Some time ago: What’s your name,what’s your phone number,  where do you live, who are your parents etc.? Do you want to go on a date?  Your going on a vacation tomorrow? Okay, I’m very sorry:(

Nowadays: What’s your name? No I don’t need more. I can get everything else from your Facebook. Let’s go on a date? No, you can’t because your to far?. No problem, turn on your Skype and let’s have an E-date:)

E dating is the best solution for the ones who are busy most of the time. You can do this through social media by using your smartphone for example. E-dates are much more fun aren’t they? We show our best body part through a Skype video chat and the other person will much likely be more interested. Imagine your left ear being more attractive than your right one, this will obviously result in you showing your left ear only and hiding your right one. Great way to deceive someone.

Research shows that online dating is successful. The percentage of marriages in which the couple met on a dating site accounted for 17% of all. The number of people engaged in romantic relationships is higher.  It is great right? What happens here is that couples create an emotional bond together. Let’s take as an example that there is a fat man trying to seduce a really well shaped woman  through an E-date. This man is likely to lie about his weight.  After several E-dates this woman may begin to like this man (because of his characteristics of course) and they set up a real date. When the woman gets to see that the man is a bit overweight she will feel a little deceived but the chances are small that she will not be willing to see him again. So in time people get attached and they don’t mind a small lie that is used on a E-date.

In my opinion E-dating is tricky but still a strategic way of getting a fiance.

What do you guys think of E-dating?

The two examples that illustrated the topic are ‘the CLIO like Challenge’ and Anthon Berg’s ‘The Generous Store’. The first example ‘the CLIO like Challenge’ was a project carried by Renault in Netherlands, which basically is buying likes. This project was the first project a car was carried by the likes of Facebook. It was preceded through online and offline. Online likes showed the enthusiasm of the people, and people could watch what is going on offline. Offline, Renault constructed a heaver construction; one side there was Clio, and the other side was the box which people can put their likes in.

The second example is Anthon Berg’s Facebook marketing; ‘The Generous Store’, which promoted the following. ‘We built the world’s first chocolate store where you couldn’t pay with money… only with the promise of a good deed.’ The company built the ‘Generous Store’ and began to sell chocolate that costs generosity of the buyer. This costing system was done by sending the mission to the buyer’s friends through Facebook(posting the deed on the buyer’s wall and the receiver’s wall). And the buyers would keep the promise and post their generosity by taking a picture and etc on Anthon Berg’s Facebook wall. These pictures of their generosity triggered a chain reaction through Facebook and the image of Anthon Berg became the icon of warmhearted and generosity.

I know a lot of you guys come from outside the Netherlands and I know there must be a moment that you were on the internet looking for a good university or school and courses with nice subjects. You finally decided to choose the Social Media and Social Network course here at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

But I am actually wondering whether you used social media to get the information you would like to know about (maybe Europe), the Netherlands, Rotterdam, the university and even the course? And what social media did you use? Have you checked wikis or blogs?

I namely found an article about the role of social media in online travel search. The usage of social media is getting more important when people are travelling. E.g. in the Netherlands you see various sites on which you can see a lot of reviews from people who have been to that particular destination. The most popular site in the Netherlands is zoover.nl.

This interesting article is a research about the search of holiday destinations on the internet. How much do we use Google, Wikipedia, review sites, virtual communities  when looking for an accommodation or destination? In 2010, 40% of the Social Media sites were virtual communities and 27% were review sites (like lonelyplanet.com).

If you like to know more about their findings, I would recommend you to read this article!

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517709000387

First of all: ‘What makes Facebook campaigns successful?’.
A few factors are important for success (Li & Soonius,2012):
– Posting a minimum number of campaigns in a given day.
– Including photos, videos and/or links.
– Focusing on getting Likes and Polls.
– Posting on Monday, Thuesday and Wednesday, around 11:00, 15:00 and 20:00.
– Not posting campaigns in the weekend and between 14:00-15:00.

One of the most successful Facebook campaigns is Volkswagen the Netherlands’ Fanwagen campaign.

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This Co-creation campaign looks attractive and is also creative with the Facebook functionalities on the car.
The weak side of this campaign that not everyone has the time to create their own design.

Another successful campaign is the Ford Explorer Facebook campaign. Ford launched its new 2011 Ford Explorer on Facebook instead of at an auto show, as the first car company who used social media to reveal their new model.

When Ford reached 30,000 fans one of the Ford fans got a free Explorer.
Ford did a good job by revealing information stepwise. They promoted their campaign on websites and launched the virtual Auto-show on Facebook 6months before the car was available to buy, so the Ford fans became all warmed up!

References
Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns. – Li, T. and Soonius, G. (2012)

Fanwagen Facebook Car by Volkswagen – Hypenotice

Ford shares its new 2011 Explorer with the world by unveiling it on Facebook – Facebook success stories

I remember I saw this title a few days ago about how companies should stop with the digital advertising and I thought “well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon” and then I remembered a campaign KLM did which I like to call “from social media to personalization”. They would check foursquare or Twitter for people who have checked in at Schiphol and are using KLM and look at their accounts on social media platforms to find information about them, like if someone is a person who likes sports. They would find the person and give him/her a small present, like a bracelet that measures distance, an app voucher and so on.

Here is the video to the campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHWAE8GDEk

This campaign for me raises a few points:

1. Speaking of stalking on Social Media, does this seem acceptable to the public? I mean, if I were a friend of the person it should be “ok” for me to look him/her up or if we met at a bar and they have me their name I could do it but that’s about it. They had access to personal details such as passport numbers, flights and so on.
2. They made it very obvious. Most companies hide the fact they “stalk” people, but here KLM goes “hey, we looked you up, found out you are that old, have as many friends, you like sports, you flight number is *** and your passport says that ***. Does it look like they didn’t interfere with people’s privacy just because they put it out in the open that they did it? Or no one cares because they did something good with it?
3. They used Social Media to do something personal. It wasn’t one of those “check-in and get a prize” or “take a pic and win a prize” campaigns, the person felt like they “stole” your money but.. they give it back… it was sweet and the people will definitely tell the story for a long time. but it’s the fact that they got in contact with the people, they made an effort and they made it personal, they made the people feel special.

What are your thoughts on those three points/any of the three points on the campaign in general? Do you think more big companies should try and make more personal gestures like that one?

Publishers WPG and Lannoo are allowed to create something like a ‘Spotify-concept’ to let people read E-books. It will be able to read E-books online if you have a subscription on this ‘concept’. This will work exactly the same as Spotify. On Spotify you can listen to songs if you have a subscription (free on laptop/pc).

This concept is already invented and used by Yindo and a lot of foreign companies. But there was no real company who got it going in the Netherlands. This is because there mostly a few books to read and there is not a big demand. WPG and Lannoo are trying to make it happen in the Netherlands and try to add more as a thousand books extra online.

The question is, will this work out? What you do guys think? Here is a movie about Google eBooks:

The way Google is doing it is different from the ‘Spotify-way’. Google eBooks still wants to sell you the books and let you read them everywhere. Will this be able with the ‘Spotify-concept’? I guess this will be hard to tell, because how long can you borrow these books from the ‘Spotify-concept’?

Can this new way of borrowing books compete with the way Google thinks it will work? What is your opinion about this?