To help come up with unique ways to promote a business, my COMM 464 class’ discussion has suggested to try approaching influencers to promote your business to their fans/followers. The type of influencers one can engage with is very diverse. Ranging from celebrities to local community group leaders to even the mom who is most active in engaging the neighborhood mothers. I am personally quite interested in the growing presence of some YouTube users who have successfully built a strong follower base with the YouTube channel.

Most of these YouTubers started their channel for fun and mainly posts videos discussing their perspective on areas they are passionate about. But over time, those who liked their video creation and identified with their comments’ values and perspective started to become an avid follower of these YouTube stars which gave rise to their celebrity status. The fact that most YouTubers started posting videos from when they were still ordinary people also allows fans to relate to them much easier as they feel that these ‘celebrities’ are very similar to the people who they would meet in real life.

Noticing the huge fan base that some of these YouTube celebrities are having, many brands have started to take advantage of their status and collaborated in promoting their business products. For example, TheFineBros, which posts videos on the reaction of different demographic group sample as they are exposed to a trending topic. Jumping on their strong fan base, Ford and ComedyCentral have sponsored them.

 

Aside from sponsorship, I have also seen many videos where a business sends free samples of their products or give free access to their exclusive events and asked the YouTuber to review them and post it on their YouTube channel. This tends to help give businesses better, loyal new customers as followers from these YouTube stars tend to trust their comments as they have identified with them over long period of time.

All in all, I would highly recommend businesses to start jumping on the YouTube bandwagon and collaborate with these YouTube stars to get exposure to a strong community of followers. So go ahead, get your products reviewed by YouTubers and watch your customer base grow!

 

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/top-20-most-popular-youtube-stars-2014-11?op=1

Yesterday, Julio presented to my COMM 464 class why we should invest our time to build our social media profiles professionally and taught us great tips on how to do so on LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. It made me realize that more and more employers are now not only reviewing resumes and cover letters that we send them, but they will also take a proactive approach by looking into our social media pages to complement the hiring review process.

I thought I’d try to do some research to find out more about this topic and stumbled upon surprising facts:

Apparently in 2014, 93% of recruiter now use social media review to help with recruitment process! This is because they expect increase in job competition by 2015, and to anticipate this, recruiters plan to invest 73% more time in using social profile review of job applicants to further enhance the recruitment process quality. Not surprisingly though, the Marketing field is one of the job fields that will see a rise in job competition and thus, further emphasize that job applicants in this industry need to differentiate themselves through social profiles.

Recruiters have gained success by this method as employers gained a 44% increase in candidate quality and quantity. This may have also been contributed by 55% of recruiters reconsider candidates thanks to the help of social profile review.

Although it may seem scary and overwhelming to know that recruiters are now starting to asses our social profiles to evaluate us as a job candidate, maybe we should not be too intimidated after all. As of now, only 75% of recruiters who use this method actually claim themselves as experts in assessing social profiles for job recruitment. This leaves us with plenty of space in how we can market ourselves through social profiles as there are no right or wrong answer as to how our social profile should look like. In fact, we should use this opportunity to help make our profile unique and eye-catching from other candidates by taking advantage of the individuality-oriented feature of social media profiles. Some of my favourite social profile interpretation can be seen below:

 

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/11/17/job-recruitment-social-media/

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-best-tech-resumes-2014-11?op=1

When managing social media pages for businesses, have learnt from my COMM 464 class that we have to make sure to constantly check our social media campaign’s progress by regularly evaluating key performance indicators of each social media pages. Most social media pages gives fairly accurate analysis of your social media performance based on the REA (Reach, Engagement, Amplification) model.

In Facebook, this can easily done by checking on the ‘Insights’ section of the Facebook page which gives the numbers from indicators, e.g. Facebook page likes, post likes and comments, etc. I personally believe that Facebook page likes are not a strong enough indicator of the loyalty of customers, in comparison to Facebook engagement indicators (e.g. post likes, comments, shares). This is because only ‘true’ followers are usually more inclined to respond to businesses’ posts, thus helping to provide organic engagement numbers and reduce the chances of accounting passive followers as the business’ online fan. Also, engagement from users are more likely to lead to 2-way communication between them and the business itself, if the business actually respond to comments, etc. This will not only help improve bond between the business and the user who engaged with them, but also with those who viewed the business’ responses as they would all feel the business cares about its customers and becomes a part of a community in itself. Thus, further indicating that Facebook engagement provides better feedback on your social media posts as the numbers highly correlates with the responses that your specific posts generated. Not only that, in class we have also been told that many businesses buy Facebook page likes to show that they have strong followers, on the surface level, but have low engagement rate as a result of having ‘fake’ followers. Thus, Facebook page likes can be more easily deceiving than post engagement.

In the statistics below, we can see that McDonald’s lead in the amount of Facebook page likes. However, Subway has the most Facebook engagement. If you were to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media page, which indicator would you emphasize more in evaluating their social media activity and presence? I would again, choose to put more weight on engagement as this easily tells us how active and responsive their social media platform is.

