With all the hype around social media and social media marketing, it seems that E-mail marketing isn’t really used. However, after class yesterday with our guest lecturer, Stefan Lorimer, I realised that E-mail marketing is still a crucial part of a business. The reason E-mail is still such a large part of marketing is because 91% of consumers still use E-mail. According to an article by McKinsey & Company titled “Email Marketing: Think Inside the New Inbox“, email conversion rates are estimated to be around three times higher than social media conversion rates.

This graph shows how much time consumers spend on different communication activities. It  shows that email has the highest proportion over the years.

Adding to that is the following graph, which shows that as far as e-commerce is concerned, E-mail is a far more effective customer acquisition channel.

Since E-mail marketing is such a vital component of marketing, marketers need to focus on not just the click rate. There are other aspects which they need to focus on according to the article to have this form of marketing be successful.

One way marketers can make the E-mail channel successful is through focusing on the entire journey or process, rather than just focusing on the click-through rate, as it is only the first step in the consumer decision journey according to the article. This is because E-mails are a series of interactions between the brand and the consumer. Having identified the correct landing pages for consumers based on their interests can increase the conversion rate. Having a more customised and personal email allows for consumers to relate to the brand, and form a relationship, going further in the consumer decision journey.

There are various other steps marketers can take to ensure their E-mail marketing campaign is successful. The article describes these in detail. However, this blog shows a snapshot of E-mail marketing and how it is still an important and large part of marketing activities today.

Community forums have become a great way for consumers to ask questions, voice their opinions, help other consumers, and just learn more about the brands and their products. Community forums have become an essential part of a brand’s website and provide companies with an advantage over their rivals. There are many advantages of having community forums, some of which I will discuss in this post.

Through well-developed and popular community forums, brands can significantly reduce their customer service costs. This is one of the biggest advantages of having an online discussion forum. Community forums allow for other users, whom may be more experienced, to provide help to others on the forum with questions or concerns. By helping others online and by answering their questions, the experienced consumers can get some sort of status on the forum, something similar to badges on FourSquare. This now creates this “gamification” aspect within the site. By doing so, consumers are more willing to give advice, answer questions, and help users. A great example of this is Apple’s community forum, where most questions or concerns regarding products get answered by other users on the discussion forum. It reduces customer service costs because Apple doesn’t need to have many call centres operating to answer basic questions. This is where the major costs savings take place.

The second advantage of community forums is that it helps foster and build brand loyalty. While it is true that a product plays a large role in that, the services offered by a company, whether offline or online, also play a role. A brand that has a well-developed community forum fosters brand loyalty because many customers are inclined on not leaving the brand for another, as they know they can always get help from the online forums without having to wait on the phone for hours trying to speak to a customer service representative. Thus, customers are less likely to leave the company. A great example of this is Apple.

While many more advantages exist, these two are the most important advantages as they help foster brand loyalty and assist brands increase their bottom line.

Consumers already view businesses in a negative sense. They see them as a group only focused on profits and increasing its bottom line. Trust is a very important aspect of business. Successful businesses have established a level of trust with their consumers. These businesses have created a loyal customer base and following. Factors discussed below allow for businesses to develop a trusting relationship with their consumers. These were posted Seth’s blogs.

According to Seth’s blog, word-of-mouth is a big factor in establishing trust. What we hear from our friends, peers, family members, and others really shapes how we perceive the brand. If we hear good things, we tend to search or look into the brand and its products. If we hear bad things, we immediately decide to shun the product, without doing any research for ourselves. That is how big of an influence word-of-mouth has on a brand.

Additionally, Seth mentions social metric or ranking as another way customers start to trust a brand. A person is more likely to trust a brand if it shows up within the first page of a Google search, than they are if a brand were to show up in the fourth or fifth pages.

The last thing I will discuss in this blog is the offer a brand is making. If the offer is attractive for a consumer, they are more likely to trust the brand rather than an offer that is not appealing to the customer. An attractive offer hooks them in and once this is done, a customer moves through the consumer decision journey, learning more about the brand as it moves through the consumer decision journey.

