Social Media might not be the best option for marketers after all — Here’s why.

Welcome back, you guys! It’s finally the end of the semester, so this will be my last article here. I’ve had a lot of fun writing my blogs and I really hope you guys enjoyed reading them!

Without further ado, I’d like to write about this week’s material, which is a 34 minute long lecture by Professor Mark Ritson, basically saying that there’s there’s no actual thing  as digital  marketing….

I was just as confused as you are.

But hold on, Let me explain. Answer me this:

What media channels would you use to target millennials to advertise a product?

Did you happen to think of social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook? Then guess what, you have the “digital first” mindset like me, unfortunately. But are we wrong? Why wouldn’t you use social media to target millenials? I mean, the world certainly agrees with us.

What Defines Millennials – and How Marketers Can Reach Them by Wharton, University of Pennsylvania

from Wipster by Maham S. Chappal

See the two articles here and here.

 

These are just two of the hundreds of articles that talk about the opportunities of social media marketing, how much millennials spend online, why traditional media does not reach to them etc.

Because of all these headlines saying so, it’s hard-wired us to believe that social media, or digital marketing is the go to marketing approach.

We no longer even care so much for traditional media because we’re now so convinced that it’s becoming obsolete. But Ritson found that when measured against the same metrics, consumers – including millennials, are still watching 4x more content on TV than on digital devices!

There is a line between digital and traditional media and people to like to choose one or the other but it’s about time that line is gone. Why? Because there are no longer any non digital mediums anymore. It’s all mashed up together!

We now watch YouTube on our TVs, read newspapers on our laptops and read magazines on our iPads. So, why are we still separating digital from traditional, when everything that we used to know have now gone digital?

My key takeaway from this is to not think of social media as this great, the-only-strategy-needed kind of thing, but to think of it as just another strategic tool that can be used along with other types of marketing strategies. Marketers should never forget who their customers are and what method is the best to reach them, then create a strategy from there.

There is no such thing as ‘digital marketing’, it’s just marketing effectively in a digital world.

With that, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my very last post ever!!!

Cheers everyone, and good luck!

Viola – out!

What do big companies like Facebook know about you? – See here to find out

Hey guys! Thanks for engaging and commenting on my posts so far. I really appreciate it and hope you’ve all been well!

When I thought about this week’s topic: ethics, privacy and consumer data, the first thing that popped into my head was that viral video of Mark Zuckerberg “Explaining the internet” at the Zuckerberg-Senate meeting. And here’s the video if you haven’t seen it, it’s hilarious.

 

This event is relevent to this week’s topic because the meeting was held in response to Facebook unethically sharing the personal data of up to 87 million people with the British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. This sparked questions for the entire internet sector on data protection and raised a lot of concerns from people everywhere. I mean, I got worried too – made me think about how much of my personal data they even have, and how many other companies might have the same kind of information about me.

So I did a little research and here’s a little unsettling list of things Facebook knows about us:

Mind Blown right? How shocking is this? But what’s even more shocking is how unconcerned some people are about their data being in Facebook’s hands.

I researched some more and here’s what I found:

Janrain’s Consumer Attitudes Toward Data Privacy Surveywas conducted online in April of 2018 where 1,051 US-based residents 18 years-old individuals were asked their thoughts on the scandal.

1. Are you aware of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal?

2. Did the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal change your opinion about sharing your personal data online?

 

42% of 1051 participants answered NO! Half of these young people do not mind their data out there and they feel neutral still. But let me tell you that not everything is put on the internet is being protected and can be used in some unethical and illegal ways.

1. You know when you’re on a website and they ask you to “accept” their usage of your web cookies? These cookies are used by advertising networks to track you across multiple websites. They then tailor what advertisements appear on your screen. This might sound quite alright to you but are you comfortable being tracked or monitored?
2. Apps like Uber and Google Maps track your location even when you’re not using the app – just imagine what would happen if this data was used for unethical purposes.

What are your thoughts? Share them with me in the comments below!

The viral Super Bowl commercial – Alexa loses her voice

Hi guys! Welcome back to my blog. I’m doing a blog on Week 10’s Topic of Viral Marketing.

