Tag Archives: marketing

Get social, make profit.

Econsultancy recently covered an announcement by Dutch airline KLM that they generate 25 million euros per year off of their social media activity. This is a very significant amount of money to be made off of social media efforts. Although social media is very clearly an extraordinarily popular means of communicating with clients and potential customers, experts and the like are still measuring how exactly to determine ROI off of social media and social media marketing companies are still struggling to actually make money.

Still, a quick perusal of KLM’s social media and it’s not overly surprising that they’re finding ways to make money off of it. Take Twitter for example: browse their tweets and you’ll see numerous promotions, videos, and photos for people to interact with. Browse through their tweets and replies and you’ll see a plethora of responses. The company is consistently responding to people who inquire, even negatively, and in 11 languages.

Even more impressive, their Twitter profile cover photo is updated every 5 minutes and features the estimated response time. It’s like being at the DMV, except it doesn’t suck and they can only respond in 140 character or less.

KLM updates their Twitter photo every 5 minutes to update followers. Source: Econsultancy.

The company states that it learned how to effectively use its social media during times of trouble:

“Recounting the story of KLM’s social origins, Vogel-Meijer said that in 2010 the company learned a lesson by responding quickly when flights over Europe were banned due to the Icelandic ash cloud.

Previously the company had only been using social to push out standard marketing messages, however thousands of questions began pouring in on Facebook and Twitter as all other service channels were busy.

Faced with the dilemma of either responding to the queries or ignoring them all, KLM opted for the former.

It did so without waiting to form a proper strategy, but responded to the situation as it developed.

That was the start KLM’s social strategy and remains the basis of its success.”

Put simply, KLM sees success in its social media because it follows some of the most basic principles of social media that many companies consistently fail to follow:

It doesn’t just advertise. Amongst advertisements are valuable promotions and cool content previously curated.
They respond and engage. If you tweet KLM, they will tweet you back. Plus, they adapt to the person speaking to them and they sound human.
They monitor their social channels. They soon began to find that many of their customers and social followers wanted forms of “social payments.” Now, you can pay online over Facebook and Twitter. And they claim to be making 80,000 euros a week doing it.

I guess it goes to show that if you properly engage your audience and make your company accessible and human online, profits can follow – especially if customers specifically ask to be able to pay over your social media channels, like KLM customers did.

Could the Apple Watch change social media (and our lives)?

The Apple Watch was announced recently. This is no news to you. You’d have to completely shut yourself off from the outside world in order to have missed that announcement. What has resulted is a flurry of critiques of the product, as well as speculation on sales. On this, it seems people are pretty split: “among the finance set, estimates range from a few million to almost 40 million in the first year of sales.”

Interestingly enough, CNBC recently featured a number of business professionals, marketers, writers, bloggers, etc. to speculate on what the future of social media will look like. A number of these predictions focused on the integration of wearables into our daily lives and our social media.

Melody Kramer of NPR predicted the following: social media “will become part of the fabric of our clothes, part of the glasses we wear and the shoes we put on, and the gadgets we no longer see as gadgets but as part of our very selves. Social will measure, but sharing will become more passive in the process; it won’t require any effort on our part to share any part of our lives.”
Piera Gelardi, a creative director of Refinery 29 predicted: “I think that anything we talk about in 25 years is going to sound like science fiction. Mobile is the first step toward the portable future of social media and how we consume it, and I think wearables will be a big part of that. I can see it evolving into an implanted device in our bodies that will connect to everything around us.”

That might seem a little far-fetched right now, but the common trend is that wearables could be a large part of our daily lives within a short period of time. The information that we process and share could be shared even more instantaneously while we’re on the go. We could be constantly collecting data as we walk, talk, jog, or mountain climb. Our weekend getaway could be supplied by a virtual reality machine (see: Oculus).

The predictions are an interesting read and they do raise many important questions:

As social media becomes more and more engrained in our lives, will we even view social media as a separate entity or will it simply be commonplace in our share of ideas, commerce, etc.?
How quickly will the shift from online/mobile platforms change to wearable platforms? When will this be adopted by the majority of consumers? How will this impact our lives and the industry?
Is the Apple Watch the first step — or is it just a gimmick?

If you’ve got an opinion on this, sound off by commenting below or tweeting me @aclavers.

Ello and (probably) goodbye.

If you follow the internet, which you probably do, you’ve now heard of Ello.

Ello is all the rage, especially amongst the defenders of the free, advertising-liberated internet. Even Tom from MySpace is kickin’ around, repeatedly poking fun at his former default popularity on MySpace. (And the fact that MySpace is now, essentially, irrelevant).

Even Tom from MySpace is on Ello.
Screenshot from https://ello.co/myspacetom.

So what’s the scoop with this bare-bones social media network? Deemed by some as the “hipster” social network, Ello has branded itself as the antithesis to Facebook. According to its manifesto, Ello will have be completely ad-free, will never charge a dime for access (but will be “freemium” by charging for additional services), and will never sell user information to third parties.

Recently, Ello has exploded. There have been reports that the site is getting between 4,000 and 30,000 account requests per day. A staggering number for a social media site essentially in Beta. If reviews are positive from initial users, Ello could be on the cusp of becoming the next big thing.

But will it be?

As Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols noted on ZDNet, there’s a lot of people who have been quite unhappy with Facebook. Some of it has to do with the mood-experimentation that it completed on users without permission. Some of it has to do with their “real name” rule that has affected numerous members of the LGBT community. But is this really enough to convince 1 billion users of Facebook (or even a sizeable fraction) to leave for something new?

