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.

 

The Molson launched bear campaign called “I am Canadian” in Europe this summer. A fridge full of free beer sit on the street corner, locked. What will unlock the fridge? It will only open if a Canadian passport was inserted. The idea of swiping my passport through a vending machine is fascinating and wondrous for me, regardless what reward i will get out of it.

Molson emphasized on framing their brand image as patriotic, and apparently they have done a great job raising their brand awareness and proud patriotism. Why did Molson chose Europe as their first destination? I think, first of all, European countries are one of the top priorities for tourist destination. Also, many Canadian immigrants are from European countries, and a lot of them travel back to Europe to visit families and friends.  Therefore, millions of Candians travel to Europe every summer. Nevertheless, the top four countries with the most beer consumptions are all in Europe: Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, and Ireland. And the fifth one is Canada. As a result, Europe should defiantly be the first destination for this marketing campaign.

I love this campaign, and especially the ending of the youtube marketing campaign clip as one Canadian traveller with Canadian flag on his bag pack holds a bottle of Molson’s Canadian beer in hand, longing for his home country. Everyone will be homesick at some point when away from home, and Molson brings the reason why you need to be proud of being Canadian. “Here is being proud of where you from”

It is definitely  one of my favourite ad campaigns!

 

PS. The clip is a little staged tho. Not every Canadian traveling has a bag with Canadian flag on.

 

 

Ads are coming to Instagram, the company officially announced early this month.

According to its press release, Instagram will slowly feeds ads which users might be interested, but not necessarily follow.

According to your interests, Instagram will push selective Ads, that users might not follow , onto users’ news feed. These ads, which will be both image or video based will first come from only a small number of brands. However, users have the option to hide and dislike the ads they do not like, and provide feedback.

On the other hand, Instagram was acquired by Facebook last April with 1 billion dollars,  and Facebook announced last month that they are testing a new video feature with small group of users, too. When scrolling through their news feed, the video will automatically starts playing, but without audio. Only when the users click on play, the audio will come out. It is reasonable to believe that Facebook is using Instagram as a testing ground for future mobile ads marketing. While the number of social media users are increasing at steady speed, many marketers have laid their eyes on this huge consumer market and potential its potential marketing channel.

However, it is still unknown how well Instagram is going to tackle this. There is definitely some resistance at the beginning. As an Instagramer myself, i would not mind having ads on my feeds since it takes less than a second to bypass the ads i don’t like, but it really depends on the quality and relevance of these ads.  When i told this friends to my friends who are frequent Instagram users, they feel annoyed and skeptical about this marketing strategy and wonder how people would react when random ads  appearing on their feeds.

It is a big challenge for Instagram because it is a tradeoff between revenues from marketing services and users satisfaction. I am looking forward to seeing how Instagram is going to handle this.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/instagram-to-add-ads-to-its-feeds/article14685140/

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the last blog post, I talked about how small businesses use the news feed, moments, to market their product. Some might argue that the target consumer base is still limited as one can only push photos to their friends, and thus generating new client base is difficult. Also, the authenticity and reliability of these business is quite limited because it got no business license nor legal credential to prove its authenticity.

So, WeChat delivered another function which is called “Public Platform” where companies, public figures, and institutions can register for an official WeChat account with ID verification . Their  authentication act as a product warranty for consumers. All users with authentication will get a “V” beside their display picture.

 

 

 

If WeChat Moment where like Facebook where users can see feeds from other friends, the Public Platform is the mirror image of twitter where users can follow individual whom they are interested and get tweets from them. For example, the Chinese Central Television (CCTV) has its official WeChat account where it can feed the latest news to its followers. Some popular Public Platforms have millions of followers and the marketing effect works as well, if not better, as marketing with twitter.

I am a intense WeChat user who follows a lot different public platforms such as my favourite online clothing stores, local news, interesting shops, restaurants, and many celebrities. The official clothing account will notify me if there is a new collection coming in or if there is a sale going on on a regular basis. And because they come as messages and i cannot miss it,  I was always up-to-date with their events.  By having Public Platform, users receive instant messages about companies’ most up-to-date promotion events, new products and other related news. Many companies use this platform as direct B2C marketing channel. 

At the companies’ end, WeChat marketing is every effective and it is just a few clicks away. It is the same idea of tweeting on twitter. The marketing team just need to feed informations and photos on their end with a few clicks, the information will appear on the users’ end instantly. Public Platform is used as authorized marketing engine where it enables companies to reach a vast number of consumers directly with marketing materials. Its extremely effective nowadays and it is becoming a frequent marketing channel in China. It generated over billions dollars of indirect and direct sales, and most companies start to use this platform.

