A Tale of two cities..

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

That was the opening line of the book, "A tale of two cities", which highlighted a reality of both happiness and sadness. Something I personally feel, is similar to our current situation. We live in a world where social media is the fastest growing online activity. Social media has made life so simple we can even find life hacks. That's right, cheats for living our lives. 

However all this freedom has brought its own set of problems. Twitter, a social media network hailed for its ability to give people the power of free speech has recently withheld content from an account, preventing the user from posting status updates. The main reason was because the user was a German Neo-Nazi group, and status updates were generally anti-Semitic and racist propaganda. 

CNN reported that this was the first time that Twitter has ever withheld content, and it has taken the first step to limited hate speech. Yet Twitter has been accused of having lagged behind other social medias in managing these sorts of incidents. 

Honestly, the balancing acts social medias have to perform is tough. I feel that social media websites should all try and protect themselves by having guidelines regarding what is not permitted, and possibly encourage users to help monitor for violations of such rules. 

 Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, the multi-player online battle arena has allowed players to play the role of whistle blower, judge and jury of the game rules. The Tribunal is where players can review the behavior of other players and determine if they have indeed violated rules of fair play. Players deemed to have violated such rules will then be banned for a certain number of days. 

I feel this idea not only allows players to feel more involved, lessens the burden on management, and also helps keep the content of the game clean. Something social media networks should possibly look into. Do you guys agree?

A blessing, a curse and a blessing

A Blessing

I'm sure by now, we have all heard the benefits of having the internet, social media etc. and I having embraced the internet so tightly, I simply would not know what I would do without it. In fact the internet at my place was actually capped for 2 weeks this month,  so I ended up spending my hours and hours in the Monash Library. EVEN ON MY FREE DAYS! True story. Back to the point! The presence of the internet and social media has spawned giants like Groupon and eBay where you can buy things cheaply, and lets face it, who wouldn't want to save money in these tough economic times. But.....

A Curse

I feel that because things seem so cheap, people often buy more than what they need. I mean think about it, how many times have you bought things you did not need from Coles just because buying two gives you 20% discount? Or for you drivers, you try and hit the $30 mark for the petrol even though you only needed $28. That 4 cents per liter isn't even worth spending that additional $2! If you think about it, if things are could be bought for so much cheaper now, why are we in tough economic times? Its a curse I tell you! And yet....

A Blessing

this rapidly changing world is also an opportunity! With all this new means of doing things, there has bound to be new problems! Identifying these problems could be your key to a new business idea! Cheryl Yeoh realized that because so many people bought vouchers for various Groupon and Scoopon deals that she simply could not keep up with all her vouchers! Vouchers was becoming a currency itself! So she too up this opportunity and created an app that allowed you to keep track all your vouchers in 1 simple way and even set up an online market for you to sell these vouchers! Her full story is in the link above! 

I think what Cheryl did was just brilliant, and we should also make use of the rapidly changing technological advancements, especially on the internet to find new business models!!

Leveraging on the growing number of smart phones

The Herald Sun predicts that the number of smartphones in Australia will hit 8.8 Million in 2012, a 40% growth from the previous year! At the moment, phones are reportedly outselling PCs now! This suggests that people are more on the go then ever before! I feel companies should leverage on this, and this might be an idea how!

Tenza Yakitori is a game available on the iPhone and android systems! Just a typical game right? Wrong! It is a game that has real food rewards. After completion of every level, users can redeem a voucher that provides them discounts for REAL food rewards from the restaurant Tenza! Part of me feels that the idea is not complete, and that more things can be done, but I honestly feel this could be the first step towards leveraging number of smartphones used by the public! This not only makes use of the popularity of cooking genre games, but it also takes the opportunity to market and sell their products!

What can other companies not selling food do? Do you guys think its a good idea? Let me know!

So fail it wins?

Brad Pitt is the first male to ever become the face of the perfume Chanel No5. If you guys have not watched the video yet, I put a link up top. He was apparently paid 7 million USD for saying those simple lines. This advertisement has received quite a lot of attention for being so underwhelming. Tabloids have referred to it as being perplexing, and honestly I thought it was pretty bad too!

