Social media use has rapidly increased ever since the idea of Facebook became the norm to society. Many consumers are on social media everyday, including myself and I would honestly miss it if I were not able to access Twitter. Romero et al (2011) describe twitter as the fastest growing social media platform, which is why all advertisers and celebrities are attempting to exploit it. Social media has become a way of life for many people whether it is, as they want to connect with friends or simply receive travel and news information. Social media is not just used by consumers but also businesses and even the government with it being a very important platform of speech and representation for most especially celebrities (Qualman, 2009).

Celebrities have used the increased importance of social media effectively to successfully market themselves to both further their career in their respective fields but to also sell their own products and become an entrepreneur. Marwick (2013) explains how the introduction of social media allowed people to successful brand themselves. People adopt social media like a work place describing the people they’re interacting as co-workers (Marwick, 2013), social media became a way in which many different types of people are able to communicate which one another. Celebrities have used social media to connect with consumers and consumers now follow what celebrities wear what they eat and even where they go.

With celebrities influence so great in this current generation it was only a matter of time before businesses and companies started to use celebrities to market their products on social media where they are in control. Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian have over 45m people choosing to read very tweet she posts which means if a business are able to get her to tweet about their product or service there is a potential for large amounts of exposure and considerably amount of interest.

Celebrities are used as a marketing tool similarly to TV and or Radio. Marketing literature does not mention celebrities themselves being a brand only the way in which they endorse others (Johns and English, 2016).

However to understand the effectiveness of celebrities you must thinking of the negatives also of them being used as advertising billboards when on social media. This is often more common with reality television stars as many are just given free products to endorse them but still can have a positive effect on the brand. The downside to celebrity endorsement on social media is the interlinking image that comes with the business and the celebrity. For many brands imagine is one the most crucial parts of their marketing campaign. You wouldn’t see Rolex endorsing a hot headed aggressive celebrity as their imagine is high class. Social media makes it easier for celebrities to voice their opinions and views meaning that if there views or ideas conflict with the imagine the business is portraying it could be highly detrimental to the brands image. For example LeBron James’ tweet saying his phone had erased everything and that it was the worst feeling ever (below). Samsung was endorsing LeBron James and complaining about his phone was not the best thing to do. Despite James deleting the quickly his millions of followers had caught onto it. The reply by Jen Clarke (below) represents how Samsung must have felt and shows that endorsements by celebrities is not always beneficial to the business not all publicity is good publicity.

The marketing of products by celebrities is a very effective way of gaining publicity and customers but getting celebrities endorsement creates a link between the person and the business that in some cases cannot be reversed such as ‘the go compare man (below)’ who many will only him from their adverts and therefore his imagine will directly effect their business.

References

Carter, J. (2014). Six celebrity endorsements that have gone badly wrong. [online] MyCustomer. Available at: http://www.mycustomer.com/marketing/strategy/six-celebrity-endorsements-that-have-gone-badly-wrong [Accessed 6 May 2016].

Galuba, W., Asur, S. and Huberman, B. (2011). Influence and Passivity in Social Media. SSRN Electronic Journal.

Johns, R. and English, R. (2016). Transition of self: Repositioning the celebrity brand through social media—The case of Elizabeth Gilbert. Journal of Business Research, 69(1), pp.65-72.
Marwick, Alice Emily. (2013) Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Qualman, E. (2009). Socialnomics. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Email is a free and simple way for consumers to be contacted by business to keep ongoing reminders of their products or services new and/or old. The question posed is whether “email marketing is an effective way of marketing your business”.

Email marketing has taken a back seat to new marketing techniques such as social media and has been described as outdated (Steiner, 2016). Steiner (2016) states there are reasons why email marketing is no longer effective:

1. Marketers do not know the customers they are marketing to, blind sales pitches no longer work with customers. Emails are not personalized and need to segment.

2. Most emails subject lines are not effective enough to gain a reaction from consumers and when they do react businesses are not monitoring results of email marketing such as conversion rate.

3. Outdated email addresses result in wasted time, as they are not making contacting with the intended recipient. Marketers may believe they have contact addresses for say: 100,000 businesses when 50% of these businesses may no longer be trading or the email address are out of date.

