WOMM Shout about it!

Word of mouth marketing or WOMM for short is a very effective way of marketing for businesses. The dictionary definition is:

‘Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM), also called word of mouth advertising, is an unpaid form of promotion—oral or written—in which satisfied customers tell other people how much they like a business, product, service, or event. Word-of-mouth is one of the most credible forms of advertising because people who don’t stand to gain personally by promoting something put their reputations on the line every time they make a recommendation.^’

Plain and boringly put, its just a case of talking, because we are never going to trust a brand as much as the people we socialise and hang out with everyday.

Womm allows brands/businesses to get effectively free feedback from customers online through monitoring things such as twitter activity, re-tweets etc and peoples blog posts. If you get one influential person who likes your product and takes the time to blog about it then instantly people will know about it due to the amount of followers they have etc and the fact that with new technology, updates and tweets etc can be sent straight to your phone!

It also allows business see what their customers think of the product and if there are negatives they can take them on board and fix them, likewise if there are positives then these are just free for all to see recommendations!

its more than just gossiping to your friends, its promoting a product!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future for Social Media…

So what does the future of social media hold? With the ever-increasing amount of users online everyday, social media is ever expanding and evolving. But how can we top what we have already got. So far social media allows us to: (to name but a few)

Contact people in a number of ways

Share information

Become our own journalist,

Create uprisings,

Give our own opinions on everything and anything

and all this is available not just on computers but to hand as well on our mobiles! I sound like a walking talking advert for social media but all of this is true, what else could there be!

There is an up and coming trend for 2012 and this is QR codes and NFC technology. QR codes have been around a while but nobody seems to know what they are, however they are being developed to become the next big thing in social media. They allow us to connect directly to a social media platform to do with the topic that the QR code is placed on. All you need to do is take a picture of it on your phone and boom sends you straight to the appropriate website via your phone! How cool is that.

 

NFC (near field communication) codes follow a similar principle except its more the idea of scanning rather than taking a picture. This technology is being developed so that we will eventually be able to pay for items via our phones!

Watch out 2012 technology is taking over!

 

Social Media and Politics

Believe it or not, social media has been heavily involved within politics, from the uprising revolts in Egypt and Tunisia to the promotion of President Barack Obama’s campaign.

Obama has been known to use social media platforms such as Facebook and twitter to contact his supporters and answer any questions they may have. This made his campaign much more personal, allowing the audience to feel involved and to get to know Obama better as a person, not purely as a presidential candidate. This worked very well in his favour as people grew to like him more; the more involved he got with the public. He used social media to increase awareness of his campaign and encouraged people to help promote his cause. His supporters even set up fan pages linked to their own Facebook pages with a strong message: ‘Vote for Obama’.

Obama also set up his own youtube channel to answer any questions etc. The channel was quite informal, which helped people to feel comfortable with Obama and the ideas he was putting forward. Using this channel, along with his own website, Obama really managed to cover all angles of social media, widening his target audience, attracting a younger generation of supporters, and audience engagement, which in the end won him the election.

Citizen Journalism

Social media is not only used for connecting with people, building relationships and marketing it can also be used for political campaigning and citizen journalism. In the case of journalism with social media it means anybody can comment upload and share news, we can all be publishers. It also means that we can access news much faster because it is usually uploaded in real time via twitter feeds and blog posts and allows the public to comment back or share it and get involved. This does however beg the question is citizen journalism a reliable source, as it will be very much based on peoples opinions, as they are not tied to any rules like for example the BBC are.

Also with new technologies it is now easier than ever to upload photos and videos in your phone, this was exactly the case when the London riots happened in august of last year.

Twitter became one of the best sources for keeping up to date with what was going on, as the media just couldn’t keep up. However it became controversial when the ever so popular social networking site was also used to organise crime :

Be inspired by the scenes in #tottenham, and rise up in your own neighbourhood. 100 people in every area = the way we can beat the feds – Jody MacIntyre, Activist

Neither the people nor markets trust governments anymore. There will inevitably be more civil unrest. The prospect frightens me. #tottenham – Laurie Penny, New Statesman

There were also sites set up by the public for journalistic purposes, to help the cause of the riot, such as catchalooter.tumblr.com where pictures were uploaded of people that had been caught on camera stealing during the riots so they could be identified. The site owner states ‘This site does not support vigilante action,” the site says, “merely using social media to collate all images in one place.” Read the rest of the article here.

