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A few weeks ago, I found this Infographic which makes it clear what the 9 common social media marketing mistakes are. This infographic from socialtimes.com wants to prevent us from making this common mistakes.

Everything we learned in class can help us during our jobs or interships in the future. Using our social media and social networks minor in possible functions like marketing and pr can help us understand the best ways to design and implement a social media strategy. One of the highlights of this Infographic is definitely the fact that focusing on too many social media channels can damage your company.

Snapchat for example is a very popular and active service were users are able to send pictures to friends for a short period of time. This seems attractive for companies to increase awareness about your brand. I use snapchat a lot and I do follow some brands who post about their ‘product/service’ like Victoria Secret. They stand out for me because they are dedicated in increasing awareness about their product. If however your company is not dedicated to keeping this account up to date, this will not have any positive effects on your possible market. Business should make sure to only join those social media platforms which can help them interact with customers and increase awareness for new customers.

Oh and if you (with your business) were wondering about joining snapchat, here is a nice infographic to help you make that decision:

Keep this info in mind if you are managing or going to manage social media accounts for companies!

– http://socialtimes.com/9-common-social-media-marketing-mistakes-infographic_b205565

– http://socialtimes.com/snapchat-marketing-brand-infographic_b201873

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Nowadays, there are many social platforms for different purposes. For instance, Facebook to keep in touch with your friends, LinkedIn to find a job or employee and Dating websites to find a partner. In the future a new sort of platform will probably enter the internet.

[Holland needs more donors. Would you like to be a donor? Yes. No.]

The new foundation “Donate and Transplanting” wants to create a special platform for donors where they can choose to whom they will donate their organs. They are already talking to different relevant organisations, including the Kidney Foundation to develop such a platform. This takes all place in the Netherlands, where 1200 people are on the waiting list for a new organ. In their opinion, by creating such a platform, they think it will partly solve the problem of the stagnant number of donors in the Netherlands. The number of new donors is declining each year, which is a big problem for the growing number of people in need of an organ. On this platform, healthy people and people in need of an organ can register in order to find an match.

This idea originated from the fact that more and more people from waiting lists are searching/asking for kidneys on social platforms like Facebook. The foundation therefore thinks it could be a wise idea to centralize this with a platform.

What do you think about this social issue? Is it fair to let donors pick their own people for donating an organ? Will it solve the issue of the stagnating number of new donors?

– http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/23284684/__Donor_kan_ontvanger_kiezen__.html

– http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/3919862/donoren-mogen-ontvanger-gaan-kiezen.html

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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

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More and more retailers are making huge mistakes with some of their pieces. Let me catch you up! Two weeks ago, Zara – the famous fashion chain – was selling a striped shirt featuring a ‘sheriff’ star for children. This shirt caused an explosion of tweets from angry customers. This shirt had awfully many similarities with the shirts of Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Here are some reactions from outraged twitter and facebook users:

Some even made comments that ‘Hitler has found a job at Zara’ which is actually horrible if we consider everything that happened during the war. Of course, after this boom of reactions on twitter and Facebook, Zara came with an apology saying that this was never the intent and that the shirt was based on sheriff look-a-like shirts:

As I mentioned, Zara was not the only one. Urban Outfitters – made this mistake a few days ago. They sold a “Vintage Kent State sweatshirt” with blood spatter on it. As some of you might know, at this university a tragic event occurred in 1970. Four students were killed during protests. So you can see why this piece of clothes was not warmly received by customers of Urban Outfitters. As soon as people spotted this sweatshirt online, twitter exploded – again – with the hashtags #kentstate #UrbanOutfitters. Again an apology followed from Urban Outfitters saying this was a ‘vintage shirt’:

Nowadays, retailers cannot make such mistakes anymore. Their brand image is being damaged by these actions. The power of social media is enormous, just one bad tweet or message can set off a chain of negative reactions. Urban Outfitters directly removed this sweatshirt from their webshop because of these reactions.

Do you think the public is being harsh on such badly made clothes (of course the brands did not make these shirts to link these horrible events) or is it really the fault of the clothing stores? Is it right that Urban Outfitters removed this piece of clothes or should they stay behind their story and try to make the public see that they intended to make a vintage shirt? Let me know what you think!