CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing Class 7: More on Social Media Marketing

Administration Second assignments = likely next week Final project questions? March 13 – Keith MacDonald March 20 or 27 – Julie Tyios (if 27 th, we’ll consider revising final project presentations.)

The social media turn

Four general forms Bookmarking/Aggregating Content Creation/Sharing Social networking Mobile/location-based

Bookmarking & Aggregation Creating links, collections and connections with ease Embedded buttons (like/share/digg/reddit/RSS/etc.) increasingly default in most CMSs, allowing for easy sharing by readers

Delicious Personal bookmarking with a social focus Bookmarks reside on server, can be public to show interests of individual/group Was on the ropes after purpose/lack of integration with Yahoo! – still sticking around though Marketing implications?

Reddit/Digg User-submitted content with up/down voting by user population Quick scan of what’s trending/hot on Internet Reddit gaining in popularity at present – partially due to nature of historical audience Marketing implications?

StumbleUpon A mix of aggregation and social sharing “Stumble” button scrolls through categories of sites based on user preferences and like/dislike ratings of stumblers Marketing implications?

Content Sharing Free publication platform for photo, audio, video content “Long tail” model – all media theoretically equal, but some more attuned to mass consumption, some more niche Viral possibilities via sharing with other services (but only a possibility)

Wikis as knowledge sharing Collaborative document creation Limited marketing potential (e.g., Wikipedia’s neutral POV and restrictions on biographical pieces limits “spin” on pages)

Blogging Longer-form information pieces (compared to FB and Twitter at least) Can be effective marketing if done right - challenges in corporate communication? Blogs for personal branding (e.g., academic/opinion leader blogs) Commenting and its discontents SEO and blogging – readable permalinks, keywords, social sharing integration, others

Twitter as Microblogging Short bursts (140 char) Organic tagging through hashtags (#omgwtfbbq) Rapid public communication – can be effective or toxic, depends on how the conversation is enjoined Examples of successes/failures?

Podcasts Structured audio/video message Like other internet content, far more measurable, targeted Quality an issue – good audio/video is not easy to do, and expectations are set by radio/TV which have decades of experience Examples?

Social Networks See last week’s guest lecture (and wait for Juile’s for more) General (e.g. FB) and specific (e.g., LinkedIn) Facebook Connect – FB as Open (and largely shared) ID – taps into FB’s already immense marketing database

What does it mean for a company to be social? Individuals are social, organizations not as much – makes for a potentially complicated relationship Organizations with tight messaging control fail on social media – why? Increasingly, organizations that don’t join the conversation are at the mercy of it Successful techniques in enjoining the conversation?

Various Roles in Social Media Strategy

Tips Establish (and follow!) fair community guidelines Engage and schedule regular communication across channels at an appropriate level (e.g., what’s the right level of communication around Twitter? Facebook? Blogs?) Crosslink – don’t just post to one medium, ensure and build links to others Conflict resolution tips

Tracking/Analytics More from Keith next week Easily accessed info – e.g., YouTube/Google Analytics, Facebook Page counts, Twitter Analytics (drawing on internal APIs) and URL shorteners – all tracked and if done intelligently, yields important information never before available

Geolocational/Mobile Will fit this in somewhere! Specific challenges/opportunities when computing and data are mobile and embedded in physical/social context

Next week Keith on analytics Mar 20 – either Juile or piece on mobile/locational marketing (depends on schedule)