Recently I am crazy about searching good deals from websites such as Groupon, SocialShoppers and Dealfind. You can always be surprised about those super good deals which make you think ‘’I can’t miss that!’’ I am an example of this! HAHA

You may ask, companies are offering all these good deals and discounts, how do they make money? That curious me too. But I know the answer after I redeemed my very first coupon purchased from one of these websites. It is a $19 for one-month unlimited times for 1.5 hours yoga lesson. Good deal right? When I got to the yoga place, I realized people who brought that same coupon were all in different age group. There were a lot of males (this really surprised me) and even old people!

Then, I know companies that offering these discounts are not really aim to increase the sales but the brand awareness! By attracting new members to the yoga club using discounts as promotion tactic, customer base is expected to increase even the deals are over!

I am planning to go on a vacation with my friends after the final exams. To search for the lowest price for the travel package, I visited this website – TripAdvisor. It seems to be the largest travel site(at least they claim they are the largest).

For companies that related to travel industry, maybe it is one of the best ways to promote and build brand recognition through TripAdvisor. People can simply click on the photos and website link to check out if they are interested in it. It sounds awesome, doesn’t it? But, be aware of the risk! If you are confident enough or even proud of your company products or services that offer to your customers, of course TripAdvisor is like a bonus for you. What if you are not very qualified company? You probably want to keep an eye on the reviews and try to improve your products and services that meet the expectation of your customers. Never look down the power of reviews. Too many negative reviews will definitely harm your business. Just like me, I would never pick a hotel that has many negative reviews from past users.

Sometimes, social media helps to boost sales. Sometimes, it can be toxic. To enjoy the benefits of online marketing, keep up the products and services with the expectations of your customers first!

When you are asked to name some businesses which have great success in social media marketing, what company first comes up in your mind? To me, the first business that I can think of is Starbucks. Starbucks has over 2,200,000 followers on twitter and over 29,400,000 fans on Facebook up to date. You could say that they’re doing something right on the Web. What is it about Starbucks’s social media strategy that makes it so successful?

Here are some of my analyses of Starbucks’s social media success:

1) Starbucks on Facebook & Twitter

Starbucks updates their Facebook page very often. From their page, you can easily see a lot of videos, blog posts, photos. The company also invites people to events and contests. Fans are welcomed to have open discussions and commends posted on the Wall.

Starbucks engages with customers on Twitter by answering questions and retweets their followers. People can follow Starbucks’ latest products or promotion on twitter without spending time to search from the search engineers such as Google or Yahoo. It creates a perfect open communication channel to speak with the public.

2) Starbucks on YouTube 

Over 13,000 people have subscribed to Starbucks YouTube Channel. They regularly upload videos of commercials as well as informational videos explaning the origins of the different coffee blends and some of their charity work videos. They also upload videos showing their history thus enabling people to relate more to the brand. This strategy has proven to increase the positive exposure for the brand.

3) My Starbucks Idea

On the Starbucks website, you can see that the company connected with its customers by asking them to share their ideas on anything related to Starbucks. The site gives users the ability to see what others are suggesting, vote on ideas and check out the results. Users who are part of this network feel that they have some role in the decision making process of the company and it makes them feel a part of it. This is a brilliant social media strategy to interact with customers.

To prepare for my job interview, I did some research for the company Target. One of the interesting things that I read about this company is the excellent social media presence among retailer in U.S. According to the study by L.E.K. Consulting, 8.5% of the 2,000 U.S. consumers surveyed said Target has the best social media presence, followed by Amazon.com Inc. (8.0%), Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (5.4%), Best Buy Co. (4.0%) and Macy’s Inc. (4.0%).

Social media just like an ecosystem with a variety of users who have different motivations. Understanding what customers want is not easy. The biggest challenge for these retailers to succeed is how to align its social media offerings with its customers’ interests. Consumers like to be engaged whether on a social network like Facebook or Twitter or on the more social aspects such as the customer review pages on a retailer’s website. 51% of respondents said that they appreciated Target, which asks shoppers to Like its posts and post their own personal photos and stories.

The most socially adept retailers do share a few basic ideas about how their social media operations Feature of large amounts of user content, such as reviews and product images; offer exclusive deals; and quickly respond to users’ comments and needs seem to be some of the things that ensure what a retailer is doing is interesting to users.

What interested me the most is the different approach on Facebook page for Target and Wal-Mart. While Target set up a discussion board on its Facebook page, Wal-Mart, instead, restrict comments and feedback on its Facebook page to “Wall Posts”. This limits the interaction between users. Furthermore, the target market for Wal-Mart is mainly the older people. I am curious if the approach of publishing content in such a media that the users are younger would help attracting their general target audience.

