In one of the recent lectures, we discussed a very interesting issue – is there any alternative to Facebook? Many of us agreed that we are concerned about our privacy. Facebook has no qualms about selling our personal data to companies and overloading users with tones of advertisements. However, here comes the problem: if you don’t have a Facebook account, you practically don’t exist. According to Social Media specialists, an alternative to Facebook has just been born. Ello is a ‘simple, beautiful, and ad-free’ social network that aims at people who are tired of having their profiles ‘tracked, recorded and converted into data’.

Ello has been created this year by a group of artists and designers. Initially the platform was only private, however due to a great public interest the website has recently become public. Ello is currently invitation-only. To join Ello, you need to know someone that is already on the network. Alternatively, you can request an invitation by visiting the Ello Home Page. Since Ello does not allow advertisements,users can “choose to pay a very small amount of money” to add a favourite feature to their account on a permanent basis. The profiles itself can be described as a combination of Facebook and Twitter.

In my opinion, even though the interface looks very appealing, the company is not user-friendly. It seems to be problematic to identify certain features and option. However, the founders of Ello claim that the platform is constantely being improved.

To be honest, I am highly concerned about my privacy. Even though, I never use the ‘login-in with Facebook’ option, I clearly have been tracked by numerous companies that attack me with their adverts every day. My first impression of the website was so positive that I immediately requested invitation after looking at one public profile and reading the Manifesto. Unfortunately, it takes a while to create a profile, since the invitation does not come directly.

While I am impatiently waiting for my invitation, I was wondering what you think about the idea? Would you be willing to create a profile on Ello? Do you think it is a good alternative for Facebook users who are concerned about their privacy but still want to be a part of online Social Communities? Does Ello have a chance to become as successul as Facebook?

References:

Kaplan, A. M., and Haenlein, M. 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons 53(1) 59–68

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/11121502/Is-Ello-the-hip-new-Facebook.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/06/12/privacy-experts-say-facebook-changes-open-up-unprecedented-data-collection/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/facebook-ad-profiles_n_5487372.html

Apple just released its new versions of iPhone – as known as iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. It should be an exciting moment for all the Apple fans to upgrade their iPhones! However, this time, a controversial issue seems to become bigger and bigger that iPhone 6 Plus is easy to bend?! On Wednesday, owners of iPhone 6 Plus took to social media to complain that iPhone 6 Plus unexpectedly bent when they put their phones in their pockets. Afterwards, the mass show an extremely high attention on this topic, especially on social media level. Not only the regular audience, who may the current users of iPhone 6 Plus or potential buyers of the phone show their concerns on the iPhone 6 Plus bendgate issue, but also many competitors of Apple and popular websites try to make fun of the product in a very sarcastic way on social media. Personally, I found the most interesting case is how 9GAG, which is a famous social media website, reacts to the issue. Going to 9GAG Facebook page, since this Wednesday, which is 24^th of September, there have been around 10 posts regarding to this bendgate issue. In 2 days, half of the 9GAG posts are related with the iPhone 6 Plus bendgate issue. Moreover, LG, Nokia and Samsung are also involved in the topic discussions. LG even posts a picture to respond the issue in a very funny way.

Afterwards, I am very curious about how Apple reacts to such an issue after reviewing so many anti-voices. Therefore, I went to Apple’s official page to check it out. Surprisingly, the website does not have any official declarations on the page. The only place you can find out the issue is under the SUPPORT column that some users made a post in the community and anyone can contribute to the answers. However, it is really hard to find a very authentic answer responding to the topic. Apart from Apple Website, there are actually quite a lot of blogs talking about the issue. They quoted some statements from Apple’s official responses, while those ‘statements’ also come from other blogs’ contents. So it is a bit weird for me that Apple hasn’t offer any official statements from its own channel yet. Also as everyone knows that Apple does not really own any official social media channels. It is maybe a tricky part for Apple to deal with this situation. In the most blogs, the opinions on the iPhone 6 Plus bendgate issue are not very positive. Regarding from the blog post of Forbes recently, the title of the article is ‘Apple responds to the iPhone 6 bendgate but questions remains’. The other blog post from 9to5Mac even indicates that 30% of readers are concerned about this bendgate issue based on their own poll results.

I think Apple really needs to come up with good social media strategies to subside the issue, but on the other hand, what would you do if you are market risk manager of Apple?