Alas, it’s important to always check up with your social media analytics to constantly improve your social media page’s effectiveness. Although the amount of data and statistics may be intimidating at first, I find them to be very useful as a tool to gain real-time customer feedback towards a business’ social media campaign. What’s even better is that most of the data are available for free either through the social media page itself or using other analytics page like HootSuite. So what are you for? Analyze your social media page now!

 

Source: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/see-how-top-fast-food-chains-are-performing-facebook-and-if-fans-are-liking-it-161236

Just like the instant rise in fame for Justin Bieber from having his video go viral on YouTube, apparently now you can also make a viral star overnight through social media.

Recently I noticed a new trending topic on the internet: #AlexFromTarget. Apparently a photo of a US Target employee named Alex was shared virally overnight from a British female teenager’s twitter and everyone else (mostly girls as well) have expressed their agreement on how handsome he appears and became a fan of him instantly. Yet, I could not help but be suspicious as to how a single photo could raise someone into online famous status right away.

Here is the photo that brought Alex into stardom:

 

The article I found explained that a marketing agency was behind this trend all along. The company called Breakr claimed that they wanted to test whether the power of fangirl demographic can be easily used to create fame on something we created that is not originally  ‘organically’ driven. They did this by not only posting Alex’s photo, but also started the conversation about him by making the first few initial posts that triggered girls globally to hail him as their new heartthrob. From here, it went into a domino effect where other girls started jumping into the conversation on twitter until the hashtag #AlexFromTarget become a new trend.

This shows that social media has the power to bring people forward towards certain topics and causes in a passionate way. So businesses could greatly benefit if they can create a viral campaign through social media if they engage with the right demographic and present themselves to these people in the right manner.

 

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-from-target-a-marketing-ploy-2014-11?utm_content=bufferd2e22&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

In my COMM 464 lecture on Search Advertisement, my professor mentioned an interesting fact: “Search Engine Optimization is 6 times more effective than banner ads”. I did some research about this to find out why this was the case and stumbled upon an article that compared the effectiveness of search advertising and banner ads.

Based on an experiment conducted by a major bank in the US which used both banner and search ads, it was concluded that search advertising is more effective in driving sales compared to banner ads. This was because search advertising could be directly measure in its contribution to user’s purchase decision. Moreover, banner ads pose the attribution problem, where it is hard to identify which ads attributed to customers’ decision to buy business’ product.

However, it is important to note that banner ads does play a role in improving the purchase funnel process. Banner ads can be seen as being on the top of the funnel which drives customers down towards the bottom of the funnel, that is the search ads. Thus is because customers who are researching about whether they should open a bank account with them tends to take more time in the research process. During this stage, they are more likely to go through several webpages over time that also serve the bank’s banner ads. The constant exposure to the bank’s ads help drive customers’ curiosity to start clicking on their search ads which then leads to customer purchase.

Thus, although banner ads may not seem to give as much ROI as search ads, I believe that there is still value in having them for certain cases. Banner ads seems more helpful in increasing brand awareness, especially for products or services that would require strong consideration by customers (e.g. luxury products, opening bank accounts). For these type of businesses, it would not hurt to try using the combination of banner ads and search ads to help further optimize the effectiveness of their online advertisements.

 

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/15/search-vs-display-advertising-which-promises-more-bang-for-the-buck/

I have recently been introduced to the world of digital advertising in my COMM 464 class. As I start to learn more about this field, I realize that the most optimum way to get the maximum benefit out of this platform is to take a Search Engine Marketing approach (SEM). SEM essentially means we should use both Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Advertising to enable our business’ website appear higher on the search engine result list and thus, more likely to be noticed by online users. Paid search advertising mainly uses the Pay per Click (PPC) or Cost per Click (CPC) model as a revenue model, which means that advertisers only need to pay when users click on their paid advertisement. However, a recent article I found suggests that we may have a new revenue model to consider, Cost per Hour.

 

This was started by the Financial Times who recently declared that they will start using this revenue model for their website’s online advertisement space. Apparently The Financial Times website visitors’ habit of reading their articles for long period of time means that they are exposed to less amount of online advertisement compared to users of other websites, which gives them a disadvantage in following the traditional CPC model as this translates to less advertisement clicks. To accommodate the unique nature of its visitors, The Financial Times proposed the CPH model so that advertisements on their website can be evaluated more fairly based on how long users are exposed to the ads on each webpage they stay on. Theoretically, I believe this would be a great fit to The Financial Times and other websites where users are less  likely to go to many webpages but more likely to stay longer on the webpages they visit, since customers are also more likely to remember ads when they are exposed to ads for long period of time. However, in practice, I think this model would not be able to replace the CPC model yet, as this model still brings a more certain measurement on ROI by having interested users take one step to confirm their interest in the ads (by clicking them). So, I would recommend news websites and other website with similar user habit to follow both CPC and CPH revenue model to maximize their advertisement space potential.

 

Source: http://adage.com/article/media/digital-advertising-ready-ditch-click/295143/

This September social media industry garnered much attention from the public by the introduction of Ello, which strongly advocates against the customer data selling model that Facebook does and promise to deliver a better alternative without having to ‘sell its users’.

