Why Real-Time Marketing is Real
Real-time marketing refers to the speed in which the content hits the market.
Brands can use real-time marketing to monitor their digital environment, respond in real-time, build a relationship, increase and promote participation. Marketers are still trying to figure out how to master this strategy. Real-time marketing requires originality.
It takes grit and creativity for brands to successfully implement real-time marketing into their marketing tactics. It takes creativity to make a clever tweet but it brings a whole new level of creativity for brands to create mini-campaigns to leverage breaking news about their brands in a timely manner.
Oreo, a popular cookie brand, is one brand that introduced and dominated the concept of real-time marketing in the digital world. Oreo cookie released a simple special tweet/image that capitalized on an expected power outage second of half of the Super Bowl in February. Oreo cookie took two minutes after power failure to come up with this concept, the image led to a massive brand awareness boost to the brand. The image was retweeted more than 15,000 times, accrued 19,610 Facebook likes within the first hour.
Oreo’s marketing campaigns always spoke to the target audience. Oreo’s marketing team is definitely taking the digital world by storm; in the 2011 Guinness Book of World Records awarded them with the record of most “likes” on a Facebook post within 24 hours. Today, they have doubled their Facebook likes from 16 million to 32 million. Oreo cookie has one of the most creative and successful real-time marketing campaigns.
Janda Lukin, Brand Director said, “we will continue to look for ways to grow and expand in [the digital] area – always keeping the filter of looking at the world through the eyes of Oreo.
Oreo’s real-time digital marketing efforts have thus far paid off. By observing Oreo’s cookie marketing tactics, one can begin to understand what real-time marketing is and how it can be used with a good humor. Oreo 101-year old cookie has the best digital marketing campaign to date, and they have set a whole new standard for marketing in the digital age.
Thanksgiving openings are the new normal, get with it or get left behind
Thanksgiving brought a huge crowd, with most people substituted turkey for a discount. Every year companies review their competitive market and how consumers are changing their shopping habits, what other retailers are doing and what methods they are espousing.
More than a dozen major retailers from Target to Staples opened on Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving openings come despite planned protests across the country from workers’ groups that are against employees missing Thanksgiving meals and spending time with their beloved ones at home. In the past few years, many retailers were warming to the idea of opening on Thanksgiving night as they have now pushed up discounts that were reserved for Black Friday into early November.
This year, retailers made headlines on Thanksgiving Day in a greater number than ever before. Companies like Wal-Mart had adopted this method before, and more companies are following suit. Wal-Mart said more than 22 million people showed up to its stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, with an estimation of 10 million register transactions between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Toys ‘R’ Us in Manhattan had more than 200 people stood in line before its 5 p.m. opening.
Mall stores such as Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch also opened Thursday night. Some stores had people waiting to go into specific stores as early as 11 a.m., nine hours earlier than opening. Last year Macy’s, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s didn’t partake, but this year Macy’s drew a record-breaking crowd on Thanksgiving.
Target said it saw lines stretch for several blocks before its 8 p.m. openings. And Toys ‘R’ Us saw crowds gathering at 4:30 p.m. The online sales were also robust, with Adobe says online purchasing surpassed $1 billion for the first time. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark said Thanksgiving web sales rose 20% from 2012, with an average order value of $127.59. Social media platforms like Instagram announced that Thanksgiving 2013 in the US was the busiest day on Instagram so far.
Thanksgiving opening is getting more popular, and it has in fact taken a bite out of Black Friday sales since last year. Sales on Thanksgiving were $810 million last year, an increase of 55 percent from the previous year as more stores opened on the holiday, according to Chicago research firm ShopperTrak. And sales dropped 1.8% to $11.2 billion on Black Friday, even though it was still the busiest and the biggest shopping day last year.
How Productive Social Media Managers Spend Their Day [infographic]
How Social Media Marketers/Managers handle their day-to-day challenges?
