Firstly, I decided to take this course is because that I realized e-Marketing is a huge trend in marketing industry. And what I knew about e-Marketing before learning this course is just check Facebook or Twitter and mobile app. During the process of learning, I started to realize that social media is so important for marketers to doing their business nowadays. In terms of Google Analytics, Adwords, and Wisdom, I am really impressed that how powerful social media tools can be to analyze and understand their customers’ profile in an easy and comprehensive way by using these tools.

Next, is how important to discover what is UNDER the iceberg. Monitoring online conversation as much as possible to have better understanding what customers are talking about is crucial to marketers to think really seriously before they start any marketing campaign or advertisements. How to listen to customers, and what tone should marketers chose to talk to them is also significant in marketing world.

In terms of social media, nowadays our daily life is based on those social media tools. We chat, watch videos, share posts, comment on post, blog, take pictures, like, dislike, etc… you name it. It is all about social media. So if marketers could use these tools in a very efficient way, you basically could know everything about your customers. They sometimes could know yourself better than you did. It is amazing and creepy at same time. WOW. Use it wisely, and you will know how powerful it is. J Great class! Now I like marketing more.

 

The future payment had arrived— Square Wallet has launched its mobile payments app at Starbucks in the U.S. two weeks ago. It seems like that Starbucks will start a new adventure on breaking the mobile payments barrier all around the world. Since one of the world biggest companies showed its courage, it is a clear sign for others that they should seize this opportunity ASAP too.

Last year, Starbucks had launched its mobile payment App on Smartphones and achieve more than a million mobile payments a week. A bar code on customer’s smartphone is needed for that App. But now, they even simplified customers’ payments by just giving their names to the merchant. How? Here is a video for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtwyHyIjRAk

Since Starbucks use Square’s GPS technology, the customer’s phone will notify the store automatically and showed the customer’s name and photo on cashier’s screen when they has entered, and then after match their photo and name, the payment will be completed.

Mobile marketing trend is one of the mainstream e-Marketing tools for marketers and valued by customers in these days. However, mobile payment is still on their early stage in markets, what should marketers do is probably to go online and monitor customers’ conversation on social media tools and see how they react to this new payment system and make it widely spread to attract more customers to experience it for their very first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWljqAQZR-I

McDonald’s CMO, Joel Yashinsky, came to our 464 class for a special lecture for their new campaign across Canada— Our Food Your Questions. After listening to his speech, I was very impressed and inspirited by him. Not only because their eye-catching campaign make me feel like that I like more about McDonald’s than ever, but also make me start to think more about the huge benefits e-Marketing and social media could bring in the near future.

My takeaway from our special speaker is below:

–       the importance to be BOLD!

–       Undertake brand action first, and then do brand advertising.

–       E-Marketing can really make things happened.

–       Make sure to bring customers’ initial interest

–       Mobile marketing is a huge trend

–       Always make sure to find right tone for online conversation and stay in part of customer conversation.

–       Make customers think that they are important!

As one of their loyal customer in the past, I remembered how much I loveMcDonald’s when I was a child back in China. But after all these years’ scandals about their food and stuff I lost my passion about McDonald’s. After learning about their whole campaign and listening to Joel’s in-depth explanations of their campaign, I really think “Hey, look, McDonald’s does care about us after all”! And I really like the way they face their rumors and questions for their food quality and they push themselves in front of their customers to accept any challenges. How brave are they! Now I trust more about their food than before and be willing to eat some BigMac sometimes~ Thanks COMM 464 , McDonald’s and Joel for this amazing experience. 🙂

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_DLJK4o2YM

On November 8, there is a video from Youtube caught people’s attentions and shared by the popular social sharing site which showed that four guys in their 20s in the back of Pikeville’s Wal-Mart in the U.S. throwing iPad around and taped this video. And you can clearly tell that they were destroying those products purposely. After monitoring lots of comments for this video from different forums and Facebook and basically the main concerns from people are wondering whether they got fired, what action will Wal-Mart managers will respond and they declared that they do not want to shop at Wal-Mart anymore.

So what did Wal-Mart do and how long it took for them to respond to this online “crisis”?  A spokesperson told NBC News in response to this, said “It made us wince” and “we are also embarrassed”, she also added that the “associates involved no longer work for Wal-Mart”. Other than these, I checked there is nothing officially speaking or news press or online video response for that. However, from the online conversation about this video, Wal-Mart’s customers should be very careful and think twice when they buy any merchandise from Wal-Mart. From a marketer point of view, I think that preparing a very comprehensive plan using social media “triage” framework for better monitoring online conversation and faster responses for future crisis solution.

New York City Marathon is an annual popular event for runners globally which attracted tons of participants every year. However, this year because of Superstorm Sandy in the U.S., NYC Marathon got officially cancelled. Suddenly, fans that are flying in from all over the world became so upset about it and still want to find a way to run marathon for this year anyway. Therefore, a new race organizer took over the event — social media!

A Facebook page promoting a DIY RunAnyway event sprang up, as well as #RunAnyway hashtag on Twitter. Then, the race was on again! Steve Mattina, who is a Running Room manager and came a long way from Vancouver for his forth NYC Marathon, organized this social-media sponsored marathon for the every first time.

“Runners followed the original route of the first NYC marathon, run in 1970: four loops around Central Park, with a little added on at the end.” [Vancouver Sun]

The important take-away for this is that social media is now truly becoming everything in our daily lives. We do anything with social media. And it is a magic to get impossible things done in a easy way. The success of this event is because FB and Twitter spread the words so fast that attracting participants who had became one of the spontaneous volunteer or organizer for the event.

Well, in the near future, we might not be able to live without social media. And as a marketer, I think we need to work harder to figure out a way that promoting everything through social media and this way will bring the most benefits to us for sure.