It is not only Steiner (2016) that highlights the disadvantages to email marketing but also Forneris (2009). Forneris covers points such as the lack of engagement by consumers mentioned by Steiner (2016) but adds to the arguments by mentioning the introduction of spam filters, which acts as another unfortunate barrier to email marketing.   Even if companies manage to get an attention grabbing ‘subject’ line, many consumers will not see the subject line due to it being automatically discarded into the ‘spam’ or more recently the ‘junk mail’ folder. Both Steiner (2016) and Forneris (2009) do not completely disregard that email marketing has its uses however they focus on the downsides.
Shewan (2014), on the other hand, believes that email marketing is an effective way of marketing. He states that although email marketing has a bad reputation it is still effective and has lost it’s appeal due to marketers being seduced by social media, as the ‘cool’ thing of the moment. Email marketing may not be the most talked about topic at present but it still remains the cornerstone of many businesses marketing campaign. Despite supporting email marketing Shewan (2014) acknowledges that many email newsletters are regarded as ‘rubbish’ not worth reading, however some can really grab user attention and still generate business. With the assistance of email newsletter platforms such as “Constant Contact” and “MailChimp”, businesses are able to get very detailed statistics on the interactions with emails and direct traffic to a website (Gurr, 2014). Email marketing gets business’ brand image out there to the right people at the right time. The emails can be sent to a certain demographic at a certain time without wasting time advertising to everyone with the hope of getting someone (Gurr, 2014).

A combination of email marketing and social media can be an extremely effective marketing strategy with social media’s rapid growth and the total number of worldwide email accounts expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016 (The Radicti Group, Inc, 2016). Evidence of email marketing’s effectiveness is shown when consumer were asked to opt-in to receive updates from a company, only 10% elected to do so through Facebook, while 90% chose to receive email newsletters (Neilsen, 2010). Email marketing despite being seen as old school in comparison to new social media marketing, it is a cost effective way of getting business data to be seen by consumers.

When getting personal information from consumers an email address is the minimum details you would expect to be given. This shows it is easy to access the information to market in this way. However, the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign is specific to the businesses using it.

References

Shewan, D. (2014). Is Email Marketing Effective? Three Examples That Prove It Is | WordStream. [online] Wordstream.com. Available at: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/11/12/is-email-marketing-effective [Accessed 23 Apr. 2016].

Steiner, D. (2016). 6 Reasons Your Email Marketing Efforts Are Not Effective. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253802 [Accessed 23 Apr. 2016].

Forneris, J. (2009). The Disadvantages of Email Marketing. [online] Smallbusiness.chron.com. Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-email-marketing-3472.html [Accessed 24 Apr. 2016].

THE RADICATI GROUP, INC, (2016). Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016. [online] THE RADICATI GROUP, INC. Available at: http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Email-Statistics-Report-2012-2016-Executive-Summary.pdf [Accessed 24 Apr. 2016].

Neilsen, J. (2010). E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usability. [online] Nngroup.com. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/e-mail-newsletters-usability/ [Accessed 25 Apr. 2016].

Gurr, J. (2014). Pros and Cons of E-mail Marketing | Iceberg Web Design. [online] Iceberg Web Design. Available at: http://www.icebergwebdesign.com/2014/08/pros-cons-creating-e-newsletter-clients/ [Accessed 25 Apr. 2016].

Mobile phone applications (‘app’) are a rapidly developing market, which has increased as a compliment to the growth in the use of smartphones. A complimentary product is one that is dependent on another such as a DVD’s to a DVD player. A complimentary product is useless without the core product. The mobile phones in this instance is the core product, and the fact consumer’s lives are often centered on them in recent years (Claussen, Essling and Kretschmer, 2014). Mobile phone applications have become a basic necessity for businesses. Almost every business is expected to have one whether it is for an online retailer or an application for news updates and information. However creating an application is only the beginning, as businesses will need to keep it constantly updated with the rapid technological advances and use of social media connections (Iansiti, 1995). Most importantly businesses need to look at App Store Optimization (ASO) and other channels in which to market their app effectively. Different types of business application will need to market their app in different ways if at all. For example, an app which is directly connected to the business that could result in more sales and/or overall revenue would definitely warrant the financial outlay to market it. On the other hand, an application which is information based and has no direct benefit to the business as it may only be mentioned on the website as an alternative.

Once an application is created it is imperative to effectively handle the continuous development and marketing of the application. Ganguly (2016) explains the five biggest mistakes businesses make when it comes to mobile application marketing. The five mistakes highlighted by Ganguly (2016) are:

1. Businesses treat the mobile experience like it’s a desktop
2. Building an application without a plan to market it
3. Building a website application and trying to pass it off as an application
4. Assuming people will come back to use the application for no reason and finally,
5. Ignoring the applications customer base.

