week 11---Analytics(Topic 11)

Building up a business online maybe is not a difficult thing, but how to run or monitor the business is much difficult than that. We need to keep track of our brand constantly and we might wonder if our brand has been attacked or how is the brand running, which that’s why we need monitor systems give us the answer. They are probably not the solvers, but they are truly the one that help find the problem, actually, a successful social media marketing strategy not only have an outstanding plans, but also need to have a great assistance of metrics platform, providers and information source. Some of information search engine like Google Alert help us get up-to-dated information, so if one’s organization or company release new information every day, and more and more people will be more easily to receive it when they search, which increase brand awareness greatly. In addition to this, some of metrics providers like research tools, which give a direction on how to target audience and how to manage their social media tools that used to interact with people more efficiently. Some of tools like Hootsait, TweetDeck which not only do they help business to look for organizations that are relevant to the business, but also managing some social media tools simultaneously, and this save a lot of time and increasing efficiency in providing feedback to people.

As to metrics platform, most of them both can give us a clear statistics about the number of social media users and guide us select the best social media for our marketing strategy to meet customers, of course, some of them can protect brand from attacking. When designing a social media marketing strategy plan, we need to consider how people think of some media tools or what sort of content we release can attract them, or if the way we engage in having conversation with people is the most effective way, all these doubts can be solved by those platforms that having mix of vertical industry knowledge, social media expertise, analytics technologies, data control and real-time measurement system. It seems like all those can help organizations or marketers save a lot of efforts to do research more easily achieve their goals. 

week 10---preventing and managing social media marketing mistakes

Coordinated brand attacked
Brand attacked, it is a quite common issue in the current competitive world and competitors will use that as a strategy to beat that company down and the sad thing is that no one will care about the truth and people will continue to spread the news even though they do not know if it is real. Most of information can be found via the search engine, and the best way to consider reducing the exposure of negative event of a brand is give a positive response back immediately, trying to post as many positive responses as possible. But here is an issue as the article mentioned, there might be a case of what is being said is false, what we need to do not just only focusing on the search engine, but also try to use different ways to inform the original senders and ask for removing. However, what if you are not present to face the situation, I think the only way to tackle it is to use a series of back up implementation in case situation gets serious. And there will be two ways involved about brand attack, I suppose, one is before the attack, the other is after the attack, that’s, we need to prevent brand attacks, we can building up a warning system that monitor in which way would be attacked, or the company can keep track of those suspicious referral links. As to how to detect the brand has been attacked, the good ways can be employed is to monitor those blogs and blog comment fields, not just focusing on the content of the blogs.

If the brand has been attacked, the company must not avoid confronting the general public, instead, talking to their customers whatever the fact it is, which it is the only way the company can reduce the damage degree of the brand reputation and re-attract customers and that’s why I believe an outstanding brand or company will have set up a crisis response plan. When you give response to the general public, making sure that the word addressed to them must be realistic and truly listening more than speaking. But the company would better not to believe they can always deal with the customers very well, once customers have alternative choices to their products and services, they will abandon it without any reasons.

Exercise: A recent case myself

 Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/starbucks-juice-bar_n_1009161.html

The case I introduce is about the rumors of Starbucks, as the article mentioned, the Huffington Post believe that CEO Howard Schultz Poaches Liquiteria Employee and hired veteran juicer Yohana Bencosme to train their employees about how to make fresh juices. The rumor has caused Jamba Juice stocks to take a tumble as investors do not believe the company can continue to make much profit as usual, but the Starbucks have been very quiet about the stock price.

As to the case, I think they have dealt with the rumor very well as one of representatives from Starbucks asked Huffington Post to release a statement on the rumors and admitted the employee Yohana has joined in, but refuse the rumor and did not talk much about it.

