While everyone is busy talking about the recent Twitter IPO event, something else about Twitter caught my attention. The title says “You Can Now Book Hotels Through Twitter”, which is a bit misleading as i would think we can actually “purchase” something on twitter. Thats not true. What is happening is that, some brands often provide shortcut to customer service and more personalized support through the platform of twitter. These brands constantly monitor activity on profiles and answer questions promptly as a way to increase customer service and satisfaction. For example, Delta Air lines launched @DealtaAssist twitter feed to answer questions and provide customer support.

Monitoring isn’t a fresh topic, and many brands know how to do it well. However, the idea of actual “selling” on twitter is just not there yet. However, some travel brands are now looking into new ways to take advantages of social media platform. For example, Loews Hotel are now accepting room bookings completely through Twitter, removing the need for an online booking portal. Users can simply @Lowes_hotels and use the hashtags #bookloews to communicate with online booking agent and sort out the room and payment details.

I personally had a similar experience with Facebook early this year. I was trying to book a hostel for my stay in Taiwan, and my friend told me this great hostel she stayed at while she was in Taiwan. So she gave me their Facebook page where i could find all the room types available and their rates. Then i could talk to the owner of the hostel directly to confirm booking. However, i don’t think this style of selling is scalable or cost effective. Because if i did not know about the hostel from my friend, i wouldn’t have trusted them. Nevertheless, it is only for smaller business where it is easier to personalize each order and answer to each question asked.

However, i do have to admit that the mobile sales have risen dramatically from 3.4B in 2011 to 13.6 in 2012, suggesting the sales on mobile devices is sky rocking. It’s a smart, low risk move on Lowes part to spend a little time developing a sales channel on Social media. Although i think this form of “selling” is still unscalable and inefficient, it does signal a big splash in the B2B and C2C world.  Its still unclear how Twitter Booking Service and sales portal will go about, but it will be a big buzz if all the structure and regulations were set in stone. I will definitely overthrow the traditional sales model and bring great impact on the E-Commerce world.

I anxiously look forward to Twitter’s next step regarding its more advanced sales portal and booking system.

 

 

 

As more and more people use their mobile devices as their primary device to obtain information, marketers and advertisers are keen to understand the constantly changing mobile behaviour of their customers. Research says that there is 72% people using smartphones, while the figure is only 62% in the U.S.

So, the ComScore Inc. came up with this technology that could monitor and measure online traffic and gather data for further analysis. They could use these data to identify the demographics of visitors, when and how many people visit the site in a particular day. They could also summarize these information into a more easy-to-understand one that companies can use to know their traffic pattern and whether their online campaigns are reaching out to their customers.

Hoping to better understand their customers, many U.S and U.K companies are using this system to track down their customer mobile activity. While I was feeling like this system is somewhat similar to Google Analytics which basically does the exact same thing, mobile-measurement system is what differentiates ComScore.

While Google Analytics could only provides data over visits that are done on laptops, mobile measurement system could measure actives on any mobile device. Mobile measurement are based on a survey panel of 3,000 to 5,000 Canadians that roughly represent the population. They would allow the research firm to tract their daily activity on their smartphones and tablets, and report their mobile behaviours through surveys. This valuable data will give companies full picture and landscape of effectiveness of their campaign. It also gives direction in which companies should improve on.

However, it comes down to several potential threats and problems:

1. Using sample of 3,000 to 5,000 Canadian, how do we make sure they are representative enough to give an comprehensive data?

2. How would these set of data satisfy the different needs of every company who has different intention to purchase this system?

3. If this method of data-collecting were to expand, how does privacy issue come about?

 

There are definitely some tradeoffs between monitoring and privacy. Third party monitoring and information sharing is nothing new in the digital market, but third party monitoring on mobile devices might be something advertisers need to look out for. No one likes the feeling of being spied on or peeped at.

I am pretty sure our smartphones have built in tool that track our daily activities, just like iCloud stores some important content for Apple users. How can marketers and advertisers take advantages of this tremendous amount of data and make sense of it in the marketing world is what i want to keep an eye out for.

