With Social Media fast becoming the King of Marketing, it’s about time us social media users really understood what we are letting ourselves in for.

Jennifer Golbeck gives the example of the ‘Curly Fry Conundrum‘ to explain what our social media ‘Likes’ really say…

She decides to use Facebook as just one example of where big data is collected on every single user, and why not when this particular social media network has over 1.2 billion users per month, making it the most used social network in the world!

Facebook lets people share photos, blog posts, product reviews, videos (think you get the idea) and more, even to the extent that Facebook now gives you the freedom to make your own online persona. Pretty crazy right? Well that’s not the half of it. Golbeck gives us an eye opening to the amount of personal data that is collected from our social media activity. Personal data that we as users have no control over at all, so much so, that we are no longer the customers, instead we are the products.

Data is stored not only from our purchase history, but also on our behaviour. Golbeck gives the example of a person liking a page for ‘Curly Fries’ – whilst this seems irrelevant, it’s not. Say one smart person likes the ‘Curly Fries’ page, then their smart friends see’s that they have liked it, so they then like it (do you see where this is going?) Big Data would then indicate that Smart people like Curly Fries. Sounds absurd doesn’t it? But according to Golbeck, this is how it works! Well, I don’t think so. This is just one example that shows how Big Data is not sufficient enough to work without human intelligence. Schroeder (2014) supports this proposing that Big Data is used to generate abstract knowledge, without prescriptiveness about how to use this knowledge to change behaviour.

Of course we know it is not true that smart people like Curly Fries – if it was true, I would be stuffing my face with Curly Fries in the hope of becoming “smarter”. It must also be noted that the example Golbeck is giving here is a case study on Facebook – a social media platform whereby people are highly influenced by the actions of others. “Sheep” springs to mind here – if one on my friends likes “Justin Bieber” on Facebook then the likelihood is that I will like “Justin Bieber” on Facebook because we are in the same circle of friends and all have similar interests

However, another example that Golbeck gives is of two parents who received baby products to their home. These two parents found out their daughter was pregnant thanks to Big Data. Through the girl’s actions on social media and purchase behaviour, data was collected and brought by a company. This Big Data contained the girls name, address, her purchase behaviour, her personal interests etc. and from this data collected, the company worked out she was pregnant and sent the girl baby products to her house as a marketing strategy – giving out freebies. Is this Big Data taking it one step too far? Hell yes it is, but it is out of our control.

So, next time that you “Like” a page on Facebook or make a purchase online, be aware of the big data that is being collected on you. Just because I like Jacobs Creek on Facebook and I recently purchased a bottle opener from Nisa, it doesn’t mean I need alcoholics anonymous sign up forms coming through my parents letterbox. I think you get my point.

Always think twice.

Golbeck, J. (2014) ‘The curly fry conundrum: Why social media “likes” say more than you might think’. [Video] <http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data> [accessed 30 April 2015]

Schroeder, R. (2014) ‘Big Data and the brave new world of social media research’. Original Research Article, [Online] Vol 1 (Issue 11). <http://bds.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2053951714563194.full.pdf+html> [accessed 30 April 2015]

So, you’ve been optimising your site, it’s full of great, interesting, useful content – now, we just need that extra push to really get it out there. NO – I am not referring to any practice of black hat SEO here (we say no to black hat SEO), I am in actual fact referring to blogging influencers!

In today’s society, blogging is considered a huge word-of-mouth engine, being recognised as a strong platform, not only for customers to find out more information on the latest products and services, but now even more so for companies to promote their product and service offering (Li, Lai & Chen, 2011). It is crucial for companies to find a blogger with great marketing influential capabilities in order to get their product or service visible to a large amount of people in a little amount of time (Li, Lai & Chen, 2011).

So, think of an “influencer” as your new crush. You really want to build a long, loving relationship with a blogging influencer as they are your golden gateway to reaching out to the world!

