As we know, twitter is a popular social media for companies, executives and other influencers in the world to communicate with the world, or at least those who are also on twitter. While a successful twitter campaign can certain raise a lot of brand awareness and generate additional followers, twitter users -who are historically known to enjoy satire – sometimes add a little twist.

A popular one is the #McDStories campaign started by McDonalds. My guess is that it was supposed to attract cool/nice/fun/heart-warming stories about customers’ experience at McDonalds, thereby generating additional brand advocates.

Instead of: “I was so tired after work, went to McDs for some hot food and as always was greeted with smiles *insert selfy pic with Ronald or staff* #McDstories”

The world sent tweets such as:

• These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald’s 10 piece Chicken McNuggets left in the sun for a week
• #McDStories I lost 50lbs in 6 months after I quit working and eating at McDonald’s
• One time I walked into McDonalds and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories

Surely these are not the kind of responses McDonald’s marketing manager was hoping for… Worse yet, the campaign is irreversible!

The lesson here is that companies cannot run a Twitter campaign expecting to only target customers with favorable opinions. Hashtags inevitably fall into the hands of those who disagree with the company and, unlike TV spots, there is two-way communication which means that the company has absolutely no control over what is being said about them. So, companies should think twice before launching a potentially over-the-top twitter campaign!

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/24/mcdstories-when-a-hashtag-becomes-a-bashtag/

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very important aspect for any company that wishes to attract customers via online channels, particularly when the vast majority of internet users resort to Google searches in order to find what they are looking for.

Some great tips are covered in the extensive article by Minda Zetlin, How to Improve Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization, which focuses first on explaining some methods behind Google’s page ranking.

As outlined in the paper entitled The $25,000,000,000 EigenVector, The Linear Algebra Behind Google, there are three key steps behind all search engines:

1. Crawl the web and locate all web pages with public access.

2. Index the data from step 1, so that it can be searched efficiently for relevant keywords or phrases.

3. Rate the importance of each page in the database, so that when a user does a search and the subset of pages in the database with the desired information has been found, the more important pages can be presented first.

The reason why Google returns better results than other search engines, particularly in the early stages of search engine development, is because it goes beyond matching the searched text with page content and ranks website based on their ‘citations’ on other websites.

This means that given two webpages with identical content, the one that is cited by 100 other reputable websites will rank much higher than the one that is ranked by 100 ‘shady’ websites. The whole concept comes back to a measure of ‘influence’, or centrality, known as EigenVector and which is extensively used in the area of Social Network Analysis (SNA). Based on this calculation method, a page’s centrality (or relevance) is a function of its ties to other sources as well as the other sources’ ties to other sources.

This concept is illustrated in the following image: Webpage A has three links to other websites while webpages B, C and D have four links to other websites. In this case, even though webpage A is cited fewer times (3 < 4), it may actually rank more highly since it is cited by pages B, C and D which all have 4 links.

This short example of EigenVector centrality highlights a key business and SEO take-away: linking your website with fewer very reputable websites may increase your ranking significantly more than being cited by hundreds of obscure/less reputable sites.

Canada is notorious for its telecom oligopoly which causes Canadian consumers to pay some of the highest rates in the developed world for a relatively restrictive service.

For example, in France, for EUR 15.99 a month (roughly CAD 24), users can get unlimited texts and calls to over 100 destinations as well as 4G internet with a 50GB limit, after which internet speed decreases since EU regulation has made it illegal for telecoms to charge additional roaming fees. Now think back to what you pay in Canada for 100MB of data, or even 1GB of data.

This small factor has a potentially huge impact on how consumers behave in Canada versus other developed markets:
– in Europe, where users can afford nearly unlimited amounts of high speed data, they are more likely to actively interact online and use apps and other social media without restraint
– in Canada, many users (particularly youth) simply do not have a data plan or often limit usage of their data to situations which they deem particularly important.

I’ve always wondered why I could never get myself to actively use many of the apps and other solutions made available for free on my smartphone. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because I am not willing to pay such a high price for limited data access. I think this single factor likely has a disproportionate impact on the Canadian market (consider start-up apps especially), and I would argue that it makes excellent business sense for Canadian companies and marketers to help break-up Canada’s telecom oligopoly in order to create more dynamic interactions with customers as well as a more flexible business environment.

This post reflects on the article 3 Ways to Use Social Network Analysis for Marketing which makes the case that the science of networks (or Social Network Analysis, SNA) is largely omitted by the marketing industry as a whole. SNA research has gained a lot of momentum throughout the last fifty years and has been used as an important tool to solve problems in areas such as counter-terrorism, ecology, disease prevention and even for inter-organizational structure evaluation.

A notable use of SNA occurred in 2009 when leaders in the SNA field Christakis and Fowler managed to prevent a large outbreak of the H1N1 influeza virus on the Harvard University campus by isolating the networks of infected members. Imagine if we applied a similar framework to predicting the diffusion of a marketing campaign? (or other)

SNA research is being applied in even more innovative ways, such as by consultants Funds@Work AG and SONEAN GmbH with their work in the investment industry. Areas of work include looking at the networks of Shariah scholars in Islamic finance, mapping out the historic ties between executive and non-executive directors in Europe’s top 50 companies and even mapping out investor, entrepreneur and organizational networks in the German VC/Start-Up space.

What we can learn from this is that the potential applications and insights are endless. From my perspective, it makes sense that the next big revolution in digital marketing strategy will take place when marketers are able to bridge the gap between academic knowledge in SNA and practical applications to the field. Think about it, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other popular tools are known as Social Networks, yet, we rarely think of solving marketing problems from a Network Perspective. Interestingly, when you look at the most effective marketers and marketing campaigns, you realize that they are actually intuitively applying SNA theory.

This post aims to question the assumption that implementing an eMarketing strategy is always necessary. Many of us have heard stories about successful companies, large and small, who actively state that no marketing strategy IS their marketing strategy. 

Typically, what they mean is that they do not post ads online, they don’t send out flyers, instead relying on word-of-mouth and the intrinsic value of their product or service in order to grow their business. This is often true for your local baker or even your investment consultant. In these cases, the marketing strategy is often network-driven, a.k.a. word-of-mouth.

This view is highlighted in the article When Social Media Is Not Your Best Marketing Strategy by Jim Joseph. He states:

Many small businesses think they have to be active in social media just because it’s become such a central part of big brand marketing and pop culture. I get it. It’s starting to feel like if you’re not in social media, you’re not doing real marketing anymore. And in many categories, that may be true. Social media has become the great connector, aligning brands and customers in real time in ways never seen in marketing.

But you can’t just jump into social media because you feel obligated. You need a plan of attack that makes sense for your brand and your customer. It may not make sense for your customer to engage. The key is to know when using social media fits strategically with what you are trying to accomplish.

 

In essence, business owners, strategists and marketers should consider the fundamental nature of their business and customers and develop a marketing strategy that is in line with their characteristics. This means that eMarketing should not necessarily serve as the go-to method of reaching or interacting with customers. However, Jim Joseph also points out that while channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn are not always appropriate for ‘traditional marketing purposes’, they can still serve other strategic purposes, such as demonstrating thought-leadership, supporting charity causes, sharing insights or even networking with others in the industry.