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

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