 

 

 

 

 

The brewer company has found success in an experiment that ties the social network’s Facebook Advertising with city’s temperature. It was a marketing campaign Molson Brewing Co. came up with this summer to examine the correlation between weather and beer sales, and the ties between social media advertising and cost-per-click rate for advertiser.

The amount of time people spend on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets is way more than television and other traditional advertising channels nowadays. Research shows that the  marketing budget spending in social network platforms will increase 35.3% this year as there is more emphasis on social network marketing.  Therefore, companies have to think of alternative ways to better target and reach out to their consumers.

Basically, Molson Brewing Co came up with a digital advertising tool for two of its products that marketed heavily in the summer. The tool was built into the programming interface of the online forecasting service Weather Underground. Using the service’s coding, it checked into the weather of eight Canadian cities every 15 minutes. When the weather was above 23 degrees and sunny, it triggered delivery of Facebook mobile ads for the products that mentioned the weather – for example, “Summer heat? Simply say ‘Cider.’”

The ad, which was run for a month, tested those weather-targeted ads against generic ads.

Result showed that the click-through rate on these ads were higher than those generic ones. Also, it achieves a lower cost-per-click rate for advertiser as there was higher engagement. Specifically, the CPC rate for Molson’s weather specific ads was 67% lower than generic ones. Nevertheless, 93% people would share the ad as they spoke to how hot it was outside.

The result was outstanding. The reason why Molson’s marketing team chose to run this campaign in the summer was  because they already noticed the strong correlation between hot weather and beer consumption. Furthermore, they also realized that people tend to share weather-related feeds on Facebook during heat waves.

What can we learn from this campaign? First of all, user generated content on social media platform will be more and more important in marketing and advertising as it becomes the main stream of how people express and input their opinion these days. Nevertheless, by understanding the trend in beer consumption and correlation between social network and city’s temperature, Molson launched the advertisement at the right time (summer, where beer consumption is high), and at right place (Facebook, where people incline to talk and complain about hot weather). Last but not least, the concept of cost-per click rate was introduced in class. We familiarized with this concept by running google adwords for our final project too. We still have a very high CPC rate, low Click through rate and impression rate. The Molson experiment inspired me that maybe I could improve the CTR by running the ad during the period that my product is most needed. Instead of running the ads for a long time and receive a little CTR and low impression, we could do more research on when and where our product is most needed, and design our adword campaign tailor to that need. For example, we could emphasis more and market heavily for our nutritionist consulting services during flu season, where people might need nutritionist consulting service the most.

 

We’re always looking for smarter ways to target users.

 

 

 

At least for me, Coca Cola’s commercials have always the most creative and influential. Their advertisements were almost unavoidable in marketing classes. So, my attention was drawn to this Coca Cola Creates a Park campaign in the E-Marketing class today, and i have to admit, it brightened my day again. It has some of most typical Coca Cola elements: joyful music, colourful objects, smiling faces, heartwarming, and some free coke. It fell right under my expectation of being a Coca Cola advertisement.

It was similar to the Molson Beer fridge campaign where Molson also used the concept of fun commercial. However, the whole thing feels just a little too perfect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not every Canadian travel aboard has a Canadian flag on them. The idea is that, despite of heartwarming surface Coca Cola trying to deliver, the combination of individuals, actions, and the settings just make me feel its too good to be real. How real and genuine are these commercials? Are the individuals actors brought by ad agency? It would make me less skeptical and cynical if Coca Cola incorporates more user-generated content. For instance, locate the vending machine and the ‘park’ in front of office building in busy downtown Vancouver. People can participate in the advertisement making process.  It will definitely create tons of buzz in media and bring happiness closer to every individual. Although it sounds like a better and more genuine marketing plan, it would be way costly and effortful. There is going to be so many unpredictable circumstances and breakouts that are out of control.

The question left for advertiser is how to find the pivot point between a genuine and effective commercial.