Admittedly, I have not yet received my invitation to Ello, although I requested it multiple days ago. I was initially quite intrigued but have now lost a lot of my interest. The whole idea of a completely ad-free social media platform is definitely attractive. But Ello really offers nothing new. It’s been online since March and it still has a number of basic features which are listed only as “coming soon,” including: user blocking and a notification centre. These two features have become almost integral on social platforms. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see much of a point in developing or sharing any content if I’m not even going to be notified when someone interacts with it. What motivation do I have to actually make my profile interesting?

I feel like the strongest argument on generating content on Ello is to be individualistic. To have an online profile that defines “me.” A utopian profile free of advertising and without Big Brother tracking my keywords. But with such a minimalistic theme and a platform driven by, seemingly, visual content – what’s the difference between Ello and Tumblr besides a few visual tweaks? What feature would cause me to actually interrupt my natural time spent on Facebook (where thousands of people in my network are) for a brand new site. I don’t think Ello is there yet – but with the added attention it’s been getting, they better start figuring it out or people will say goodbye as quickly as they’ve said Ello.

Ello logo from ello.co

Sound Off: What are your thoughts on Ello? Are you a fan? Do you think it will survive? Comment below, or tweet me @aclavers.

Is there a backlash against social media?

A recent article published on Forbes asked a couple of key questions regarding social media and digital marketing efforts within corporations:

Are companies bored with social media?
Is there a backlash against social media within many companies?

Photo from http://terezalitsa.blogspot.ca/2013/09/is-it-time-to-unplug-from-social-media.html. Original artwork credit unknown.

Depending on how you look at things, author David Amerland says that it could be true. There is some evidence that many companies across America are laying off some social media employees. A key motivator behind skepticism of social media marketing, citing a McKinsey study in the article, is the difficulty in which the ROI of digital efforts can be measured. Simply put, the effectiveness of a Tweet cannot be translated as easily into dollars and cents as a traditional advertising campaign or a traditional direct sales push.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people in sales roles in 2012 was virtually unchanged with that compared to a pre-Web 1992. And that’s without even taking into account the trend for changing traditional titles into “Associates” or “Service Directors.” -Forbes, Amerland

Personally, I have to admit my skepticism of social media as a career. Without a doubt, I think social media is a very important aspect of marketing and customer service these days. However, year after year, more and more young people are entering into the workforce with an almost natural ability to understand social media trends and learn social media marketing at a fast rate. I think this raises the question of whether or not we’re going to need specific people within our marketing departments to handle the execution of our social media, or if any marketing/communications generalist will be able to handle social media within a few years time? Why would companies continue to create more salaried positions if the duties could be merged with the work of another new hire? Combined with this, the difficulty of measuring ROI is a very important pitfall of social media marketing endeavours. Without a doubt, many individuals in corporate executive roles are still of the older generation. This is a generation that learned to measure much of business success on dollar figures. More efforts will likely need to be made in order to make social media an obviously profitable marketing stream. The link to ROI is not as clear with social media as it is with direct sales. In order to measure this, much attention will need to be paid to tying in business goals with social media efforts, as well as assigning proper analytics in order to track the progress. HootSuite (an obvious advocate of social media) presented a short blog post on a handful of ways businesses can measure the ROI of social media.

Sound Off: Do you think social media jobs will continue to remain prevalent in the coming years? How should firms measure the ROI of social media? Tweet me at @aclavers.

Lady Gaga vs. Target

I never planned for my first blog post to reference Lady Gaga. However, with the recent focus on Target’s various ad campaigns in lecture, I recalled the tension between the large retailer and the ultra-famous pop star. A deal had been inked between Lady Gaga and Target to release an “exclusive to Target” deluxe edition of her Born This Way album. However, Lady Gaga and her representatives moved quickly to dissolve the deal when it was discovered that the company’s political action committee (PAC) had made donations to Minnesota State Representative Tom Emmer’s campaign for governor, who is a staunch anti-LGBT activist and, according to some sources, has been associated with a ministry that advocates the killing of gay people.

Even further, Target’s PAC has reportedly donated over $30,000 to politicians who are openly and vehemently anti-gay rights activists — a message that runs directly against Lady Gaga’s overarching philosophies and even the direct motto in the title track “Born This Way.”

Besides simply a bout of bad press, it is important to question how this failed exclusivity deal between the retailer and the pop star links to marketing. I don’t think it is much of a stretch to say that much of the internal workings of a corporation as large as Target goes unnoticed, except to highly attentive shareholders. But the micro (internal) environment of a corporation can have a large effect on its marketing abilities in an instance such as this — although there may be a significant portion of Target’s clientele that agrees with their political donations, there is also a significant portion that doesn’t. This internal action by Target’s PAC lost them an exclusivity deal with one of the biggest pop star’s in the world (an individual who boasts an alarmingly loyal fanbase of “Little Monsters” and has over 33 million followers on Twitter). Arguably, these political donations created an external threat to its marketing: an extremely influential pop star has publicly denounced their brand name and refused to sell her products in their store, directly affecting which consumers can buy certain products.

This brings about a few questions: is it worth it for large corporations to run political PAC’s if they have the potential to be controversial? Is it acceptable for a company like Target to openly support political candidates who openly oppose the equality of individuals?