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On January 4th, 2011, Augie Ray of Forrester Research had just posted an article describing how the influx of businesses jumping into social media is making it harder than ever to be effective online. That same day, I was attending my first Comm 464 lecture with Paul Cubbon and was enthralled with the idea that social media might be the holy grail of marketing.

Now, in the final weeks of Paul’s class, and not to mention the final weeks of my BCOM degree, I am beginning to realize that conversing with and creating value for customers with social media is only half the battle. Let me explain; Ray cites that almost 50% of American adults and almost 80% of American Gen Yers can be described as joiners who maintain profiles on, or visit social networking sites. In addition, we can expect to see 83% of American businesses using social media within a year, but only expect to see about 20% of American online users “friending” or “liking” those countless brands.

So, what’s the other half of the battle? Ray describes it as “getting creative” in order to differentiate yourself from the ever-increasing noise in the social media channel. Here’s a few strategies that will help you to “get creative” with social media:

1. Use POST to discover strategies that are relevant and worthy of consumer attention.

2. Create a cohesive strategy that blends owned, earned, and paid media.

3. Be as transparent as possible in order to gain the trust of users who are becoming increasingly concerned with privacy online.

Try using these strategies with your own twist on them. Also, never forget that social media users value social media because it connects them with real people. Therefore, you should think twice the next time you are setting up an automated DM response on Twitter.

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Watch out for some future posts on my blog. Although these 10 posts were my first experiences with blogging, they will most certainly not be my last!!

Yesterday, at around quarter to three (JST), Japan was hit with a devastating 8.9 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake caused severe shaking damage as well as tsunami damage resulting in widespread power outages and billions of dollars of damage to capital.

Amidst all this chaos, social media facilitated an interesting form of media coverage that saw more than 1200 tweets a minute coming from Tokyo residents less than an hour after the earthquake hit. Not only did this UGC appear faster than BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera’s content did, it was also used repeatedly by those news networks in their own coverage.

To me, the facilitation of Japan’s disaster coverage through social media has several implications. First, the fact that thousands or even millions of people living in Japan are using social media to share their earthquake experiences has led to unprecedented transparency and real-time coverage. It is impossible to match the richness of media coverage generated by millions of real people in real-time as a disaster unfolds.

Second, social media has allowed for unprecedented organization online as the majority of phone lines are down. For example, many are turning to ‘Facebook chat’ and Google’s ‘Person Finder: 2011 Japan Earthquake‘ in order to get in contact with their loved ones.

I think the lightning-fast social media response to this terrible disaster in Japan reinforces the idea that the internet has changed our world into a “global village” where people across the globe can communicate and work together in a matter of seconds.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all affected by this horrible tragedy.

It’s no secret that marketers are focusing on social media more than ever before. Powerful sites like Facebook, Twitter, flickr, Linkedin, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Tumblr are known to have the potential to catapult brands to great success, and in some cases destruction, as their messages go viral. In particular, customer communication, brand exposure, website traffic, and SEO seem to be the hottest topics related to these sites and luckily CMO.com has made things a little easier by providing a free Guide To The Social Landscape.

Here’s an example of how these sites can help:

Customer communication: Facebook (create a page to get your message out and receive feedback); Twitter (use as a forum for your outbound messages and use to monitor your customers’ tweets); YouTube (post interesting videos and respond to customer complaints); Tumblr (ask and answer questions – conversations!).

Brand exposure: Facebook (use your page to craft your perfect persona); Twitter (give customers a reason to tweet about you); Linkedin (create your professional persona and empower your employees); YouTube (maintain regular posts to keep your image up to date); Digg (create interesting content); Tumblr (set your scope on this site to GenY).

Website Traffic: Digg+ StumbleUpon (one great post can send tens of thousands of people to your site).

SEO: Flickr (post great photos and link them); YouTube (videos rank well in search engines); Digg (even the less popular posts get indexed); StumbleUpon (large user base who can link your posts); Tumblr (blogging nature of site allows for good link-building).

Take a look at CMO.com’s guide and see what it can do for you!

A great framework that I’ve been studying in my E-Marketing course this semester is called the POST framework. In essence, POST (People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology) is a four-step process that enables users to systematically break into the social media universe. It is a great starting point for any business, and I think it will be very instrumental in the optimization of social media in my group’s online marketing plan report for Plenty Clothing in Vancouver.

In particular, Augie Ray’s short article, Engage Conversationalists Using The POST Framework, provides a simple and informative breakdown of some great steps to take when applying the stages of the POST framework to any business. To illustrate this, I’ve done a quick exercise applying her ideas to my report for Plenty:

People – Conversationalists are hot right now! Plenty needs to start listening to what they are saying, get them talking about Plenty, and energize their advocates.

Objectives – Plenty needs to support customers by answering questions and providing educated tips. They also need to think innovatively and create a novel way to engage their customers (revamped blog?).

Strategies – Plenty has a limited budget so any applications that are free are the best strategy to start. A simple timeline will be helpful too.

Technology – Try hootsuite, google searches, and consider Facebook Share/ Tweet This. Also empower well-informed employees to make valuable posts on the company blog.

My E-marketing (Comm 464) course has proven to be an extremely informative and face-paced course so far this semester. I’ve learned all about social media, funnels, talking, listening, and the power of blending offline and online marketing – to name a few. Once these fundamentals are well understood, a bigger picture starts to appear. For example, Paul Adam’s excellent slide show, The Real Life Social Network, looks ahead to the future of e-marketing, providing a few simple concepts that will change the way you look at social on the web.

