RIM just launched an online music community platform called BBM Music. Since BBM Music is integrated with blackberry messenger, the phenomenal application, this seems a great opportunity of social engagement for blackberry users. BBM Music allows users to create their music profile by selecting 50 songs from a catalogue of millions, and then expand their profile by adding friends and getting access to their 50 songs, too.

This is how RIM describes BBM Music: ‘BBM Music makes your music collection social! With BBM Music, you can create a music profile of your favorite songs that all your BBM Music friends can listen to – and in return you can enjoy all of your friends’ profile selections. That means the more friends you have, the more music you can enjoy! You can listen to full tracks, create playlists, have conversations about music, and even listen to music offline’. You can watch the ‘How to demo’ here!

Marquis Wine Cellars is one of the finest wine stores in BC, which started the business in 1986. Marquis Wine Cellars is a community based business. They say that ‘We do our utmost to support the culinary arts and community charities which contribute to the well being and enhancement of our neighborhood and the City of Vancouver’. They successfully manage to engage their target audience with relevant events and activities such as wine shopping, wine gifts & merchandise, wine tips, wine tasting, wine delivery, and wine community through their website.

Marquis Wine Cellars use social media tools effectively to build up and enhance their wine community. They have a massive online presence and they use a large variety of tools such as newsletter, facebook, twitter, blog, and youtube.

The Istanbul Doors Group is a leading restaurant and entertainment group was established in 1993. The Group has created 13 highly successful restaurant and a luxury hotel brands. Its creative concepts pioneering endeavors, have transformed it into an international brand. 

In 2011, The Group founded London Doors Restaurant Group and acquired Tom Aikens Group. Currently, Tom Aikens Group has two sites – Tom Aikens Restaurant and Tom’s Kitchen. The Istanbul Doors Group today owns and operates over 30 of the high quality restaurants and a hotel in Turkey, London, Baku and Moscow.

Istanbul Doors effectively uses social media tools, especially twitter and facebook. They are engaged with their current and potential customers, they can give information about the events and menu updates. It is a good opportunity for not only engaging the customers but also engaging their different locations. As an example for a twitter post might be ‘What about enjoying a nice variety of cocktails @mamapizzeria before a fabulous night @anjeliqueclub?’

Innovation, improvements, changing habits of users and rapid changes in digital world create new opportunities and challenges for digital marketing. Dave Chaffey wrote an article called Digital marketing trends 2012 about how to reflect on these opportunities and challenges, and shape priorities for digital marketing. Here is a short version of the article;

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search still drives a significant proportion of traffic, so smart marketers use a deeper approach to SEO others.

2. Social media optimization (SMO)

The next stage is to develop a social media strategy and optimize how content is shared and how it supports customer journeys through to sale.

3. Content optimization

To succeed needs a deep understanding of customer preferences; analysis of what works for competitors and then development of your findability and shareability for content.

4. Content aggregation

Content curation and aggregation is how we try to help and you can use tools to tame the social media firehose.

5. Gamification

It’s an interesting new approach to engage online audiences, but we’ll see how widely it can be applied.

6. Video marketing

Many marketers are going to “up their game” on video marketing. Remember that You Tube is the second most important search engine in many countries.

7. Ad network innovation

There is growing awareness that there is value in display advertising beyond the click, for its value in building awareness, encouraging searches on a brand or category and subsequent visits to a website.

8. Privacy compliance

With compliance for the new privacy law required by May 2012 how companies interpret the ICO advice is sure to be an issue for all marketers who manage website in 2011.

9. Cross-channel optimization

This is an area that warrants better understanding and optimization of the customer touchpoints.

10. Mobile marketing

We have seen lots of interest on the blog this year in QR code marketing and this fits the increasing consumer usage of QR codes which seems like it is nearing tipping point.

11. Website performance optimization

With the new features of Google Analytics v5 and Google Website Optimizer, hopefully their usage will increase.

12. Performance marketing

People, process and setting the right KPIs are all important.

You can also have a look at the presentation which is shared by Dave Chaffey on slideshare.

The emergence of social web is continuously enhancing the focus of most of the companies on social media tools, which increase the online presence enormously and create significant opportunities for engagement with current or potential customers. But the question here is does the rise of social media diminish the number of visits to the company website or further, is social media is making company websites irrelevant? Or, are the companies loosing focus on their websites while extremely concentrating on social media? And finally, what is the right balance between website and social media for companies?

‘Facebook growth leads to decline for many company websites?’ is a very interesting article which puts emphasis on this “social media vs. company website” issue. The article is posted on Smart Insights by Dave Chaffey who is a bestselling author, consultant and speaker who enjoys sharing tips, tools and techniques on all things digital. He decided to write this article down after he had a look into a research data from Webtrends and Adgregate called ‘The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce’ and he was also curious about whether the companies are allocating the right level of resources between website management and Facebook.

These are the 4 remarkable points he mentioned in this article supported by graphs:

1) Visits to the majority of corporate websites are in decline.

2) Growth in Facebook (and other social presences) occurs at the expense of corporate sites.

3) For some brands Facebook dominates.

4) Retail and transactional sites are different.

The recent data about yearly change in unique visits to Fortune 100 sites shows that visits are declining for the most of the companies, while they are growing for the minority. Is the growing social media reason for this? Let’s have a look at the second point. Most of the companies facing decline in the number of their website visitors, experience an increase on the number of Facebook visitors. Of course, Facebook is not the only responsible of the decreasing website visits. Other online platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn are also effective in this decline. In my opinion, the most appealing analysis in this article is that it is a totally different scenario for e-commerce companies. In this case both forms of presence are increasing. Last but not least, for some companies such as Coca-Cola and Walt Disney website visits might be even negligible comparing to Facebook visits which is most probably related to the highly strong brand equities.

Dave Chaffey believes that this is a useful benchmarking analysis to perform for any company sector, and I cannot agree more. Obviously, the right balance between website and social media for companies depends on the industry, the customer base and the company itself. One of the most critical issue here is the companies should not forget that their websites are still important for their business, even if it is losing the priority. Both corporate websites and social media are strategic keys for success and companies should find out the right balance for themselves and allocate their resources appropriately. In addition, companies should be aware of the potential risks of social media presence, but this can be a topic for the next post.

The Skytrax World Airline Awards Ceremony took place in Paris, in 2011 and according to the results of the evaluation; Turkish Airlines has been chosen as the winner of the 3 categories by Skytrax. Turkish Airlines wins “Best Airline Europe”, “Best Premium Economy Seats” for its Comfort Class seats and “Best Airline Southern Europe” at the World Airline Awards. (http://goo.gl/TE3Wi). In 2010, the airline company was awarded as the “Best Airline Southern Europe” as well but it was the 3^rd in Europe, following Luftansa and Swiss International. It was also selected as the fastest growing airline in Europe and it was the winner of the World’s Best Economy Class Airline Catering for Product Quality award. The remarkable rise and success of Turkish Airlines is driven by not only significant amount of investment in quality product and service concepts, but also highly effective use of social media tools. 

Turkish Airlines is one of the best companies using social media and it has a presence in most of the popular online platforms and it actively uses them to communicate with current or potential customers. In addition to twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr etc, Turkish Airlines announced Social Trippin’ which is a social media meeting project that will happen 4 times a year, in a different part of the world each time. (www.socialtrippin.com). You can see a report in the link, named Social Media and Travel Sector, sponsored by Social Trippin’ which is shared in slideshare by Turkish Airlines! (http://goo.gl/Wrzry). Finally, here is a short video.

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