In this blog post on the Harvard Business Review, it explores the pitfalls of a company using social media.

The example Qantas, the Australian Airline company, who had a twitter promotion in which people were to tweet about their dream vacation, but backfired and had people tweeting about the CEO’s huge pay raise and the lack of employee pay raise and how it was labelled as greedy.

In my opinion, this is not bad marketing as despite the situation being negative, it has caught the attention of the media and it will provide free publicity for Qantas and it allows the customer to feel more involved and in the know about what is happening with the companies they are interested in.

As in my previous blog post, I stand by my opinion that it need’s to be handled properly with a specific purpose and a narrowly specified target market or else it will reach the wrong markets, prove ineffective and waste money.

I agree with the blog to “stop treating social media as marketing” and that it should be used more for customer relations, unless the product your are promoting is ideal for marketing through social media.

In response to Connie’s blog about social media as a marketing tool, I was left with the question: is this where marketing should expand to?

Social media, a prime example being Facebook, is “about connecting people together”, is this where companies want to begin new marketing, or stick to the conventional advertising?

Source: Glee The Music.com

I believe that the success of your marketing over social media will be based on what product you are marketing and who your target market is.

For example take Glee which has a Facebook page where it premieres its new music to the fans before it is released on iTunes in hopes of creating major hype for the next episode and increasing the initial song sales. This definitively paid off with their latest hit, the Adele mash-up of “Rumour Has It/Someone Like You” which soared to the top of the iTunes charts last week.

The reason the marketing worked: it was meant for a younger audience who use social networking so much that it consumes their life. So, marketing insurance plans over Facebook won’t go well as the younger generation won’t be interested to find out more, but if its music and pop culture sensations, I think you have found the best marketing strategy for your product!

Apple, one of the most widely known technology companies in the world today, is a classic example of being  entrepreneurial.

It fits the most common defintion for being entrepreneurial: working for one’s self as it was created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a garage in the 1970s in California. At that point, they had huge risk as they were starting up a technology industry of creating computers in Silicon Valley, where the market was booming and it was uncertain if they would be successful or not.

They were also thinking about innovation, specifically as to where the industry would be going a few years down the road and what to do to keep up with the changing nature of technology.

The best fit for Apple that defines it as  entrepreneurial is the amount of wealth and the rate at which the wealth was created. It went from being a small operated company and by the 1980s one of the main computer creators, and now today is the company responsible for the most popular laptops, the MacBooks, and the hugely popular iPod and iPad, which keep on adding to their wealth which is sent right back for new innovations.

Source: CBC News

Just yesterday, Tim Hortons announced that they would be expanding their range of all ready extremely popular Canadian coffee to now include espressos, lattes, and cappuccinos. By doing this, Tim Hortons has identified that a weakness of their company and products is that they only offer basic coffees and that they are surviving on being a Canadian company while competing against other coffee companies such as Starbucks. By moving into the espresso business, Tim Hortons has taken the opportunity to expand their line of products to increase the competition between themselves and other coffee companies in hopes of getting more sales and a larger demand for Tim Hortons coffee products which have the reputation of being good quality and affordable at the same time, in comparison to one of its main competitors Starbucks which is know for high quality coffee but very expensive in comparison.  Also, their competitors in the quick service coffee industry, most notably McDonald’s, are creating new marketing campaigns in attempt to compete with Tim Hortons with their new announcement of new coffee products so they are not swept out of the market in the eye of the consumers.

Just days ago, Warner Brothers announced that they will no longer be shipping any copies of the films to stores as of December 29. This is a marketing model that is most commonly used by Disney with their animated classics which has proven to be quite profitable. By removing the films from stores, it causes customers to rush out and buy the films before they are removed so that they can enjoy them, while Warner Brothers plans re-releases of the films in the future with new editions or on a new video format for a limited time causing the rush of sales once again.

Source Amazon.ca

This causes the supply chain for Potter films to be open for limited time windows every few years in which production will be maximized, but due to the limited nature, demand is extremely high to and profits are made, and then removed once again when profits begin to decline or the inventory turn over rate increases becomes to large.

This model has been extremely successful for Disney as they re-release their “classics” every few years, but will Harry Potter be able to be as profitable as their are a limited number of films, considering they have made $5.1billion before the release of the last film on DVD/Blu-Ray?