My love for Pinterest has been well documented by friends, family, and classmates. Pinterest is a virtual scrapbook or pinboard that allows users to share and organize visual imagery. I regularly use the website to find food and fashion inspiration. Since launching in March 2010, Pinterest now has 70 million users who share images online. The most popular categories are “food and drink”, “DIY and crafts” and “home decor”. As Pinterest continues to grow in popularity, there’s been a lot of talk about how businesses and brands can get involved.

Advertising is not yet possible on Pinterest, but companies and brands can open their own accounts and participate as users. Most companies involved so far are visual in nature, including fashion, cosmetics, achitecture, design, and food. I came across two interesting case studies of two very different companies who are doing well on this platform so far, PetSmart works to engage pet owners through health tips and information about breeds and Sony focuses their boards on the beautiful photos that can be taken using their Sony cameras

Whether you’re involved in an “aesthetic” industry or not, Pinterest could be an great avenue to explore further. My only caveat is that considering the visual focus of Pinterest, it seems best-suited for product-based businesses.

Three criteria for success for companies and brands on Pinterest
1. Consider what your target audience is interested in seeing
2. Create great content and beautiful pictures that people are proud to share
3. Post often, post regularly, and comment on others’ posts

Food for thought: What is the bigger space that your company or brand competes in? How can you start to participate in that conversation? What would that look like for you?

For our final group project for BAMA 513 (Internet Marketing), my group decided to approach a local business, Cartems Donuterie and offered to help them further develop their Social Media presence online. Cartems was already very active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and had a good sized following on each. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss my learnings from this consulting project.

In our kickoff meeting with Cartems, they told us they could use help getting more engagement within their online community. They wanted to do this while staying true to their mission of celebrating and encouraging smiles, conversations, and donuts in and around Vancouver. I thought this was a very well thought out goal. As we learned in class, getting additional “likes” and “followers” on social media isn’t nearly as valuable as having truly engaged and committed fans. Because of this, I was excited to tackle this challenge.

Most of our experience at b-school is working on cases for fictional companies. As we got into this project, working with a real client and real information, I quickly realized that we were faced with a few very real challenges:

• Our group had to scope the project ourselves and be very clear about what we would deliver. This project easily could have gotten bigger and more complex, but given our collective capacity, there was only so much we could accomplish over the 6 week course
• Cartems was not nearly as responsive to emails as Sauder professors and this slowed us down on a few occasions
• For Cartems, it was business as usual. Even though we wanted to take over their social media accounts to run some tests, Cartems continued to post as they usually do, and we held off on running some tests we had intended because we didn’t want to clutter their feed by having 5 simultaneous campaigns at one time

Once our work and analysis was complete, our group had the opportunity to present our findings to Cartems founder, Jordan. After spending the past 16 months in school, I’d almost forgotten how presenting to a client is very different from presenting to a professor. Our Internet Marketing professor, Paul Cubbon had warned us that presenting to our client would probably be very casual. In fact, when we asked Jordan where he wanted to meet, he initially suggested a local pub, definitely more casual than the academic setting we’ve been used to. Unfortunately, on the day we agreed to meet, Jordan was sick, but understanding that we were under a school deadline, he agreed to meet with us but changed the location to a local coffee shop.

Presenting in a coffee shop was a unique experience and I learned a few things from the experience that I thought I would highlight:

• Be familiar with the location you agree to meet. Is there actually room for 6 people to sit around one table?
• Show up early to get a good spot. If that fails, don’t be afraid to ask other patrons to move.
• Make sure your laptop is fully charged, there’s no guarantee you will have access to an outlet
• Have your slides prepared, but be ready to jump around based on the clients questions
• Take screenshots in case the internet isn’t working

The actual experience of presenting was a bit awkward. Our group had decided in advance that we wanted to give everyone an opportunity to talk so that everyone could learn from the experience. If this hadn’t been for academic credit, we probably wouldn’t have elected to have five different people speaking to the client. Luckily, we had prefaced Jordan about this and he was very understanding. While having five people speak in an academic setting works fine, “and now Lauren will walk you through the analysis we did”, it felt too formal for a coffee shop and I think it hindered some of the casual conversation that may have arisen if we’d had less people speaking.

My role during the presentation was to take Jordan through our recommendations. As I started to talk, I realized the delicacy of the situation. Here we were, a bunch of almost MBA grads, telling this guy what he “should” do with a business that he’s spent the past 3 years pouring his heart and soul into. I found myself carefully choosing my words, and I tried to make everything as factual and non-biased as possible, ie, “considering that ABC, we suggest that you XYZ”.

In the end, Jordan seemed interested in the work that we did. He was particularly interested in some of the analytics we had done on their website and Facebook page and liked many of our ideas to further engage their followers.