Increasing sales is directly tied to brand loyalty and the value a brand places on its customers. Both these variables can be increased using social media. An article by Lousie Julig on Social Media Examiner examines how a Winery used social media to increase sales and brand loyalty.

Whitehall Lane is a 20-year-old winery located in Napa Valley. Using social media they have increase brand loyalty and there by sales. The social media channels they have are a website, a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Wineries face challenges in promoting or using social media to advertise their products as they are regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, TTB. The regulations disallow wineries to run contests in which they will be giving away wine, as well as they limit user-generated content as it may promote irresponsible drinking. However, through the following ways, Whitehall has been able to achieve significant results, such as increasing wine club member sales by 39% in September 2012 to September 2013:

• Partnering with complementary brands, such as companies that sell wine glass and partnering with them to run contests

• Rewarding loyal fans and focusing on quality and conversation
• Use twitter to educate their fans about wine and giving tips on pairing wine and food

Throughout this term, these were all tools we learned about in order to create value for brands using social media. The Whitehall Lane winery has served as a case study to demonstrate and explain such topics.

On November 7, 2013, Twitter finally went public, with the stock closing at $44.90 on the first day.  This post discusses why Twitter has become such a valuable channel over the years.

Social Media is now playing an ever-increasing role in business. According to Alyson, a blogger on Nimble, Twitter has taken a “Center Stage as a Social Business Worktool”. For many reasons, twitter serves as a great tool for business to connect with their customers and get their brand message across. As Alyson mentions, on Twitter, companies can act quickly, naturally, and casually.  It is an informal way to talk to consumers, sending them reminders, quickly and efficiently.

Additionally, twitter allows for businesses to effectively monitor the problems or negative word-of-mouth and be able to quickly respond to them. This ensures that timely and effective measures are taken to control any issues so that they don’t further effect the brand in a negative way.

Moreover, through twitter, brands can create relationships and partner up with other businesses to grow their business or to create or change their existing brand image. For example, a brand can associate or partner itself and build a relationship with a company specialising in ethical and sustainable practices through twitter to change perceptions about its brand.

There are many more aspects to this topic, however, the major aspects have been discussed in this blog.

The following video explains Twitter’s revenue model and I have shared this because it firstly shows how important of a marketing tool Twitter has become and also because there are aspects of the video that show how businesses interact using Twitter.

The previous post focused on the advantages of User-generated content (UGC). This post focuses on the disadvantages of user-generated content and its effect on companies. These can affect the company and brand image and force other consumers to go to a competitor. I will discuss the following disadvantages in this blog post.

Companies give up control to a certain extent

• By allowing users to post content on their site, they are allowing users to have more control in the sense that they can post a variety of things, that may or may not be good for the company and brand image

Negative reviews and wrong perceptions can drive other consumers away

• Users who are disgruntled due to poor service will post on the site, causing other users and consumers to see
• Users may have a wrong perception of the company or may have had a bad experience due to some reason. They may post this on the site, which can have a negative impact on the image of the company if not addressed properly

Lack of moderation of comments, which can include offensive language, spam comments, and insults can damage the brand’s website and cause traffic to move away from the site

• Users may get annoyed by the spam comments or posts that others post if the site is not moderated correctly, therefore the site must be monitored and moderated by the company at all times

User-generated content (UGC) is content that is uploaded to a company’s site by its users and customers through the use of blogs, community forums, reviews, and comments and opinions sections. There are many advantages and disadvantages of UGC. UGC can have either a positive impact or negative impact on a company’s marketing efforts and the image of the entire brand. In this post I will discuss two of the advantages of user-generated content to companies.

Firstly, UGC enhances the user’s experience in various ways.

