Facebook to Add “Want” Button: New Opportunity in Social Commerce?

You probably have liked a lot of stuff on Facebook using Facebook’s “Like” button. Well, here’s more. Facebook is on its way to adding a “Want” button. This will allow anyone to see what any member of his network wants to buy.  This is the ultimate peek to someone’s virtual shopping wish list and this is a very good opportunity if you have an online business.

According to Mashable, Facebook is gearing up for a huge social commerce push. Tom Waddington, a web developer for the site Cut Out + Keep, has decided to take a deeper look into the code behind it. And the fact that the code contains references to “socialcommerce” is a sign that they are taking it seriously.

 "Social Commerce" feature in Facebook's code

On the other hand, after being interviewed by Mashable, Facebook’s spoke person says “We’re always testing new platform features, but at the moment we have nothing new to announce”. So, if Facebook is really going to launch this “Want” button, company can make use of it as a medium to collect a lot of information about member interests, just as  the “Like” button already does.

In addition, as Business Insider has reported, this move is driven by the notion to keep the advertisers or businesses interested. The move would also allow companies to have a greater integration with Facebook without having to build their own apps or platforms.

In developing this “Want” button, Facebook has been working with several famous brands such as Victoria’s Secreet, Pottery Barn, Wayfair and etc. In order to have a better picture of this new app of Facebook, Here’s a sample of how Facebook’s testing partner Pottery Barn is using the feature:

Example from Pottery Barn

 You can also explain why do you want the item

Would you be interested in seeing a Want button on the site? What do you think of Facebook becoming more of platform for social commerce? Share your thoughts.

Cheers,
Ivan

Social Media and Marketing: How to Convince Your Boss That Social Media is a Good Idea

Bosses are stubborn by nature and therefore convincing them to use social media can be difficult. They can be more comfortable with the traditional method of marketing such as TV ads, Billboard, and etc. If your company is rooted in traditional marketing and won’t shift from it, here are some ways that you might try to convince your boss to use social media as a part of your company marketing tool:

1.     Social media is cheaper than most other marketing methods

    There are a lot of case where many companies have successfully used social media without spending much money at all. The most popular social media platforms today, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, are free to use. Building up a successful online network requires time, but once a company gains some traction, things often take off and grow quickly.

2.      Social media results are measurable

Tracking social media marketing results is quite easy. The success of a campaign can be measured by the number of followers, fans, shares, likes, and additional website visitors it generates. All of those can directly relate to increased sales and leads as well.

3.     Start Small

A company should start small when it comes to social media. Trying to do too much, too soon is going to be overwhelming for you, your boss, and the company. Starting with an established network like Facebook is your best bet. From there, you can show the value of social media and branch out to other sites.

4.    The domino effect of social media increases results over time

     Web users nowadays are tend to share their experience with others through social media platforms. When something entertains, educates, or inspires them, web users are very likely to share that content with their own networks. And this can be regarded as the “domino effect” of social media.

5.     Social media content lives on forever

Unlike the traditional method of marketing that usually booms only at certain times and then is forgotten, the content of social media that shared on the internet usually lives on forever. Every piece of information shared by a company via social media is stored so that a company may keep the current information as their record that can be used for a future plan.

What do you think? Do you think that Bosses nowadays are more open towards the idea of using social media as a marketing tool? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Cheers,
Ivan 

Getting Hurt by Social Media: What Went Wrong?

Using social media as a part of your marketing tool is a very smart way to reach your target markets. A poorly managed business social media campaign, however, can easily backfire if the right measures are not put in place by key people in your organization.

So if you're using social media for marketing, what can go wrong? How might you be hurting your business rather than helping it thrive? Based on MarketingProfs, here are six likely shortcomings you should look out for in developing your social media marketing:

1.     Not displaying your corporate branding

When you want to use social media as your marketing tool, be sure to brand your organization across all social media platforms. It can be done by using your organization logos, colors, and tagline as well as using themes that relate well to your corporate image.

2.     Not using the right social media platforms

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions in social media marketing. Instead, you have to carefully choose social media platforms that suit with your business and integrate them into one solid social media marketing program.

3.     Having the wrong person in charge

Letting the inexperienced staff handle your social media campaign is never a good scenario.  So therefore, you need a team of trained marketing professionals who understand online communications and marketing in order to reap the full advantages of social media marketing.