How big is the user base of WeChat? Here are some numbers:

Users: 400 million

Age range: All age group

Geographic Area: Global

 

WeChat users are growing dramatically and its marketing channel is evolving rapidly as well. I believe it will become one of the most frequent used marketing strategy for many small business in the near future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It you are using a smartphone, its likely that you are using, or at least, heard of this mobile messaging app called “WhatsApp”. WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. WhatsApp Messenger is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia. Because WhatsApp Messenger uses the same internet data plan that you use for email and web browsing, there is no cost to message and stay in touch with your friends. It was launched in September 2011.

WeChat, the Chinese version of WhatsApp, launched in January 2011, slightly earlier than the launch of WhatsApp. At the beginning stage, the functionality of the two apps was basically the same: messaging, photo sharing, and voice messaging. The idea of “free” and instant texting and sharing photos quickly captured a large user base, and the two apps became one of the most popular apps in app store.

As time went by, WeChat started to differentiate itself from its competitor, WhatsApp, by adding additional functions to its app. Some of the functions were innovative and eye-catching. For example, one of the biggest and most differentiating features of WeChat was ” Moments”. Moments works the same as Fecebook news feeds where it enables users to upload photos and status onto their own profile (moments) and allows friends to like and comment on photos.  One interesting factor of the function is that the user can classify his or her friends into different category, and share moments according to category. For instance, if the users were to post some photos which might be inappropriate for their boss and colleagues to see, they could classify them into a category, and avoid having the photos to appear on their moments moment board. This feature is not only innovative, but also extremely convenient and useful. It a marketing sense, it allows marketers (us) to target the specific segment of audience. 

 

As more and more people started to us WeChat, some smart marketers recognize the potential of this new marketing channel “WeChat Marketing” . People start to promote all sorts of products on their moments to their “target categories”. You can literally sell anything on Wechat: small products from facial products, clothing, shoes, designer bags to big objects like houses and cars. A lot food bloggers and restaurant owners also use this platform to promote their food to their friends. Another handy feature within WeChat was the “sharing moment” function. It allows users to repost somebody else’s moment onto their on moment feeds. This online sharing community is the virtual form of “word of mouth” marketing. It created a huge network of B2B, B2C, C2C for direct marketing.

 

Some examples:

 

 

This US-based Chinese fashion buyer sells designer handbags, clothing, and shoes on her Wechat Moment.

 

 

 

 

Although its all in Chinese, but we can still tell this friend of mine is selling facial and hair product on her WeChat moment.

 

WeChat moment created a brand new marketing channel for small business to expand their market and increase their brand awareness. In the next blog, i will talk more about the marketing platform for bigger companies and public figures.

 

 I found this news quite hilarious as i could imagine the look on my face if i were the ‘lucky’ one to get the message on the cap.

Coco-Cola’s combination of French and English words under its bottle caps as part of a fun game for customers ended disastrously this week when an Edmonton woman unscrewed her Vitaminwater and saw the message “YOU RETARD” under the cap.

The consumers were supposed to collect caps with one English word and one French word to combine funny sentences. The word ” retard” in French means “late” so the sentence were suppose to mean ” you late” .

If I were the one getting this cap, I would be pretty shocked as I wouldn’t believe my eyes for a second, but I would give it a laugh and forget about it. Unfortunately, the Edmonton woman who got this cap, Loates, has a 11-year-old sister who suffered from Cerebral Palsy and is cognitively delayed. The word “retard” meant a lot more to their family than others. Her family felt offensive and wrote a letter to Coco-Cola asking for explanation and apology. Coco-Cola was very responsive and serious about this issue as they immediately apologized to Loates’s Family and cancelled the entire campaign.

Was the campaign a total failure?

I personally did not think it was a total failure because, first of all, Loate’s case was rather an individual case. Although I totally understood why they felt offensive and I felt extremely pathetic for them to go through such incident, the percentage of people getting this cap and their family members being handicap at the same time is relatively low.I believe people’s reaction to this incident is highly correlated to their personal background and family condition.  I surveyed a couple of my friends to see how they look at this. They were all indifferent of the message and found it quite funny. They all gave a laugh and raised question towards Coco-Cola, the biggest beverage company worldwide, and doubted how they could have done such careless action. I didn’t think the campaign was a total failure because before the survey, none of them realized this campaign and its public attention was minimal.

Even though this incident embarrassed Coco-Cola’s marketing team, but it brought this campaign into public eyes and raised brand awareness at the same time. The marketing effect might not have been so significant if the incident was not brought up. Also, Coco-Cola’s public relation team did a very good job in responding Loates’s concern, showing their apologies and proving corporate social responsibility. Right after receiving the letter from Loates,  Coco-Cola’s PR team post apology letter and remedies on their twitter and Facebook account. Their action was acknowledged by both Loates and other consumers.

Some people might felt this campaign offensive and inappropriate, but it would definitely be the one for them to remember in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/offensive-phrases-on-bottle-caps-prompt-coca-cola-to-cancel-canadian-promotion/article14427173/