Project Start

The final project was a dramatic learning experience for our team because it was not only a new idea that we wanted to test but also, it forced us to creatively overcome many challenges along the way. Our team embarked on a difficult mission to create a social media presence and gain community of online subscribers for “Lens of Aladdin”, a company that is at a nascent stage.

First, we wanted to ensure a common vision and excite team members about the concept. During the start of the project, we had many conversations about the potential of the idea in the market as well as about the learning and exposure this project would give to each of us. Once everyone was excited about the idea, we moved ahead with allocation of modules to every team member. Team members mostly volunteered to take up the module they felt most fascinated about and this eliminated the need for any formal task allocation process. From there we established timelines with respect to drafting a strategy for each of the sections. This activity was lead by the people who were the representatives of these sections.

I volunteered to take up content calendar and social media piece because it is a subject I was passionate about and felt that this project would give me the opportunity to test many of my own hypotheses.

Challenges we faced as a team

There were a lot of challenges we faced as a result of the company having no presence. Some of the key challenges are listed below

• There were no established connections and hence no email list. We had to recognize our user base from the ground up and build an email list.
• There was no social media presence. This meant that we had to educate the users about the organization first, next create awareness and finally incentivize people to follow us on social media.
• We had no solid business model yet, so it was difficult to incentivize people to give out their details and subscribe on our website.

Outcomes of the presentation.

We had to present our outcomes to the class since we did not have a real client. Our team had done a great job of recognizing alternative approach to elements of the projects we could not implement (eg: Google Adwords). We were initially concerned if we would be articulate enough to explain to the audience about our workarounds, but we were happy to gather that most people understood what we were trying to achieve.

The sections of the presentation were laid out as follows

1. Introduction to the business
2. Email Campaign learning
3. Content calendar
4. Hootsuite and social media campaign
5. Adword campaign
6. Google Analytics

For each section, we planned to outline the strategy and the thinking behind how we planned to achieve it, we outlined our initial hypothesis, and we then proceeded to explain our tests and then presented our outcomes. The audience seemed to be very engaged during the presentation and appreciated our creative approaches to email marketing and social media campaign. Our results in these categories had validated our efforts as being successful. The audience expressed some concerns with respect to how we extrapolated our Adword campaigns but we managed to ease the concern by showing the business similarity of the alternate organization used by us. We also gathered some very insightful questions and suggestions after our presentation. One key suggestion was about how we could leverage blogging to establish ourselves as the experts in the area and build a following. We thought that the suggestion was well worth investigating in the future. We were also provided with suggestions about how we could grow our email list and pursue campaigns on social media channels like Linkedin and Instagram to expand our client base. These suggestions were very thought provoking for us and well appreciated.

Key Lessons learnt.

Going through the final project was both eye opening and refreshing for all of us in the team. As I managed the social media aspects of the team, I learnt the the following key lessons about a social media calendar and campaign.

• When you have no social media presence, it’s important to first establish a rapport with the customers, establish credibility and then influence them to make the “call to action” (such as like, share etc). This is a more effective method of doing it rather than trying to convince the customer to make the call to action from the beginning.
• While choosing which social media channel to select to run the campaign, we should carefully consider the nature of our business and think about the channels where our customers are most likely to notice us. In addition to this, there are some inherent weaknesses in the social media channel. Eg: When I was considering LinkedIn as a channel to promote the business, I realized that established credibility played a big role in people accepting connections or reading your post, hence LinkedIn was quickly dismissed. Hootsuite was another platform we could not use because of limitations in tagging and uploading high resolution content.
• Organic growth hugely depends on how customers are incentivized to share or like your content. When we started capturing headshots of people and started sharing it on their wall, we achieved the greatest engagement and word of mouth. We also gained a big share of new followers on our page during the time.

In conclusion, personally the exercise was a great lesson in starting a social media campaign for something from scratch. I learnt a lot of lessons that I could take back and use as a framework and apply it for other businesses and industries.

Four major hi-tech companies are expected to release their first versions of Virtual Reality devices at the beginning of 2016. With highly anticipated products such as Oculus rift and Sony VR entering the market, the potential of finding and engaging customers in the virtual world is now a real possibility. Second Life, a fantasy based virtual world, has around 20 million members and 2 million active members. Digital Marketers are already leveraging this platform to get higher returns on their marketing and advertising spends.

