Saturday, November 29, 2014

Corporate Social Media Marketing & Twitter: What Not To Do-Malaysia Airlines

From the “You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up” Department, Malaysia Airlines has once again found itself lost. This time its not because one of their planes disappeared, but because its brand marketing strategy has crashed head on into the Twittersphere thanks to someone at that airline tweeting a promotional message that reads: “Want to go somewhere, but don’t know where?”


140310150517-nr-quest-malaysia-airlines-flight-00022920-story-topWe love marketing/advertising tactics that employ simple rhetorical questions, its a tactic that often works well within the context of brand marketing and positioning, but gee whiz.. someone flying their branding campaign clearly failed to do a pre-flight check list, and in turn, Malaysia Airline’s violated Corporate Branding & Marketing Rule #1 of “What Not To Do..”


That rule clearly states: DO NOT allow any employee to tweet anything unless it is approved by both the head of corporate marketing and the head of public relations. That said, if the marketing department’s “air traffic control” as well as its “flight operations manager” were both on board when that message was launched, it clearly demonstrates that whoever is flying that airline is completely lost.


 



Corporate Social Media Marketing & Twitter: What Not To Do-Malaysia Airlines

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Monetizing Social Media in 2015: The Brand Marketers Dilemma

Social Media Marketing Trends: How To Monetize in 2015


The Top Reality TV Show in 2015 “Bots For Boobs”


While no great surprise, a recent report found that marketers focused on B2C (business-to-consumer) brand awareness/marketing strategies have found LinkedIn to be much less significant when compared to Facebook or Twitter for their marketing efforts. For the B2B crowd however, there are several different options, and LinkedIn remains the domination choice. In the Social Media Examiner survey, 88% of business to business marketers are utilizing LinkedIn in comparison to 89% for Facebook and 86%t for Twitter. The 2015 outlook envisions LinkedIn will increase its market share, subject of course to whether Facebook’s recently-announced service for corporate enterprises gains quick traction. Because adoption by corporate users is dictated by an assortment of compliance rules, one can argue that the winners in the war to win social media audiences will be niche players that provide business professionals with specific offerings that address their focused interests..


Social media marketing will continue to become a major pillar of content marketing strategies in 2015.  During the upcoming year, we expect that smart corporate marketers will appreciate there are actually 2 major pillars for content marketing strategies: publication and distribution and that social media is the most efficient technique of enhancing the reach and visibility of their content. Consequently, social media will become the amplifier for their published content somewhat more than the content itself.


Notwithstanding above, most industry followers will keep a keen eye on how “social shopping” evolves in 2015, and specifically as it applies to features/functionality within social media websites and apps. While social media marketing strategies are designed for executing and enhancing brand marketing campaign, transactional activity is where the rubber should meet the road for any corporate marketer who is presumably focused on ROI.   Given their respective audience sizes, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are hoped to be the holy grail for truly monetizing messages, but advertisers and marketers are becoming increasingly aware that the audiences that FB and TWTR claim to have are actually highly-populated by non-humans. Facebook recently acknowledged that of its reported 1.3 billion users, at least 67 million and as many as 137 million are fake accounts, and FB claims it continuously policies those phony accounts accordingly.


According to filings made by Twitter with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, their estimated number of fake accounts aka “bots” is estimated at 9 percent of its total base. While FB and TWTR are arguably the largest social media platforms, there are tens of dozens of others that offer advertisers and marketers audiences that are clearly over-estimated.


Because social media websites are more concerned with reducing the amount of malware and viruses that both infect and effect their platforms, the disconnect between butter and margarine will not be easily-solved in 2015. This is best illustrated in a Nov 20 New York Times column by reporter Nick Bilton (“Phony Friends, Real Profit”), which profiles the burgeoning availability of  free or nearly free software that offers “bot programs” that enable amateurs to create legions of fake followers and “AI” re-tweeters. As such, the only high-probability prediction that we can make is the launch of a new reality-TV show “Bots For Boobs”…which will profile a group house whose residents include 2 hot-babe Russian avatars, a metro-sexual black-belt Indian programmer, a former member of China’s secret internet espionage squad and led by a 25 year-old billionaire who made his first fortune building services for the medical marijuana industry.



Monetizing Social Media in 2015: The Brand Marketers Dilemma