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Whatsapp, in the first half of 2014 they lost 230 million dollar. Their sales volume was only 10 million dollars. Being a free app without any advertisments made Whatsapp an app without any revenues. But they have many employees who have to been paid and that’s the reason why they lost this amount of money.

But then a interesting question is rising in my opinion. If Whatsapp is losing money, it’s a free app without any possibilities to earn money (maybe ads, but they’re not going to introduce ads on Whatsapp), why does Facebook paid 19 billions dollars for this app?

Well, the answer is difficult, I found an article where is said that Facebook bought Whatsapp to have the 600 million users of Whatsapp in the ”Facebook group”. Facebook is losing users for different reasons and by buying Whatsapp they try to get those lost users back in their hands. In other articles I read that Facebook is never going to earn that 19 billions back, but that’s not the reason why they bought Whatsapp. The reason is that they saw in Whatsapp a big rival as a messenger app. By buying Whatsapp they got the total control over them and can do with them what they want.

But if it’s smart to buy Whatsapp, we will never know. Losing 230 million dollar in half a year is a lot of money, on the other hand when we look at the earnings of facebook, they made 806 millions of dollar profit in the third quarter of 2014, 806 million in three months!
Facebook can have that 230 million loss…

To be continued..

References:

http://www.nu.nl/internet/3914910/whatsapp-verliest-230-miljoen-dollar-in-eerste-helft-2014.html

http://www.nutech.nl/apps/3707201/waarom-betaalt-facebook-19-miljard-dollar-whatsapp.html

http://www.demorgen.be/technologie/waarom-facebook-zijn-19-miljard-dollar-voor-whatsapp-niet-moet-terugverdienen-a1798169/

http://nos.nl/artikel/613772-waar-verdient-whatsapp-geld-mee.html

http://nos.nl/artikel/715214-winst-facebook-bijna-verdubbeld.html

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A couple of weeks ago I saw a very interesting news item about Starbucks. Everyone of us that have ever ordered a coffee at starbucks knows it: usally they spell your name wrong on your cup. This is the reason:

This is one of the best social media strategies I ever heard! They spell your name wrong on your cup for a reason: you’ll post something on social media about it and by posting that Starbucks gets free publicity! Without you even noticing it! And that one time that they spell your name correctly you’ll post something about it on social media because a ‘miracle’ happened!

I did a little test! I’ve searched on instagram on the hashtag #starbucks. I found over 15 million posts with the hashtag #starbucks and many of them are with wrong spelled names! Then I searched the name of other large food/drink companies. McDonalds for example: almost 5 million posts.
KFC: not even 2 million posts
Burgerking: they don’t even reach the one million posts.

And if I take a look at the 5 largests coffee company chains in the world:

McCafe: 350.000 posts
Dunkindonuts: 950.000 posts
Costacoffee: 75.000 posts
Timhortons: 550.000 posts
Starbucks: 15.000.000 posts!!!

So it’s clear that their social media strategy works very good! Because if we compare the amount of locations of dunkingdonuts (10.000 locations) and starbucks (20.000 locations, 2 times more) and the amount of posts on instagram (more than 15 times more!) we see that Starbucks is very succesful on social media.

I was thinking about this very special social media strategy that actually works! But are there other companies that are using a social media strategy like this without we – the customers- are noticing it? I don’t know other companies, do you know other companies that uses such a special social media strategy? Share it with us!

Sources:

http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1014/Bizar/article/detail/3745444/2014/09/10/Starbucks-schrijft-met-een-reden-verkeerde-namen-op.dhtml

The Five Largest Coffee Shop Chains On Earth

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Engaging customers & prosumers through social media is a very new thing in our world. Where in the traditional way of promotion the control was always in the hands of the managers of the companies, with the upcoming of social media this turned 180 degrees. Customers can talk back through social media and can – maybe more important- talk to eachother about products & services.

For the managers is this a thing to learn from. In the first article it’s made clear how the managers can use social media in a positive way. The example given in the article is about a seller of web conference software. If the manager of this web conference software seller sees a post on Facebook or a tweet about poor quality of web conferences they can immediately jump in and offer them their ‘better’ product for web conferences. This is a smart way to sell your products trhough social media.

The second article is about the impact from corporate twitter channels on the corporate reputation. In this research they made eight twitter accounts with all different channel settings to find out which settings has the most impact on the corporate reputation. They found out that a high user engagement and informedness has a positive relationship with the corporate reputation. In this research they used a fictitious coffee company, what I am wondering is if the same results came out if the researchers used a fictitious gaming store or maybe a fictitious clothing shop. I think that can maybe attract other people who react on a other way on the settings of the twitter channel!

The third article is a research to find out the best social media strategy on Twitter. For ten months they followed four big dutch companies to find out which kind of facebook campaigns can reach the most people. They found out that campaigns that are focussed on getting likes or campaigns with polls are the most succesfull. They also found out that the more campaigns you post on a day the less total reach you’ll have. So it’s better to reduce your amount of posts! This research is very interesting in my opinion but I don’t understand the chosen dependent variable. In this case it’s total reach. I think total reach is not a good indicator for a succesfull campaign, they could better use click-through-rate in my eyes.

The fourth article on this subject is about the consumer-consumer conversations that came up with the rising of social media. What I think is very interesting of this article is that it is written in 2009, when social media wasn’t that big as it is now. But the predictions they made in this article are almost perfect. Very interesting to read!

As a last part of this subject I compared two big companies to see how they engage their customers on Twitter. I found out that KLM does this with one central Twitter account where you can talk to them in 10 different languages. On the other hand I found out that T-mobile does this on a totally different way. They have already 7 dutch speaking official Twitter accounts!! And many other accounts in other languages!

Sources:

Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy. Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93.

Glynn Mangold, W., and Faulds, D. 2009. Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons 52, 357-365.

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.

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We all heard the horrible news about the beheadings of the two American journalist James Foley and Steven Sotloff by the terrorist organisation IS. They posted the horrible videos on social media websites to scare whole the world with those videos. 

But the problem starts earlier in this process. All the people who fight for IS are for a big part recruited through social media. The IS has a whole social media strategy team who is leaded by Ahmad Abousamra. Through social media they can reach the whole world and they try to convince innocent young muslism from all over the world to come fight with them in Irak to create an Islamic State. 

Not very long ago the social media didn’t exist and the only way to be recruited for this kind of terrorist groups was with mouth to mouth recruiting by Islamic preachers. But nowadays they post video messages at social media to persuade people to come to Irak and fight with them. And it works, and it comes very close to us. I read that a dutch guy was the leader of the Islamic State jail where James Foley was locked. Also I heard in the news that people from The Hague, the city where I live, are fighting with the jihad.. Scary!

In this video they show how IS use social media: 

It scares me to see how close it comes to us, someone who lives in my street can maybe leave to fight with them in Irak! Isn’t that scary? 

And how can we solve this problem? Is the responsibility in hands of the large social media platform as Facebook and Twitter or does the governments from the countries have to do something to stop the social media recruiting by IS? 

I would like to hear your opinion about it! 

Sources:

http://rt.com/usa/185784-isis-social-media-abousamra/

http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2014/08/26/nederlandse-jihadist-leidde-is-gevangenis/ (dutch)

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/08/is-clinton-atrocities-social-media-baghdadi-mccain.html#

http://www.revu.nl/nu-in-revu/arnhemse-isis-strijder-nederland-komt-zeker-aan-de-beurt/ (dutch)

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/563710/20140824/islamic-state-brit-rapper-abdel-majed-bary.htm#.VA7JBPl_t8F