Ann Smarty (2015), a hubspot marketing blogger, views influential bloggers as trusted voices who get the buzz going around your product or service or even just you brand in general. She goes on to say that if you invest the time and effort, blogging influencers can turn into your brand advocates. So, the main goal here is to gain influencers endorsement, that way his or her thousands of followers, who trust his or her every word, will trust his or her approval and recommendation of your product or service.  These people will then go to your website / blog page, this greatly increasing traffic, improving your search engine ranking and hopefully converting into a transaction or two – Ding! Ding! Jackpot!

But, of course – it’s not that straight forward – when is any relationship that straight forward?

You won’t find the love of your life by expecting them to come to you. Get out there and look for it. You need to find the perfect one… the right blogging influencer for you – let’s be honest, if you own an argentine steak restaurant, reaching out to a vegan blogging influencer is probably not going to be ideal. Ann Smarty (2015) gives some great tools and programmes which you can use to find your match made in heaven, read more here.

First you need to initiate contact.

Find them on social media channels, retweet them, share their blogs, favourite their tweets, like their posts, leave comments on their posts (you get the picture, right?) – You basically want to be on their radar.

The key thing to remember here, as Susan Payton (2015) so rightly points out, is that you want to find influencers that will benefit from your product or service as this will encourage them to write more passionately and therefore work in your favour too.

So, you’ve found “the one”, you’ve made the initial social media contact, you have reason to believe you are on their radar – maybe they favorited your retweet of their article or they responded to on one of your comments – well, now it’s time to bring out the big guns and make your move. Send your pitch in an email. Payton (2015) gives some great pointers to help you structure your email, read more here.

So, a lot of grafting is put in here to get the “perfect one”, but it is all worth it in the end… right?

Well, what Payton (2015) and Smarty (2015) don’t seem to take into consideration, is the actual value that a blogging influencer brings to the table. I find myself coming back to this key concept that seems to be ever present in digital marketing – QUALITY OVER QUANTITY! Are we associating the power of the influencer by their volume of followers? Of course, increasing brand awareness of your product or service is key, but at some point we all want to see an up on the conversion rate too.

Let’s take Life Hacker this blog site gets over 23,250,000 estimated unique monthly visitors (EbizMBA, 2015) so it might cost you a few pennies, but getting your product or service featured on their blog would be “out of this world” right? I mean, look at how many people you are reaching out to all over the world – “amazing”! But, who is to say that people actually trust this blogging influencer? People know they are getting paid, so who is to say that they are telling the truth about the product or service they are writing about? Are they just in it for the money? Who knows!

(Source adapted from Life Hacker, 2015)

Now, The London Word has only 1,873 subscribers – a considerable amount less. So, does this mean that these devoted residents and established enthusiasts are not influencers because they aren’t as well-known as Life Hacker? The London Word is written by people who have visited these “amazing” beer gardens and therefore have first-hand experience, aren’t these people as Smarty (2015) says –“trusted voices”?

(Source adapted from The London Word, 2008)

So, back to the conversions point- at the end of the day, of course we would all love clicks to convert into sales, but we know it doesn’t work like that.  All I’m trying to say, is when you are choosing your “chosen one” don’t be deceived by their following and always remember – QUALITY over QUANTITY! Are people going to follow up on the recommendations of the jack of all trades? Or are they going to go with the recommendations of an enthusiast who has first-hand experience? I know which blog post I would take advice from.

