Making Your Holiday Social

Mother’s Day is just around the corner and holidays are a prime time to use social media to enhance your brand.  This is the opportunity to really connect on a more personal level and to spark conversations and connections.  It’s an excuse to sell your product or brand with an interesting spin – that it’s a gift for someone special in your life.  So, what can you do to ensure your Mother’s Day (or really, any holiday) marketing stands out from the deluge of other businesses attempting to do the same thing?

1.  Give things away.  No, seriously.  2 out of the 3 suggestions from Go Digital revolve around this idea, and social media experts giving advice on the topic agree that giving is a great way to ultimately get.  Don’t make it just about sharing a link, but have users share stories, or host a photo contest.

2.  Ask users to share.  It doesn’t have to be about winning something.  Sometimes people have great stories to share and want to do just that – share.  They’re happy to engage with your brand if presented the opportunity, just as Dress Barn did:

Anti-Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing isn’t just for companies trying to sell a product or gain some notoriety in the public eye, but even for the President of the United States.  In order to get people to sign up for healthcare, President Obama teamed up with BuzzFeed made fun of himself and the video went viral (with over 52 million views as of the date of this post).

With today’s emerging media, we all know how quickly a great video can spread throughout the Internet.  When a video is a hit, it seems everyone has seen it within a 24-hour period.  But should viral marketing be a marketer’s goal, or should they simply work to have a good campaign, practice some buzz building techniques, and be pleasantly surprised if they end up with a viral hit?

Sinking Your Teeth into Bluetooth Marketing

Bluetooth advertising, or location-based advertising (LBA), is an emerging media tactic that is still in its (relative) infancy, but is sure to draw a lot of attention, as ads can be targeted by location directly to a consumer’s device with bluetooth capability activated.

This is a medium that is easily tracked and very powerful, allowing marketers to push real-time messages, coupons, images, etc directly to select persons in a particular vicinity.  However, this type of outreach comes with disadvantages and great ethical implications which marketers must heed.

Marketers have to be aware and not inundate consumers with these messages, or this powerful medium will be viewed as invasive and marketer’s will be the ones who suffer.  In order to use LBA responsibly, marketers should do the following:

1.  Inform consumers of the advertising, allowing them to disable or enable Bluetooth as desired.

2.  Ensure they are using the best equipment for the job.

3.  Ensure they are using the best software for the job.

For more information on software and hardware, check out the  Wireless Communication Library article which delves further into the pitfalls of marketers entering the Bluetooth arena.

There are also security concerns associated with Bluetooth, as people do not fully understand the functionality. The last thing marketers want is to have systems that are not secure and have spammers gain access.  This is a quick way to ensure you lose the trust of your consumers.  You can read more from Proxama about the technical aspects of the security of Bluetooth marketing.

If done properly, Bluetooth marketing can be effective.  Marketers must simply be conscious of all the intricacies involved and put the consumer first.  Giving consumers warning to opt in or out by enabling or disabling Bluetooth and ensuring their not being spammed builds trust and will open gateways for this type of marketing to become only more prevalent in the future.

What are your impressions of Bluetooth marketing?  Do you think this is the way of the future?  Should marketers have to notify consumers of the incoming messages?  Have you been exposed to LBA in the past, and how did you feel about it?

The Internet is Smarter Than you Think

In the last blog, shopping cart abandonment and what companies can do to turn that into a profit instead of a loss were discussed.  In this post, we’ll look at how a real-life banner ad turned my shopping cart abandon into a purchase.

I’ve been wanting a new water bottle, so was shopping at Tervis.com for one of their products.  However, the products were a bit more than I wanted to pay.  I had coupons for both Kohl’s and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, which I knew sold the products, but they didn’t offer the same personalization options as Tervis.  After browsing for a while and putting a bottle I wanted in my cart and looking at shipping costs, I decided I wasn’t ready to take the plunge.

