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This is a World Food Programme (WFP) campaign, featuring Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, addressing the problem of world hunger. The social influence of Ibrahimovic, coupled with high media coverage made this campaign go viral earlier this year.

The campaign is an excellent example of how social influence can help tackle global issues such as the eradication of hunger. Although world hunger is a well known issue it is often neglected in the media. As the WFP says: “People suffering from hunger don’t often make the front page, yet hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to health worldwide — greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.” (WFP, 2015)

The United Nations WFP is the largest non-profit agency focusing on the issue of world hunger. They operate in 75 different countries and on average help 80 Million people with food assistance each year. The WFP claims that world hunger is a solvable issue even without major scientific breakthroughs.The resources and knowledge we currently have, with sufficient political will can solve this problem. The difficulty is to pool all the resources together to solve the issue as soon as possible. This was the main goal of the ‘805 Million Names’ campaign.

The video was published online on the 15th of February 2015, with most of the video footage recorded the day before during the football match between Paris Saint-German and Caen in Paris. Within a week the video had reached 13 million viewers on Facebook and Youtube, and the campaign was featured in over 3000 articles worldwide. (Catena, 2015) Several other celebrities such as David Beckham, Novak Djokovic and Enrique Iglesias have shown their support for the campaign. Even the FC Barcelona football club shared the video on their facebook page.

Ibrahimovic’s Facebook page has close to 23 Million likes which helped the campaign reach a large audience instantly. Ibrahimovic posted the video among with several photos, and statuses updating his fans about the progress of the campaign.

This campaign shows how important social influence can be to raise awareness on social media platforms. The campaign also shows how social influence can help address major global issues rather than simply promote a product or brand. Nowadays social influence is often used as simply a tool to increase profits and we rarely hear about humanitarian campaigns such as this one. Only time will tell if the campaign was a success as hopefully the number of people suffering from hunger will steadily decrease from 805 Million.

References

Catena, M., (2015) ‘805 Million Names and How It All Happened’ HuffingtonPost viewed October 13th 2015 at <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marina-catena/805-million-names-and-how_b_6722472.html>

World Food Programme, (2015) ‘805 MILLION NAMES’    http://cdn.wfp.org/2015/805millionnames/

https://www.facebook.com/ZlatanIbrahimovic

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Twitch is a live video game streaming site founded in June 2011. It currently has more than 55 million active users and in the last year alone it had total views of over 10.5 billion. Its increasing popularity sparked the interest of Amazon who bought the platform for $970 million last year.

Twitch can be considered an online social network as it meets Boyd and Ellison’s 3 criteria to define a social network: “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” (Boyd and Ellison, 2007)

Twitch allows anyone with an account to broadcast, chat, follow and subscribe to a channel, view past recordings and privately message other users. Users can set up a profile with a picture and general information about themselves and their channel such as age, location, favourtie games, hobbies etc. Broadcasters include individual gamers, pro players, publishers, developers, media outlets, conventions and esports organizations. You have the option to ‘follow’ other channels and be notified when they are live.

Twitch is notable for its very active community with the average user spending 106 minutes per day on twitch. Over 58% of users spend 20 hours a week on twitch. Almost half of the US live video streaming traffic in 2014 came from Twitch. Twitch also accounts for 1.8% of peak internet traffic in the US, close to Netflix, Apple and Google.

The popularity of this platform is revolutionizing the gaming industry and creating a unique community which can interact with each other 24/7 regardless of location. It is reported that 68% of users have decreased watching television as a result of twitch. Twitch’s main demography includes young adults, with a reported 76% of users between the age of 18-49.

Twitch can also be considered a viable profession for broadcasters that can attract a large audience. In fact Jeffrey Shih, a popular Twitch broadcaster, stated that the best broadcasters can earn over $100 thousand a year from their channel revenue alone.

With all these impressive statistics it is no surprise Amazon was so eager to secure this platform ahead of Yahoo which was also bidding to acquire Twitch. The concept of video streaming combined with an active online social network is what allowed Twitch to be successful. It will be interesting to see if other firms will try and recreate this in other industries such as sports or education. I believe there is huge potential for video streaming outside of the gaming industry. More and more people prefer watching content on the internet rather than television, and having a community to interact with at the same time is a significant advantage. If you are interested in this topic I encourage you to take a look at the links below.

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

-Eadicicco, L., 2014, ’10 Facts About Twitch, The Company That Amazon Is Buying, That Will Blow Your Mind’, Business Insider, Viewed October 5th at <http://www.businessinsider.com/statistics-about-twitch-2014-8?IR=T>

-Kim, E., 2014, ‘Amazon Buys Twitch For $970 Million In Cash’, Business Insider, Viewed October 5th at <http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-buys-twitch-2014-8?IR=T>

-https://www.quantcast.com/twitch.tv#/trafficCard

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I’m sure by now you are all familiar with the concept of social commerce and the advantages it can offer compared to traditional distribution channels. While social commerce is growing exponentially and many firms have adopted this strategy, there still remains unfulfilled potential, particularly in the Western World.

China is the most advanced nation under this aspect and experts estimate it to be 10 years ahead of the Western Hemisphere. The growth of Chinese social commerce, particularly mobile commerce, can be summarized with a few statistics. The market for rural customers (Living outside the big cities) is estimated at $16 billion, for mobile commerce alone. Contrary to the West, the Chinese consumer makes most of his e-commerce transaction through mobile phone rather than computers. A staggering 388 smart cars were sold in just 3 minutes through the ‘WeChat’ social app. It is hard to imagine someone from a western culture make such a big transaction online, let alone 400 in under 5 minutes.

So how can Western firms emulate the success social commerce is having in China? There is no clear answer and this should be analyzed more thoroughly by Western Marketers. It may never reach the level of China due to the cultural barrier. Chinese consumers seem a lot more active in the social commerce arena, 40% of user who have shopped online are willing to share their experience on social media compared to the almost insignificant 1% in the West. It is worth noting that social commerce is a relatively new phenomenon, so the psychological/cultural reasons that convinced the Chinese new generation to trust and shop online so often can be replicated in the West.

One step Western firms can take to bridge the overwhelming gap with China is to use Social commerce as efficiently as possible to create a unique and valuable experience for the user. Bottica, an online jewelry retailer, published the results of a study comparing the traffic generated from Facebook and Pinterest.

Every firm should analyze the data from their social media platforms as they show what type of transaction they can expect from different users and create a suitable strategy for each channel. Bottica might consider displaying some of their cheaper products to Facebook users given their purchasing habits for example.

The main conclusion is that firms have to think of innovative ways to exploit all the information they are receiving through social media. It is no longer enough to simply have a Facebook page or Twitter account, firms have to think of ways to optimize their social commerce strategy to create value for users. If Western firms can do this successfully, we might one day see them reach the impressive level of social commerce growth of China.

References

Bowler, C. 2015. Six Eye-Opening Stats About Social Commerce in China. Forbes Magazine. http://forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2015/07/13/six-eye-opening-stats-about-social-commerce-in-china/

Feinleib, D. 2012. How Facebook, Pinterest Compare In Social Commerce. Forbes Magazine. http://forbes.com/sites/davefeinleib/2012/05/22/how-facebook-pinterest-compare-in-social-commerce/