Robert Cifarelli, A&W manager of in-restaurant and online communications, provided tips on what’s next for social from a fast-food chain perspective. Three main ideas are:

1. Is the end of TV near? Social media has disrupted the state of the industry for both media agencies and creative agencies.
2. The drive to create truly engaging “real” content has cut out the need for complicated campaigns and apps developed by creative agencies.
3. People will create content. Anyone armed with a mobile device or digital SLR will be the future of social media advertising.

A&W has developed an extremely strong social following by delivering specific and easy to understand content. Their marketing message was simply, “Like A&W if you like burgers.” It’s clear and direct, and allows followers to connect with the brand because of a common understanding. By not providing any incentives or perks, A&W has been able to attract true and loyal consumers to their social pages with over 500,000 Facebook followers within 16 months of their inception.

Many social marketers would argue that providing coupons, freebies, or discounts is a marketing strategy to incentivize consumers to like a brand, and ultimately purchase a product. Which it is. However, the downside of value exchanges is that if you offer an incentive, will you be attracting the right people? Finding those true and loyal consumers will ultimately set up a company for long-run success.

Do you ever find it a pain to drop by the grocery store? Well, the world can now welcome the “Amazon dash” – a new way to shop from home by simply saying or scanning the product you need and adding it to your grocery list. You can conveniently restock and refill everyday essentials, and have fun doing it!

Dash connects to your home Wi-Fi network and works directly with your AmazonFresh account. You can view the list on your desktop or mobile device to purchase and schedule delivery straight to your home.

The future of making everything simple and easy has definitely arrived. As a Generation Y baby, I grew up in a digital age where technology has always been at my fingertips wherever I go. There are constantly new and faster tools to make life more convenient – a dream for lazy people. It seems like it’s only a matter of time until we are all living in iRobot with Will Smith, or in the midst of a nano-technology revolution with Johnny Depp.

Corporate giants push for research and development to create innovate products. However, I think it’s important to bring up that at some point consumers will push back and that fast-paced innovations should be released in strides. The ever-increasing privacy concern will be a growing market segment itself as consumers protect how their information is shared over the Internet.

Chiara Ferragni, also known as “the Blonde Salad,” is often described as a prominent fashion blogger, with a huge social following, who has collaborated with major brands and fashion magazines. However, take a closer look and what do you notice?  Behind Ferragni’s fashion facade exists an intricate business model built entirely by creating a rock solid personal brand.

She has been named by Business of Fashion as one of the most influential personalities of the international fashion world. The credibility behind Ferragni’s personal brand stretches across the Internet and into the catwalks of New York Fashion Week. She’s invited to collaborate with top-tier design houses, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna. These luxury brands know that if Ferragni takes one selfie it automatically reaches 3 million followers on Instagram and 215k followers on Twitter [Source].

Personal branding success begins with passion, and that message is clearly demonstrated to her social following. She has developed her personal passion project into an $8 million multi-revenue generating business. Her blog itself is an advertising platform, and her personal brand is the keystone supporting it.

The video above demonstrates how Ferragni has diversified her brand by creating a luxury shoe line. The majority of her profit is made here with prices ranging from $200-$800 per pair. As a marketing student and fashion-lover, it’s inspiring to realize that mixing passion and the Internet could result in such amazing success.

We hear it in the news, and in our daily conversations all the time now… “the cloud.” This metaphor largely sums up where the future of technology is heading towards. For all companies, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve and to do so they must constantly innovate. Interestingly, Microsoft CEO said, “if you look at the co-evolution of hardware and software [that] is going to define what’s going to happen. We have a particular definition of mobile which is perhaps skewed to the mobile phone. But if you take the industrial Internet or the Internet of everything, everything’s going to be connected to the cloud, and data. So that’s the world that we are building for” [Source].

In comes the latest in mobile-focused initiatives, Starbucks will deliver your coffee or food straight to your desk starting in 2015.

Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, call its: “E-commerce on steroids.” It will be accessible through Starbucks’ popular loyalty program on their mobile app – giving customer’s their coffee fix without having to leave the office. As someone who works right beside a Starbucks, and does daily coffee runs for my entire team, I believe this concept will be highly successful.

Both Microsoft and Starbucks highlight the importance of cloud innovation. Customers should have one seamless experience across all devices, which of course are all connected to the cloud. This will determine whether corporate giants like Starbucks can stay ahead of their e-commerce game. The winning edge starts with the cloud by providing insight through data and increasing convenience for customers. How far can technology go?

E-commerce today allows anyone to have an online store, but one online fashion retailer has stood out from the rest. NastyGal.com is a global online destination for fashion-forward, free-thinking girls. In 2006, founder Sophia Amoruso started an eBay store selling a highly curated selection of vintage pieces. Today, NastyGal has evolved from a ludicrously simple platform to a $100 million business.

NastyGal builds on these e-commerce features to deliver a successful online shopping experience:

1. Ubiquity: being able to leverage technology to let everybody access you product whenever and wherever.
2. Global Reach: technology reaches across national boundaries.
3. Richness: a combination of high quality modelling photos with distinct “lookbooks” featuring trending styles.
4. Interactivity: the ability to “Live Chat” with a sales representative at any time in seconds.

Social media’s role in the e-commerce world is also key in driving success. Whether it was a crazy vintage piece, a quote, or a behind-the-scenes photo, Nasty Gal has worked hard to create the best and most compelling images, words, and overall “share-able” content for their customers. Amoruso uses social media to listen to her customers, and if they’re not happy she hears it from the ground up.

Nasty Gal would have surely failed had it been her goal to grow a business to the size it is today. When you begin with the finish line in mind, you miss all the fun stuff along the way. The better approach is to tweak and grow, tweak and grow. Amoruso calls it the incremental potential. In e‑commerce, you have to get everything right — from the marketing to the product descriptions to the checkout process.

With sites such as eBay or shopify.ca many aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs could learn from Amoruso’s humble beginnings and take online retailing to the next level.

In the digital world, the importance of energizing online communities is critical to the success of your product or company. Following this sequence will help you build and leverage stronger online communities:

1. Monitor, listen, and respond to your consumers online.
2. Energizing: bring in your best brand ambassadors to evangelize your product.
3. Supporting: help customers support one another to solve one another’s problems.
4. Embracing: integrate customers into the way a business works, including using their help to design products and improve processes.

Enter Michelle Phan: YouTube celebrity, makeup extraordinaire, entrepreneur, and master of energizing online communities. Michelle has inspired countless of women around the globe through her beauty video tutorials. She has gained over 7 million subscription followers through viral videos, such as, turning herself into Angelina Jolie – see below:

Her influence in the beauty community led her to develop ipsy, a booming $84 million e-commerce start-up. Each month, subscribers will receive a beautiful Glam Bag with deluxe samples and full-sized beauty products personally catered to you by taking a Beauty Test. Michelle has mastered the art of CGC – consumer generated content – by stimulating and harnessing CGC to best promote her brand. Members can watch and play along with the stylists (fellow YouTube makeup stars) with the same products that arrived in the mail. She has developed ipsy community guidelines outlining what to do, and what not to do on the website. A few guidelines are:

• Be Positive!
• Help your fellow ipsters: advice, tips, and tricks are always appreciated.
• Show us what you got: share your videos, photos, and looks. Share the best content on the web, but also define your own.

The ipsy community encourages users to get involved. It’s self-reinforcing and self-spreading – a recipe for brand success.