-UI

After reading HongSheng’s blog of “Ethics-based Marketing, A Second Thought“, I suddenly thought of how marketing has changed over time. I still remember when I was a kid, advertisements were very simple. “Buy this, because you need it!”, sometimes, simple line works better than advertisement that has a lot of content and does not have enough time to let customers to absorb. Also, old advertisements were usually more ethics-based. In 1911, the ad industry was dominated by males, and the advertising they produced was predominantly product-centric. “WOODBURY SOAP DARES TO USE SEX APPEAL” – “Skin You Love to Touch,” is considered by several advertising historians to be the first modern ad campaign to use sex appeal. After the success of this campaign, advertisers tended to become more open and brave about the advertisement. From time to time, people get used to it and started to accept these kind of marketing advertisement.

Back to the question, the answer of that is marketing has changed and it happened SO FAST! And have anyone noticed that there are less and less phone advertisement nowadays? I discovered that, and think the most important reason is IT DOES NOT SEEM WORKING! People like me would not even give the sellers a chance and hang up the phone right after they hear the words “This is from XXX company…” Nowadays, most of the successful advertisements are online and using channel like Facebook, Twitter, Google etc. And online shopping becomes a new trend for the new generation. In order for the retailers to capture the attention of customers, the style of advertisements has been changing over time. Here is the link talking about 10 ideas that changed the world – http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/liodice-10-ideas-changed-marketing-world/142090/

Last but not least, VIDEO TIME!!!!! (it is about new school vs old school marketing methods)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWy_svbPoP4

After reading Sally’s blog post about “Marketing for a Better Society“, I began to think about how “marketing” appear in my daily life. In a normal day, first thing I do after I wake up is to turn on my laptop and browsing internet, and marketing materials start coming out. For example, Facebook has a lot of advertisement aside the page (Groupon, Bestbuy, the bay); Youtube has a great deal of videos that involve advertising content. Marketing is everywhere in our life visibly or invisibly. I still remember in the first day of class, Professor Dickson asked us an interesting question, “How many products did we use a day?”From a dollar shop to the shopping mall, there are some advertising “gimmicks” around us. For example, MacDonald always come out of discounts on some certain foods to attract people to buy their products. Also, shopping malls always provide some offer like “parking free” in order to hook the customers to shop in their malls.

KitKat’s advertisement in a park.

I found this picture from searching funny and creative advertisement design. Almost all the large company have a marketing department just to guide and lead the company’s other departments in developing, producing, fulfilling, and servicing products or services for their customers. Marketing is to provide a communication channel for customers and the company. Marketing can be simple, humble or entertaining and complex depends on the target group of the company. In my opinion, entertaining advertisement can most attract people to try their products. Most of the time, people do not think deep when they look at advertisement on TV, bus, youtube. Making a funny advertisement that can attract their customer’s interest would lead to success in a marketing campaign.

Last but not least, FUNNY ADS FROM MCDONALD:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9ajRIgTJNA&NR=1&feature=endscreen

Seriously, before working in a company as an office assistant, I have no idea how important is marketing. I still remember one of the senior assigned me to create a power-point and present on all the different companies that sell curtain wall. I randomly researched a bunch of information and put it all into the power-point nicely, and sent it to my senior. After a few minutes, the senior called and said the power-point looks really disgusting! I realized that the choices of font size, pictures, maps, wordings are not perfect. My power-point should be in ascending order, the pictures should be big and clear enough, font size should be different in title and details, etc. All the little details make a good representation. After all the research that I have done, I figured that actually the critical thing is to market my research not simply just the content of the research itself.

Marketing is defined as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing) No matter what industry a company is in, it needs marketing to deliver the product to the customers. In a sense, everything we do is related to marketing.

From my working experience, when the jewelery company holds a launching party, the marketing team has to spend more than 2 weeks to organize the whole event. From choosing the location to small detail like providing what kind of drinks to customers, this is marketing. In the marketing world, one little factor would play an important role to determine the success of a project.

Last but not least, here is the advertisement APPLE used to successfully capture the attention of the audience by comparing to PC. Enjoy it =)

Marketing is Everything!