Social media and big brands

Social media marketing is considered to one of the most important marketing techniques that exist in marketing today. Social media has revolutionised the way we do marketing it not only covers the traditional way of doing marketing and its features it brings along customer service and communication along with it which has changes the way people do things in marketing. It has made way for two way marketing. In traditional marketing where only the retailer would say and others would listen now consumers communicate with each other and brands are bound to listen.

But even with so much advancement in the world of marketing there are few big brands which have not changed the way they do marketing. They are still doing marketing the traditional way of television advertisements and catalogue supply for example brand like Woolworth and chadstone shopping centre don’t have a proper company managed fan pages on face book or any kind of marketing is done with the use of social media. Is it because they are already an established brand and don’t see any uses or don’t see social media bringing any kind of changes to the environment.

Reputation Management in Social Media Marketing:

Social media is the cost effective way of leading the brand in any direction the company would prefer.  Giant brands like   Pepsi has decided to switch from the traditional ads on TV in favor of social network promotion online. $20 million worth social media promotional campaign, which involves competitions, is their next plan. A paid social media campaign might set back up to $10,000.00 per tweet. But the whole point of using social media is to get exactly the same result without such big investment through effective campaign. Some strategies to develop an effective campaign are as follows:

 Set up a Facebook Account:

All social media campaigns begin with opening an account and following best practices to make sure that the new network is not  pushed away .Creating a Facebook Group and Fan Page for the product or service is the 1st step. ‘Don’t beat people over the head about it, but share useful content and build friendly networks and your reputation will take care of itself. If you do a good enough job of this you could even find that a few of your friends are prepared to put themselves on the line to defend your reputation.’

 Get a Twitter Account:

Twitter is another of the best reputation management tools of all social media platforms.   Different Twitter Search tools are efficient enough to monitor what people are saying about the brand. Addressing different comments based on their polarity is as well very easy if using the twitter tool. Building fantastic friend networks helps to define a honor line for the brand.. Twitter conversations are often indexed, hence, comments can be searched through the engines, and not just through 3rd party Twitter tools.

 Use Digg and You tube

Creating a story as well as arranging a newsworthy event to hit the first page of Digg, the half job is done.’ Online this is like making the front page of the NYTimes’. Then  to keep the buzz on for a while keep on posting interesting and participative videos on you tube . this tool will give the brand a continuous engagement of the audience.

Get Blogger to write Blogs:

Getting some popular bloggers to write about the brand gives a brand a good reputation as well.  It also generates continuous comments and engagements.  This tool can be utilized to get to the cognitive part of the audience as well to keep the buzz going.

 This is how even small companies can take the advantage of social media marketing by mixing and matching different tools to build their brand.  There are different measurement tools as well to measure the ROI  of the total investment as well such as streams of  comments both negative and positive, number of fans , number of views, etc and at the end the sales volume.

Business and social media tools

Lot of business exist on social media platforms, but not all of them know how to actually use that data or monitor the usage and use it to market their brand. Lot of brands do not have an idea what its fans are looking at in their page and have no idea what they want to meet their needs and make social media marketing working for them.

In a recent summit by social media experts the listed out various tools that could be used to make social media marketing easy. One of the tools was social bakers this can be use to get useful stats from social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. It is a paid service which monitors the brands Facebook page. But also provides with useful stats for free

Another such tool is kurrently, this allows you to monitor what information is being shared on the social media platforms in real time Companies can capitalize on just-in-time marketing and social CRM opportunities like never before by using this type of data.

Another important tool is to find out what is happening on the web or social platforms with regard to your brand or your competitors is to use blekko.  Here you can select the sites you want to search with Blekko. You can create “slashtags” for groups of URLs, friends, experts and communities and you can “slash in” what you want and “slash out” what you don’t want to search.

All this leads us to one question even with the existence of such tool why do the companies fail to manage their social media presence effectively and use it for their advantage. Is it the budget or do companies still believe in traditional advertising.

Google + and business

Google plus is a new addition to the world of social networking sites. Whilst there are lot of debates on if Google +will become a successful social networking site many marketers feel that it is a much better option for a business to markets its goods and services.

Lots of marketers feel that Google + will be more advantageous to the business than any other existing platform. They feel that just with the current features business will be able to do target t market activities and advertising using circles. With multiple video chat option or Hangouts it will allow to target with customers individually and provide a more interactive and personalised approach to problem solving and by using multiple chat option business will be able to conduct exclusive workshops or to roll out exclusive promotions to VIP customers.

Perhaps the most useful of all Google Plus’ features is +Sparks, which allows users to suggest news stories, videos, photos, and more to specific users or groups rather than automatically posting it to everyone. This allows for targeted marketing opportunities by focusing on those users who would find your content most useful.

All of these advantages even before Google + has yet to launch its much advanced options specifically designed for business.

Lot of social media experts feel that users of Facebook have become more attached to the platform to notice or change to Google + or any other platform. But all this said and done there is also a saying that when lot of good things exists in something sooner or later it is bound to gain audience. Will this be the fate of Google + only time will tell.

Has Facebook Gone too far with its changes

Facebook is a social networking website which allows people to communicate with friends and family and share some of the experiences with them and the best part about it was it was free and it did exactly what it was created for. This is what Facebook meant couple of years ago but social media has changed so much that it has turned the entire world of marketing, business and advertising and how they function and how people communicate with each other. It has changed the way what people perceive social media and its uses have surpassed communication and experience sharing.

Facebook has changed its layout and setting so many times that it has begun to annoy its users. People have started blogging and posting videos and comments regarding its changes. Yet Facebook comes back with one reply to all those reviews that is Facebook is evolving to keep up with the changes in world of social media, but not all people buy this answer. People feel that changes in the site are not for the convenience of its users but for the convenience of its advertisers or business that exist on this site. People feel that Facebook has become more of an advertising billboard rather than a social networking site and is more of a business friendly rather than a user friendly site.

All of this brings us to one question by providing the social networking platform for free has face book made us into an audience to the marketing agencies rather than the actual users? Will these actions by Facebook make way for Google + to become the dominant player in the world of social networking sites? Only time will tell!


some of the videos relating to Facebook changes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MDP8E84BBs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=RD_hAoOYl_M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYGkJJbWezc

Social Media the threat of bad publicity

The need for risk management and mitigation in the arena of public relations has become imperative in the new world of social media. We have seen countless cases where bad PR events and customer complaints that would have gone unnoticed a few years ago but nowadays it becomes an internet phenomena’s in a matter of hours.  These events have been detrimental to the company’s brand and reputation. One such recent event which went viral is the customer complaint about an arrogant sales person in Gasp store on Chapel Street. Because of the mistake made by one sales person not only the brand has to face the aftermath from its customers but it also has to come up with an explanation and solution to stop the damage to the brand and revive its sales.

Companies need to be more diligent around their public relations and the people who represent them in the market and what they do or say in relation to the brand, as everything will eventually go online through blogs, social media sites and forums. Not only are companies affected by this, so its employees, Celebrities and executives have been caught off guard making silly statements that have come back to haunt them. The same applies to the average Joe. We have seen Microsoft employees get fired for tweeting about the company, competitors and its customers.

It is almost inevitable for such an event to occur to just about every business. The ability of companies to overcome it and reap the PR for their own benefit using social media is what will put them apart. All of this leads us to one question why do brands justify these kinds of experiences and mishaps for example gasp is justifying its employees behaviour even with so many customers complaining. Do they still believe any publicity is good publicity?