B2B and B2C Social Media

What are the differences between business to business (B2B) marketing and business to consumer (B2C) marketing?

Well in simple terms B2B is where a businesses sells products and services to other business usually for production purposes or day-to-day running’s.

B2C on the other hand is where businesses sell products or services to consumers fulfilling their wants and needs.

Business to business marketing is much more about building relationships with other businesses and maintaining them. In terms of social media business-to-business marketing can be used on such platforms as Linkedin to build up a relationship as well as twitter to then continue the conversation. Many aims for business to business marketing are to increase awareness of a product or service, showcase the features and benefits of a product, generate sales, connect with key decision makers, launch new products or services and of course WOMM.

Social media allows them to do this via such platforms as a company blog (wordpress) which enables them to inform other businesses what’s going on, twitter where they are able to contact them and be contacted as well as generate conversations, linked in which is helpful to establish initial contact with a client and niche social networks which enables them to target a specific target audience of businesses.

Social media also allows businesses to measure their interaction with other business through monitoring online engagements via exposure, response, interaction, participation, discussion and advocacy.

It also cuts out the annoying letters and emails and allows them to contact much easier and faster. 

Drink aware ‘Good Times’ Campaign

Drink aware have launched a new campaign ‘why let the good times go bad’.

It is made around the idea of young people drinking too much on a night out and potentially not remembering anything, ruining the night for them and the people around them. They have tried to incorporate social media as well as print ads to encourage the target audience to monitor their units on a night out.

Above is one of the campaigns print ads. I personally love the art direction of this ad. The subtle wine glass in the middle is a nice touch becoming the pillar of the two potential nights out. They have tried to demonstrate that when you go on a night out there are always two ways the night can go depending on how you moderate your drink and that one single drink (the wine glass) could be the tipping point. People should know their limits.

On the one hand it shows what seems to be a nice night out, however I feel this to be a little farfetched as even if your not totally wasted you still don’t look that great on a night out, but still the message is there, and on the other hand it shows how that night can turn bad through drinking way more than you can handle. No one wants to end up curled round a toilet on a night out do they now.

Drinkaware created a series of these posters, with different drinks shown in the middle, obviously beer on the ads that was geared more towards men.

However some have said that the message is not clear, as the pictures are not extreme enough. For all we know she could just be ill and that’s why she’s sat by the toilet.

The second part to their campaign is focused around social media and I feel will be very ineffective. The idea is an app ‘good times’ that you and all your friends download which enables you to see where each other are etc, that’s the good part as I know it would be useful on one of my nights out as I’m forever loosing people, however the second part seems slightly high in aspiration. The idea is that people will also monitor how many units they are having on a night out by inserting the number into the app. This then shows at what time you had a drink and how many units you had. Of course people arn’t going to do this!! As I’m buying a drink I’m not going to stop and think ohh wait a sec let me just make a note of this and as I get drunker 1. I would probably type it in wrong and 2. I don’t particularly want to me using my phone in the middle of a club for fear of it being stolen!

Maybe rethink this one guys.

Innocent Smoothies Social Media Audit

Innocent smoothies are a fun soft drinks brand who enjoy creativity and being slightly different and like to heavily engage with their customers. So is it any wonder they are deeply routed in social media?

Innocent cover various platforms from a Facebook page and twitter to their own blog. All of which have many fans and followers:

Online statistics show for their Facebook page that they have:

Fans: 36344
People talking about: 585

Their fan growth is:

364 by 1 day 
2174 by 7 days 
3031 by 14 days

which is huge! Put in graph form to make it easier for you:

WOAH! Innocent sure is doing well in social media!