In the end, I want to share some heated posts on 9GAG with you. 😀

Reference：

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/09/25/apple-does-not-say-sorry-over-bendgate/

http://online.wsj.com/articles/apple-defends-against-complaints-of-bending-iphones-1411668618

http://www.zdnet.com/apple-to-replace-bent-iphone-6-plus-models-7000034040/

Apple responds to iPhone 6 Bendgate controversy, says only 9 customers have complained

https://twitter.com/CNBCtech

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102034087

Apple says some bent iPhone 6/Plus phones will be replaced under warranty

Nearly every single one of us carries a wireless device with them onto the airplane. Since most of the airlines started introducing Wifi on board and during the flight – the next step is to stream the inflight entertainment via wifi and drop the expensive and not really high quality seat screens.Delta , United, and Southwest introduced the new plan called “Bring your own device”.

 Did you know that every screen per seat weights 5kg which on a 250 seats plane adds up to 1,250 kg. By dropping them from the aircraft might add up 80,000 kg of fuel being saved per year per aircraft.

This could not only effect positively the environment but probably cost of our plane tickets as well.

Apart from those effects it could have effect on possible future ventures with electronics companies because currently the installation cost per screen can reach up to 10,000 dollars. With this kind of cost there is incentive not only to deliver best technology, but the switching cost to deliver new technology is way lower then the current cost of the entertainment screens.

The view of every airline is different so we can expect certain strategy game to evolve.

But lets get to the social media point of view. According to report by Osurv, a mobile survey firm, found that 87 percent of travelers consider the bring your device pitch a cost-saving effort by airlines—and yet many still prefer using their own gadgets to jabbing a seat-back screen. “Superficially, BYOD is a cost-cutting initiative,” says Jad Meouchy, Osurv’s founder and chief executive. “However, the long-term vision is Netflix in the sky.”

This new business opportunity gives space to new companies coming up with ideas how to refresh the airplane entertainment. Maybe its going to be Facebook who will take over this new big venture. The wifi on board is very big opportunity for social media to gain there power in this industry. Competitions, posts, engagement of customer, entertaining the customer, engaging the customer into the service improvement – who knows, maybe one day we will check in through our social networks.

Would you welcome this change on planes or would you rather stay with the old screen aircraft entertainment? Do you see any dangers in introducing bring your own device, wifi onboard and social media?

Reference:

http://www.klm.com/travel/gb_en/prepare_for_travel/on_board/entertainment/index.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-03/byod-airlines-need-your-carry-on-gadgets-to-end-seat-back-screens

Unconscious division

Online social networks are broadly researched the last few years because of their gained popularity worldwide. These social networks are services that are online on the web that allow people to create a personal profile they display publicly or semi-public to the people they give access by adding them to their ‘friendslist’. People then can upload content on their wall and others can view, react, like and repost the content. Most of the people use multiple online social networks next to each other and they all fulfill the need of people to belong to a certain community and stay in contact with people. A good example of two online social networks are Instagram and Pintrest, they look the same but are used very differently. Instagram is based on placing homemade pictures that can be edited before putting online and Pintrest is more a pinboard-wall that people can use to collect and organize their found pictures on the internet and share with others

We see two online social networks that are based on sharing photo’s to an online community where the user is the creative designer of his or her personal wall and by that their online identity. The sharing, reacting, hash tagging and liking of content is also integrated in both of the networks. In both cases people upload content that is viewed by others, these others tend to fulfill the roll of peers and provide feedback by liking and reacting for the one who uploaded his or her content.

What is quite striking actually is the fact that both networks are used in a very different way. Instagram is based on the connection people already have in the offline world and Pintrest is more based on the connection people create in the online world which means that they don’t actually have to know each other in the offline world. People seem to structure this unconsciously by dividing their content, in this case photos, to two different social networks. They unconsciously know that certain content belongs more to Instagram than Pintrest. This indicates that people have different communication networks which they use in their daily life. This is also what Borgatti, Mehra, Brass and Labianca show in their research to offline networks between people (2009). Researchers discovered that in social groups different kinds of networks exist which are responsible for the kind of contact that people have with each other and the way that they communicate. We can assume that this also is the case for the online world of networks.

