Ana Cirera's Blog

Flash mobs have become a trend activity in many cities around the world. As it says in the wikipedia “Flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression”.

It started in 2003 and thanks to all the social media platforms Flash mobs connect with million of people and attract more attendants that it would have been possible without those platforms. Moreover, it gets spread away fast through them and it has gained a lot of fast relevance thanks to that.

Sound of Music | Central Station Antwerp (Belgium)

The success of a Flashmob relies on its originality, attraction and on choosing the right place and the right time. It is not a vehicle for political purposes or for selling products but it has been used to promote companies anniversaries and celebrations. For example, the next video is an initiative of a spanish bank that was celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Beethoven Symphony – Banc Sabadell Barcelona

Social media platforms and the engaging of users have made possible to create this world wide movement.

If you want to enter into the social media network world you need to know how Hootsuite works. Hootsuite is a tool created 3 year ago that help us to be updated and monitorize the social profile of our business or of our clients business. It allows you to monitorize at the same time Twitter, Facebook (personal profile and pages), LinkedIn, PingFM and others.

Why do you need it?

• It can update in all the social networks at the same time and set schedules for the update
• It doesn’t use resources from your computer because it is an on-line tool
• It can be used through phone
• It allows you to import RSS from a cool blog that you like and automatize its diffussion
• It is easy to use and customize to our preferences
• You can upload photos, videos and links
• It has a tool to analyze your activity which will help you to review your performance and redirect you social media strategy if the results are not the expected

How to use it?

If you don’t have a Twitter account do it first! What is intersting of this platform is to monitorize your different platforms. You will also need Facebook, LinkedIn.. to if you want to control all the social media platforms where you consumers or friends may are.

As soon as you register on Twitter, register on ( Hootsuite ) you can add in your profile the social media networks that you want to work with. Then you can create a message to upload in your social networks at the same time or in some of them. You can also chose to create a new colume to see another social network or answer the twitts by clicking on (“Retweet”) button.

In the Hootsuite dashboard we see the main navigation tool which gives you 5 main options.

• Streams – where you can see you social  platforms streams
• People – where you manage the people you are following on twitter, your friends on facebook…
• Stands – it gives you the statistics of your activity
• Assignements – it allows you to share the manage of your social platforms account with other people
• Settings – for all your account settings and preferences

If you need to go deeper in the use of this tool you also have the opportunity to upgrade your account to the premium level and get the following features:

• Unlimited social networks
• Unlimited RSS/Atom feeds
• Unlimited stats history
• Add one team member to your account
• Google Analytic integration and Facebook Insights integration
• Bulk scheduling

Continuing with the previous post, I would reinforce the idea of FUN by giving and example of a whole campaign build around of fun, happiness and smiles. But also, it is an example of how make a good viral campaign because if people like your videos they would like to share them with their friends and the videos would “fly” around the internet without you realizing of it.

This campaign  is a initiative of Volkswagen that started in 2009 and wants to show that by making thinks funnier we can change people’s behavior and make them do things good for the environment, for others…  We can apply this theory in our on-line strategy by encouraging our fans to have fun with us.

Here we find 2 of the challenges that they presented:

1. “Go up the stairs in a fun way” which is its most famous video of this campaing and it has currently reached almost 1,900,000 views on its official URL alone.

Piano Stairs – The fun Theory

2.  This is the second most popular video in their campaign and helped them to reinforce their environementally friendly image by promoting the idea of “Be clean!! We all can help the environment”. 

The world’s deepest bin – The Fun Theory

Within this campaign Volkswagen also reinforces its image in its social corporate responsibility branch. The first to videos of the campaign weren’t related with VW products but now it is using this campaign to promote its products and its advances in their cars models. Here is an example:

Belt Car in Serbia – The Fun Theory

In addition to this particular campaign, Volkswagen have shown their inclination for “smiles, happiness and fun”. Here we have the 2012 campaign!

Smile – VW 2012 campaign

Smile!

There are several tips that you should take into account when boosting your Facebook profile for your business.  Here I have detailed the main ones so you can start improving your profile.

1. Talk about topics that are not strictly related to your business but that you find interesting for your audience. For example, E-dreams explains us how to live in the dessert and gives us tips for that and indirectly gives us a point of departure to start thinking about travelling to the desert.
2. Find creative ways to engage your audience with photos, contests, games, TV, apps and videos and don’t be afraid to be bold and creative when asking for a Like.
3. Use hot spots on your welcome page to integrate your other online sites.
4. Use videos to instruct and inspire, taking advantage of comments.
5. If you have a blog, a business or a store, add your Facebook Like button in your blog page and integrate it
6. Form strategic partnerships that benefit your fans
7. Tell fans the rules of engagement on your page and monitor the comments that users post on your wall to limit the inappropriate comments or limit the comments about conversations far away in time.
8. Make clear the benefits of liking your page. Users like to feel that you care more about them if they become your friends so you have to show them what privileges they would have.