I think…not every social marketing strategy is successful to every nature of the business, just like the example of Wal-Mart.

Recently, my email inbox is flooded with invitations from my friends, asking me to join Pinterest. I know about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…But what is Pinterest? Pinterest is like a blog, but mainly for sharing photos and images. You can “pin” an image for your followers to view. They can like it, comment on it, and re-pin it on their own boards. An image or photo can then be circulated between people, between networks, or even between countries very easily without spending any money. How genius is this online bulletin board thing!

That gives me an idea of how do companies utilize Pinterest to help with their online marketing strategies. Visual images is always more powerful than words! Businesses can simply use Pinterest to post their product images and share them with their users. Then, when people see the images and interested in the products, they will visit the company websites or blogs. This is definitely a great way to increase brand awareness. Also, Pinterest can serve as a channel for businesses to interact with their customers. Somehow, companies can categorize their customers by seeing the variety of photos and images that customers post on their own boards.

Does it sounds awesome for businesses?

Do you have any Sony product at home or at your work office? Computers? Televisions? Headphones? Or their most famous product – PlayStation??? For me, I don’t have any Sony product except my old cell phone (Sony Ericsson). That’s why I was quite upset when I heard that Sony divorced with Ericsson! I guess there will not be anymore Sony Ericsson cell phones 🙁 What makes me curious is that the company has been making decent profits over the years, why would Sony like to pay US$1.37billion to divorce?

It’s all about e-marketing!!!

Sony is famous with its technology investing into hardware developments, and they had never put a lot of focus on doing internet marketing. BUT now, they want to make some big changes! Choosing to pay US$1.37 billions to withdraw from the investment in Ericsson Company means Sony is really putting much more focus on online marketing. Its new gaming console ”PS Vista” connects to its US PlayStation Online Store. This a combination between hardware and e-marketing. However, this kind of strategy is not new. The Internet Big Five compete and benefit with each other gave the best example to Sony that e-marketing is fairly important in the marketplace.

The Internet Big Five

Google – Searching Engine

+bookstore (compete amazon)

+net working (compete Facebook)

+hardware phones

Amazon – Services

+hardware, kindle fire (compete Apple)

+server business (compete Facebook)

+online banking industry

Facebook – Networking

+online banking industry

Apple – Hard-ware

+sell phone, computers etc

Microsoft

+Business software

Any thing special happened in reading break? Hmm, though I am not a big fan of NBA, I watched FIVE basketball games in a week! If you have some interests in sports, you would have definitely heard about this name – Jeremy Lin. Over the past 2 weeks, the basketball world or I should say the whole world, has been captivated with his success. Jeremy Lin is the new point guard for the New York Knicks who has lead the team to a 7 game winning streak, set NBA records, and won NBA player of the week. He has officially taken over nearly every major media and news source at some point in the past five weeks.

Jeremy Lin’s impact is immense, with millions people glued to TVs and researching his story online everyday, even for people not even watching the game. Terms like “Linsanity,” “Linning,” “Linderella,” and “Linternational”have been flying across headlines everywhere from newspapers to SportsCenter. Everyone shares videos about him on Facebook and Twitter. And yes, that’s where I first heard of his name!! I can foresee that he will be the next hot prospect for marketers of many large businesses in the world like Nike and Sprite! Somehow, this Linsanity inspired me about the concept of social media.

1. Value your partners and customers. When Jeremy Lin was given the chance to step onto the court, he was not just looking to score points himself. Sure, He was the one making all those buckets and fancy passes, but he also understands that without teammates he’s not going to accomplish very much. Indeed, he does a fantastic job of seeing opportunities for his entire team, and distributing his resources and skills throughout the whole game. In marketplace, especially on the internet, share stories with your partners and customers will drive them pass your message along to another crowd you may not have known existed. It is always important to let others know how much they mean to you success. And this is social media marketing!!!

2. There is always opportunities to improve. Despite all of Lin’s success, he has also set the record for the most turnovers in a player’s first 7 games, including a NBA season high of 9 in his first loss. For digital marketers, no matter what marketing we are doing across any channel, there will be an opportunity to improve. Optimizing keywords, creative, or anything, there is work to be done. Don’t be too persevative. Keep optimizing, and stay agile in all your digital marketing efforts.