Social media marketing is becoming increasingly popular, as more and more businesses are warming up to social media. The social media battle is huge, and the demand for social media managers is on the rise. As a social media marketer, managing and maintaining all social media platforms is a challenging task. It requires keeping with industry news, trends and posting refreshing contents from a lot of resources. Another important aspect is engaging with others in the industry with regular chats, for instance, #brandchat.
For those who are still unsure how social media marketers spend their day-to-day challenges and work. Take a look at this info-graphic by RazorSocial that shows how a productive social media marketer spend their day, including social media management tools. If you want to be a smart social media marketer learn how productive social media marketers spend their time.
Courtesy of Razor Social.
Favorite Commercial
After I viewed most of the Ads (new and old) I picked Apple’s 1984 Mac Ad as one of the greatest, even though the budget was $900,000, one of the most expensive advertisements in television’s history. This ad was the birth of Apple; Steve Jobs thought that it would generate a buzz for the Macintosh without even featuring the product itself, this was a genius idea from one of the greatest thinkers ever. The storyboard was amazing, from hundreds of men listening to Big Brother on a huge screen to the model running into the room and destroying the screen with a baseball bat and freeing the men from Big Brothers grasp.
I read online that the response to the ad was so strong that Apple bought months of ad time on ScreenVision, a company that sold ad time in movie theaters. Some owners reaired the ad for months after Apple’s contract ran out with ScreenTime because they were so enamored with the commercial. Great ad and great concept.
Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media websites, blogs such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg etc., and analyzing that data to make business decisions, ideas or solutions. Social media analytics are mostly used to support marketing or customer service activities, but this depends upon your type of business and your goal.
The first goal is to determine what are you trying to analyze and what is your end goal. For instance, some companies use analytics to find better ways to engage with customers, to reduce customer service costs, to determine the return on investment, feedback, or amending the public opinion of a particular product or service.
Once you identify your end goal, key performance indicators (KPIs) for objectively assessing the data should be placed. For example, on Twitter customer engagement might be measured by the number of followers, retweets, mentions or clicks on a link.
There are so many social media analytics tools that measure performance. Below are different social media analytics tools.
Works with all major social media channels
Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Klout, and Google Analytics; Tumblr, Pinterest, and LinkedIn is coming soon. With Simply Measured, analysis doesn’t stop with one profile. Measure the cohesive relationship between each network, your competitors’ social profiles, and how your audience interacts throughout the entire social space.
Hootsuite is one of those multi-function social media tools.
The leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks. You can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets. Track brand mentions. Analyze social media traffic. 7 million+ satisfied users. You can post updates on a wide range of social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube. Tumblr, WordPress.
Social marketing is all about relationships. With the new Adobe® Social, marketers finally have a comprehensive solution to build stronger connections through the content that’s guided by tangible data. Create the most relevant posts, monitor and respond to conversations, measure results, and connect social activities to business results.
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time.
PageViral tracks real-time user behavior, sentiment, engagement and interaction patterns in 41 different languages. PageViral is one of the very few multilingual social media analytics platform in the industry. Multi-Lingual support is a subset of our natural language processing technology, which analyzes audience interactions in their own native language. You get to identify key influencers and understand your audience better, including how they feel towards your brand, how they engage, their active time intervals, etc.
Conclusion
In social media, it is important to determine if you’re reaching the right audience and connecting with them. Regular reports and metrics enables you to figure out the best solution and gain insights for your company or brand.
YAHOO! New Logo
Yahoo! Has unveiled its first major logo change in 18 years. Yahoo logo has been mostly the same since 1995, but the last logo update was 2009 (18 years ago). Yahoo spent the month of August releasing teaser designs one a day, which was a setup for a more exciting swerve on day 30. This new change is trying to breathe new life into the brand.