Do you feel like this in Linked-IN?

• it doesn’t seems to work?
• it doesn’t bringyou jobs?
• no ones look at your profile?
• you are not member of any group and you don’t know why you should be a member

LinkedIn is not only a recruitment tool and it doesn’t work alone, you have to start capitalizing its value by following those 7 steps below:

1. Look over your profile by valuing what format is better for your profile and how you should explain your qualities and background
2. Join more than 40 groups, Groups are the biggest arm of LinkedIn so you need to join them to take advantage of it
3. Score the group digest
4. Spend time every day in Linked-In looking for interesting groups and themes and value this time as an investment for the growth of the company
5.  Engage in discussions: Being part of groups but not talking doesn’t have a lot of sense…   Add comments in the conversation that result interesting for others and that add them value. If so, they would go to your profile and connect with you.
6. By initiating a conversation and posting interesting comments you can be considered as an influencer of the group!
7. Connect: Through Linked-In you can search for people that you want to connect with and scan their profile to verify that they have interesting qualities for you. After that, you can connect with and wait for them to accept you. It can also be the other way around and someone can be searching for someone with your background and ask you for connection. After connecting, you would move the conversation offline and start building a business network with that person or institution
8. Reevaluate

Every 3 months value the groups you are member and change they don’t fit in your interest anymore but, FIND NEW CONNECTIONS in NEW GROUPS!

Brand positioning in SEO is crucial for brand awareness and drive traffic to companies’ web page.  Companies have historically created audience through TV adverts and advertisement campaigns, and more recently through online social networking services, blogs.  However, recent studies have shown that good SEO positioning have influences in the number of traffic driven to the web page, in consumer perceptions of a brand and consequently in brand purchase decisions. In the graphic provide by Optify we see that by being appearing in the first result in SEO, you get 36.4% of the clicks but only 1.5% of organic clicks if you are in second page.  As a result, we can realize of how important is to be in these first positions to profit the benefits of the SEO.

 A report made by Marketing Charts found that brands experience a 30% lift in awareness among respondents when it appears above the fold and in universal search results (digital assets). When appearing in paid search (PPC) together with natural search results above the fold, the brand awareness lift was 20% above the baseline results, and 10% when only in natural search above the fold.”

However, pay-per-click advertisement will only succeed with the correct words.  To know which words users are using to search in your category, you can contact a specialist in this field or make and own study research using tools like Google Insights.  Google insights gives users information about the performance of different words and provides sadistic information in the different words analyzed by answering different questions as the followings:

• What users are looking for?
• How often they search?
• Which are their interests?

In conclusion, companies should drive some of their marketing budget to this on-line positioning as it has been demonstrated how useful it is.

Studying in depth the topic initiated in the previous post I will talk about consumers’ evangelism. When the influencers become very active and influential, they are called evangelism users. Those users creates content and generates a lot of traffic within comments, blogs and videos. The influence of those users in other consumers is very big. In addition, it influences and adds a lot of value to the brand by contributing with new ideas for new products, new ways and moments to use a product, new designs or improvements for an existing product. Those users have a lot of importance in the developing are of the company and their comments ought to be taken into account.

A study made in 2012 showed that the percentage of users that look for information of a product or services in the different sources is:

•  28.6% in web pages that collect reviews from other web pages and makes comparisons.
• 27.06% in the company’s webpage
• 20.3% in a company wall on social networks
• 5.9% in blogs about brands

Despite blogs about brands are the source where users go less to look for information, blogs in general are the source that more information and comments generates, they are the most active source. Evangelists and users connect in all of those sources and share information about the brand and its products.

Evangelism users build a strong relationship with the brand which results in a proactive attitude that brings a lot of benefits to the company. They can help the brand reach new costumers, achieve a better reputation in the social media world, come up with new ideas for their products, become know worldwide.  In addition, they will tell the brand what is wrong and they will surely try to solve it, they will make the companies’ video’s viral, etc.

To sum up, companies should identify those users and give them privilegies, value their suggestions and make an effort to multiply the positive effort that those users generate for the brand.

80% of internet users are enrolled in more than three social networks, and 40 percent reporting being active members of two. How usually users share information?

Consumers are talking about brands and products in social networks and those conversations influence other users even if they are not actively listening. In many sectors consumers rely more on the information they found in social networks, blogs and in other users’ reviews than in the information provided by the company.

We can classify those influencers in Social influences and Key influences. The channels they use to communicate are  blogs, social networks and reviews of products or services. For example, in 2011 81% of travellers declared that they find users reviews important and 49% declared that they won’t book a property without reviews.