As I’m coming down to my last few days of b-school, this was an interesting project, to go through. It felt like I had one foot still in school and one out in the real world. For this reason, it was a good teaser before going back to the real world and I definitely learned some important lessons that I will be able to take forward with me.

In a recent article on HBR, Mark Bonchek and Sangeet Paul Choudary wrote an article on “The Age of Social Products”. They hypothesize that the most successful products of the future will not only be connected but social. With hardware getting cheaper and information increasingly being stored in the cloud, with only sensors, a simple processor, and a wireless connection, you can have the makings of an intelligent and connected product. Some examples of this include the Koubachi Plant Senosr that emails you when your plant needs watering, or Jawbone UP that tracks your movements throughout the day and messages you when it’s noticed you’ve been sitting for too long. What Bonchek and Choudary suggest is that the future of the internet is not only when these devices communicate with you, but when the products speak to each other. An example of this is the NikeFuelband.

The Nike Fuelband is a step ahead of the Jawbone UP because of the social network aspect to the app. You can wear the Nike Fueldband and it follows your movements throughout the day. You can be part of a team and together with your Nike Fuelbands you can work towards a group goal. As a wearables market seems primed to explode, companies and brands are being challenged to include social features from the get go, not as an after thought. This is because the real competitive advantage of these products will come from the network effects, not just the product features.

Food for thought: How could your industry benefit from a product with network effects?

A lot of discussion in our BAMA513 class has surrounded businesses having a distinct online personality, or standard voice. Maintaining brand personality is always important but this is especially important, and sometimes harder to maintain, on a realtime platform such as social media. This can be especially true when there is more than one social media manager manning the accounts. In class we had the social media manager from the Vancouver Canucks as a guest lecturer and she told us how all messages go through her so she can personally ensure the voice consistency. While I think it’s important to give the account a feel that followers get used to, it seems to me that this is a lot of added work for her. Well-tended social media accounts can make a company entertaining to follow, whereas others can make it terribly painful. In an attempt to make social media more personal, some companies such as Toronto Hydro have their social media managers sign their tweets by adding their initials at the end of the tweet so followers know exactly who sent it. Hootsuite has even added auto-initialing into their product offering. The challenge with doing this is that it makes the tweets about the social media manager and less about the brand.

Food for thought: Consider all the communications you have with your customers. Is your company voice consistent? Are you leveraging this personality online to the best of your ability?

It’s hard to know, as a brand, when and where to interfere in social media. Few companies have a deep understanding how social media interacts with consumers, whether it will expand product and brand recognition, drive sales, profitability, or gain loyalty. It does seem, however, like brands are increasingly expected to participate in social media. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Vine, and Google+. Unfortunately it seems that within each of these mediums, the social media landscape is becoming increasingly cluttered.

Luckily, as we’ve learned in our BAMA513 class, with an open mind and a willingness to try new things, here are three techniques that companies and brands can use to stand out.

Be Flexible
Some websites such as tweriod can tell you when most of your followers are online, but there are many different factors that can affect the success of a tweet or Instagram picture. By doing A/B testing and playing with the types of content included, the time of day, or the frequency of posts, companies and brands can learn a lot about their customers. Constantly gathering insights and adapting strategies based on these insights can result in happier and more engaged followers. Companies and brands can never rest on their laurels but must be willing to constantly evaluate and adapt social media strategies.

Look at Analytics
Beyond A/B testing, there are quite a few tools out there that are helpful to companies and brands looking to learn more about their social media. Dashboard such as Hootsuite makes it easier to track conversations and hashtags and can generate many useful reports. Even simple Google analytics and Facebook analytics, once set up, can provide a lot of insight too.

Have a Great Website
At the end of the day, the goal of every business is to make money. The reason companies and brands are involved with social media is to attract followers who ideally will purchase items from them. Because of this, all activity and content on social media should have the goal of leading followers back to their website to learn more about or purchase their product. A great website is essential for connecting with customers. Using a URL redirection service with real-time link tracking such as bit.ly can tell you how often followers click on a link.

With these tips in mind, companies and brands will be better able to stand out online.

Food for thought: The social media landscape is changing everyday. Is your company properly set up to monitor its social media analytics to gain insights to how these changes are affecting you?

In our BAMA513 class, Professor Paul Cubbon recently talked about usability and design of a website. We learned how to do a proper website audit and about the 7C’s of web design. What was interesting to me was when we got into a discussion about what the purpose of your website is. It turns out that websites are most successful when they have specific purpose. The purpose can be to,

• Gather info
• Raise awareness
• Direct enquiries
• Influence sales
• Transact sales

More importantly, not every site should do everything. Companies must ask themselves,

• Who is your target customer?
• How will you serve him/her?