I personally also use different kinds of online social networks like Facebook and Instagram and I don’t use hem in the same way. Some content I place on Facebook while other content I only place on Instagram. Quite funny when I think of it, because I really didn’t realized that. I am very curious if you use your multiple online social networks in the same way or that you also unconsciously divide content between different types of online social networks.

Literature:

Boyd, D.M., and Ellison, N.B. (2007), Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1) 210–230.

Borgatti, S.P., Mehra, A., Brass, D.J., and Labianca, G. (2009), Network analysis in the social sciences. Science 323(5916) 892-895.

Kauffman, R.J., Li, T., and Heck, E. (2010), Business network-based value creation in electronic commerce. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 15(1) 111-142

Over time there has been changes in buyers’ behavior. Customers are more active online, doing research about specific products/services and making online purchases. For a company to not be active on social media nowadays results in a competitive disadvantage. According to Business.com 55% of buyers turn to social media when they’re searching for information (Giamanco and Gregoire, 2012). But how do you create a successful social media campaign? How do you engage customers?

The first article Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy discusses how companies can sell, making use of social media in a consisting, productive way. It shows how a sales rep can react in an effective way to for example tweets about poor quality, by offering them a better deal. A smart way to sell products and keeping your customers satisfied.

The second article Corporate Twitter Channels has some very interesting findings on using a corporate Twitter channel and the effects on corporate reputation, where corporate reputation is explained by user engagement and informedness. The article can also help managers to choose the degree of corporate involvement and whether to create different kind of accounts for different purposes. Results show that user engagement decreases when there is a high degree of corporate involvement and a channel with a generic purpose whereas user engagement increases with also a high degree of corporate involvement but a channel with a specific purpose (Li, et al., 2014). I think in addition it should consider the difference in companies, product/service/non-profit, size, target group etcetera as the results of the experiment are based on a fictitious company called Beans ‘n Coffee.

The third article Is Your Social Media Strategy effective? focuses on Facebook campaigns and how you can make them successful. Some interesting factors that can lead to success are (Li and Soonius, 2012): posting a minimum number of campaigns in a given day, focusing on getting Likes and Polls, posting on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, around 11:00, 15:00 and 20:00, not posting campaigns in the weekend and between 14:00-15:00, use contests, a question, LIKE and a Thank You Note (Li and Soonius, 2012).

An additional article emphasizes how consumer engagement and making consumers co-creators can create business value, using Nike as an example. Another company who engages customers by running a contest is Lay’s. Their campaigns Raad de Smaak (Guess the Flavor) and Do Us a Flavor are both examples of where a company engages consumers by interactively involving them. By running a competition and using money as an incentive, they attract people to participate. Do Us a Flavor made it possible for consumers to come up with their own flavors, making prosumers out of consumers. Learning about consumers engagement and prosumers, I think this a crucial topic for companies to be able to gain competitive advantage but also create a base of loyal customers.

Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. (2012), ‘Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 90(7/8), pp. 88-93.

Li, T., Berens, G., and de Maertelaere, M. (2014), ‘Corporate Twitter channels: The impact of engagement and informedness on corporate reputation’, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, forthcoming.

Li, T. and Soonius, G. (2012), ‘Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns’, Proceedings of the Workshop on Electronic Business, Orlando, FL, December.

Ramaswamy, V. (2008), ‘Co-creating value through customers’ experiences: the Nike case’, Strategy & Leadership, vol. 36 (5) pp. 9 – 14.

Consumers spent their time on social networking nowadays for almost one out of five minutes. It represents an audience of nearly 1.2 billion internet users. Brands know this things and are competing on social media to increase their reach of campaigns and create engagement with their customers. It’s a new thing which is very complicated, but many researches try to make it easier to find the best way playing on these platforms. In an article I read they said: When the 1950s-era criminal Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he allegedly replied, “That’s where the money is.” For any salesperson wondering why she should use social media, the answer is similarly obvious: That’s where the buyers are. (Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K., 2012)

Four articles connected to the subject described many ways in different social platforms to choose your best strategy for joining social media. The first one was about how to use the brands employees in communicating with the customers. According to the writers, brands would have to use all their employees so not only the sales and marketing department. I disagree, because these are the people who are trained and educated to do these jobs.

The second article was about different Twitter channels and its effect on corporate reputation. The researches tried different Twitter channels to see if, for example, the design factors influence the brand’s engagement.