The new logo retains many of its predecessor’s qualities, but unless you have studied design it’s hard to differentiate the new logo with the old one. The logo retains the traditional elements, the color remains purple, though a bit darker, the letters capitalized and rounding off with the signature exclamation mark. In some versions the exclamation dances around. Overall the look is sleek, cleaner with a new sans-serif typeface. See the previous logo below.
The unveiling generated a lot of an unfavorable buzz on social media platforms. Most of them were in favor of the old logo and widely viewed the new logo as a let down. More than three-quarters of Internet users prefer Yahoo’s old logo to the new logo, according to a survey of more than 400 online respondents Thursday from Survata, a market research group. See below.
My $0.02
Most people hate change, I would have guessed even before the release that consumers would vote for the old logo. This new logo is close to the old one, and I may not be a designer but that is a good outcome for Yahoo and its customers because they haven’t made a major change. Consumers can still identify with the color purple as well as the exclamation mark, and these two are the most important symbols for Yahoo.
In most recent years, companies like Gap, J.C. Penney, MasterCard, Microsoft and Tropicana have experienced disastrous logo changes. Yahoo will not experience a similar fate because it has clearly communicated through the change with the 30-day rollout. Most importantly Yahoo is not a physical product that consumers need to locate in stores. I doubt somebody will quit using Yahoo because the logo is so “a decade ago”.
The new logo shows a more serious look, signaling to consumers, investors, others in the tech world and employees that change is occurring. The 30-day rollout was successful in creating a buzz about Yahoo and sharing these variations prepared consumers for the change.
Even though this new logo generated a lot internet hate but if you think about it, a bad Yahoo logo made everyone talk about it. It was a successful campaign to get the media and consumers stay afloat for 30 days. On the whole, people are paying attention to Yahoo again. I believe in no time consumers will get used to the new logo. By the way, I like the new Yahoo fantasy football (soccer) layout. I Play for fun with people around the globe.
New Yahoo logo live stream.
The logo concept..
Placebo Effect in Advertising
This A new study suggests that the placebo effect can be invoked by advertisements.
As with all kinds of placebo effects, the placebo effect plays an important role in advertising especially during drug trials. The strongest factor behind the placebo’s in advertising is that it can influence the actual effectiveness of a product.
The expectations play an important role in the placebo effect; companies use the placebo effect in advertising to influence customer buying behavior. For instance, a placebo effect on price, you’ve probably had discovered that many companies sell items at $99.99 instead of $100.00 or at “25 percent off the retail price.
From a scientific standpoint, it’s a positive response which does not derive from the actual ingredients but from the patient’s perception and expectations. These expectations can lead to inappropriate and excessive prescribing. Just as placebo (Latin word) means, “I shall please”
http://io9.com/bizarre-study-shows-that-advertising-improves-effective-992610371
Infographic: Over 7.5 million Africans on LinkedIn; South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt account for over 60% of users
Africa is the world’s second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. Social media in general is taking Africa by storm . Over 7.5 million Africans use LinkedIn, over 20% are entry-level, and the majority of the users are ages 18-34, most of them are male. LinkedIn is quickly gaining popularity among working class professionals in Africa though it is still far less popular compare to Facebook and Twitter. Other countries with the fastest growing number of users include Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Morocco, and Cameroon as seen in the images below.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media can also be viewed as a monitoring tool, widely used to inform customer service, product development and marketing activities.
Social media marketing uses technology to build relationships, drive repeat business and attract new customers through friends sharing with friends. Social media marketing not only increases branding and website traffic, it is a powerful influence in overall search engine optimization.
Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:
- Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
- Conversion and sales tracking
- Page views, ad exposure
- Raising brand awareness
- Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there
- Broader customer reach
When shifting gears from traditional marketing to social media, it is important for a company to prepare a scheme. The strategy begins with a focus, which include goals. And those goals can include short and long-term goals. When you think about social media, it is important to remember to set realistic business goals. For example: Are you going to generate leads, answer complaints, engage with customers, or something else? Will you be doing all the above? How will this relate to other functions and tools, like the rest of the marketing plan or the rest of customer service? Try to stay focused and be specific.