References:

Life Hacker (2015) ‘Best UK Beer Gardens: Top 5 Pubs with Amazing Beer Gardens’ [Online] <http://www.lifehacker.co.uk/2015/04/24/best-uk-beer-gardens-top-5-pubs-with-amazing-beer-gardens> [accessed 27 April 2015]

Li,Y., Lai, C. & Chen, C. (2011) ‘Discovering influencers for marketing in the blogosphere’.  Information Sciences, [Online] Vol 181 (Issue 23). p5143-5157, <http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0020025511003550> [accessed 25 April 2015]

Payton, S. (2015) ‘How to Connect With Social Media and Blogging Influencers’. [Online] <http://www.cision.com/us/2015/01/how-to-connect-with-social-media-and-blogging-influencers/> [accessed 26 April 2015]

Smarty, A. (2015) ‘7 Tools for Finding & Connecting With Influential Bloggers’. [Online] <http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogger-outreach-tools> [accessed 26 April 2015]

The London Word (2008) ‘The Garden State – London’s Best Beer Gardens’. [Online] <http://www.thelondonword.com/2008/07/the-garden-state-londons-best-beer-gardens/> [accessed 27 April 2015]

So, you’re getting a high volume of traffic to your website, you’re page ranking is on the up and this has all happened within a month of hiring you’re SEO company. Wow! They’re amazing; I take my hat off to them. Actually maybe I don’t… I smell a rat. I think your SEO company maybe be wearing the black hat.

The different techniques that you choose to adopt when optimising your website to improve its search engine ranking are where you choose which hat you are going to wear; Black or White?

Stephanie Matsuoka (2014) describes Black Hat SEO as a “quick fix method” that is enriched with techniques to trick and fool search engines that usually lead to only temporary results. Duk, Bjelbork and Carapina (2013) expand on this “quick fix method” supporting that bad SEO practice is a promise of high ranking and number of clicks, in a short period of time… Does this sound familiar?

Well, what needs to be taken into consideration is how valuable that one click is. If the customer is misled and they click on the website and don’t find what they are looking for, what are they going to do? Click straight back off the website! What does this do? It increases your website bounce rate and that doesn’t look good for any website and actually that is the least if your problems.

When practising black hat SEO, what you need to be more worried about is the fact that Google or any search engine can completely de-index your website, yes… banish your website from all search engine page results!

So, it is important that you are in know when it comes to black hat SEO;

• Key Word Stuffing – Can simply be a list of key words in a footer or area of a page and is also recognised when content is packed with keywords and therefore doesn’t read naturally.

Example: We sell custom pig skin handbags. Our custom pig skin handbags are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom pig skin handbag, please contact our custom pig skin handbag specialists at custom.pig.skin.handbag@stupidexample.com

(Please note this is only an example – no pigs were harmed in the writing of this blog, but I think you get the keyword stuffing part, right?)

• Link Farms – Can be in the form of paid links whereby you offer payment in return for links to your website. Some naughty SEO-ers even go to the extent of creating new sites with the sole purpose to create a link back to the main site. Both ways, these links are usually unrelated and of course, search engines do not like this!

Download your backlinks from Google Webmaster Tools or SEOMoz, now if you see links from non-relevant sites, they are usually paid links and nine times out of ten, the link to your website in the content of this article (the link usually comes from a blog i.e.-  builderboylife.blogspot.com) will be a load of nonsense.

Example: Brick laying is not that hard, just make sure you have cement, the correct amount of bricks and a custom pig skin handbag.

• Invisible text – This kind of speaks for itself; placing text the same colour as your background to trick the search engines and of course we humans don’t pick up on it.

• Cloaking & Doorway Pages – This is simply showing two different versions of your website; one to your users / visitors and another to the search engines which is usually a keyword stuffed page. Similar to this the doorway page features a list of key words whereby after a minute or so both the users / visitors and the search engine are redirected to another page which has the actual content that you as a webmaster wants users to see.

Be aware people – both of these are classed as spamdexing! Oh and just so you know – Google released the almighty Panda back in February 2011 that eats sites with spam and poor content for breakfast! If you have the time, I suggest you read a little more about the Google Panda here.