4.     Lacking consistency

Sometimes, an organization has launched programs that start out well on their social media page but then all of a sudden, they never seem to update their program anymore on their page. This can convey the impression that the organization is neither organized nor committed and it can affect your organization image.

5.     Including negative content about your competition

Saying negative things about your competitors in social media is a big NO-NO. It will make your organization look bad to your customers. On top of that, it also can get you into legal issues.

6.     Not responding to comments from followers and fans

Social media is a two-way-street.  Many organizations, however often forget and use social media only as a medium to broadcast. Ignoring the comments and feedbacks from your customers is considered as one of the biggest mistakes in social media marketing and you have to avoid this.

Therefore, in order to avoid social media marketing failure, it is highly recommended for every organization to take these six shortcomings listed above into account so that they can learn from it and then generate a cohesive social media marketing plan.

Besides these six, can you think of any other shortcomings? Share your ideas here.

Cheers,
Ivan

Red Bull and its Social Media Strategy

There is no shortage of creativity at Red Bull. Most companies don’t have the resources available to develop viral content every day like Red Bull and when it comes to social media and marketing, Red Bull is clearly a very good example for companies that want to start using social media as a part of their marketing activities.  

Red Bull’s social media presence is outstanding. Their Facebook and Twitter profiles are gaining tons of traction. They have over 32 million ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page and more than 700,000 people have followed then on Twitter. How have they been so successful, especially on Facebook? According to Optima Worldwide, there are 7 successful ways that Red Bull has been constantly doing:

Gorgeous Photography – Red Bull has posted some of their awesome extreme sport event photos on their Facebook page and these photos bring their social media strategy to life

Tapping into Popular Memes – Red Bull has cleverly and creatively tied their brand in with some popular internet memes to increase social sharing.

Promoting a Lifestyle – Red Bull promotes a lifestyle that their target market identifies with and is happy to interact with on Facebook.

Incorporating Video – A good video can drive people to watch and share it. Red Bull understands it. By promoting a cool video on their Facebook page, Red Bull is able to generate massive number of people to share their video on Facebook.

Highlighting Offline Campaigns – Too many brands view social media marketing and traditional advertising as totally separate. Red Bull gets it, every cool offline branding event is featured on Facebook.

Sex Appeal – Apparently, sex appeal works really well on Facebook.

Acknowledging and Engaging their Fans – Red Bull has got many cleaver and unique ideas on how to reach their Facebook fans in simple yet fun ways that will attract their fans.

Clearly Red Bull has done a very good job in using social media as a part of their marketing activities, especially in using Facebook. What do you think? Are there any other good examples beside Red Bull that caught your attention? Leave your thoughts here.

Cheers,

Ivan

Introducing: Path

The number of social media platform has increased significantly in the last 2 years and one of the most recent is Path. Path was launched in November 2010 (Not too long ago) by a former Facebook employer, Dave Morin.  Path is basically a social-networking platform which enables of photo sharing and messaging for mobile devices. It is interesting to see that while Facebook continues to face trouble in translating its success into the mobile platform, Path is simply ignoring websites and focusing their company entirely in the mobile realm. Why do they focus on mobile platform? After being asked on an interview, Morin said that there are 5 billion mobile subscribers and only 1 billion desktop in the world, so the mobile era is here.

Path also limits each user’s social network to 150 friends and therefore it is an intimate way to share the stuff that you like without broadcasting it to wide range audiences like on Facebook or Twitter. However, there is still an option for you to synchronize your Path account with your Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare account. In addition, when asked about the reason behind limiting the number of friend that each user might have, Morin said that this is based on research by Oxford University professor, RobinDunbar who reveals that the number of social relationships that our brain can handle is only 150.

Introducing: Path

As Facebook has become more and more popular, don’t you think that sometimes Facebook is overused by displaying advertising, events or photos that we actually don’t care about? This is where Path becomes a refreshing alternative for us. Based on Morin’s interview on CNBC, He said that as per June 2012, Path has more than 3 million users and Path is expected to experience a significant growth in the future.

Path Has Some Pretty Solid Ratings in Apple's App Store 

Through its commitment and innovation, do you think that it is possible for Path to gain more number of users than Facebook in terms of mobile platform? Leave your thoughts here.