The third article was about increasing the reach of your campaigns. For example, do not focus on quantity and just post especially funny and creative advertisements. It’s better to use photos and text, because customers don’t have the time see all videos appearing on their timeline and external links aren’t very attractive.

The last article is from The Guardian and it says that companies miss 80% of customer engagement opportunities. Because of this very high percentage, the writers gave away three principles to use and to use the opportunities which normally have been missed. These three are: engage and empower your workforce, get personal with your customers and create advocates.

To see how brands are using the social media and to see if it’s effective in creating engagement, I found two cases. The first one is Coca-Cola. The creation of its Facebook page was strange, because it is created by two big fans who were allowed to keep the page. This means that Coca-Cola didn’t have any influences in how the page will be used. The brand chose to connect their customers with each other and tried to create this word-of-mouth promotion which is succesfull.

The second case was about Starbucks. The brand is very active on social media and especially on Twitter. The creation of an extra Twitter channel, where customers are ably to apply new ideas, became a big success. The normal channels are used to give suggestions, ask question and complain. Many employees are working on this and that’s why these one-to-one conversations became so successful.

References

• http://www.brandingpersonality.com/how-starbucks-built-an-engagin-brand-on-social-media/, 23 September 2014
• http://adage.com/article/digital/coke-fans-brought-brand-facebook-fame/135238/, 23 September 2014
• http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2013/mar/13/social-media-customer-engagement, 24 September 2014
• Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93
• Li, T., Berens, G., and de Maertelaere, M. 2014. Corporate Twitter channels: The impact of engagement and informedness on corporate reputation. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 18(2) 97-126
• Li, T. and Soonius, G. 2012. Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns. Proceedings of the Workshop on Electronic Business, Orlando, FL, December

In the last few years, social media became inevitable by launching marketing campaigns. This new media, consisting of online social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many more, is closing the gap between producers and consumers. Consumers are empowered to make decisions by voting, to come up with ideas for new products or improvements and to really express their opinion about products and services.

It all starts by engaging consumers.  When a company engages consumers in their business experience through social media, they can generate free publicity as many consumers will express their thoughts about it on social platforms. This also contains some risks but “sitting on the sidelines is the greatest risk of all”. By engaging consumers, brands can create trust and opportunities by building a presence in consumers’ lives. Ultimately these ‘loyal’ consumers will generate the revenue a business is looking for.

In the article “Tweet me, Friend me and Make me Buy” the authors even point out that research showed that many consumers complete their purchase journey before having any contact with sales. Another interesting fact can be found in the research of (Li, Berens, & de Maertelaere, 2014). Also, social media –the new form of electronic word-of-mouth– is 20 times more effective than marketing events and 30 times more effective than media appearances.  A well-managed twitter channel can definitely improve a firm’s reputation and profitability.

The strategy must be effective in order to sustain attention from users and to gain value in the end. Two successful campaigns using social media and engaging the customers in a creative way are the campaigns of Lay’s and Cap’n Crunch. Lay’s campaign included consumers creating their own potato chip flavor. This successful campaign illustrated the production co-creation of consumers. In fact, this resulted in 3.8 million submissions of ideas in just 3 months, creating 4.9 billion PR impressions (free publicity!!).

Cap’n Crunch (cereal company) used twitter to be directly involved with this target group. They replied to brand mentions in a hilarious, unique way. They used trending topics on twitter. For instance, when #ThreeWordsSheWantsToHear was trending, the Cap’n replied with “Breakfast in bed” (Chan, 2014). The strength of a twitter campaign is that you can create potential new followers/consumers. All in all, social media should be a key point in all marketing strategies nowadays. It creates a bigger reach of the content a company is trying to communicate.

References

Chan, N. (2014, September 22). 3 Customer Engagement Strategies That Marketers Can’t Ignore. Retrieved from OutBrain: http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2014/06/3-golden-customer-engagement-strategies-that-marketers-cant-ignore.html

Giamanco, B., & Gregoire, K. (2012). Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review, 88-93.

Li, T., & Soonius, G. (2012). Is Your Social Media Strategy Effective? An Empirical Study of the Factors Influencing the Success of Facebook CampaignsProceedings of the Workshop on Electronic Business, 1-11.

Li, T., Berens, G., & de Maertelaere, M. (2014). Corporate Twitter channels: The impact of engagement and informedness on corporate reputation. Forthcoming: International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 1-34.

http://graphs.net/social-media-on-business.html