As a 5th year student I have worked on a number of group work projects. The toughest part of group work is often just finding time when everyone can meet. For example in an average group lets say you have 5 people, and each person is taking 5 classes,  say 3 of the classes have group work,  half the group members have jobs, 2 our on a sports team, 3 live east of main street so they can’t come back to campus after they go home,  3 are heavily involved on campus say they are execs of two different clubs and 2 of the students our RA’s which means 4 days a week they myst stay in residence, it can be incredibly hard to find a time that the entire group can meet up. Our group was pretty close to this but luckily we all had a break after our marketing class at 5pm. Once we had established our meeting time things flowed quite well.

Another thing that was fantastic about our group was the fact that we were able to decide on using a facebook thread as our main communication channel. From past experience I have learned that this is hands down the best communication channel. Email is fantastic for two way conversations but quickly gets messy and confused when sending emails to 6 people at a time and people forget to hit reply all. Facebook threads are an instant way to keep the entire group in the loop even if if people miss a meeting or miss a few messages you can simply scroll up to fill yourself back in easily.
All in all I think our group was very effective. We were able to destribute the work and finish our projects on time to a level of excellence that we could all agree on.

Promo Post with the Concert Lineup (only 24 likes)

Wow. This has got to be one of the most successful social media campaigns I have seen. Contact Winter Music Festival is a fairly new project started by Blueprint Events, Vancouver’s biggest Electronic Dance Music promotions company. The precursor to  Contact Festival was the boxing day Avicii Concert in 2011 (a world famous DJ). The following year on the same date Blueprint announced Contact Festival, with Deadmau5. After putting in the ground work Blueprint is now working on turning the event into full 2 day music festival at BC place. The campaign for this new and improved festival started in September of this year 4 months before the event.

Real Content from an artist “An Interview with Diplo” (33 likes)

On August 14th blueprint made a new facebook page for Contact Festival a separate from their existing Blueprint Events page that already has 24,000 followers as well as a Contact festival Instagram and Twitter account.What I am so intrigued about is the rate at which both the page and Instagram account were able to gain followers.After only four months the Facebook page has gained 10,000 followers and the Instagram 2,400 while only 500 on twitter. This is so incredible because it took blueprint roughly 6 years to gain 10,000 followers on their original Blueprint events page. They have been able to efficiently transfer existing likes to the new page and gain momentum exceptionally quickly. The Instagram followers are especially impressive because Instagram accounts don’t grow virally.

So how did they do it? The as a designer the content that is being pumped out for the campaign on facebook and Instagram isn’t mind blowing in terms of design. There is no long form content such as write-ups or bios. And the photos from the feed are just regular photos. So what is making it tick so fast? The timing and abundance of content being pumped out everyday sometimes 4 posts a day is what is driving this train combined with a number of contents. Every day Instagram and page pump out 2 or 3 pieces of content usually one piece about one of the artists, one that is pure promo, a cool graphic or animated logo, and one more that is a contest. Together they work quite well. The contest incentives the existing followers to like and share the post in order to win prizes, this drives its viral spread, but when people check out the page, the promo content explains what is happening and the artist content is provides the meat real quality content to watch or listen too.

This photo shows a real project that someone created for campus, it is original, it is funny and as a result it got 220+ Likes

I run a small business at UBC called TheCalendar.Ca. My primary communication channels with our customers is through our facebook page www.facebook.com/TheCalendarUBC. One of the most common mistakes page managers make is when they loose engagement with their current followers. Because of they way facebook algorithms work managing a facebook page is an ongoing process. If your account goes in active for a month and you then make a post, it won’t show up on your followers news feeds and they won’t see it. However if your followers have recently liked a post from your page, then the next post you make will show up on their news feed. For this reason it is extremely important for page managers to consistently and continuously post awesome content.

This post tells a story about 2 people who are singing to raise money for charity. It is is original content, it is inspiring it got 97 Likes

So what makes good content? lets start with what doesn’t. In the online world everything is run by algorithms designed to keep the best content at the top, judged by real humans likes of approval.  For this reason you can’t fake good content. For examples many facebook pages will just post generic images of old memes, or quotes with nice backdrops. This is old recycled content, it isn’t original and it doesn’t create value for your customers. As a result it won’t get you likes and shares and no one will ever see your content.