By taking the time to answer these questions, companies can create a seamless website experience that fits into the total customer experience.

One company that is doing a good job of this is Lululemon. Through various classes at Sauder, I’ve heard various individuals from the company speak about their strategy. Lululemon’s goal is to make great products and then to simply educate customers about their products. To this end, their in-store sales staff are called “educators” who aim to teach guests about the technical elements of their products. This mentality translates to their website that has a lot of features that allow customers to learn about the products. Take, for example, this jacket I’ve been eyeing at Lululemon for a while. The website features multiple pictures of the jacket, a video of someone wearing it so the consumer can see how it moves, and customers can build profiels and leave comments about the jacket. All of these features are used to better educate potential customers about the jacket, which ideally will turn into a sale.

To contrast this, another company, Gilt has designed their website to have the functionality to allow many customers to make multiple purchases incredibly quickly in a short period of time. This has been enabled through one click purchasse.

Both Lululemon and Gilt have achieved success by having a clear understanding of who their company is, who the target customer is, and what specifically they’re trying to achieve. By taking the time carefully consider this last step, they have thoughtfully created websites with the functionality required to satisfy their customers’ needs.

Food for thought: Take the time to think about your company’s website. What do you want your customers to do immediately after they visit your website? Is this call to action clear? Is there something you can do to improve this?

I picked up this book a couple months ago while perusing my local Chapters. The title stood out to me immediately because, as someone who checks Facebook incessantly and is obsessed with Pinterest and Instagram, I think that social media is the bees knees. Nevertheless, I decided to give author B. J. Mendelson a chance to convince me otherwise.

The Book
B.J. Mendelson is a comedian, writer, and speaker. He spent some time as a marketing consultant after undergrad and the experience ultimately led him to the idea for this book.

In the book, Mendelson states that, “social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and just platforms. They’re not good or bad, useful or useless; however, we’ve allowed smug, greedy, well-fed white people to create a myth around them that says otherwise. A myth that says all you need to do is use social media for your business and all your dreams will come true. All the while, these companies and marketers pushing the myth are lining their pockets.”

The book can be summarized in three main points:

• Social media is not the second coming Mendelson’s main critique in the book is with self-proclaimed marketing gurus who claim that by simply being on social media, companies will have increased exposure and this “awareness”, “engagement”, and “community” will drive up revenue. In fact, without huge advertising budgets and marketing agencies, small companies will struggle to be heard.
• There are no social media success stories Mendelson examines such well-known social media success stories as Dell on Twitter and Kia Soul on Facebook. He takes a deep dive into the numbers and histories and shows the lucky breaks and small effects these campaigns actually had. (Dell was lucky enough to get on the short-lived “recommended users” list provided to first time Twitter joiners, which subsequently drove up Dell’s number of followers and if everyone who “liked” Kia on Facebook during their Soul campaign had bought a Soul, this would represent less than 1% of Kia’s revenue that year).
• You can’t “make something go viral This point is straightforward. As marketers you can only do your best to make great content. Whether or not it goes viral is out of your hands. Mendelson does admit that you can get a certain amount of momentum behind something great, but it takes a lot of old-fashioned, real-world connections to do so.

With these points in mind, Mendelson concludes that he doesn’t believe companies shouldn’t be on social media, he just doesn’t think it’s necessary. Instead, he’s a big believer in a great website and SEO. At the end of the day, offline matters more than online and its your company’s location, circumstances and audience that will determine your company’s success, not your participation in social media.

My thoughts
At times the book can seem like paranoid ranting from someone with a real chip on their shoulder. There is excessive swearing throughout the book and at times I found myself wondering if the author was just having a really bad day.

It was interesting to learn about the inner workings of social media. Mendelson gives some great gossip about various marketing gurus and he tells what it’s like to be at $4,000 conferences in Silicon Valley. I was also able to learn about how stories get picked up by different media outlets and about what it takes to be a featured video on YouTube.

The book echoes a question that has come up from professors here at Sauder many times over the past year, how do you calculate the ROI of social media? Mendelson does a great job indicating the tremendous costs associated with running any type of campaign on social media and the challenge of linking real world sales to activities happening online.

I agree with Mendelson, social media cannot be seen as a “get rich quick” scheme. To me, social media is just another marketing medium. Like billboards, newspapers, radio, and print. I do believe, however, that it’s becoming more important as people are increasingly communicating and doing commerce online. But what’s more important as marketers is to have a good understanding of who your target audience is. Sometimes the best way to reach your customer will be through advertisements in the local pennysaver. Other times, it might be a message on an airplane banner. And in some cases, it might just be on YouTube.

What does this mean for marketing professionals?
What’s most important is to do your research, have a great product, and know your target audience. Only once you have a very clear idea about these three things will you be able to determine if a social media platform is the right medium for you.