Leading the smart speaker market at the moment, the Amazon Echo is a spectacular innovation that lets you communicate with virtual assistant Alexa to do a range of different actions.

Basically, Amazon Alexa can answer you a large degree of questions, set up dates on calendars or even play music. If you have smart appliances in your home, the assistant can further be ugraded to perform a range of different actions with those appliances. Now how awesome is that?

But we are here to talk digital marketing! And one of the most unique and creative marketing campaigns of 2018 is “Alexa Loses Her Voice.”

Now, while the digital marketers in us do see how the content of this Super Bowl ad could be strategized in a far better way on social media alone. Yet, Amazon decided to spend a few million and go for a big publicity stunt as a viral advertisement during the Super Bowl.

Watch on YoutubeThe advertisement itself is extremely creative and quickly became one of the most talked about commercials from the Super Bowl. It presents the idea that “Alexa lost her voice” and the echo smart functions would instead be replaced by famous celebrity voices.

Part of the marketing strategy is the distinct selection of the celebrities chosen to be featured in the ad. They decided to feature some infamous faces, such as Cardi B, Gordon Ramsay and Sir Anthony Hopkins. And while most celebrities do have their own brand, the celebrities in questions are infamous for their powerful characters.

Now, let’s look at the table below describing different groups social media viral marketing campaigns. There are four in total:

1. Strokes of Luck
2. Triumphs
3. Nightmares
4. Homemade Issues

Which category do you think “Alexa loses her voice” falls into?

Yup! It’s definitely a Triumph! Since it was a campaign produced solely by Amazon, “The initiator of viral campaign” was from the “Company”. And since it topped USA Today’s Ad Meter as audience’s favorite commercial and reached up to 48 million views on youtube now, we can definitely say that the “Outcome” was POSITIVE.

The reason for this success of this campaign is not only on how brilliant the video was, it is also thanks to online word-of-mouth; the sharing of information between a customer and a colleage/friend/family member or so on. Since the advertisement was released on various social media platforms, the customers were allowed to share the ad with people and then ended up becoming “viral”.

What are your thoughts? Share them with me in the comments below!

How Spotify uses Big Data and is killing it in the music streaming industry.

Welcome back to my blog!

This is an interesting topic for me to write about and I’m sure it’ll interest you too! 13 years ago, the term big data wasn’t even born yet until it was launched by O’Reilly Media and the concept is still evolving continually. But what is big data, first of all?

— Big Data is a phrase used to mean a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is so large it is difficult to process using traditional database and software techniques.

These Big Data are collected and gathered by people all the world, and that includes me and you! Basically, every click, like, comment, share and follow that you make on the internet are valuable information to businesses everywhere. To give you a better idea, I’d like to use Spotify to illustrate what big data is.

But some stats first! Spotify currently has a whopping 83 million number of active subscribers and 35+ million songs, as of June 2018. That is pretty amazing to me. I mean, they charge $4.99 ~ $9.99 a month and they got over 80 million people subscribed. I’m not good at math but I know that that is A LOT of money.

When millions of people are streaming and listening to music every minute of the day, you have access to an astonishing amount of intel. These intel include what songs get played the most, to where listeners are streaming from and even what kind of device they are using to access the app. Spotify is a data-driven company and it uses the data in every part of the organization to drive decisions.

One example is the Discover Weekly feature on the app that reached to 40 million people in its very first year. How this works is that every user gets a personalized playlist of music that they have not heard before—a modern-day version of a best friend creating a personalized mix tape!

Spotify also created the Spotify for Artists app that provides mobile access to analytics—everything from which playlists are generating new fans to how many streams they are getting overall. The geographic streaming data can be useful to musicians and their teams to plan tours more effectively. They can see which country to include in the tour list by looking at how many fans stream the artist’s music. For example, Halsey! I got to go to her concert in Singapore on October 8th. It was spectacular, by the way.

But sometimes, having and using people’s personal information can be a scary thought for consumers and companies must know where to draw the line and never cross. The community will respond if it feels like it’s taking too many liberties with data. I for one, do not mind my personalized playlists and yes, I do prefer Spotify over Apple Music so fight me! hahaha I’m kidding of course, I’d lose.