I couldn’t get the nagging bottle out of my mind, so searched the web for promo codes for a discount or free shipping, thinking that would make up the difference and I could justify my purchase.  I found a couple offers on some different sites, but nothing that seemed legitimate.  Nope, my brain told me, you’ll just have to wait.

I ventured back to the site again, and now had a pop-up offering a 10% off coupon for signing up for e-mails, so I did that, but wasn’t quite sold, since the shipping costs were not even offset by this amount.

I continued my normal Internet activities, and I don’t remember exactly where I was or what I was doing, when what pops up but a Free Shipping coupon for Tervis.

Wow!  A 10% off coupon and free shipping!  Imagine my delight.  When all was said and done I could only use one code, but the free shipping was enough to get me to turn my shopping cart abandon into a purchase for the company.

The tricky (and frightening, to be truthful) part is that I try to remain fairly anonymous on the web.  I block cookies, I turn off tracking using Ghostery, and I keep most of my social networks set to private.  Yet, the Internet is smart and it knew what I wanted.  And it gave it to me.

While this is one example, this happens all the time.  Companies use online marketing such as banner ads, widgets, pop-ups, email marketing, etc. to reel in customers.  The advent of technology far beyond my comprehension allows them to track us and give us what we want.  And they gain valuable knowledge in return when you use a coupon.  This prospect is wonderful if you want a personal assistant type feeling (or you really wanted justification to purchase that water bottle), but can be a bit disconcerting if you’re not interested in this sort of tailored marketing.

The reality is that no matter how much we resist, the Internet (or rather, the mountain of data processors that lie beneath the Internet) is smart and knows us better than we think.  I’m not naive.  I know that my activity on the Internet is far from invisible, but with more and more emerging media being used to target consumers perhaps we should be concerned that we have few ways of finding out when and where we are tracked and how that data is used.

What do you think?  Is resistance futile and should we embrace the technology and the ability to have things we want delivered to us, or should we be a little frightened and work to try to ensure we can protect our privacy if we wish?  Tell us in the comments.

New Media: Emerging Into Our Everyday Lives

Vast technological innovation corresponds to changes in all aspects of our society.  One of the most important things affected by advances in technology is the way in which we communicate.  This means interpersonal communications as well as how businesses and brands connect with consumers.

Thus, emerging media is born.  Unlike traditional media (newspapers, magazines, television), emerging media is interactive, real-time, and allows communication to be a two-way street between consumers and brands.  We are bombarded with emerging media messages daily – on our cell phones, computers, and televisions; through social media sites, billboards, and even wearable technology.

The only constant is change, and as Gretchen Fox points out in her Forbes article from 2013, marketers must keep up with the rapidly and ever-evolving world of emerging media, or be left behind.  The emerging media world is only going to continue to move faster and faster as technology advances more rapidly.  Because of this, the businesses and consumers who can keep up with the technologies will be the ones that will reap the rewards.

This infographic shows just how powerful emerging media can be in all fields of integrated marketing communications, and the vast amount of time that must be put into this type of media for success in today’s media landscape:

Social and Emerging Media Use in Public Relations

The future of emerging media is not certain, except that it will continue to progress quickly.  As wearable technologies such as Google Glass and the Apple Watch are adopted widely, emerging media will be even more integrated into our everyday lives.  Real-time data regarding locations, preferences, and even bio-metric data will be available to marketers and they will be able to customize messages to consumers, and receive instantaneous feedback from those consumers to further tailor messages.

One speed bump I anticipate emerging media to encounter is privacy and security issues.  The younger generations will be more open to these types of technologies, as they have been part of life for them.  However, older generations will have concerns about security and privacy, and want to be able to opt-out of these technologies.  It will be interesting to watch this field develop and see how they tackle the challenge of catering to consumers with various levels of comfort and use with these types of emerging media.

There is no doubt, though, that emerging media is a powerful field that will continue to develop and impact how we interact with products and services on an everyday basis.