• Social influences are everyday people who participate in social platforms influence brand affinity and purchasing decisions through consumer reviews, by updating their own status and Twitter feeds and commenting on blogs and forums.
• Key influencers in specific fields have an outsized influence on brand affinity and purchasing decisions on social platforms. Key influencers typically have their own blogs, huge Twitter followings and rarely know their audiences personally.

As a consequence, the relationship between consumers and brands is changing and it should be reported in brands’ strategy. Now that companies know where consumers are listening, they should probably engage relations with those influencers and move their “talk” to social network. In other words, companies should become more social to become more trusted by consumers.

Sources:  The complete Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report

One of the sectors where Social Media has become a key factor for businesses to engage and build loyalty is the airline sector.  Not all the airlines agree in investing in social media and in taking care of the consumer journey*.However,  I will put the example of Vueling to explain a business that is making a big effort to implement this strategy.

*The consumer journey is a new concept that Mc Kinsey’s experts have created to describe the new way of purchasing applied for consumers. As it is described in the article “The consumer decision journey – Mc Kinsey Quarterly” ,  in the past the process that consumers used was described as a funnel where the investment of marketing was basically redirected to the first stage, AWARARNES because  consumers start with a number of potential brands in mind (the wide end of the funnel), and methodically reduce that number and move through the funnel until the end of the process where they chose one brand. The strategy used by marketers was push and one-way communication.

Due to the expansion of media and products, the customer’s possibility to be very-well informed, a two-way communication between customers and businesses and between customers within blogs, forums, facebook…  the old way of buying has become obsolete and customers have changed the way they purchase.  The “alert point” when customers are listening has been divided in different stages. Businesses need to develop a new marketing strategy and integrate social media as part of the whole business activity integrating in it employees, departments and CEOs to adapt their strategy to this new way of purchasing.

Vueling is a Spanish airline created in 2004 that operates in Europe but basically in Spain. Vueling has integrated very well the Customer Journey and has developed a strong social media strategy, taking advantage of the specific functions of social media.  Within Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Vueling tries to create a strong two-way communication with customers to develop a close relationship with them.

What has Vueling done in every platform?

Facebook

Their Facebook page is very active and well designed. They have more than 4.000 fans! Within the facebook webpage they develop the two-way communication with customers. There they can apply (1) the responding function and learn from customers suggestions and regrets; (2) the amplifying function by posting  exclusive content, offers, promotions and new products and inviting their fans to publish it in their walls ( evangelism customers) and they connect with the customer by publishing pictures, allowing users to also publish, comment the pictures..

In 2011 they duplicate the number of fans in facebook achieving a total of 95.00 fans in only 4 hours thanks to the campaign Vueling Day. They were promoting their new routes and every five hours Vueling gave a free flight to one of their new routes.

Example of promotion in the facebook page

Twitter

There they update customers with the last promotions, send information to them about their activity, apologize is there has been problems in any flight, congrats the internal team for some activity they have realized well… Concluding, they also exploit the two-way communication and invest in creating a relationship with customers

Youtube

Their activity in this channel is also very active. In the end of 2009 they realized a Lib Dup that has had more than 6.900 views

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

In 2011 they invited David Guetta, and the new single was played for first time in one of the Vueling flights. The video has more than 8.000 views!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R7GTWRO3ZU&feature=relmfu

Webpages

When they arrived to the number of 50 million passengers, Vueling created the webpage www.vuelinggallery.com where they thank passengers for travelling with them and collect the best pictures posted in Instagram to create the Vueling Air Gallery book.

Vueling Air Gallery making of: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=6tac7OUfU4Y&feature=youtu.be

In conclusion, we can say that Vueling is doing a good effort to take advantage of social media carrying out the demands of social media as creating critical brand asset, opening new channels of interaction and have a clear framework where operate. In addition to create buzz, learn from customers and target new customers with their activities in all their channels.

In the frame of e-marketing, businesses have very useful tools that can help them to promote their businesses by attracting new consumers, increasing sales, achieving more brand recognition…  To benefit from all this possibilities businesses need to well use the web search engines as Google, Altavista, or Bing.

The tool I want to highlight today is the tool offered by Google named Adwords.

The way Adwords opperate is the following: businesses buy the words for which they want to appear in the first position of the search and the price you pay for the words depend on how demanded are the words you chose.

Many small businesses manage their own account with Adwords and it results in a waste of money because they don’t plan well their campaigns. Others simply believe that is useless for them because they are too small.  In addition, it costs money and not all small businesses want to spend their resources in it

From my point of view Adwords is a great tool and all businesses should have the opportunity to use it. Luckily, Google has also realized of this necessity, in April 2012 Google launched a new program named “Google AdWords Premier Partner Program SMB”

With this program Google has gone one step further realizing of the necessities in the market and offering the small business the possibility to benefit from all the advantages that Google Adwords has for them.