Throughout the semester, my team has been working closely with Peqish to develop their digital marketing strategy. After our initial meeting with the co-founder and operations manager, it was evident that their biggest issue is being able to generate content for their online pages on a regular basis. This led me to wonder if the problem is one that applies to all small businesses or if this is a unique obstacle for Peqish.

From what we have observed, it seems that insufficient resources such as being able to hire marketing staff is one of the main contributors to the difficulty of content generation for smaller businesses. Producing quality content consistently is more difficult than it seems and if a business doesn’t have the sufficient budget to allocate manpower dedicated to growing their online presence, this can take a backseat in the priority of operations.

Another issue that often arises is the difficulty in measuring ROI for content marketing. It can be hard to directly link a growth in a business’ social media pages to an increase in traffic within their brick-and-mortar store. This is something that Peqish asked our team to work on and is definitely something we have struggled with as quantifying a digital marketing strategy can be tricky if there are no clear content goals.

The diagram above is known as the ‘project management triangle’ where you will have to choose between two of the three factors when it comes to producing content – efficiency, price and quality. Many times small businesses may have to sacrifice quality for consistency especially because they will have to either choose between a heavy time investment required to produce consistently quality content or invest in hiring an in-house content marketer. Therefore, it seems the Peqish’s issues with content generation is definitely something that many smaller businesses struggle with and is actually a common obstacle for many.

In light of the recent ISIS attacks in Paris, the world has been on guard with many cities being placed on the highest level of terror alert. Recently, Brussels was placed under this category due to ‘serious threats’ made upon the city, causing the entire city to come under lockdown as schools, universities and public transport systems in the city closed down to protect citizens. In a more humorous turn of events, the Brussel federal police force sent out a Tweet requesting that the public remain silent on any counter-terrorism operations on social media to help prevent terrorists from gaining access to this crucial information.

The people of Brussels and around the world banded together to not only fulfill this request, but also took it a step further and showed their sense of unity in the face of fear and terror. Users on twitter flooded the site with the hashtag #BrusselsLockdown with funny cat memes, effectively burying any intelligence on police movements that may have been shared. Examples of the memes that users were posting included:

It is well-known that ISIS is notorious for exploiting social media (in particular Twitter) to recruit new members and spread their propaganda. This is why the #BrusselsLockdown movement has been so refreshing to see as it is far rarer for us to witness social media being used for good in the war on terror. Through this example set by the people of Belgium, hopefully the rest of the world can follow suit in the face of adversity and use social media to spread positivity when needed.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/23/europe/paris-attacks-brussels-lockdown-cats/

I was immediately intrigued by my fellow classmate Jessica Pan’s blog post on “Phones Before Wallets” because smart phones nowadays play such an enormous role in our everyday lives. We use our phones as a map, camera, music player and even as a flashlight!

Apart from all these uses, mobile phones do indeed have a significant impact on how consumers make their decisions because of their ability to connect people globally through online forums or review sites which consumers can access in order to help them make their decision. People can share their experiences with others whether it regards a hotel stay, the pros and cons of a new speaker or the latest lipstick from Revlon. These online discussion platforms give consumers an additional source to find more information on what they are buying from objective viewpoints rather than information from the company itself.

Jessica mentions that “a company must be prepared to spend more money and effort on making itself phone-accessible”, which I completely agree with as the statistics from MobiThinking show that 105.8% of the US population are subscribed to a mobile service. This massive percentage of mobile users highlights the extreme importance of companies focusing on interacting and accessing consumers through their phones.