The reason why I think the representative address to the general public very well, it is because he make everything peaceful as he speak less about it, the company knows that the impact of rumor will be reduced and gone as time goes on, the good thing the company had done is that it delegates a person to show up give a brief response rather than avoiding confronting it. At least he has given response to their customers, the company knows it will be backlash which affect the stock price if they do not response it.                                                                                                         

week 9----promoting social media marketing programs

In this week's topic, I realized that there are some of things might be considered when we designing a campaign of social meidas program for our business, we need to know why people join social networking, once we figure out what sort of platforms or why put their attention on that, we can better to design a campaign strategically to capture their attention, like if we have no idea what features of network would like, we just lose our way to find a direction to move on, it seems like all thes things both are challenges and opportunities, when we design the campaign of social media programs, we should not just only focus on the how much profits for the sales, instead keep track of the way of how to bulild relationship with people in order to get their support mentally.

Building critical mass is really a good way matketers go into, when we employ social media tools for the particular business, we need to consider the way we use if can disseminate messages to most part of people and be noticed for particualr target markets. the more people you get them in through critical mass, the more awareness for your campaign or brand you can earn.

speaking of awareness, there are probably some traditional ways to do like advertising, personal selling, but the most succeessful business or campaign is to spend less budget and human force to achieve that rather spend large amout of capitals, I turly believe. we might use peer-to peer recommendations, word of mouth recommendation or digital word of mouth, I think the ways we cannot make sure they will buy the products, but at least what we can do is to have a good start of capturing and making relationship with them.

week 8--social CRM

when it comes to CRM(customer relationship management), there will be a concept in our my mind that building up relationship with cusotmers in person rather than via the way of social media. nowadays, most part of customers get involved with online stuff, what we need to do for dealing with customers is to keep in touch with the ways that cusotmers will use, like twitter, facebook, blog, email,ect. the impact of CRM through soical media at times is greater than in person of CRM, I suppose. if the problem or issue can be solved through email conversation, customers will earn lot more satisfaction than on the spot, which means save cusotmers plenty of time.

I also realize the different social media for different type of customers when it involves with customer relationship management.

the essence of sCRM is a tight cycle where critical elements like collective intelligence,customers, community, and customers can be divided into different group like self-service, community generated activity put into the cycle. every element can contribute to the relationship management, that's why the social CRM can have massive influence on business.

the way of sCRM on business will impact on the reputation, there is no doubt about it and it is one of strategy to marketing of one's marketing. most of time  keeping customers is much difficult than attracting new customers, I believe.

due to the wide spread of social media, business will adopt it to promote cutomers service, but a matter of fact that we lose the basic value of customer service, that's to ignore the actual exprience of the organization, instead, what we need to do is to employ both ways rather than focusing on soical media to promote customers service if we want, I suppose.

and blog is one of platforms to capture people's attention, but some of them does not do very well, which I think maybe due to the content they post does not fit the general concerns or lacks of using media toos like video clip or never allow people to make an cmment.

we might have received apologies about products or service or changes from the organization, but some make their apologies work as they truly listen what customer want rather than what the organization want to address to their customers, I always believe that customers is the support foundation of the organization, no matter what desicions the organization make must be depending on the perspective of customer.

Exercises
the key word for google alert is social meida for blogs and I have been monitoring the information form my email for 3 weeks, I found that all the information was up-to dated, but they are not all blogs and most of them are some articles about social media.

there are three blog sites that I found differently. one is very good, the other is average and bad.

the good one:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/author/admin/
the author try to make a response to those commenters and insert vedio clips that related to the topic, which I think it is pretty visual and attractive to make interaction with readers. one thing the blog do very well is that lot of readers will be willing to make comments on it.

the average one: http://thenextweb.com/asia/
it has wide variety of topics and readers can be made comments through facrbook and Twitter, but you cannot receive from the author.



the bad one: http://soshable.com/, the author of the blog never make response to their commenters which reduce the interaction and the the layout of the blog is too simple, it never use social media tools like vedio clip, and most of improtant thing is just few people make comments on that blog site,

week 6--Nurturing a Social community to build deeper relationships

wide range of social media toos can be help us to build up deep relationship with customers when it come to busienss, we can use the google alert to search the thing we want, by using the twitter hashtags, we can be more easily to be recognised by others, try to make your topic as a trending topic so that tons of people can be coming across it. of course we can employ other research tools to get the community you build up in a more visible way. as myself, google plus sometimes can be regarded as a good way to set up a deeper relationship, circle group in google plus and blog content sharing, the former functions as a more interactive way to each others, while the latter one can be viewed as a source of what they think of it when posting their comments.