Non profit organizations and Social Media

Non profit organizations have a very different strategy to the usual profit driven organizations/business. Their use for social media is different and is more there to raise awareness and sell an idea/values/beliefs rather than ‘come to our website press the buy button and done’.

For a NPO to have a successfully part in social media they need to stand out from the crowd and be a bit different so that people are drawn to them and pass the message on. They done have the advantage of being able to bombard people with lots of advertising or extravagant products as there money is limited, so using social media is a great cheap way to entice people and spread there message and many NPO’S are taking advantage of this.

If you’d like to take a look at the very pretty info graphic I have placed below you will see that 92% of NOP websites contain a social media button and with Facebook and twitter being the most popular of social media websites you can see that 92% of NPO’s have a Facebook link and 90% have a twitter account. Which is amazing to thing that there message is getting spread across several social media platforms to millions of people pretty much for free buy the touch of a button.

An NOP that has utilized these social media giants well is Oxfam. Their Facebook page is used as an online store, while creating awareness for the issues they are helping at the same time. You are able to follow them on twitter and keep up to date with charity events going on and the causes they have helped and they even have their own you tube channel where you are able to watch their adverts and latest videos from third world countries.

By using all these platforms they are able to target a much larger audience and hopefully spread their message quicker.

 

Facebook privacy… well why don’t I throw in my bank details as well?!

I signed up to Facebook when I was 16. First on my agenda was not worrying about how my personal stuff is viewed or even distributed, I just wanted to talk to my friends and share photos of what I’ve been honest and well if I’m quite honest it was the cool thing to do to be on Facebook.

However now I’m much older (and a little wiser) it comes to my attention that really everyone and anyone, friends or strangers can access my information, view it comment pass it on do what ever they feel like with it , taking it to extremes it wouldn’t take a genius to impersonate me if they really wanted , I mean they know what I look like , my date of birth, where I go to uni and the county I live in , I mean throw in my bank details and I could potentially have a twin out there for all I know.

Facebook has been in many privacy issue debates for many of the reasons I have stated above. Our lives are just put on display for all to see. But if I’m quite honest, as much as I am querying the issues now, I feel there shouldn’t really be any debate: if you don’t want people to know your date of birth, don’t show it, don’t want people to know what you look like? Don’t have a picture and block your tagged photos! Maybe stop complaining about it and start looking into to how you can hide your information because it can be done, but lets face it your on Facebook for a reason and quite frankly you like people being able to see your pictures and see what you’ve been up to because lets face it, it would be dull if everybody blocked everything we wouldn’t be able to Facebook stalk anybody! (And don’t deny you do it because I know you do!)

 

Anyway I digress as I said Facebook has had many complaints about privacy, however they attempt to combat this and show viewers the effects of allowing all your information to be on show, (Because after all it is the users fault that their information is on show as Facebook is just set on default to display everything but this can be changer) they created the app take this lollipop, which showed viewers a video of a man searching through your profile and accessing your information and then eventually driving to where you live! Scary stuff really but it defiantly hit home with a lot of people about how much information is actually shown on their profile and what they should possibly hide.

But another issues is, its not just what Facebook does with our data its what it allows other do to with it! How many of you join up to apps via Facebook? Well your information defiantly isn’t just stopping at Facebook then it is allowing those apps to access everything about you and then potentially (I’m not saying they are) use it anyway they please , possibly even passing it on! Forbes wrote a very interesting article which summed up the more serious notes to Facebook privacy issues rather than just the: ‘omg everyone can see that awful picture of me drunk last week!’

My Social Graph

A social graph is a visual representation of the interaction you have between you and your friends online. Each person is represented individually and shows how they are connected, creating different networks. This makes it good for business because it allows them to have a whole load of data on you, which enables them to specifically target people that are interested in their product or service.

A social graph is a concept created by Mark Zuccerburg and consists of three main parts: context, which is who your associated with, sharing: what you are sharing online and who you are sharing it with and nodes, points of reference on the graph and mp out all your connections.

This is my facebook graph which I created on myfnetwork