Of these 5 mistakes I believe one of the most crucial mistakes is creating the mobile application without a plan. Consumers must be aware that you have an application, which can be used as an alternative and or compliment for the website. Although visitors to your website do not need to be bombarded by links to your application it does need to be noticeable. The website below shows an example of a badly advertised application, which was badly signposted and I personally would not have known there was an application available, had I not been looking.

ASO is the process of optimizing mobile applications (‘apps’) in order for them to rank higher against other apps within the App Store and the aim of ASO is to direct more traffic to the applications page. Businesses must have a plan when it comes to market their app. ASO is a new concept but one that is very effective when it comes to application marketing and sustainability. The application market is predicted to have over 268 billion downloads and which could result in revenue generation of approx. $77 billion (Businessdegrees, 2016). Making use of application and their marketing is crucial. ASO has been described as a crucial piece of the mobile app marketing puzzle (Ganguly, 2016) and is therefore a necessity to gain a foothold in this rapidly developing sector. The theory that ASO is a vital marketing tool for applications is indirectly supported through the 2015 report on the ‘Discovery of Ranking Fraud for Mobile Apps’ (Zhu et al., 2015.) The 2015 report highlighted the importance of gaining high rankings for applications have lead some application owners to attempt to ‘cheat’ the rankings. A higher ranking within the app store will then in turn lead to more downloads.

References

Claussen, J., Essling, C. and Kretschmer, T. (2014). When less can be more – Setting technology levels in complementary goods markets. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014(1), pp.11919-11919.

Businessdegrees.uab.edu. (2016). The future of mobile application | UAB Business Degrees Online. [online] Available at: http://businessdegrees.uab.edu/resources/infographics/the-future-of-mobile-application/ [Accessed 6 Apr. 2016].

Ganguly, R. (2016). App Store Optimization – A Crucial Piece of the Mobile App Marketing Puzzle. [online] Available at: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/app-store-optimization/ [Accessed 6 Apr. 2016]

Ganguly, R. (2016). The 5 Biggest Mistakes in Mobile App Marketing. [online] Available at: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/mistakes-in-app-marketing/ [Accessed 6 Apr. 2016].

Iansiti, M. (1995). Technology integration: Managing technological evolution in a complex environment. Research Policy, 24(4), pp.521-542.

Zhu, H., Xiong, H., Ge, Y. and Chen, E. (2015). Discovery of Ranking Fraud for Mobile Apps. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng., 27(1), pp.74-87.

Social media is now a major force in today’s society with people of all ages, backgrounds and social groups. Fuchs (2014) explains that now more than ever we need to understand social media and the impact it is having on our lives and how it is such a useful marketing tool if used effectively. Fuchs 2014 book explains that people need crucial knowledge to help us navigate throughout the complex digital media landscape that is now present. This applies also to businesses, especially small businesses, as reputation is a crucial part of business enterprise risk management (Arnold, 2006). A business’ success is based on its reputation by many consumers and is measured by how much it is trusted by consumers, stakeholders and employees. When consumers hear good things about a business they are develop brand trust even before actually experiencing the businesses service. With the introduction of social media such as ‘Twitter’ consumers are able to voice their opinions on companies and brands more openly. Negative reviews on social media towards large businesses/brands are often ignored and disregarded compared to comments regarding smaller business/brands that is not so prominent in the public arena.   The effect of a bad reviews/complaints broadcast on social media regarding small business can have highly detrimental effects.

Personal recommendations is an extremely important marketing tool that has the potential to significantly increase the revenue of companies but also has the ability to negatively effect a company’s revenue. However, with the rapid increase in use of the Internet and social media, negative publicity is spread very differently from ‘word-of-mouth’. Consumers are now more than likely maybe even expected to voice their opinions online with big companies notably Tesco and ASOS having twitter accounts to enable unhappy customers to scan for a deal. (See Examples 1 and 2. Below)

Big business such a Tesco and ASOS already have solid reputations and do not necessarily need to go out of their way to fix every single costumer problems but have nevertheless employed teams to do so which shows the importance they place on this.