Instead focus on real content from your work u and community. Tell your customers what you are up too, show them real photos of current happenings that are interesting to them. Hire a designer to create awesome corresponding images. Make them laugh entertain them and give them a reason to like your post. Better yet give them a reason to share it. If you have an instagram account, think about putting someone in charge who has a real artistic eye, higher quality content means more likes, and more visibility online.

Here is a video for a stunt we organized for the last day of classes. It received 2,500 views in 12 hours because it is high quality original content.

My families first computer was an Apple.

This blog is in response to Jeff Effas blog post “The Value of an Apple“. This was an interesting read because I have grownup using apple products my whole life. The first computer we had in my house was the apple that was released before the classic model. For a long time it was hard for me to argue that apple was “better” than the pc machines my friends had. I had less games available for my computer, and at that time, before the internet, that was the only use for computers. Or put another way the machine was only as useful as the applications it had loaded on it.

The only choice for my college computer

For some reason my family only ever had an apple computer. We would get a new one every 5 or so years. So by the time it came time for me to get a computer of my own I was already completely loyal to the apple brand. There was no other option in my mind than the 13 inch macbook pro even tho it would be almost twice the cost of an alternative. But to an apple user you see there was no alternative, the pc laptops simply don’t compete in the same league. There batteries stay charged half as long, their screens are worse, they are made out of plastic and they don’t have the famous apple operating system. On top of that, my computer would match my phone and ipod. This was a very interesting lesson in brand loyalty and building barriers to entry.

I  run a lot of contests from my companies facebook page www.facebook.com/TheCalendarUBC and have learned a thing or two over the years. I wanted to see if I could learn some more tricks from fellow social media marketers. I am going to review a post by Jay Baer about how to run the perfect social media contest and see if I can learn anything else from him! 

First off Jay suggests that we choose a Venue for our contest. I don’t tend to move far from facebook but twitter and Instagram can be great complements. The next thing to think about is how the guests will enter into the contest. This needs to align with your goals, if you are simply trying to gain a bigger following, I would suggest asking the user to like your page to enter, if you are simply trying to increase engagement with your followers I would suggest doing a like contest, and lastly if you are trying to spread the word about something in particular host a share contest. Next up Jay suggest you need to set up your timeline, pic your prizes and make sure you have someone to manage your graphics. I completely agree about posting graphics, there is no point in posting text alone as no one will ever see it. All posts need an accompanying image.

Make sure your prize is exciting and relevant for you target audience. We usually give away concert tickets.

Get the word out. Social media contests are the most effective when people know about them before they even start. This way the contests pops out of the gate. Lastly and this is something that I need to get better at, Jay suggest that you create an editorial calendar. You need to mark out when each of your posts needs to be published. If you want to go a step forward which I and Jay strongly suggest you should write all the messaging and posts for the campaign at one time before hand. This way you can execute your contest quickly and efficiently.

How many times of you seen an television add for a product like Febreeze or Clean & Clear that shows a CGI clip of how the product “scientifically” works. I feel that these advertisements are unethical because they take advantage of the uneducated general public. These cartoon depictions often use small dots of green or brown “germs” or “dirt” that get washed away by the cleaning solution usually depicted as blue particles or water getting splashed into a skin pore.

Clean and Clear Television Commercial

The traditional Clean & Clear advertisements sill show a side view of a human poor. The depiction will show the water and cleaning solution splash into the poor and clean it out. Anyone with any scientific background knows this entire depiction is completely false. Water can’t even get into your poors because its surface tension is to strong to get “splashed in to a tiny poor”. These cleaning products work by drying out your skin by cutting your natural oils with emulsifiers. Millions of young people watch these ads and think wow “science says this product works” when in reality the depiction has nothing do do with what is actually happening.

Febreeze Air Freshener Television Commercial

The Febreeze example bothers me a lot more because while the depiction of Clean & Clear is in accurate the product does in fact clean your skin. With Fabreeze the entire product is unethical because they are marketing as a cleaning agent when in fact it is simply just a perfume. Worse than that the adds almost always use fear to make their target market, mothers, by making telling them that there are dangerous germs in their carpet and sofas. They suggest that you would be an incompetent mother or host if you don’t use Febreeze to clean away these germs. There is simply no way that the Febreeze solution can actually significantly clean your carpet or sofas as it is only applied by spraying it on to the surface. Only the outermost layer would even make contact with the antibacterial solution. Febreeze is unethically marketed because it uses dramatizations of “science” to convince and scare its uneducated target segment into buying the product to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.