My favourite concept from the slide show is a simple picture of how we form social relationships online versus offline.

The picture on the left depicts the typical offline, real life relationships that the average person has. There could  be a bucket of friends from college,  a bucket of friends from your hometown, and a bucket of family members; most of whom would typically not interact between your buckets. In online social relationships, on the other hand, all of your friends are thrown into the same bucket on sites like Facebook. This means that content posted by you that may have been intended for your college party friends only is seen by everyone (including your family, eek!).

It’s hard to say exactly what social media 2.0 will look like, but Paul Adam’s slideshow has me imagining the future social media experience more closely mirroring our much more complicated, real life social experience.

The clever thinkers at Google have decided to use their street view technology to photograph 350 different gallery rooms containing the work of over 450 artists. Like street view, you will be able to go on a virtual tour by controlling where the camera is facing. These ‘gallery tours‘ will allow anyone from the art enthusiast who wants to build a virtual private collection from the best galleries out there to a curious traveler who wants to narrow down a few museums to visit on their European Vacation.

I logged on at www.googleartproject.com and saw a super high-resolution photo of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. As I continued to zoom in further and further and the moon in the top right corner of the painting filled my entire screen in perfect clarity, I felt like I was looking at The Starry Night with better-than-20/20 vision — it was awesome!

Speculation that the virtual tours will decrease museum attendance as consumers get to view the paintings for free seems silly as a major benefit of paying to go into a museum is being in close physical proximity to the original painting. If anything, consumers will get inspired to go to a museum after looking at the 7 billion-pixel high-resolution photo of the Starry Night!

This is a great example of how Google continues to strive to provide searchers with “the world at their fingertips”.

Everyday more and more businesses are going digital. Digital can come in many forms such as mobile apps, websites, and online sales/customer service. The problem is, as Mary Beth Kemp explains in her article “CMOs Must Connect the Dots of the Online Brand“, that simply creating a mobile app or a website is not enough. In fact, if a business does not employ an effective strategy for going digital, they might actually do more harm than good for the company and the brand.

One of the best concepts in the article is Kemp’s description of how to align your digital initiatives with your digital ambitions. Kemp describes a step-by step process whereby a CMO first uses digital content to complement a brand, then enrich it, and finally to extend it. These three steps can be applied to any of the four stages of consumer involvement, which are: discover, explore, buy, and engage.

Kemp also provides a ‘connect the dots’ framework that allows CMOs to visualize how they will connect all of their digital ambitions as the four stages of consumer involvement unfold. To me this seems like an essential tool for any CMO who hopes to add value to their brand through the addition of digital content rather than tarnish their image with a poorly designed website, for instance.

In contrast to my Jan 17th post about social media, David Pogue’s, “Don’t Worry About Who’s Watching“, explains that although the majority of the websites we use gather some form of information about us, “the chances of of someone actually looking up the boring details of [our lives] are reassuringly small” (Pogue).

Websites such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google all record our information whether it be what we say, what we buy, or what we search for. As a result, online privacy concerns have become a hot topic and consumers are being more careful about what they say and do on the web.

On the other hand, in the wake of all this online privacy buzz it seems that most people have forgotten that “convenience-for-privacy” (Pogue) deals such as credit cards, phone bills, and mortages have been tracking us since long before the internet even existed.

Today, Google is collecting more information about us than ever before, whether it be “what we watch (Google TV), where we go (Google Maps), whom we call (Android phones), what we say (Google Buzz), and what we do online (Google Chrome browser)” (Pogue). To me, Google’s quest to know everything about their users seems far more harmless than the sensitive information those same users post on their social media pages everyday.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are all the rage today, but like all great things they too have some caveats. In her article, “Social Media Attract Online Scammers“, Jenny Lee of the Vancouver Sun delves into the darker side of social media with a description of the most popular ways that scammers are taking advantage of social media users today. Lee explains that social media users should be aware of free trial offers that have hidden conditions and loans that ask for a fee in advance before the loan can be obtained. Furthermore, social media users need to be more aware of the fact that any personal information they put on these sites can be accessed by almost anyone. For example, a scam that has been popular in the past few months involves the scammer using social media websites to discover that a person is on vacation. Then, the scammer calls that person’s grandparents and pretends to be a grandchild in financial distress. Since the parents are on vacation it is less likely that the grandparents will be able to phone them to confirm this, and the scammer succeeds in ripping the grandparents off. The moral of this story seems to be that social media users should all take a look at their privacy settings and make sure not to post any information that they wouldn’t tell a stranger.

The concept of the marketing mix has been a mainstay in the past marketing courses that I’ve taken at UBC. The mix typically includes: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (or distribution) decision variables. As Brad Geddes explains in, “Putting Search into the Marketing Mix” the proliferation of the internet has created the need for an additional variable to be added to the marketing mix, online search. With about 10 billion dollars spent per year, online search is a small mix variable in comparison to the 150 billion dollars spent per year on the four traditional offline mix variables, but it will only continue to grow. In his article, Geddes goes on to explain that in comparison to the traditional advertising channels which push themselves into the consumers consciousness, online search advertising actually pulls the consumer to the product or brand.

With more users logged onto the internet than ever before and more of those users taking advantage of online search than ever before, it seems that more attention should be paid to this relatively young and untapped mix variable. It seems that the technique of pulling customers to a business through their own interest will be much more effective than pushing it upon them.