There are 4 main tools marketers can leverage to promote their company through Second Life.

Second life Groups/Avatars

1. Communities and groups

You can create affinity groups for your company. You can also create in-world events for potential customers and drive engagement. You can then, network with other groups of similar interest by having combined events with them. Second life also enables transactions between people in groups, thus enabling businesses to create a network of potential customers.

2. Advertising on Virtual property

Second life enables the purchase of land in the virtual environment. Business can buy these spaces and advertise them in the virtual world. Advertising themselves on virtual merchandises is also an effective option.

Advertising on virtual property

3. Web based calendars

Web based calendars not only allows businesses to create public events and advertise it to everyone on second life but also these events reach users outside second life. (as they are web based)

Second Life Events

4. Personal invitations and gifts

Once you have acquired a good connection in Second Life, you can send personal invitation for events and promotions in Second Life. The invitations could also include freebies. Businesses can strengthen their SL networks and work co-operatively with other residents to connect with the market and learn from the market. An event also helps bring the community members closer and establishes a better brand recognition and advocacy.

Cosmetics play a crucial role in how businesses are portrayed to the customers. Many serious businesses are vary about the social platforms on which they operate so as to not to hurt the Brand image. This may be a key reason why many business lose out on the opportunity to use a cheap, dirty and hipster web interface (Reddit) and fail to maximize their marketing spend. However, Reddit is not called the “The front page of internet” for no reason.

The aim of marketing with Reddit is to get enough upvotes to be a featured content and watch as millions of users bring your web server down. The great thing about Reddit is that there are many subreddits and they are communities that bring people and interests together. And all one has to achieve is to be relevant in the appropriate subreddits to be successful.

There are 4 key ways in which companies can use subreddits to grow their business

1. Engage and interact with your market

The hardest part about this approach is to find the relevant subreddit category where your company should engage. Once this has been established, companies can use various methods to generate responses from the community. Topgear is the best example of a company that is using subreddit to engage with its customers. Every week, users are encouraged to submit a picture of a car and prizes are given to the submission “Car of the week”. This approach creates both brand awareness and brand advocacy.

Subreddit groups

2. A new Customer Service Channel.

It costs less to maintain a customer than acquire a new one. Companies can benefit a great deal by leveraging subreddits for customer support. For a company to do this effectively, they must identify a clear purpose for their subreddit, provide cross-links and outline directions. They must also be quick in responding and acknowledging the complaints. However, the benefits provided to the customers will far outweigh the costs since customers now have easy access to the support staff and have ease of sharing videos, pictures etc to get a response. Companies like Xbox and Tesco have been using subreddit for a few years and have reported increases in customer satisfaction and greater enthusiasm among the subreddit communities for new product launches.

3. Creating a network

Networks are created around ideas and passion and not around industries and businesses. This is the concept “Game Of Thrones” has leveraged upon, with different subreddits for each character and dynasty, they have a big network of users sharing insights and possible plot twists. Game of thrones has the highest user community and network in reddit history. Businesses can learn a lot from this strategy and create user networks around ideas rather than product/companies. This will enable greater industry insights and will also enable the companies to crowd source ideas for subsequent products and releases.

TopGear group engagement

4. Promoting events

While platforms like Facebook and Twitter enable a high reach to potential event ticket purchasers, the growth is primarily organic, meaning that the visibility of the promotions will first, reach your followers/fans and then, is propagated to a greater number of people through them. Though Facebook and twitter lets promotions reach non-followers through use of hashtags and by methods such as the paid “Boost post”. These methods are not as effective as can be done through subreddits. Subreddits enable a community of users who are constantly engaged and ready to take action. This unique positioning is different from other social media platforms because the action is immediate and the flow of information is dynamic. This provides event managers with a special tool that can reach more at lower cost and also better the conversion rate.

Overall Reddit may be overlooked as an Internet marketing tool in many industries but the main strengths of Reddit is its extremely engaged and passionate user base. As social media marketing evolves, I am sure that Reddit will evolve into a very powerful research data collection tool and will drive many major decisions.

Everybody wants to “fix” the status quo. No brainer? Heard a million times?

What happens next? The “we are fixing” status becomes a life time mantra with only incremental progress and there are simply too many distractions to enable a true Sea change or a paradigm shift in how companies operate.