3. The Bounce effect. According to social media analytics too Topsy, Lin’s on court heroics spawned more than 3,000 tweets in a 12 hour period. In four days the number of people following @JLin7 surpassed 190,000 and is projected to net more than 400,000 within 15 days. Is he the only person who benfited from it? NO! In fact, not every tweet was centered around his basketball prowess. The topics varies from the Knicks toward Ivy League basketball, Harvard, the stereotypes of Asian males in American society, and even Tawianese nationalism. In other words, the subject bounced around to almost every and any topic Jeremy Lin can be identified with. Don’t you think social media has the same characteristics? People are connected, the world is connected. So as social media.

If you own a business, what kind of social media you would choose to setup you company profiles and pages on ? Do you know what channels are best used for which type of interaction? I’ve found some great insight about many popular social media platforms shared by Grovo.

• 40% of people like brands for discounts and promotions
• 51% of active Twitter users follow companies
• 8% of all Huffington Post traffic comes from Facebook

The above infographic tells us the best channels to interact with the world are probably Twitter and Facebook (well, at least it is correct at this moment..!) They serve as a platform, a communication channel between not only people but also between companies and businesses. One interesting forecasting: Facebook’s 2012 Ad Sales to Top $5B

With ad revenue expected to increase by 2 billion year over year, this social media giant Facebook is expected to reach 5.1 billion in ad sales revenue in 2012. That’s right, over $5 billion! Of that 5.1 billion, 2.6 billion is expected to come from display ad sales while Google is expected a 2.5 billion ad sales revenue in this year. With increasing users for Twitter, I think companies will invest more and more in display ad on Twitter. And it will soon become another giant in the social media marketing!

One day when I was doing some research about our client for the e-marketing project, I bumped into a COOL Youtube video! It is a marketing rap video recorded by SEO Rapper. In his 3 and a half minutes rap, he describes how web standards and proper design can affect the ranking and conversion of pages on a site. I can’t believe someone can actually combine e-marketing with Hip-Hop music together! AWESOME way to learn!!

In this video, SEO Rapper talked about the importance of have a good navigation, appealing graphics, animation etc, he also explained the reason of doing all these actions. For example, having a nice navigation is importance because people may feel frustrated when they can’t find what they are looking for. He also reminded website owner to check if the website is valid on all the browsers since people use different browsers such as Firefox, IE and AOL. It was actually really helpful to me when I realized our client’s website is in flash and couldn’t be browsed using smartphones like iPhone, Blackberry. Our initial idea of creating a mobile Google AdWords was not applicable.

Looking for more marketing rap videos? SEO Rapper has did a whole butch of marketing videos on topics like social media marketing, page rank, paid search and many more. The interesting thing is that it’s not any random video that you would forget the details easily, in fact, you really learnt something when you watch these catchy videos! Try it out and ENJOY!

Lyrics:

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration
a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information
display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation
every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination
but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat,
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css

now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox
title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
design and code right man I hope you get the picture

what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter
if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

I am not a person who are very good with computer or have many online personal blogs or website. I just use Facebook and e-mails to communicate! So when this Google+ pop up in my life, I have no idea what it is about. Hopefully I am not the only one who just heard about this new Google feature (but seems everyone knows about it, or at least heard the name before…) What drives my attention is: David Beckham’s doing it. The Muppets are doing it. Even Barack Obama’sdoing it. 

It seems to me that many of the politicians, famous stars, even cartoons are using Google+ to talk to their followers. If so many celebrities are using this feature, there is no surprise that companies do the same! But what are the opportunities for brands to use Google+ hangouts? 

Customer service. It is the most talked about application for Google+ hangouts. Many companies like Dell have used the Google+ hangouts to see how the ability to switch from broadcast to face-to-face conversation with a customer who needs specific help with an issue will be useful for customer support services. LOYALTY to the company may increase when customers think the companies are not just selling products and services to them, but actually care about them.

Market research. Google+ integration with YouTube lets G+ users watch YouTube videos together. Sports fans can now watch the Super Bowl ads together and then ‘dissect’ them through Google+. This could also be a great way for qualitative research to be conducted, letting customers discuss and choose new product lines, logos, or marketing campaigns. *Seems this may be useful for our AdWords Campaign group project or my project in marketing research class 🙂

Broadcast: this is a great way to interact! ESPNused a combination of Google+ hangout, Facebook and Twitter to host a live webcast of the Winter X Games Selection Show, fans were welcomed to send questions that they would like to know about the host Brandon Graham. And Brandom Graham would answer the questions!! The conversation and chatting design create more interactions between companies and their customers, or companies to companies

There are many more COOL features about Google+. I think I should explore it a little bit more so that I can create my own Google+ !!!!