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