Category: Comm464

I’m not a customer of AE. However, I was impressed by their social media campaign when I read this article on Mashable.

AE has put great effort on social media in past years. They almost cover all the major social media channels, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, Linkedin and Google+. Unlike their competitors, they are available for their customers on all social platforms.

AE launch the campaign AmEx by first setting up their Facebook and Twitter account, focusing on providing service for cardholders’ questions and inquiries. Their Twitter account @AskAmex has over 348,000 followers and Facebook account has over 2.4 million fans. These accounts are setup for serving unique value that’s shareable and create seamless digital experiences that surprise and delight their customers. Since the beginning, American Express has built its social strategy on service, and it continues to improve its implementation by taking in user feedback.

With AmEx Sync, cardholders can enjoy exclusive merchant deals by syncing their cards with their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. No coupon is necessary, just the linkage and a qualifying purchase. This is the concept of “card linking” on e-Commerce. When customers setup their credit card to associate with their social media account, they will automatically benefit from all the deals and discount when they use their AE card.

“AmEx first launched Sync with Foursquare in June 2011. In July, it added Facebook in on the fun, launching its “Link, Like, Love” app — after linking an AmEx card, a user can then access deals based on brands that he or she “likes” on Facebook. Partnering with the likes of Whole Foods, McDonald’s and Best Buy, AmEx announced that after linking an AmEx card to their Twitter accounts, cardholders can tweet strategic hashtags to load deals onto their cards. With the hashtag #AmexWholeFoods, for example, a cardholder receives a $20 statement credit when he or she purchases $75 or more at Whole Foods using his or her synced card.”

AE cleverly combine their service onto social media. They not only promote the traditional 1 side or 2 sides communication, but also actively response to customers’ interest, encouraging customers to experience all the deals and promotion. When there are more interaction between company and customers anytime anywhere, the campaign will lead to great success.

Social media has been huge part of our life of stay connected with our friends and community. It’s now a powerful tools for business in the field of advertising and public relations. But there are always downsides for technologies or products. Learning how to use social media in a right way is crucial for business.

The first awareness is argument. Social media is usually public platform. When there is one customer not happy about your product or service, they might complain through the channel of social media. When this kind of problems constantly happen, it will result in negative impact among the customers. DO NOT argue with customer on social media, try to put it off public eyes. Tell your customers that you will solve the problem if they call you or email you. Other customers will observe that you put effort to solve the problems. If you argue, it’s never going to portray your business in the best light. It can take a long time to recover if you become defensive on social media and sometimes it’s hard to recover at all.

There are businesses out there that when confronted by customers on their social media accounts, they fail to address any issues. Even if those businesses try to solve the issue, it might come in a vague response. Once this happens, there will be a impression for other social media followers that the company is ignoring the problem. Therefore, rest of the customers are going to ignore the problem as well. It’s deadly for company that they are not hearing from their customers.

Advertisement is overwhelming on social medias right now. It’s not a wise choice to oversell your product on social media. The problem is that people are sick of the desperate kind and no one wants to deal with an over pushy business who cares more about making a sale than they do building engaging relationships with their customers via social media. It’s important to lead your customers learn about your products and service, trust and impressed your brand.

Social media strategy need to be carefully practiced and maintained. It’s a powerful tool, so let’s use it right! 🙂

The link of the article 

Nowadays mobile device including smart phones and tablet are replacing the use of desktop computers in people’s daily life. Especially for business site, mobile device helps people obtain information whenever and wherever they need. Since it’s the next trend of eCommerce, how do companies take advantage of it to improve their business. I read an article about evaluating mobile eCommerce site. It taught me some idea of how to make a better mobile site.

After I was impressed by Starbucks’ iPhone App, I notice QR code is the key technology to achieve this service. Then soon I look into some web pages craving for more knowledge about it. QR codes have been around since the early ’90s, but only with the widespread adoption of smartphones and barcode-scanning apps have customers been able to easily access QR codes in significant numbers. I found an article on Mashable about 10 creative way to use QR code in marketing.

1. Reinventing the Shopping Experience. QR code is placed around public transit in Korea. People can scan the QR code poster on the wall while they are waiting for the bus. The products they scan will deliver to their home which will saving a lot of time.

2. Enhancing the User Experience. Some museum and art gallery place QR codes next to exhibits to direct visitors to online or audio tours, or to provide more in-depth information.

