Social Marketing Tricks

Today I found a few interesting articles offering tricks in social media marketing. The first article was from Mashable and offered tricks that top brands utilize. (I thought it was relevant that in italics before the article started, author Wasserman noted that the post had also been published on American Express' OPENforum, a community based forum I have previously mentioned...) Wasserman goes on to identify three social marketing tips used by large brands that you could use too. 1. Becoming a passion brand. An example in this category is Nike, consistently highlighting the same underlying point: athletic achievement. This is a topic that all athletes are passionate about and can connect with on some level. The second tip comes in the form of becoming a personality brand, such as Skittles. Skittles does not have the same opportunity as Nike to attract passion but rather can utilize a stream of consciousness updating on outlets such as Facebook to drive involvement. One funny example of their posts is, "the frenemy of my frenemy is my enefriend. This entertains followers and comes off as witty and clever. The last tip from large brands is to be transparent. A good example of transparency comes from Microsoft, who regularly post blogs about current initiatives, etc. Transparency is highly valued among consumers and creates a certain level of trust.
Another excellent article I found today came from the Examiner regarding the idea that social media strength lies within content/audience, and not the viral factor. It is safe to assume that brands do not produce anything "ground-breaking", and as a result you can see that a good social strategy must be based on the content published and audience involvement. Viral videos are really quite random and short-lived, usually individual user generated, and do not seem to thrive in the big business social world. Instead social strategies should aim to strive in responsiveness and to publish information specific to the needs of your audience. Finally, this article states an interesting development- the circle of content life breakdown. In this model, there are three circles of reach for a brand. Circle 1 being your immediate family, followers, fans, etc., circle 2 being your family's connections, and circle 3 being the people that are unreachable to you but that circle 1 can share information to. The article also goes on to reiterate the importance of quality over quantity in posting and information sharing.
The final article I found for today from NDTV.com touches on a different subject, the risks of social media marketing. The prime example illustrated in this article is of the recent McDonald's hijacking of the Burger King Twitter account. The daunting task of managing a company's social media feeds is becoming more and more difficult, as hackers seek to complicate the entire process in a variety of ways. Hackers posted on the Burger King feed that they had been "sold to McDonald's". Wow, think of the implications here. This shows the importance of being a step ahead of hackers - you must have prepared statements for such emergencies, and be ready to react quickly. Public relations and corporate communications is a major part of the success equation today, and must be managed correctly.

I hope you enjoyed today's post or learned something new. See you next time.

Steffan Pedersen

Interesting Articles

Doing my weekly scanning of GoogleNews' "marketing" and "social media" articles I found a few intriguing ones this week to write about. First of all, PC World published an article regarding recent surveys done by Pew and GlobalWebIndex about social media platforms. It stated that whites are more inclined to user Pintrest, Twitter is mostly populated by African Americans and people who live in cities, Facebook has more women than men, and Instagram is most popular with adults under 30 years old. With surveys like this becoming readily available, just think of the marketing implications. Knowing this kind of stuff makes segmenting so much easier and you can really target whichever audience suits your product. Social media campaigns are undoubtedly becoming more and more specialized with these types of facts in mind. The article goes on to highlight more demographic information of the various social platforms. The most interesting statistic, in my opinion, was that 67% of internet users are active on Facebook (crazy!). The next article was from UK's Guardian about baby formula milk and how marketing promotions aimed at women are causing a decline in the number of women who naturally breast feed.  Gifts and samples are given out with misleading information about the nutritional benefits of formula as opposed to natural milk. This is illegal and in fact putting children at risk. It's horrible to think that through marketing and promotions a company can cause mothers to change their habits and attitudes towards such products. And the fact that they are publishing misleading information about what to feed newborns just for monetary gains is horrible. To them I say: let mothers make their own decisions, and be more careful about the information you publish. The last article I found was from Yahoo about recent hacks on Facebook, Twitter, and news websites. The attacks on Facebook and Twitter were not to hurt the sites, but to infiltrate user accounts and obtain email addresses, names, etc.  The hacks on the news sites were by a Chinese hacking team that wanted to control the sites' coverage of China. With overall technological knowledge increasing globally, attacks like this will continue and could potentially lead to the downfall of such sites if precautions are not taken. Facebook is an extremely powerful social site, and with over 1 billion users it is scary to think about someone hacking into it. Apologies for the randomness of topics covered today (especially the breast feeding). Hopefully you learned something or at least found this interesting.