HOWEVER! I thought about it, and wondered who would pay 10 million dollars for THAT!? They picked an A list celebrity that the mass generally liked, paired it with a brand of perfume that people generally associate with being good, and came up with that!?

And I simply concluded that it had to be a genius. Lets look at it objectively! It is creating a buzz at the moment! It is a crazy and bold move to come up with something as simple as that, but people are talking about it, people are drawn to watch it, people are making parodies of it.In 3 days they have amassed almost 3 million views! That has got to be some sort of success! I'm sure there are certain conditions for these campaigns to become successful, and I believe one of them has to be the fact that the brand has to have a strong association with being great. Do you agree with me? What else do you think is needed for such a campaign to be a success? Do you even think its successful? Leave me a comment!!

 My mind is completely blown!

The 10 ways we should be using social media

Web 2.0 has allowed for us users to generate content and upload it on the internet. This user generated content has made social media possible. Social media isn't just Facebook or Twitter, it includes things like Blogs, content communities and virtual game worlds just to name a few.

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) highlights 10 points that companies should follow while using social media, and I will summarize it for you! They basically broke it down to 5 things you should be considering when using social media, and advice during your 'social interactions'.

• Choose the right social media - essentially it is important to choose the right social media platform to use. There are heaps of them out there, and if you are looking to target something very niche, you might want to consider being hipster and avoid Facebook or Twitter altogether! 

• Don't reinvent the wheel - the advice here is not to go and create something that is already available to you already! Just join an existing social network and benefit from its popularity and user base! 

• Be consistent - Just make sure what you are saying and doing is consistent across all the social media platforms! 

• Integrate - If you're using traditional media to promote! Make sure you try and work something out so that it you benefit from the synergy of having more than one platform for promotion!
• Access - Not just access for your target market, but access for your employees too! How would they be able to know whats going on if they don't actually participate?!

• Active - Something that I should have been when doing my blogs! Being active helps you get followers. But in all honesty, I think communitychannel (one of my fav YouTubers) inactivity seems to get her more views on her videos because people just get go into cold turkey and simply just watches her old videos

• Don't be BORING - If you guys are still reading this, I salute you! Because I feel this post is exactly what I'm telling you not to do. Being boring just puts people off.

• Be humble - Remember Gasp? How the shop assistant Chris insulted a customer and it all went to hell? Now picture that happening online. Yeaaa.. 

• Be daring- What they really said here was to be unprofessional, but what they really meant here was to be daring. Loosey Goosey guys! Things that look too professional don't encourage that much interaction with people. Its like going to Karaoke with Reece Mastin! Imagine all the fun you'd have :( probably not much..

•  Do not try to test the system - It is highly encouraged that you respect the rules of social media! 

Is there anything else here you guys might add when using social media as a company? 

Doing sports without working up a sweat!!!

Okay, before I mislead you any further, I think its only fair to point out to you guys that I am not going to talk about some revolutionary new way to get your summer body in 2 months or whatever. I am in fact going to write about the rise of e-sports, which is in actual fact just playing video games (competitively of course), aaand you'd probably just become fat if that is all you do. Just saying :)

Just recently Riot Games hosted season two of the world championship for "League of Legends", a game they developed.  A typical League of Legends game would last 20-40 minutes where 10 players (5 on each side) would choose from a host of playable characters and work together with the aim to destroy to opponent's base. Each playable character is unique and they all perform a range of roles. I know this probably sounds geeky and you are at the moment imagining a typical gamer who looks like that guy below.

But honestly, what is amazing is that the total prize money for League of Legends World Championships is $5million USD. Even the US Open (tennis) only pays 20million in total prize money for various divisions (men and women). 

According to Riot Games, 32.5 million people world wide has downloaded the game league of legends, 4.2 million people play it every single day. These numbers are absolutely incredible. As far as I know, the only major partners for Riot Games are Razer and Alienware. Two companies that have products absolutely congruent with Riot Games.



First guy to ever become the face of Chanel



However I believe that there is an avenue for other companies to seize this growing avenue to market their products. I mean if marketers can pull selling earrings during tennis and saying absolutely nothing for perfume, this should be a walk in the park right? What do you guys think?