I personally do not have an Ello account, so I have only been exposed to reviews from Ello users thus far. It’s important to note that Ello is still in its beta version, so there are still changes potentially to be made. So far, I am impressed by the unique way it projects an exclusivity vibe towards its user by only giving Ello accounts based on friends’ invite. However, this advantage will likely diminish once, if it does, Ello has many users. Although it is refreshing to see a social media page that’s much simpler and less cluttered than its competitors, there comes a point where users might not know how Ello is different from others (e.g. some say Ello focuses more heavily on images but it doesn’t seem to be as well managed as, Google+ per say). Also, the fact that it categorizes your news feed into ‘friends’ and ‘noise’ can be seen in two ways. It is nice to finally be able to only focus attention to updated from people who we care or interested in, but categorizing others as ‘noise’ makes it seem like Ello thinks that other types of relationships are useless.

In the end, although Ello does offer strong points that people look for from an alternative to Facebook, it still has a long way to go based on its lack in certain areas which most people can still forgive as it is still in its beta version. But if they don’t fix them soon, they hype generated in the past few weeks may soon leave them with much to be desired.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/09/29/ello-is-no-facebook-killer/

In today’s e-commerce world, customers almost can’t help but share a considerable amount of their personal data to businesses. It has come to the point where some people take this standard as a norm that we all have to submit to as we feel powerless towards it. Slowly, we start to devalue our personal data. This could become a blessing for businesses to help improve their practice. But what about the well-being of the consumers?

We often rely on third parties, most commonly the government, to protect us from possible injustice and disadvantage we could be subject to because of the misuse of our data. Thus, to some extent, I believe government policies towards customer data protection can be seen as a reflection of how much the privacy and protection of personal data is valued in that country. As I read through this article, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Indonesia have a fairly strong regulations in place for this issue and seem to follow at least the best practice in Asian countries for most of its policies. As an Indonesian myself, I have always been curious of the cyber crime policies in place as the Indonesian e-commerce industry is developing at a rapid pace. For example, we can see that from the table below, offenders can be penalized for a 6 to 10 years of imprisonment, which is much higher compared to other Asian countries listed. However, I also know that Indonesian laws will only become powerful when the regulatory body actually enforce them and continuously monitor the actions of related parties. Thus, we should not only rely on government policies, but also encourage regulatory bodies to constantly show a strong hold of the market to protect us all.

Source: http://www.techinasia.com/data-transfer-asia/

Many digital marketers still struggle to find the way to use their social media power to push its company’s brand image. Most still engage in the practice of just automating scheduled social media posts which ultimately leads to generic content and thus, less engagement with consumers. Although at times, this is necessary, it definitely is a bad idea to be used as regular practice.

However, a great way to utilizing social media power is by making real-time posts when a memorable event just took place. Many of the most well-known examples include Oreo’s “dunk-in-the-dark” tweet as a reference to the 2013 Super Bowl lights out. A more recent case is KitKat’s tweet on a reference to the emerging iPhone 6 Plus bending issue under the hashtag #bendgate. KitKat made a smart play by posting a fun take on the trend through its tweet: “We don’t break, we #break.” This instantly got the public attention of those who were following this issue and gave KitKat 28,500 retweets and 13,549 favorites at that time.

Thus, the power of capitalizing on current trends does pay off well for companies who are alert to them and can be used as a way to effectively brand yourself by showing a more ‘human’ and personal connection with its followers. It helps to show that the company was in the moment as they could not have made these smart references without being alert to ongoing trends at the time it was happening, which means that timing is key and there’s no way to automated that except by being at the right time with your followers.

Source 1: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/06/how-automating-your-social-media-content-can-hurt-your-brand/

Source 2: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/kitkat-has-best-response-so-far-apples-bendgate-scandal-160352

Social media has come a long way into become an integral part in the digital marketing industry. The fact that it has become an irreplaceable part of most people’s daily activity has served the marketing industry well by indirectly benefiting from consumers’ behavior.

Now we have entered the third generation of social media analytics, and the potential that it brings has never been more exciting! Initially, companies would only play with the surface of social media users’ data, e.g. using number of fans, followers, likes to distinguish online market share. Yet, the industry has evolved so much that we are now able to look in depth as far as the reasoning for each consumers’ reaction towards marketing promotions they are exposed to. For this, we have Social analytics to thank for. Using these tools, we can now analyze and improve social media campaigns in real-time! for example, Netbase can identify promotional campaigns that are underperforming and suggest you ways to improve your promotional content to help make it more relevant to your target market. Social media analytics also allows us to discover new ways to position your product based on understanding how and why customers buy and use them through social media post analysis. Moreover, we can also take advantage of this to increase market share by offering customers what they did not find from competitors’ offering based on social media data.

With such promise it brings to the table, I can’t wait for what social media has to offer next.

 

Source: http://www.adweek.com/brandshare/next-gen-social-analytics-are-transforming-digital-marketing-160064