We all want to do this, don’t we? No matter how large or small an organization is, no matter what Industry, the mantra always is “fix this” and “that’s broken”. Leaders engage consulting firms, create TASK groups, halt initiatives and dig into historical data to solve this but the reality continues to be that most organizations due to one reason or another are unable to invest the time to truly map out the big picture. It would be absolutely naïve of anyone to think this can be achieved overnight or there is one answer. This is part of the reason companies go into a whirlwind of symptom fixing and never quite get to the holy grail. Again, very simple to comprehend but it is amazing how often this is missed. The bottom line is, we are missing a baseline – a foundation – a definition of what our business has transformed to in the age digital communities. i.e. Understanding your Customer Centric Architecture of today and how it has transformed your business as you knew it.

Most Business/ Tech Leaders have heard this, recognized it but don’t know where to start. How to get answers to; what are we in the business of today? Where do we meet our consumers today? Where are they going?  Not what capabilities you want (that’s the fundamental mistake businesses make with a starting point), not what frills you want but “Who are you today and who do you want to be?. Let me elaborate on that a little bit. Several companies may have started out as manufacturing, finance, retail organizations 10s of years ago but the reality of many of these companies is that they have undergone transformations to where they cease to be and flow like they used to owing to several factors but primarily to digital innovation and the changing landscape of consumer definition.  For example most financial organizations have now become automation and data driven companies that think less like insurance companies or hedge funds and more like statistical and decision engines that are influenced by everything from changing definition of customer, CRM, meteorological data to terrorism alerts. Retail organizations have transformed from pure selling organizations to customer behavior analytics engines where everything starts from and ends with the customer including what they want, where they want it and how to provide it as well as what to measure towards their next purchase. Most companies conduct studies and assessments and jump to BPM or technical architecture based on their assumptions of reality. No wonder there still remains a huge gap between business expectations and technical delivery.  IT and business are no longer siloes; they have to and should operate as one entity to deliver one result.

What is key therefore is to define who the company is and lay a framework or an architectural vision for how the company should truly strategize and operate in this digital renaissance – a rebirth that will keep changing based on massive shifts and innovations in the world – like the next internet or social media. A baseline understanding also keeps at bay distractions and fads owing to the awareness of Who are we? Where are we headed?

It sounds fairly simple right? Bring in resources/ consultants, create a big picture, layout a roadmap. Albeit this approach gets you a bunch of excels and PowerPoints but what are they worth? How relevant are they?

In the early days, Internet Marketing would conjure up charming images of David valiantly fighting Goliath. In recent times however, that fable doesn’t seem to have a happy ending. Digital is no longer considered as a guerrilla marketing spend, but an accepted norm in marketing budgets of companies. Global trends indicate digital spend has increased by over 30% of overall advertising budget in the last three years and has crossed over $140B in 2015 (Techcrunch), with search and display ads almost evenly split.

With the rise of internet businesses, businesses are now having to compete with Global counterparts at a more localised scale than ever before. For instance, a local realtor might have to compete with AirBnB or the local cab company might have to compete with Uber. Given the hyper-growth nature of these businesses, large amounts of advertising dollars are being spent to prioritise scale over profits. ROI seems to have shifted to user registrations and active users than revenue. And it is without a doubt that majority of their advertising budget will be spent online.

What does this mean to small businesses?

For starters, digital is no longer an afterthought. Needless to say, businesses will ramp up advertising spends. But, that could be a bloody battle, given that they will have to compete with much larger budgets. A smarter approach would be to compete on local expertise and culture. Small businesses have been aping social behaviour way before it was online. Think about it. You walk into your local coffee shop, the barista greets you, s/he knows your drink, you exchange conversations and go about your day.

There is an inherent trust and knowledge in the aforementioned transaction that larger businesses, hitherto inanimate and cold, have tried to mimic through social media and internet marketing (closing the customer feedback loop). Consider also, the fact that small businesses understand local trends far more intimately than other competing businesses. Given their access to advertising dollars, larger businesses are less prioritised to innovate (a reasonable premise). If small businesses shift some of the conversations and expertise online, they can extend beyond patrons to local communities and beat the Goliaths at Internet Marketing.

The game is afoot.