3. Streamlining the Customer’s Visit. Just like I mentioned in the above post. Starbucks has use this technology to create a personal experience for customers. Rather than waiting in a long line to pay, customers can now integrate their pre-loaded card and their phone app to pay more quickly, as well as learn more about the products and stores.

4. Noting the Things You Enjoy. This is about obtain information more easily. For example, you don’t need to copy down or remember the name of a wine that you like in the restaurant. Simply scan the QR code on the bottle, and you will be about to read more information about the wine such as  the vineyard, the grape, and ordering details.

5. Providing Real-Time Information.QR codes can take customers to real-time updates anywhere where there is a constant flow of information, for instance, train stations, bus stops, department store sales, live events, restaurant specials or airline booking.

6. Help Your Customers Grow Their Businesses. Google identified over 100,000 businesses in the U.S. as “Favorite Places on Google,” based on Google users’ interactions with local business listings. Each business received a window decal with a unique QR code, which passersby could scan to find information about that business, read reviews, star the business as their favorite and much more.

First of all, I’m not a regular coffee drinker. As a traditional chinese, I would prefer tea instead. Therefore, usually I purchase tea in Starbucks. I used to go Starbucks 3-4 times a month. But one thing change my habit. My friend show me his personal Starbucks Card with his name on it. Starbucks Card works like other gift card for processing payment. People reload money in it and purchase their beverage in Starbucks later. After I saw the “cool” personal card, I decided to get one for myself.

When I have my own Starbucks Card, I realize it’s a lot more than I thought. I have to register my card associated with a new Starbucks account in order for the system to record my transactions. After I register, Starbucks send me emails about promotions and sometime they send me “free drink” coupon as well. Social media can’t be missed here, Starbucks is very active on social media. When they first promote a new drink, they will test the water among their loyal customers (which are those who registered their Starbucks card) and collect feedback from social media channels (such as Facebook and Twitter). The Starbucks Card acts as a tool for marketer to obtain information and examine their target market. In the process of registration, selecting coffee or tea preference can also collect value information for marketer.

Another thing I want to talk about is the mobile app. Starbucks has a brillant smart phone app in my point of view. Through the app, I can customize my own drink in the app, and when I’m at the store, staff in Starbucks can simply scan the QR code of my drink without making any possible mistake. Furthermore, I can customize my favorite set of “combo” as well and make it into a QR code. Also I can make drink for my friend and reload money to their Starbucks Card, after the QR code is produced, send it through Facebook or Twitter to my friend, then they can purchase my customize “gift” for them. There is job section for users who want to work in Starbucks as well.

Overall, Starbucks is taking great advantage to other competitor in the market by using eMarketing technique, which I believe is the next trend for business.

I was glancing through Mashable Business for some news. Soon I was attracted by one post that has comparably much more response than others. Usually when I visit Yahoo, the banner Ad is the most thing that annoys me when I’m first in the page. The banner Ad is often made by Flash and when I’m not careful enough to avoid clicking on the Ad (some of them are moving on the web page), it will directly take me to another page. And most of the time, the cross button that close to the Ad is extremely difficult to find and position to click. This certainly prevents me from going on Yahoo anymore.

In this article, the ad, “created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, feature Schroeder, the Peanuts character, at his piano.” This ad is posted on The New York Times homepage, which is kind of awkward. A headline asks “Help Schroeder with his big performance.” You will need to use the keyboard of your computer to play the music (any key would work, but have to follow the tempo of the music). There is a metre on the side to tells you whether you are playing too fast or too slow.

This approach allows the viewers interact with the website positively, and with the high involvement, viewers will tend to think that the website is interesting. And in this ad the piano music are “played” by viewers, viewers will gain satisfaction from visiting the website as well. Marketers can use this strategy to integrate with their ad without just “telling” but encourage viewers to participate.

I believe many of the teenagers have played Angry Bird, and I learn from the news that Angry Bird is planning to open a theme park in China recently. I was surprised simply just because how successful Angry Bird becomes. In my memory, Angry Bird is an iPhone Application that was very popular two years ago. The unique background music and the simple ways of playing has gained huge amount of fans for Angry Bird around the world. Different but somehow similar with other top rated iPhone game in the market, Angry Bird dramatically increase its popularity and soon appear in not only digital but reality.