(Source adapted from Yu, 2014)

 Now, don’t think “oh I can get away with it” because you can’t – no matter how big or small a company, Google will look for you, Google will find you and Google will deindex you (Yes, Taken is one of my favourite movies). In fact BMW, the German car manufacturer, were one of the many that thought they could get away with it and they learnt the hard way…

Back in 2006, Google blacklisted BMW, removing them entirely from their search engine page results (BBC, 2006). Why? Simple – they used doorway pages to improve their ranking and this is of course going against Google’s guidelines;

“Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as ‘cloaking'”

So folks, as you can see it doesn’t matter who you are, if you don’t abide by the rules, you will suffer the consequences. If you are interested to know more about the BMW ‘death penalty’ click here.

I hope now you can understand why it is not worth cutting the corners to improve your ranking and volume of traffic, after all they are just numbers and you need to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO it is always quality over quantity. On that note, I feel my work here is done and I leave you with this – SAY NO TO BLACK HAT SEO!

References:

BBC (2006). ‘BMW given Google ‘death penalty’. [Online] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4685750.stm> [accessed 23 April]

Duk,S.,  Bjelbork, D. & Carapina, M.  (2013) ‘SEO in e-commerce: balancing between white and black hat methods’. Information & Communication Technology Electronics & Microelectronics (MIPRO), [Online] 36th International Convention (20-24 May). <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6596289> [accessed 22 April 2015]

Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Matsuoka, S. (2014) ‘Black Hat vs. White Hat: Do You Know the Difference?’. [Online] <https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141010205518-247571609-black-hat-vs-white-hat-do-you-know-the-difference> [accessed 20 April 2014]

Yu, J. (2014) ‘How Google’s Latest “Panda” Algorithm Should Change Your Content Strategy’. [Online] <http://marketingland.com/panda-4-1-changes-content-performance-strategy-103850> [accessed 22 April 2015]

Like it or not, whether it is the bane of your life or the love of your life, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cannot be avoided. So, why is it so important? Well, if Google can’t find your website, then how do you think we can! Statistic results from March 2015 show that Google is still dominating the UK Search market share, making it the most used search engine;

(Source adapted from The E Word, 2015)

Now, as a person who has their own website, it should be your golden dream to be on page one of Google – and you can be! Imagine SEO as your yellow brick road to achieving your golden dream! Boutet and Quoniam (2012) explain that by optimising your website, you are increasing your websites visibility and improving your search engine ranking, which means your website, will get more valuable, targeted traffic (people).

Boutet and Quoniam (2012) reinforce the importance of being on the first page of Google – a person seeking information cannot equally value all the results provided by the search engine. Why? Well, it’s simple – you don’t review every single result that Google offers and if you do… you have way too much time on your hands. In fact, most people (myself included) limit their search to just the first few pages. Therefore, having your website on the first page of Google gives your website a sense of ‘legitimacy’. As users of the internet, we trust Googles judgement, we wouldn’t think “hang on Google is tricking me here… it’s giving me the wrong information” No! We see Google as our information providing guru, but that doesn’t always mean Google has got it right. If a website does not have an effective SEO strategy, google may not rank this website highly. Therefore it is imperative in today’s society that your website ticks all the right boxes…

Think of Google (or any search engine) as a recipe. Does your website have the correct ingredients for Google’s recipe? If it does, Google is going to really like your website, in fact the finer the ingredients, the more google will like you – the more Google likes you, the higher they will rank your website on their search engine page. After all, Google only wants to give the best, most relevant information to its users. The big problem is; nobody is 100% sure on the exact ingredients that Google is looking for and if you ever manage to find them out, my friend THAT is worth more than gold! But, for now, we all know the basic ingredients; Milk, Butter & Sugar. In SEO terms, we know that a search engines algorithm is based on key principals; content, keywords, HTML, architecture of the site, links, reputation, and trust (Sullivan, 2013).

(Source adapted from Vertical Response, 2013)

Great, so let’s take a closer look at how you can develop a good SEO strategy and become that one step closer to appearing on the first page of Google!