I have been a stand-up comedy performer for a few years now. Over the years, I have known many people who got into this art form and either stopped after sometime or became extremely successful. The key difference between the ones who have become successful and the ones who did not make the cut has been that the successful ones have followed a strategic marketing plan to promote themselves and incrementally built their following, engaged their audience and gathered enough social proof to propagate them to the next level. In the last decade, the rise of Internet has enabled small time upcoming performers to gain traction and become popular without backing of big Hollywood agents and managers. Justin Bieber is one such example!

I had an opportunity to speak to a few of my friends across India and Canada about the Internet marketing strategies that they followed to understand what what worked for them. I collated all their responses and observed some common principles that can be used by anyone who is looking to promote himself as a performer on social media. This blog is mainly addressed to upcoming performers and not to performers who already have established agents and managers.

These are my top 5 insights!

1. Target high number of likes on Facebook fan page

A Facebook fan page establishes social proof. There is no better way to demonstrate social proof as an upcoming performer than having a high number of likes on your Facebook fan page. This can be achieved by sharing self-written content, images and video snippets of your performances. I was repeatedly told that High quality videos always get the most amount of likes. An alternate way of doing this is by re-sharing content so people visit your page.

A key benefit of of having a high number of likes on Facebook is that all you need to do is direct show producers and booking agents to the page where you have built your social proof. This offsets the fact that they have not heard or seen you before.

And we all know how valuable it is to get stage time in major clubs as an upcoming performer!! . This really helps!

2. High Quality Video/Picture matters

One of my good friend (Kanan Gill) who is now an Indian YouTube sensation learnt this the hard way early in his career. He would toil hard and create extremely good content but failed to put as much efforts on high quality production for his videos as he truly believe that the consumers watched his videos for content and not the cosmetics. His initial efforts in video making resulted in him having little to no viewers. Just when he was about to give up he met someone in a backstage of an event who had professional recording equipment. As they had sometime to kill, they compiled a quick video in matter of an hour and shared it online and this video went viral. The most amazing part about this video was that the content was way inferior to all that of his other videos. He immediately realized the value of high quality production and invested in a professional crew. This resulted in him becoming India’s top 10 YouTube sensations in the coming months.

3. Establish channels for content distribution

You may make amazing videos on YouTube or make really good memes on Facebook or say really clever stuff on Twitter but all that is of no use if your friends are the only ones looking at it. Though some friends may share your content, its not a sustained approach for establishing long term following. The solution is to reach out and establish relationships with content distributors. The best example in comedy space is 9GAG.com and Buzzfeed.com. Once you recognize and build these relationships, an easy way to establish a greater reach to your content is achieved since these sites have millions of already engaged followers. This method is much more effective than the approach to “boost post” on Facebook in terms of both reach and cost.

4. Believe in the theory of reciprocity

Reciprocity is really important in the entertainment industry specially because the environment is both hostile and cut-throat. It is always important to support your peers by sharing their content and dropping a word of appreciation for them on social media and it is also important to reciprocate when someone else does the same to you. The common theme I have observed in people who are able to successfully market themselves on social media is that they always believe in growing as a team than individually. The basic principle is that if you enable other people to gain a following, you get a following in return.

5. Engage continuously

Finally, once you are successful in gaining a huge following on social media and getting good visibility and acknowledgement for your content, its important to keep your fan base engaged without letting the quality of your content dip. In my conversations, I heard a lot of stories where performers gained a following and just to keep the fan base engaged, they constantly shared low quality content and this jeopardized their whole career. On the other end of the spectrum, performers were so bothered about quality that they did not frequently generate content and that was equally bad. So the trick is to establish that happy middle ground where you are generating quality content on a periodic basis and unfortunately no-one seems to know how to quantify this metric. Maybe that’s why its called “Arts” !

Last year when I visited Taiwan, I was taken aback by the multi-cultural environment and the vibrancy of the city Taipei, However, as an average tourist, its not very hard to notice that the businesses are still getting accustomed to the cross-cultural dynamics since the city was recently opened up to international tourism. In this context, I thought, it would be interesting to explore some of the best practices that the industries such as hospitality and services that are most impacted by increased tourism could follow so as to stay competitive and gain the greater market shares.

