This is my first blog post actually about something that I’ve tried and tested and i’m excited to write about it! For those of you who don’t know, I’m the Digital Media Director for UBC Recreation this year. What exactly does that entail? I manage a team of 4 lovely assistant directors with the objective of enhancing the experience students on campus and in our intramural events and leagues through our digital channels. In a nutshell, my department is in charge of the social media and our online magazine called The Point

So, as a project this year my team and I decided that we wanted to take on the challenge of implementing a new social platform. Over the last couple years there has been one new social media platform that has grown exponentially, especially among our target audience, that we had yet to take advantage of – Snapchat.

Now, with this opportunity there have been a number of obstacles we’ve been working to overcome. We knew that it would not be easy to establish ourselves on this new channel; but, the benefit was that it’s a great way to engage our participants on a more personal level. As a user of snapchat, it only requires 10 seconds or less of your time to get updated and among a community who generally check their snaps a couple times a day, it’s a fantastic way to build that personality behind our brand. As an organization, we want to foster the community around campus events and intramural leagues – this is an excellent platform to be doing so.

What barriers have we faced and what have we done to work and overcome them?

As expected, the initial effort of gaining followers is a challenge. Especially with snapchat where you cannot encourage ‘sharing’ of your content, it’s strictly an “I will follow you because I made the effort to look up your account”. We’ve tried to leverage our other social channels and promote snapchat and the exclusivity benefits. On the platform we’ve run a few small contests where individuals can ‘snap’ us and we bring them a treat to their location. Or the opposite where we snap us at a central location with prizes and wait for people to come find us! These have been moderately successful and our following is growing at a steady rate.

A more effective method we used to gain followers was by encouraging our participants in leagues and events to follow us for perks and prizes. This was very effective, because they’re already familiar with the brand and engage with us on a regular basis.

Outcomes

The engagement rates on this platform are UNREAL! On average, about 60-80% of our followers watch our stories. This is an insane proportion in comparison to our other platforms, especially considering that all stories expire after a day! This adds incredible value to the posts created on this platform.

Looking ahead

We’re looking at building more of a personality behind this platform. Regularly posting footage of our events and leagues as well as holding impromptu contests & giveaways. In October, Snapchat launched a new product called Our Campus Story which is a public feed that everyone can post to, only that its geotagged to a campus location. It is my personal goal to get this rolled out at UBC for Storm the Wall in March (Even if I have to go down to LA and persuade them). So stay tuned… big things may be coming!

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Two week’s ago I had a good friend of mine come running up to me jumping around in an excited frenzy asking if I had heard about the “new Facebook” called Ello. I had recalled hearing the name a few times in conversation but I hadn’t really looked into it. This particular friend of mine was talking about how she was dying for an invite and was hoping that I could help her out – at that point in time I hadn’t really gotten into the community.

Her excitement on it really got me curious so I went home and looked into the rapidly growing platform and reached out to a few of my colleagues who are my go-to’s on digital trends. Out of a few quick conversations I ended up getting an invite so I could 1) secure my username and 2)  really get a feel for what this new platform is.

It really is an interesting design and community. Putting aside its no-advertising and privacy perks, its simplicity is refreshing. On most websites you’re bombarded with colour, styling, mass amounts of text and different pieces trying to fight for your attention all around the screen. With Ello’s intuitive layout and design your attention span gets a blissful rest where you can simply browse content that you want to see.

One piece I find especially entrancing is that you can follow people as ‘friends’ or ‘noise’ but they will never know which section you categorized them into – again further allowing you to customize the content that you want to see.

In it’s beta stage there are not as many people on the platform (at least within the social circles I interact with) so my feed isn’t very exciting. However,  I am really interested to see how it grows. The focus of the content right now seems to be more art and graphics. I wonder if when it opens up to the mainstream public that people will use it as a platform to share their personal thoughts and stories as they do on other social media sites. On the other hand it may continue to be primarily used by people who who want to share (or, as in my case, browse) less quantity, but high quality interactive content.

Personally, I love the unique look and feel of the platform and I really hope it does not turn into the “next Facebook” with mass amounts of personal information (that many of your followers could probably care less about). Keep with the simplicity and foster a place for people to share and interact with the interesting and cool things you do or create.

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Your phone is buzzing off the hook – notification after notification on twitter as one of your unfortunately overlooked tweets goes viral. What do you do next? The piece of content may not have even been created or posted by you, but it’s your responsibility to “fix it” – and fix it fast. Where do you even start?

Well first start by taking the piece down. There are likely copies and screenshots already so this won’t solve the problem, but it’s important to get it off of your brands page.

It’s also important jump into action immediately! This is where brands often fall short in recovery, they want to develop the best possible plan of action, resulting in a delayed response. When media picks up the story you want to have your voice in the mix (to be clear – not in a defensive or aggressive way, take responsibility, and explain your plan to solve the problem).

An example of this is when a Dominos staff member posted a video of employees contaminating food before sending it out. This went viral and Dominos waited a full 48 hours before responding. They apparently hoped the hype would die down – and when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen they issued a formal apology and action plan via Youtube video. The video resulted in a quick positive sentiment recovery, but issuing this quicker would have been much more effective.
More information on Domino’s social media mishap can be found here and here.

The most important thing to note is that playing the blame game won’t work. Take responsibility for the mistake and try to move forward. The DiGiorno example in the previous post was handled well. Only a few minutes after the tweet was sent it was deleted and a formal apology tweet was up. They also have sent personalized responses to numerous people who expressed their discontent.

Photo via Adweek

As digital marketers it’s important to be careful with content being posted, have an action plan in place in case of a mishap, and when something happens take responsibility and swiftly do everything in our power to remedy the situation to minimize the damage to your brand and reputation.

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Every couple weeks a story breaks because a brand’s digital media content was perceived negatively or a mistake was made which put a group of consumers in uproar. Most of the time the post was sent with the purest of intentions, but as digital marketers it’s especially important to ensure that your post will not be misinterpreted and that you fully understand every context it could be viewed from. Being that the social media sphere is such an instantaneous community there is pressure to get your content out fast – especially around hot topics – for the best results.

(First example of a company doing this right that comes to mind is Oreo’s “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the 2013 Superbowl blackout)

But what about when you come up with something clever, put it out there, and things go horribly wrong? The unfortunate thing with digital media is that once it’s out there, it’s near impossible to take it back. Last week it was DiGiorno’s twitter account made a horrible error by trying to get a witty tweet into a trending hashtag conversation without researching the context. The #WhyIStayed was for people to express their experiences in abusive relationships and to combat the perception that the victim is at fault for staying in that relationship. DiGiorno prides themselves on being on top of real-time conversations and quickly put in the following tweet after seeing the trending hashtag without apparently looking into the context of the conversation.

Photo taken from AdWeek

It’s vital as digital marketers to be especially careful with what we put out (especially if you’re doing so in the name of a brand) because this small mistake put DiGiorno’s reputation at risk. We need to be aware of the pressures of instantaneous communication but balance that with taking a deep breath to think about the many ways a comment could be perceived to avoid misinterpretation from the author or reader!

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