Leave a comment down below if you found my article enjoyable to read! Can’t wait to write more x

SMS or Location-Based Marketing – which is a better mobile marketing tool?

Welcome back to my blog, friends!

This time, I’d like to shine a light on 2 big marketing tools used to reach to target customers via online. The digital world is expanding more and more everyday and business people are looking for opportunities to make profit using the internet. It is a pretty big business trend, people taking their businesses online but with 2.958 billion active mobile social users all over the world, I would definitely get on this wagon too.

There are so many types of mobile marketing out there to do campaigns with but I believe, the real key is to actually figure out whether they go with the brand and what kind of content you want to put out there.

Types of Mobile Marketing

• SMS (short message service) -Also called text messages

Below is a real text sent to me by an anonymous person or “Sherlyn”, advertising about real estate. I’m a 20 year old foreigner studying Marketing in Singapore. I can’t do anything with this ad; it has no value to me whatsoever because I’m not looking to buy a house! This is what SMS marketing is all about, unfortunately. Sending out mass texts to people regardless of who might find the information relevant. I honestly do not like this type of advertising, I feel it is sketchy, unprofessional and unreliable. And if I feel this way, I’m sure many other as customers feel this way too.

• Location-Based Marketing – Delivers multi-media directly to the user of a mobile device dependent upon their location via GPS technology

Now this one is real trendy. I have mixed feelings about LBM because the apps use your current or  frequent locations to advertise on their products. I admit, this type of marketing is genius. It’s personalized, relevant, convenient and it’s more likely to be effective than other types of marketing tools. But then again, these companies have access to your location and that scares me honestly. I fear that this type of personal information would fall into the wrong hands and be used against me. I’m a pessimist (HAHA). But some people love it and feel it keeps them in the now and updated, which is understandable and is the whole point of location-based marketing.

I hope I gave you some new perspectives on these two marketing types! I’d love to know your thoughts too, so comment below!

How to make use of the Facebook Segmentation Matrix

The internet has forever changed the lives of people everywhere, definitely includng me! I’m so grateful to be a millenial in this amazing digital age. Some of the best, most profitable apps that lead the social media game are Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn but I think we can all agree that the biggest social media platform on the internet is Facebook, with 1.47 billion daily active users worldwide, worth over $100 billion.

(oh my god, right?)

Did you know that the average cost per click in Facebook Ads across all industries is $1.72, with the highest being $3.77 for Finance & Insurance Industry? Now, that’s a lot. If you’re going to use Facebook to promote your company and brand, you should know the four main segments you want to target.

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Any successful company knows how to segment their target markets and Facebook does it incredibly well and knows how to use it to their advantage to gain market dominance. But what are the segments and are you in any of it? (of course you are). People use Facebook for various reasons depending on how old you are, how sociable, how much entertainment you need and it all depends on a person’s personality and their motivation to use the app.

And using these reasons, The Facebook Segmenation Matrix is created. So let’s see.

I know, the first thing you’ll see is “Attention Seekers” and we all know a person or two who comes to mind. So very briefly, let me tell you what these segments represent.

Attention Seekers – are exactly what they sound like. These people are bigtime content creators who can gather a lot of attention to themselves. E.g. Kim Kardashian or Logan Paul.

Entertainment Chasers – This is the category where I fall! Engaging with facebook ads is almost never for me because I always scroll past to what I really want; videos of people and dogs doing the “What the fluff?” challenge.  #whatthefluff

Mass Facebook ads seem to fail on consumers like me but perhaps not on the devotees!

Devotees – They are people who create and consume content on Facebook. They’re more likely to click on an ad for Apple products rather than people like me. Devotees will tend to click on ads and share about it to their audience and peers as a user. E.g. Vloggers or Brand Ambassadors.

Last but not least,

Connection Seekers – These people are simply looking to connect and egage with friends through posts and messages or be in meaningful facebook communities. More than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful communities—groups aimed at helping users such as new parents or victims of rare diseases.

Brands need to know who they’re targeting and more importantly, how they are engaging to each segment when they’re posting facebook ads to be the most effective. Happy targeting!

Let me know your thoughts on this blog and which segment you think you fall into! Feel free to leave a comment, you guys!

 

“Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what’s successful on the Web.” – Rick Levine