Angry Bird was first released the game nto Apple’s iOS in December 2009, and after it quickly heat up among people. The toys of Angry Bird is produced, the official Rovio online store sells product of Angry Bird. After this, Angry Bird is not only available in iOS system, but develop on Facebook gaming, Google Chrome browser, gaming devices such as PSP and Android system. This helps Angry Bird captures ALL the gaming platform, deepen and widen the spread of this game. On the other hand, Angry Bird launch an animated series on TV platform. And one strategy I find is interesting that is Angry Bird cookbook, which is funny because it only contain egg dishes. In this years, Angry Bird continue to update their theme in different time period, such as valentine’s day, christmas and new year. Last and the most importantly, Angry Bird advertise in this year’s Super Bowl game in the animated film Rio of its

From the development of Angry Bird, we can see the expending strategy and how does this “attack” different market step by step, which I think can be a great example of E-Marketing.

Here is an interesting T-Mobile ad by Angry Bird.

I read an article about worldwide social network ad revenues on eMarketer. The growth of social network has been growing strongly and rapidly even since we noticed around 5 years ago. Along with the technology change, social networking affected many fields including marketing, IT, public relations etc. When most of us rely part of our life on smartphone, social network became a large part of it. People use their smartphone to login Facebook, Google+, Twitter when they have spare time. The whole world is more “integrated” now, tied up by connection of social network between people instantly and frequently. This huge market is now the “new land” for marketers and advertisers to fight in the coming days.

“eMarketer estimate that social network is set to grow nearly 50% in 2012, and advertisers will spend $7.72 billion on social network , this year’s growth will be even faster than in 2011. By 2014, eMarketer expects nearly $12 billion will go to social network advertising worldwide.”

Social network will tend to grow with the more hightech device produced, and more people will join this market because of the expending age range and simplified programming. In this growing market, Facebook, who is preparing for its IPO and estimated to be the most valuable company in the world is highly rely on social network for its advertisement, which occupied over 80% of its revenue. And of course Facebook has the largest share of the social network ad revenue in US which expected to be 71% this year. However, other social media will rise even more and seem to gain some of Facebook’s share in the coming years.

Although the growth of social network seems to slow down from the statistic, I believe there are still a lot of virtue in this field that needs to be discover or when the technology improve even more, social media will be better integrate with the technology in the future.

“TED” has been used as video source for few of my last courses but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I watched one of the presentation by Simon Senek in Comm464 class about leadership and business strategy. It was amazing, the charm of those speakers on TED fully amazed me. I looked into it regularly this semester, and it inspired me everytime I finished a presentation. Today I watch my prof, Ivan’s presentation on TED, and it also taught me a lesson.

Ivan’s speech is humor (I laughed when I hear Ivan first introduce his theory after the word “seriously” 🙂 ) and straight-forward (before the long formula for WOW calculation); it talked about how would a simple “WOW” change the business. For my understanding of the speech, wow happens when facts come up beyond expectation, OR from surprising and delighting events. The example that Ivan gave out was that he was “WOW”ed, when coworker from TED asked him what kind of coffee he wanted to drink in the morning. It’s the same senario that when we watch a point guard (usually shorter player) dunks in a basketball game. Positive surprise is very important for business that it can easily go beyond customers’ expectation. And from the “10-300% rule” from Ivan, 10% over customer’s expectation will endue triple chance to success. In summary, consistently providing surprise to customers will result “wow” effect to the business that impulse the positive response which is essential.

I have found an interesting article on “eMarketer” that fairly related to myself about marketing. Since iPhone has became part of my life (I believe to most of the people too in nowadays), I never notice that smartphone is replacing my TV and computer. I’m not a big fans of Super Bowl; however, I watch the NBA AllStar game last night. When I was watching the game, I’m holding my iPhone as well. I checked on statistic of the players using the NBA application, wrote Twitter about the game or looked on Facebook when it’s commercial time. Especially for basketball game, breaks tend to be long and frequent when the score is tight. When there was time out, all of my friends including me are using their smart phones! As I can see, the marketing focus has switched from TV commercial during game time onto smart phone, because nobody is watching TV!

“Google reported that 25% of searches done about this year’s Super Bowl ads the day before the game were performed on mobile devices. During the game, 41% of such searches were made via mobile.”

And according to a survey, “62% of millennials used their smartphone to text, while 57% trawled  Facebook from their smartphones (exactly my scenes) as they watch the game. Visiting Twitter was the third most popular smartphone activity, at 22%.”

It tells us, as marketer, even in the big games. Audiences’ attend will switch to a better options when they lose focus on one media. And since the media are so rich on different devices, marketers should properly adjust their focus on more efficient media combination. Further more, people might watch games or tv programs on their tablets and when these devices have developed more functional in the future, the commercial market will certainly move its weight to social network.