SEO boils down to two key parts; on the page SEO and off the page SEO – You can’t have one without the other – there is no Ying without Yang. Sullivan (2013) has broken SEO down into a periodical table to show the key factors – what I have been referring to as ingredients – needed to achieve success, i.e.- make it onto the first page of Google;

(Source adapted from Sullivan, 2013)

 On-the-page SEO consists of all the edits / changes that you make to the code and content of the actual web page – might sound obvious, but I just wanted to clarify, such as:

• High quality, relevant content – People don’t want to be misled –clicking on a website that you believe is going to give you more information about Staffordshire Bullterriers, only to find it is all about Sphynx cats is a no-no!
• Titles and descriptions that contain your key words (this is the HTML side of things)
• Proper URL Structures  (This is also to do with HTML)– Which one do you think is properly structured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphynx_cat

OR

http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1

• Relevant internal links – if you are giving a link to another page on the same domain, make sure it is relevant to your content.
• Text Formatting (use of h1, h2, bold etc.) – make use of the different text formats available to you and if you can, use your keywords in the h1 format.
• Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
• Navigation – people need to find your site user friendly, make use of HTML sitemaps and breadcrumbs and remember that Googles little robots need to be able to crawl your site easily too!
• Fast loading pages – nobody wants to be hanging around waiting for a page to load!
• External links – You don’t want any broken links in your content or links that take you to an irrelevant website / web page.

Off-the-page SEO refers to the outside activities that you do in order to get your website seen, after all Google wants to know how the rest of the world perceives your website too! These outside activities include;

• Link Building – Key thing to remember here is QUALITY over QUANTITY! You want other websites / blogs to reference (link) to your page as this is telling Google that your page has relevant, quality content. A good, highly valuable link for example would be from an ac.uk source – i.e. a university as Google sees these as highly valuable links. After all, if a University wants to reference (link) your website then you must have something relevant / important!
• Social Media – Although not a direct SEO technique as search engine don’t count these links, the main point here is that your social media profile can increase your website exposure as the more people you connect with and engage with, the more likely they will check out your website – hey! Every little helps, right?
• Trust – Google needs to trust your site, you need to have respectable “neighbourhood” links, and good reviews on your website will also go a long way. Trust can be built through having highly relevant content and useful information as naturally this would generate good reviews and welcome respectable referencing (links) from other websites.

There is so much to read up on SEO, so please if you are interested I highly recommend Sullivan’s take on SEO and the periodic table and you can read up more about it here. It really is fascinating stuff, but I hope for now you get the basics!

If you are looking to build a website or implement an SEO strategy, I wish you all the luck and remember – be patient, this takes time, but when it starts to pay off, you will realise it was all worth it!

References:

Boutet, C. & Quoiniam, L. (2012) ‘Towards Active SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)’. Journal of Information Systems and Technology Management, [Online] Vol 9 (Issue 6) pp453-458. <http://www.jistem.fea.usp.br/index.php/jistem/issue/view/55> [accessed 21 April 2015]

Sullivan, D. (2013) ‘Updated: The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors’. [Online] <http://searchengineland.com/now-updated-the-periodic-table-of-seo-success-factors-162513> [accessed 21 April 2015]

The E Word (2015) ‘Search Engine Market’. [Online] <http://theeword.co.uk/info/search_engine_market/> [accessed 21 April 2015]

Vertical Response (2013) ‘The Ingredients to Tasty Search Engine Optimization’. [Online] <http://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/the-ingredients-to-tasty-seo/> [accessed 21 April 2015]

In today’s society consumer provided information is being used to augment or even create a whole website, whether it is a video, photo, review, blog post (you get the picture), we are using this information on a daily basis. From sites that are fuelled with user generated content such as -Facebook, eBay and Wikipedia to the less obvious firms such as Honda and Proctor & Gamble, that are embracing user contributions to improve their products, service offering and of course reduce their costs – the internet is filling up with user generated content by the second.