Cheers,

Ivan

Facebook to Build Search Engine?

Social media and search engine have become interconnected. Look what Google has done. After creating its social media platform called Google +, Google has recently announced the significant change to its search engine, calling it Search, Plus Your World. The idea behind “Search, Plus Your World” is that Google is trying to personalize your search results by including Google + data when you are signed into your Google account.  Search plus Your World surfaces content that has been shared with you on Google+, as well as public information from the social networking site that is related to your search, and integrates this data into typical Web search results. 

Google's "Search, Plus Your World

Meanwhile Google is trying to socialize its Search, Plus Your World, rumor has said that Facebook is also trying to build its own search engine. According to Businessweek, Facebook has formed more than 20 engineers that led by a former Google programmer. According to Mashable, the aim of this Facebook initiative is that to take the better advantage from lots of contents Facebook users create on and off the site every day. With people sharing status updates and supporting brand pages on the network, as well as using Facebook’s “Like” button to mark articles and videos from external sites, there is certainly a lot to take advantage of.

At the moment, Facebook has not confirmed the news yet. One of Facebook’s spokesperson has been asked and here is the response: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation around products.” So, we have to wait until Facebook releases the official statement but if the rumor is true, it will increase the competition between the two Silicon Valley giants.

What do you think? Would an improved social search engine within Facebook affects the significant of Google search? Leave your thoughts here.

Cheers,

Ivan

What Happened to Friendster?

Does anyone remember Friendster? Yes! It’s one of the first movers on social networking site for consumers.  Back then, Friendster WAS an online community that connects people through networks of friends and nowadays, Friendster has become a social gaming portal. Malaysian company, MOL agreed to acquire Friendster for roughly $100 million and on 31^st of May 2011, Friendsters had deleted its users' content. To be honest, I have no idea whether the takeover was necessary for Friendster. But I suppose that was the only way to save Friendster from bankruptcy. But then, isn’t it just sad to see one of the pioneers of social media site turned into social gaming portal? (No offense for gamer). And even, the young billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Friendster was a model for his new website (Facebook)

Friendster's Page During the Old Days

So, basically what exactly happened with Friendster? Why did Friendster lose its supremacy?  Fierce competition was clearly one of the factors behind the collapse of Friendster. When Friendster was enjoying its first mover advantage, several competitors such as MySpace and Facebook came up and started to threaten Friendster’s market share and eventually due to lack of innovation in technology, Friendster had given up its “supremacy” to its competitors. Lack of innovation. Yes. I suppose this was also another reason of Friendster’s collapse. And this was also admitted by Jim Scheinman, the former Friendster executive who says that “For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side and I remember reading thousands of customer service emails telling us that if we didn’t get our site working better soon, they’d be ‘forced to join’ a new social networking site that had just launched called MySpace”. 

In addition, according to Peter Pachal, Friendster also didn’t understand some basic principle of social media. Friendster put way too much emphasize on the media side not the social side. Friendster was lacking in terms of “news feed”. It seemed that the only thing to do on Friendster at that time was polishing our profile and getting the testimonial from friends as much as we could. In contrast, although in the early days Facebook was about profile too, but then Zuckerberg has realized that Facebook's news feed was the key to its long-term success. What they did was putting friends' updates, shares, and discussions to the front and centre of the page. Full article can be read here. Therefore, due to genius movement made by Zuckerburg, Friendster did not have a chance to stand up against Facebook. Even if Friendster had introduced its comparable experience to the news feed, it was far too late for them.

Friendster's Page in Current Days

Based on the Friendster’s case, do you think what happened to Friendster might also happen to Facebook? 

Cheers,
Ivan

The Types of Self-Destructive Corporate Tweets

I assume that everyone in our class knows or might have a twitter account. Twitter is basically a social networking service and microblogging service which allows its users to send messages up to 140 characters or commonly known as “tweets”. I will be honest, I was an early adopter of Twitter and I am enjoying it so much. Through twitter, I can get any kind of information that is relevant to me. I can follow an account that I think suits me well.

I suppose the pattern of twitter user has been changing. Nowadays, not only the individual people who have twitter account, corporate has also been using twitter as a media to interact or communicate with their consumers. Similar with other platforms of social media, Twitter is like two-edged sword, on one hand, it can be useful to enhance the brand awareness and build a good relationship with consumers but on the other hand, Twitter also has a potential to destruct the brand image of a company.