• Allows users to voice their opinions
• Allows users to read comments or reviews posted by other users
• Allows users to feel that their view and opinion counts in the company and have a personal interaction with the company
• New and fresh content is uploaded to the site by users, which creates interest for other users
• More brand awareness for users as they read posts by others and as they browse the site

Secondly, UGC serves as its own marketing tool to promote the company and its products or services.

• The company is able to provide better service as it can directly address issues faced by its users
• Positive reviews by other customers and users create this positive word-of-mouth across not only the company’s site but also across various social media platforms, as a user is likely to post on other mediums
• The company can actively monitor, listen, and engage with users and provided a more effective service to its users

Here is an example of user-generated content used  in a Taco Bell advertisement, where the UGC is the instagram pictures.

UGC in Taco Bell Advertisement

Instagram has also joined the bandwagon, now adding advertisements to its application, after having over 150 million users. It was a matter of time before the Facebook subsidiary added advertisements to its app. Free social media sites have usually earned majority of its revenue through ads. For example, Facebook earned $655 million from advertisements in the last quarter according to the article “Poll: What Do You Think of Instagram Ads”.

Now that they have added this feature, it will be interesting to see the type of content that comes through these advertisements. Usually, people get annoyed and irritated by advertisements on Facebook. They find them  irrelevant and not useful at times. For advertisers to be successful on instagram, they must make sure that the material they put out or share is valuable to the user and allows for a two-way communication to exist between the user and the advertiser, perhaps through the comments section. It can be a very successful form of advertising if used appropriately by brands, as instagram has the hashtagging capability, allowing for content to become viral. If not,  users will get annoyed by the constant ads being targeted towards them.

A few days ago, traders increased demand for oil, causing a $1 rise in oil prices. However, this increase in demand was not due to anything related to the oil industry, but rather a misunderstanding by the traders due to a tweet from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Traders misunderstood the tweet, which was referring to a previous event in 1973 for something that was happening currently in Syria. This caused them to buy oil in case there a spike in oil prices.

There are two takeaways from this article:

1. Companies should focus heavily on securing their social media sites, so that they have not given access for such a powerful tool, to the wrong people.
2. The message being sent out to should be clear. A wrong tweet or post to the consumers can affect business drastically.

This article shows how social media has changed the market in today’s world and also demonstrates how a small misunderstanding can have big effects on the bottom lines of major companies. It illustrates the importance of social media in today’s world.

In the past few years, we have seen an increasing rise in the use of social media by businesses across different industries. Real Estate is one industry, which in my opinion, has not used social media to the extent it should have. There are varying opinions about how profitable using social media is in the real estate industry, specifically by agents and developers.

In the blogpost Real Estate and Social Media: A Perfect Match, the following arguments are made in favour of using social media in the Real Estate industry:

• It is still relatively new to the real estate industry, but now it is becoming “standardpractice” to see real estate agents and developers having social media accounts.
• They are essentially the same as they both emphasize the importance of connecting with people, family, community, etc.
• Social media allows for real estate developers and agents to tell a story of a community and neighborhood in which a property is listed which is done through sharing the history of the community and building relationships with businesses in that community.

The blog post also argues that social media should be used to have a two-way conversation with the client, similar to what was discussed in Class 2 of COMM 464.

Arguments made by the blog post “Why Social Media Doesn’t Work for Canadian Real Estate Companies” are the following:

• Real Estate don’t get the returns from social media sites, as much of the sales are done in person and require human interaction
• People can get annoyed with constant messages or updates about new listings
• There needs to be a two-way communication between the company and clients and it is only useful if a company has more than 500 to 1000 followers, according to the blog post
• A realistic expectation of an ROI is needed from social media and time must be spent according to the expected ROI

After looking through both blog posts, my opinion of real estate and social media is the following. While social media is an essential part in the industry, it should always be  a two-way conversation occurring between the business and client, rather than just as another marketing channel. It can be extremely useful in keeping in touch with loyal clients and investors and keeping them updated on the market trends. It can even be useful to update new clients in new areas about the market trends of the neighborhood.