Small businesses that do not have already set reputations need to manage social media post about their company and effectively respond. Stanford (2007) explains that a 7% increase in word-of-mouth unlocked an additional 1% in additional company growth and 2% reduction in negative word-of-mouth boosts sales growth by 1%. For small businesses growth and reputation is crucial when establishing themselves within the market.

Examples 1 and 2 (ASOS and Tesco tweets)

Brynley-Jones’s 2009 article on reputation management using social media goes through the 5 steps needed to be able to fully manage.

Step 1: Decided what of the company’s information you need track and specify key words

Step 2: Set up accounts, which are used to measure social media keywords. The monitoring of social media using specific programs and tools will make it easier for complained or indeed praise to be brought to your attention. This is quick and easy for small business and will not require a lot of time or manpower, which would result in extra costs.

Step 3: The monitoring tools will allow the small companies to then set up alerts telling them when their keywords are mentioned and on what platform.

Step 4: Small businesses will need to set up accounts of where they believe there business will be spoken about and be poised to reposed as soon as possible to clear up any chances of bad publicity.

Step 5: The small business needed to then react to what has been said online whether it is positive or negative it is important

References

Arnold, M. (2006) CEOs respect importance of reputation, Haymarket Media, Inc, New York.

Brynley-Jones, L. (2009). A 5-Step Guide to Reputation Management Using Social Media | Our Social Times – Social Media Agency, Social Media Training. [online] Oursocialtimes.com. Available at: http://oursocialtimes.com/a-5-step-guide-to-reputation-management-using-social-media/ [Accessed 12 Mar. 2016].

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Stanford, N. (2007). Guide to organisation design. London: Economist.

Since its introduction, the Internet has rapidly changed the way in which we communicate and spend our recreation time. Many people today would find it impossible to go a few hours let alone a day without the use of a mobile phone or being connected online.

The Gaming Industry has be changed unrecognizably due to the internet with many companies who manufacture consoles etc. benefitting from this increase in usage, with their profit margin’s increasing as a result. This has the opposite effect when there is a system failure as in the case of Sony with a loss of $171 Million when the PlayStation network went down. (Schreier, 2011). The internet has made gaming a powerful force with Australia’s media sector expected to expand by around 4.1% over the next five years due interactive gaming and the internet continuing their rapid growth (Sandev, 2011).

The growth in the usage of Internet and social media sites is said to have stimulated the growth of online gaming (Fernandes, 2014). The continuous rise in the number of Internet subscribers along with the increased social network accounts is seen as a market driver. The free and assessable nature of the Internet is driving up the demand for online gaming (Fernandes, 2014). More people are now using the Internet, which means the growing demand for entertainment on it.

The Internet revolutionised gaming to a social platform. Users are now able to communicate on platforms such as PlayStation and Xbox. In the past. ‘The Gamer’ was perceived as an introvert personality, spending hours in an isolated room staring at a screen. I believe perception of Gaming has now changed and elevated to be a ‘cool’ activity practised by a cross section of society in a wider social context such as competing on mainstream television channels and organised tournaments. Recent internet dependent game “League of Legends” airing a tournament on BBC3 where the winner was awarded a prize pool of $2.13 million. Although there can be a dispute about the difference between ‘causal’ and ‘hard-core’ gaming one thing that cannot be disputed is the correlation between online gaming and the ‘money making Juggernauts’ (Silverman, 2011) it has created such as Zynga.

Despite gaming being a social platform, social media, is another factor that is causing an increase in online gaming. This is due to the many users playing games on social media platforms such as Facebook. It is estimated that over 200million people play social games (Marketme.co.uk, 2014). Social games use the relationships of friends and their competitive nature, mixed with an addictive game to attract players and keep them hooked and the use of the internet makes these games more accessible. It is therefore plausible to suggest that the rise in social media use is directly linked to the rise in social gaming.

One of the main ways that the Internet has influenced the Gaming industry is through applications on mobile phones. Mobile applications are the basis of trends set to define the future of video games. More young people has access to mobile phones and parents allow their children to play more games using them without concern, as they become more and more acceptable and the norm in today’s society (Stuart and Webber).  In recent years parents would have objected to their child playing video games, today most parents play games themselves, most commonly on their phones. This is evident by the increase in popularity of games such as Candy Crush netting over £865 million in 2014 as a result of users purchasing the game. (Dredge, 2015)

References 

Dredge, S. (2015). Candy Crush Saga players spent £865m on the game in 2014 alone. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/candy-crush-saga-players-855m-2014 [Accessed 27 Jan. 2016].