Maria Sharapova and her dangling earrings



Side fun fact

• Last year, a 22 year old Spanish gamer named  Lucas Ordoñez went from typical gamer to pro race car driver for Nissan. To quickly summarise how it happened, basically 19 year old Lucas took part in a competition to play the popular racing game Gran Turismo. After several rounds he became the winner, fast forward three years, he was 2nd place in Le Mans 24 hour event.











eCustomer complaints: a complaint!

Handling customer complaints is an important part of any business. The way the complaint is handled can mean the difference between huge profits and losses due to satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the company. Not too long ago, as I recall, customer complaints to me usually meant my parents marching up to the store manager with a product in hand telling them how dissatisfied they were.  I was a kid then and whether or not my parents got the desired response they wanted was often a mystery to me, but one thing was for certain, the response was prompt and immediate.

As technology improved, my parents could now send e-mails directly to department heads. I would imagine these people spent a couple minutes each day reading through complain mails and replying them, because my parents typically received replies.

Now that I'm older, I too have taken the role of dissatisfied customer. Spending my own hard earned money on things I want and need only to realise sometimes they fail to live my to their promises. But somehow I feel that reporting has become somewhat inefficient.

Lets take for example social media. Kaplan and Haenlein  (2010) proposed six different types of social media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs (twitter), content communities (soccernet), social networking sites (facebook), virtual game worlds (world of warcraft) and virtual social worlds (second life).

Sharing of user generated content is meant to be what is constant in these six different types of social media, but that is not the only thing that is constant. Harassment, bullying, hacking are problems that too are constant within all six social medias. To try and rectify this, social medias have a "Report" button for customers to lodge a complain. But in my opinion, many people still end up being very dissatisfied with the way these social medias respond to customer complains. This is a link to Facebook's report page, as you can see, there is a butt load of people complaining about the way Facebook has handled reports. A quick read would reveal that sometimes Facebook has not responded fast enough (some waiting 4 months?!) and others reveal that Facebook has removed innocent photos (is what the victim claims anyway).

I personally, often read football forums. And honestly it infuriates me that people spam in multiple posts, identical comments, derogatory comments and even false advertising. Reporting doesn't seem to serve any purpose because it takes a long while for the sites to respond, and even if they ban the user, the troll would simply just create another username!

Do you guys experience this as well? What would be a way for companies with massive online presence do to curb this problem? Leave me a comment! Thanks!

Power of social media.. NOT!

I'm sure as marketing students we've all heard the power of social media. How it can quickly pass infomation and create awareness influence buying etc etc. After the unvieling of the iPhone 5, there has been alot of buzz on social media. Alot of which revolves aroudn the fact that the iPhone 5 is a disappointment, and VERY unimpressive.

The physical changes of the phone from the iphone 4s (the iPhone 5 is slimmer and longer) has become somewhat of a joke. I'm pretty sure you guys have seen this on some sort of social media.

Additionally, not long after the release, Apple had to apologize for a couple of their phone applications. Tim Cook, the Apple CEO apologized for the iPhone map application and the purple flare in photos that the iPhone 5 takes.

How in the world does apple still manage to break the record for the most number of iPhone sold still? Don't get me wrong, I'm not a "apple hater" or anything like that. I'm just curious to know how much flak a company can take before the mainstream community catches on? Is there a formular for this?  What do you guys think? Leave me a comment!



Crowdsourcing like a baws

If you guys haven't seen this, away we happened is a short story production that was a colloboration between WongFu Productions and at&t.  I could be biased, cause i enjoy most of WongFu's short stories, but this in my opinion was simply genius. Not just the story, but the promotional idea. In case you don't know, at&t is a major telecommunication company. Just by watching the first video, its so obvious what the intendend promotional product was. No prizes for guessing correctly. 

Leveraging on WongFu's typical viewer demographics, and popularity, at&t crowdsourced more than 6 million views over a period of 6 weeks. According to at&t, their goal was to improve brand affinity, highlighting the everyday use of their technology with charaters the viewers can relate to, and boy did they manage to do that. According to clickz.com, the campaign far exceeded at&t's goals. True, once the video went viral, there was no way to control who the viewers were, but with over 95% of the viwers liking the series, is that really such a concern?

Do you guys think this would change the way companies make use of YouTube? Or is this doing well because it is fresh and new, and once it becomes mainstream people would simply reject it. Leave me a comment below! :D