In case you missed our class yesterday, Wags also discussed about the twitter mistakes made by corporate. The mistake was made by Brown Brothers, a wine company from Australia posted an aggressive tweet towards its customers and eventually led to an extensive twitter war between Brown Brother and wine writers in Australia.

Yes. Aggressive tweet is obviously considered as one of twitter mistakes but there are other several mistakes that corporate should bear in their mind.

According to Jay Baer, there are several types of corporate tweets that cause heartburn such as:

• Wrong Pipes: This mistake happens when the administrators of company twitter account mistakenly posted a tweet that he or she intended to post from their personal individual twitter account.  Famous example can be taken from American Red Cross case (See the above picture).
• Tone Deaf: This occurs when the official twitter account posts a tweet that is outside customary social or societal norms. Example can be seen from the screenshot below where Kenneth Cole has linked the chaotic situation in Egypt with his new Spring collection and it has offended almost everyone on twitter.

Based on the facts above, it is a must for corporate to use Twitter carefully as their marketing tool in order not to fall into the same hole like companies that mentioned above. 

All right, I have mentioned several Twitter mistakes made by corporate and I am sure there are still a lot of examples of backfire effect from Twitter. What do you guys have in your mind? any other examples? Please do share it with me.

Cheers,

Ivan

Social commerce: Is the next big thing?

Referring to what Wags' comment in my first blog, he wrote an interesting point that directly caught my attention. To be precise, he wrote that social commerce is somewhat a new trend in social media marketing. Then, one question suddenly popped up in my mind, in what extent social commerce considered as a new trend?  I suppose Giant retailers such as ZARA, Topshop, Nudie Jeans have their own Facebook page since maybe 5 years ago? and they have been using it to communicate constantly with their customers as well as promoting their products. They might not sell directly their products through Facebook or other social media platforms but at least they have been using social media to promote their own product. Hence, one question arises here, Are promotions through social media considered as social commerce?

                       

Well, looking to definition from Wikipedia, social commerce defined as the use of social networks in the context of e-commerce transactions. Transaction is the keyword here and I can assume that social commerce must involve transactions activity between the retailers and consumers, therefore promotion only is not sufficient enough to be considered as social commerce but, who cares? In my opinion, promoting your products through social media is one of the cheapest way to reach the consumers, especially for small businesses, right? 

To be honest, I am also using social media (Facebook) to promote my clothing line. My clothing line is named Velvia and, using Facebook as a medium of promotion was very helpful for me to reach consumers on a wide scale. But then, some consumers started complaining that they were not really comfortable to communicate through Facebook and eventually my sales were going down as well. To overcome this, me and my partners provide a particular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services so that we can communicate directly with them. In line with my past problem, research that has been conducted by Forrester Research says that eBusiness in retail sectors have reported that they only had little direct or indirect benefit from Facebook, full article can be read here.

So, from my past experiences and research conducted by Forrester, do you think social commerce is still the next big thing in the future? Leave your thoughts here. In the end, I provide with a video that shows the prediction of social commerce in the future.

                             

                                           
Cheers,
Ivan

Social Media is a tool, content marketing is the KING!

It is uncontested that social media has become one of the popular tools used by every marketer to reach its target markets. Wide range of coverage is one of the advantages of using social media. Furthermore, in comparing to traditional advertising such as TV ads and Billboard, social media is obviously way much cheaper and it only makes social media become more valuable on the marketer's mind.  But, one thing that every marketer must bear in their mind, social media is only a tool to deliver your messages or your products to your target markets and the most important of all is actually the content of the marketing itself.

According to Bob Geller  content marketing is a practice that involves the development or sharing high quality content of marketing in order to engage with current or potential customers. From its definition, it can be seen clearly that delivering the high quality content is a must for every marketer in order to successfully applied social media as their marketing tools, because without a great content,  it is impossible to build successful social media presence.

So, what happens if we can incorporate social media and a great content of marketing? I would say that it is going to be a perfect combination of promoting your brand or products. Therefore, it can be said that social media and content marketing are complements and support each other.

What do you guys think? Would you say that social media is too powerful nowadays so that a great content marketing is no longer needed?

Cheers,
Ivan