Fighting Like Jordan

I may not be able to update this blog for the following 4 months. But before I turn to my Chinese blog, I would share a commercial with you in this post.

The "Maybe" commercial is for Jordan starring with Michael Jordan. I think they did a great job in the ad copy, which could be an encouragement for us to move on in our way.

Anyway, in this summer, let's fight like this NBA star to achieve what we want!

How Could Social Media Go Further

Social media is an evolving and cutting-edge field.

Firstly, information on social media spread so fast. After Knicks' Jeremy Lin has dominated on Twitter for multiple days, Twitter breaks news of Whitney Houston's death, which has spread fast and widely among Internet users. And the tragic news on Twitter was broken twenty-seven minutes before mainstream media. We could see social media competes against traditional media in its speed of breaking and spreading of the news.

The use of mobile phones makes the steps of social media even further. Information could reach mobile users wherever they are. That's why all kinds of social media services currently are developing their mobile marketing. In this year's Super Bowel, Shazam was a big winner. Apart from recognizing a song, it provided the service of tagging commercials by marketers including Acura, Best Buy, Bud Light, Disney, Honda, Pepsi Toyota and so on during the game. This is not only a smart campaign for Shazam, but also a revolution to make TV commercials more interactive. Another example of combing social media with mobile advertising should be Facebook's new move. After Facebook's IPO filing highlighted their lack of mobile advertising to day, recent news reported that Facebook would tune up Bango, which "provides many kinds of mobile payments and analytics services". The SoLoMo media convergence, which integrates social, local and mobile, actually predicts a new era of media has come.

Efforts to Feed My Blog into Other Sites

During my efforts to pull my blog feed into external sites, Twitterfeed did a great help. Other similar apps are Tweetscan, Tweetbeep, Twitteroo and so on. Instead of manually sharing the post when there's an update, Twitterfeed automatically pulls posts from my blog to my other accounts like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. One amazing thing is that Twitterfeed works for Facebook page too, so that the notification of my new post of blog would only appear on the newly created Facebook page instead of on my personal account.

However, Twitterfeed still doesn't work for Google plus. I tried to find another way to import RSS feed to my Google plus page, but in vain. And the discussion online showed that there was no service to feed an RSS feed into the Google plus stream currently. Users could use the API to integrate the app or website with Google plus and Google+ API only allows us to read people's stream not write things into it yet. So what I could do was sharing the link of my blog on my Google plus page. That's not a quite smart way. But fortunately I do find by linking Google plus profile with my blogger account, thus my blog updates could be sent to selected circles on my Google plus account easily.

Sth about Viral Stuff

Due to the growing number of social networking websites and increasing use of video sharing, viral videos have gained a rapid popularity. According to Purcell (2010), 69 percent of adult Internet users have watched or downloaded videos via the Internet and among those who watch videos online, the percentage of people who share videos have jumped to 61 percent in June 2009 from 33 percent in December 2006. The increasing popularity of video sharing has attracted attention of ad agencies; they started to add viral videos to their marketing strategies.

Viral video is within the field of viral advertising, which delivers persuasive messages with an aim of motivating the spread of messages via peer-to-peer communication. Many research on viral ads attempt to find the factors that make a viral campaign successful and make people want to forward the viral message. Millward Brown has unveiled four factors acounting for the success of viral ads-the awareness index, buzz, celebrity and distinctiveness and demonstrated the characteristics that made people would like to talk about an ad and forward the "virus" to their friends included Laugh out loud funny, Edgy, Gripping and Sexy, which are short as LEGS. I humbly think that making it go viral should always be a topic of new marketing strategies.

3 Ways How Web Changed the Rules of Marketing and PR

Here are several points that impress me most about how the web changed the rules of marketing and PR:

From Traditional Media to New Media:

Following the change of media, the rules of marketing and PR changes. It's a trend that companies are turning from traditional media like TV to new media based on the web. Investment on TV advertisement is huge so that some companies cut off their budget on TV advertisement but invest on web-based marketing campaigns. Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter provide a good platform for marketers because of their large user base. Examples:



Set the Target:

A big change web has brought to marketing and PR is that the new rules have more targeted consumers. Backing to the old rules within the media like TV or newspapers, they have a wide but dispersive range of audiences. However, the new web-based marketing rules focus their efforts to attract and keep the attention of the targeted groups, which saves money as well as resources.

Relationship management:

The old rules of marketing and PR seems to be one-way interruption, in which consumers could only acting as the role of passive receiver. Within the new rules, the consumers take more participation. Since the web connect marketers and consumers, consumers could actively express what they need and how they evaluate the product or the service. Moreover, marketers even need to discover their customers' need before they say it out. Therefore, the web helps build a two-way relationship between marketers and consumers.

Coca-Cola Blade Roller by David Fincher

You don't want to miss "the first TV commercial in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City":

Coca-Cola Blade Roller(1993), directed by David Fincher for Coca-Cola Japan.

Social Media vs. Traditional Media Marketing Campaign

a. Campaign contents in social media are often available for retrieval to look them at later dates, but retrieval of information in traditional media is much harder.

b. Social media provides a two-way conversation between marketer and their targeted consumers, who are just seen as passive receivers in traditional media.

c. Marketing campaign in social media could be modified or corrected continuously according to feedback and comments, while in traditional media, the content could not be changed once it’s delivered to the public.

d. The popularity of a social media marketing campaign could be evaluated in real time based on their site visit, comment left or membership growth. However, statistics on popularity of a traditional media marketing campaign are often with a slower or lagging speed.