Social Media Marketing Strategy (Influence and ROI)
Social media can be used for different goals. For example, Oprah’s opinion on literature has inspired millions to choose titles from her book club. But you don’t have to be Oprah to have influence. You influence your friend when she listens to a song you recommend on Facebook. You influence your coworker when he checks an article you posted on LinkedIn and shares it with someone else. Social actions like these are reflections of influence.
As a company you can influence one customer to another. For example, a loyal customer can act upon others by a simple tweet, feedback or an RT (retweet) that mentions the brand. It is important for organizations to focus on cultivating the engagement and not figures.
Define your target audience and find specific areas of expertise. Don’t try to cater to everyone. Alternatively, if you are really keen to progress to power users, key decision makers and influencers, your content should be designed around your market. Social media is simple and yet complicated.
It’s complicated because you have to know your audience so well that you know exactly what social media platforms they use regularly. Is it Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? LinkedIn? The focus should be which social network is generating more audience and engagement, see the example:
ROI = (Gain from the Investment – Cost of Investment) /Cost of the Investment
Marketing VS. ROI
Social media marketing should never be done as a stand-alone campaign, and it should always support your other marketing initiatives. Social media is not an activity that can exist on its own. For social media to be beneficial, it is important to co-exist alongside other activities such as offline marketing, digital marketing, public relations, and advertising.
Social Media Strategy (ROI and Audience)
Social Media Marketing is not necessarily a direct sales tool, but is effective at engaging your audience, conversations, expand web presence, build brand awareness, generate expose and provides SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits.
Some marketers say social media has no ROI but is great for:
- Brand building
- Relationship management
- Product development
- Reputation management
- Customer interaction
- Customer feedback
- Customer support
- Community building
Jeffrey Hayzlett, former Kodak CMO said: “Social media is not a campaign. It is a commitment.” Meaning a social media plan should cover your immediate and short-term while keeping an eye to the fact that technology changes all the time, if not daily. Don’t be surprised that some of the tools you chose are outdated by the time you get around accessing them. Flexibility is the key to success in business today.
One of the most frequent questions is that how do you measure ROI on social media? It is possible, but it’s not black and white. The same question could be asked about how can you measure ROI on organizational emails. The absence of social media, a striking example: an email in your organization would lead to an implicit cost of being in business. You can get greater profits using social media marketing that can help cut expenses and increase revenue.
For example: more traffic equals more profit.
Social Media Strategist (Return On Investment)
Measuring Social media ROI is like asking a sales person what is the ROI of a phone call. They only way to discover the answer is by tracking a volume of phone calls and looking at the conversion rate, understanding those converted and those who replicated the effort. It can be applied to customer service as well, what’s the ROI for great customer service? We know companies that have great customer service tend to be more profitable than those without it, but is it a truly quantifiable return on dollars spent?
The Return On Investment in social media can be measured by looking at:
- Mentions — people are talking about your business and your product.
- Traffic — track the number of people who visit your site or blog, Fan your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter.
- Positive feedback — look at what people are “saying” about your product. Engage with your customers through social media.
- Tracking promotional codes — How many people are clicking on a link? You can track clicks on specific urls by using url shortener: bit. ly.
- Other sites like Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Facebook Insights, Tweetreach
Solution:
A company can measure their ROI from social media by tracking which posts and tweets are driving traffic to the site, converting these trends to sales number.
It is important to keep in mind; social media is about sharing and connecting, creating a meaningful conversation around relevant content and encourage feedback.
There is a difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing. In traditional marketing, you throw out a message to millions of people who couldn’t care less. In social media marketing, you find the people who are already talking about your message and join the conversation.
Without a well thought social media strategy, is worse than neglecting social media altogether.
The Marketing Explorer 