Fernandes, M. (2014). Rising social network accounts and internet usage is driving growth in the social gaming market – WhaTech. [online] Whatech.com. Available at: https://www.whatech.com/press-release/23567-rising-social-network-accounts-and-internet-usage-is-driving-growth-in-the-social-gaming-market [Accessed 28 Jan. 2016].

Marketme.co.uk, (2014). Rise in Social Media Causes Increase in Online Gaming…. [online] Available at: http://www.marketme.co.uk/rise-in-social-media-causes-increase-in-online-gaming/ [Accessed 28 Jan. 2016].

Sandev, M. 2011, “Interactive gaming to spearhead media growth”, B & T Weekly, [Online].

Schreier, J. (2011). Sony Estimates $171 Million Loss From PSN Hack. [online] WIRED. Available at: http://www.wired.com/2011/05/sony-psn-hack-losses/ [Accessed 27 Jan. 2016].

Silverman, M. (2011). The Influence of Social Gaming on Consoles. [online] Mashable. Available at: http://mashable.com/2011/02/22/consoles-social-gaming/ [Accessed 27 Jan. 2016].

Stuart, K. and Webber, J. (2015). 16 trends that will define the future of video games. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/16-trends-that-will-change-the-games-industry [Accessed 27 Jan. 2016].

Is there a demand for ways to make money gaming?

The option of playing games online for money may seem like a dream job to some. The thought of having to wake up at 6/7am to do a 9-5 everyday is enough to give anyone a nightmare, when you could earn money from the comfort of your own home by playing the games in which you love. However is there really a demand for this?

Gaming for money also called ‘wager matches’ is where two players compete against each other to win. Both players who are competing put up the same stake and the game begins. The winner of each match takes away all the money and if the match is drawn the then money returns to the competitors.

There is another way in which people play games online for money through the website service of Twitch. Twitch has over 45million users and 1 million people uploading videos of themselves onto the site (Dredge, 2014). Twitch users can stream themselves gaming online whilst being paid through subscriptions and or donations. The games you are able to play for money vary from consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox to PC games such as League of Legends.

In 2014 EA Sport removed Virgin Gaming from within the actual FIFA game where it was called ‘Arena.’ Arena is a facility which allowed gamers to participate in wager matches. They discontinued this due to less than 0.2% of players using this service. Although 0.2% may seem like a small amount but FIFA 2012 sold over 3.2 million copies (Sinclair, 2011) within the first week. 0.2% of those who bought the game in the first week is 6,400. This number would grow throughout the year, especially over the Christmas period, with many users receiving the game as gifts. This suggests that Virgin gaming still had the potential to generate large amounts of revenue.

Many users on social media search for ways in which to play ‘FIFA for money’ which is just one of the possible games you can play online, above are some examples

Although not all the above users search have expressed a direct need for a platform where they can play their games for money it does however show there is a market for it. Personally I have seen my friends play of money and believe I know many people who would especially if there was a safe reliable platform to do so.

Google trends (above) show that in June 2014 topics around FIFA were searched over 150 times relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world.
Twitch facilitates users that would like to stream and watch game streaming. Those who stream also give their own audio commentary. Twitch differs from YouTube as the stream can run without pause for as long as the streamer allows. Streamers are also able to upload short clips accessible 24 hours a day.

With the number of Twitch audience doubling from 20 million in 2012 to 45 million in 2013 it is evident that there is demand for the service is provides, which is allowing users to stream themselves for money and cash returns. The rise in users is also reflected by the rise in interest shown by Google Trends (graph above) reaching it’s highest point in 2015.

This research shows that there is a demand for ways to make money gaming online and I would expect that demand to grow as it becomes more accessible and more well known.

References:

Dredge, S. (2014). What is Twitch, and why does Google want it?. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/19/twitch-youtube-live-games-google-acquisition-pokemon [Accessed 21 Jan. 2016].

Easports.com, (2014). The Future of EA SPORTS Arena. [online] Available at: https://www.easports.com/fifa/news/2014/changes-to-ea-sports-arena [Accessed 21 Jan. 2016].

Sinclair, Brendan (2011). “Publisher estimates football simulation’s sell-through as “the most successful launch in EA Sports history,” calls it the biggest launch of 2011 so far.”. GameSpot. CBS Interactive. Retrieved October 5, 2011.