In this context, I have decided to review the article “Facebook as international e-marketing strategy for Taiwan Hotels”. This article explains a study conducted on the e-marketing strategies for 5 major Taiwan hotels and recommends specific actions in order to implement an e-marketing strategy using Facebook. Further analysis of this article enabled me to establish certain best practices that could be used for any hotel that aims to implement a global e-marketing strategy.

Study Methodology

Owing to the staggering increase in number of tourists coming into the city, Top hotels in Taiwan saw a big increase in number of foreign visitors. However, the hotels didn’t have a clear strategy to attract and spread the word-of-mouth through these foreign visitors in order to have greater brand recognition. This was important as various research reports suggested that about 65% of business travelers and 64% of leisure travelers internationally use online methods to learn about and book hotels in Taiwan.

The study focused on 6 top hotels in Taiwan and analyzed their usage of social media (mainly Facebook ) . The study focused on the following areas

• How the hotels used Facebook to communicate and spread offers to influence sales
• How well have the hotels succeeded in communicating and spreading marketing offers using Facebook
• How do intervening factors explain international e-marketing success.
• How Hotels can expand Facebook use as a manner of widening their international network.

Analysis of issues

The study highlighted a lot of positive strategies that the Hotels were following in order to get better user engagement and following but the study found three specific areas of challenges that most of the Hotels had to overcome to implement an effecting social media strategy.

1. Language: Most of the Facebook pages were constructed in simplified Chinese language that was friendly to neighboring countries but majority of the international customers were coming from USA and UK. Though the Facebook has a language translate option, the marketing messages in translated language don’t have a similar impact on the user. Hence it was impetrative to have a strategy that could appeal to both Chinese and English speakers. Also about half these hotels did not even show up when searched for them using a profile that had English language setting.

2. Engagement using content: Among the Hotels in the study, there were only 2 Hotels that had a healthy engagement from the user base. The content published by other hotels were not being liked or commented on by the user base so these hotels had to find a way to increase the interactivity on their pages.

3. Frequency of posts: At least 2 hotels, though had a sizeable following, were not engaging the users enough through frequent publishing. They would only many 4-5 posts a month. The gap between the posts was a problem because it indicates disengaged fan base.

It was established that hotels in Taiwan should concentrate on 2 areas to optimize Facebook as a marketing tool. Language was the most important criteria. The article provides 3 alternatives to solve this problem

• Create separate but identical fan page with one page set in English
• Using Facebook API’s to provide translate option within the same page.
• Using third party service such as Facebook connect to provide translation service

In my perspective, though the first option is attractive, it would involve a lot of overheads in terms of maintaining and updating the page, specially considering that the objective is to increase the published post, so I think the second option is a good way to enhance global exposure for companies that find themselves in such a position. Secondly such businesses could follow an approach where the content shared is more visual thereby eliminating language barriers.

The article also mentions that the hotels that had a good engagement on their page were sharing content that were designed to generate discussion and engagement rather than just promote the hotel. In my perspective, this is the approach that should be followed by rest of the hotels too. However, it can be challenging for a hotel to appeal cross-culturally to its fan base but by creating content on aspects that could appeal globally, e.g.: Food, luxury and travel the hotels could be effective in addressing generically to its fan base.

Key Takeaways

There are many important takeaways from this article by looking at it from a perspective of a hospitality business in an emerging market trying to establish a global presence. It can be interpreted that some of the best practices to follow to establish a Facebook presence is as follows:

• It’s important to use the brand logo as the profile image. It’s mentioned in the article that some hotels were using the pictures of the building as profile images but if they used the logo, they will promote brand recognition and brand loyalty will follow.
• The content has to foster discussion and engagement on the page. Businesses have to prevent themselves from using the Facebook page as a mere Advertising tool.
• Language is very important while creating cross-geography content. Reliance on Google/Facebook translate function is bad because the messages don’t have the same impact. The content must be created in the language of the addressable market and its important for brand to invest in this activity.
• Brands can score themselves against their competition on the following metrics to evaluate their current practices:
  • Presence in Facebook
  • Features selected
  • Quality and volume of content
  • Aesthetics and visual quality
  • Network scope/ reach
  • Interaction quality
  • Language use

Bibliography

Hsu, Y.-L. (2012). Facebook as International emarketing strategy for Taiwan Hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management , 10.

Appendix – Analysis of current Facebook usage by Hotels in Taiwan.

Current Facebook usage by Hotels in Taiwan