chanllenges facing marketers is very tricky as marketers need an insight of what consumers will be affected by social medias? some might not be easily influenced by some of soical medias, how are we going to disseminate the maekter message to consumers can be depends on the business you engege in, if you are doing business of selling easels you probabaly use flickr or other tools something like that to project your photos about easels as opposed to building up a interative group to discuss. another chanllenge could be how to use the combination of social medias in a consistent way, being attentively if all the messages you want to inform consumers through multi social medias are consistent.

 there is no doubt that social media is another marketing channel but the functions of social medias far exceeding the way of broadcast media and we should not just exploit the way broadcast media has been, instead social medias can affect my visual, hearing interactive way, sometimes can lead to consumer expectation. so we should be exploiting on more of ways rather than the only simple way of broadcast media.


The more social medias strategies you build up, especially the critical one, the more likely you have a deeper relationship with customers.

week 5--Key Platforms

the brand that I would introduce is Zara

Introduction

Zara is the flagship chain store of INDITEX Group owned by Spanish company, the first Zara store opened in 1975. And yet it is the biggest clothing company in Spain and the top three clothing in the global world. It owns more than 2000 chains stores in the world of 56 countries in terms of the scale of Zara’s business.

Channel
the channels Zara has been using as social media strategies like twitter, facebook, linkedin, blogger, flikr, youtube.

it builds up a facebook and twitter that consumers can have an overview of the store and release the up to dated information or pics for the recent season, some of video can be found in youtube or other mdias, and pictures can be shown in the album of its blog and use the flikr to show their pictures in the facebook or blog.
the way in the soica medias customers can more easily to communicate or connect with, some of feedback the organization can receive via those mdias as well, some of quesionnaire also can be conducetd through that, promoting by using the video of youtube to let consumers know what Zara has been doing, due to the qiack and fast change of clothes style every week, so these medias can be more critical for disseminating inormation and consumers can be more quickly to get the news released, it is sort of direct or indirect way to build up a close relationship with those who have been paying attention on Zara.



target market
the markets Zara pay attention to are those markets where have a good location, more prefer located in city center, or looking for a city that have a great economic competitive force or greater purchasing force. some of target markets for Zara apart from Spain, Like France, Italy, China, Japan, Germany, UK and so on. for those countries who get lot more stores than others.


Motivations for target markets
maybe some motivations to target these markets is due to the greater economic developing, and the barriers to enter into is very low and taxation would be that high, more inportantly, it is just due to the specific place for these markets have a geater purchasing force.

week 4--social media strategy

reflection on social media strategy and what I have learnt

in the current day, social media plays an important role on busienss and I do not believe a company or organazation will be successful without using social medias, becuse they cannot connect with people who are all over the world, similarly, strategy is one of key element of success to business, how to use your strategy can be affected the running of one's company, social media strategy is the key mean to present your overview of products or company, what sort of platforms or tools might be suitable with presenting products depends on the strategies you design, which can lead to the degree of customers' attractiveness. if I have my own business, I will use lots of social medias platform and tools and present many useful information about the products and some revalent information about the products, it expands the arrange that the prospective customers can be exposed to from my meidas platform or tools, somethings is pretty important in the social media strategy, you must make sure the use name of your social media name of  platforms or tools  that other people can easily think of and to find out, you will not come up with the name of  yourself, what you can do is to create something related to your products.


throughout the previous four week, I had learnt how to create and use some common social medias around the world, also I realized that all theses medias are greatly associated witih our life, like job, career. I knew how to build up my own circle to communicate my friends in google plus, I knew how to add my friends in twitter and how to relate to them, share the information with the people that I want, I recognized the importance of digital identity, more importantly, we can create our own business and promote via all the social medias and of course, designing our social media strategies can be equally imperative when it comes to business.