Month: October 2010

When a company goes through their IPO, they are enlisted on the stock exchange for people to buy a share of their company. These people are granted the title of ‘shareholders’ of that particular company. Their share value will then go up and down depending on how well the company does and how they treat their shareholders.

Now extract from your mind the idea of company shareholding, and replace it with celebrity shareholding. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could buy shares of a celebrity who is not-so famous, and watch his value rise? For example, seeing potential in Leonard Di Caprio in his early days of filming, and being a big fan of him and believing that he would become a huge hit movie star one day….thus seeing his stock value rise.

All this is possible through the newly found Hollywood Stock Exchange!

You can now buy shares of Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt and see their values rise!

What’s amazing isn’t really the process, but the results.

Apparently, this stock exchange is the MOST accurate predictor of the values celebrities ARE actually worth on the market. By gathering feedback from consumers directly through a quick automated stock exchange system, valuable data can be used to translate into pricing information for marketers!

And it’s not just Hollywood that does this, think about Hockey Drafts and Football Manager as well! They all run by the same principles.

RE: The MarkeDer’s Blog Post

It’s pretty interesting seeing this post especially after our marketing midterms, where one of our questions was referring directly to Snooki and Coach paying her off with their competitor’s bags.

I just wanted to add that it’s not simply about the high ended brand that Coach wants to preserve; Snooki is also associated with a lot of legal proceedings. A judge even called her a ‘Linsday Lohan Wannabe”. It’s quite clear that Coach recognizes Snooki as a dissociative reference group for many people.

Nobody can deny the power of social media when it comes to marketing and advertising, but how powerful is it exactly?

I refer to the following site:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/14/eventbrite-facebook-share/

I quote from the website, “For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to a paid event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.”

A link shared on facebook is worth $2.52! My initial response was a feeling of surprise, for I did not think that each link share could be estimated at a value. I am wondering how Everbrite came up with this number, as I’m supposing they didn’t simply divide their total revenue by the number of facebook links they shared, or else the comparisons would be pointless as they could simply post more on Twitter and Linkedin to decrease their link values. If anyone has any idea as to how this figure was compiled, please reply 🙂

But assuming that the estimations are calculated on a valid basis, then it would be possible for companies to estimate their demand according to the number of times they post on facebook! Of course, not every event is the same, and each consumer has different preferences, but assuming that there are two seperate links for the old and new product, the customers that preferred the old product and don’t prefer the new would cancel out with the ones that didn’t prefer the old and prefer the new one. We would roughly arrive at a similar calculation, and the number of people who see the message would be roughly the same.

But this is not to say do not use Linkedin or Twitter; they still generate value! Be sure to use them as well along with facebook to maximize profits!

People who don’t like maths usually turn to marketing, but little do they know that they’ve turned towards the wrong direction.

In the world of marketing, numbers CAN BE everything.

When you people go into a new restaurant, plan to watch a new movie, or maybe even attend an event from facebook; the most common thing they think about is “is it worth doing?’ What’s a good indicator of whether something is worth doing other than a long review? Obviously, the number of people that go!

I’m sure you’ve heard of this highly publicized song:

The first time I listened to it was on youtube, when my friend messaged me in awe telling me the number of hits it received. At that time it was only at 100 million view, but since then it has really taken off. No doubt we should attribute a large portion of its success to Lady Gaga’s brilliant performance, but the point is that after a certain number of people started listening, a lot of people start joining just to see what all the fuss is about.

So what’s the moral? Get the word out there that a lot of people are using your product! People follow people naturally, so let them do so!

But this also brings up another interesting strategy; what if rumors about the number of people are part of your company are started, but are simply rumors? Let’s think about a simple example: CUS clubs. If a club such as the Business Communications Club started a false rumor about how the number of people joined their club exceed 200, then, following the theories posted, it is likely that a lot of other people will come and check the club out. Of course there are questions of ethics and morals, and whether people would believe the rumor or not, but if executed properly, and people DO believe, then people would be literally seeing what they believe, and thus believing what they are seeing.