Gary Akehurst (2009) writes an interesting article about the growth of user generated content where he found that consumers trusted more websites with reviews as opposed to professional guides and travel agencies and although this is looking from a tourist perspective, it can be argued that the same opinion is shared across the world. Nielsen’s ‘Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages’ report (2009) records that 84% of people across the globe believe word-of-mouth and electronic word-of-mouth recommendations are the most trustworthy source. So, can we agree with the Akehurst, Nielsen and the rest of the world that a voluntary recommendation is more reliable and more trustworthy than the rehearsed words of a salesman?

Think about it – I don’t know about you, but when I am booking to go on a holiday and I search for a hotel, I firstly go to TriVaGo or Expedia to find a nice cheap hotel (I’m a student – luxury isn’t an option at the moment), I then immediately type this hotel into Trip Advisor to check out the customer reviews. Why? Because I trust the opinions of people who have experienced the customer service at this hotel first hand much more than if I called the hotel and asked them to rate their customer service on scale of 1-5.

Here is an example of customer reviews of a hotel on trip advisor:

(Source adapted from Trip Advisor, 2015)

Akehurst (2009) is right; the development of Web 2.0 – the social web, has caused a shift in power from suppliers to customers thanks to new online resources which allows us – the customers- to research anything and everything, whether it be about our next holiday or even our next food shop. There is an unlimited amount of information on the internet available to you and me at the click of a button!

Scott Cook (2008), a journalist for the Harvard Business Review, makes a very interesting point that whilst the concept of user generated content which Akehurst (2009) is referring to is nothing new, the methods companies and organisations have created to aggregate and leverage these contributions of content so that they are valuable to others IS something new and it is something that Cook (2008) refers to as a ‘User Contribution System’.

• User – Customers, employees, potential customers
• Contribution – Active (work, expertise, information) or Passive (behavioural data that is collected automatically during activity or transaction)
• System – Method used to aggregate contributions and automatically convert them into something useful for others

The below diagram is Cook’s (2008) User Contribution Taxonomy, showing a breakdown of different types of user contribution systems;

(Source adapted from Cook, 2013)

Cook’s (2008) system pulls together the benefits of user generated content from both a firm’s perspective and our perspective as customers. There is a connection here between buyers and sellers; the customer leaves a review of a product or service, a firm then uses this user generated content to adapt or improve their product or service offering.  Don’t forget, we are also helping each other out – customer to customer. As seen in the example I gave using Trip Advisor, Web 2.0 has allowed us to globally share our knowledge and experiences making us the ever savvy customer!

So, it’s a win/win situation… right?

Well, there is a few things you need to consider and one that sticks out like a sore thumb is CREDIBILITY!

Let’s take Wikipedia as an example – there is a reason your lecturers and teachers don’t want you to reference Wikipedia, they are not just doing it to “ruin your life” which was my initial thought in first year! According to Cook (2008), user contribution systems are built on all kinds of voluntary contributions, just so, Wikipedia is made up of information willingly created and regularly updated by ‘unpaid amateurs’. Yes, it appears the majority of things are correct, however people are allegedly writing about “facts”, history and latest news and there is no guarantee that this information is 100% correct.

This applies for everything – as we have seen, user generated content is hugely based on people’s opinions, experiences and knowledge. So, firms and customer’s a-like need to filter all comments, negative and positive and remember that people perceive and experience things differently, people have different standard and tastes, after all we are only human!

Akehurst, G. (2009) ‘User generated content: the use of blogs for tourism organisations and tourism consumers’. Service Business, [Online] Vol  3 (Issue 1). p51-61, <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11628-008-0054-2> [accessed 8 April 2015]

Nielsen (2009) ‘Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages’. [Online] <http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2013/global-trust-in-advertising-and-brand-messages.html> [accessed 8 April 2015]

Cook, S. (2008) ‘The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business’. Harvard Business Review, October 2008 Issue. [Online]  <https://hbr.org/2008/10/the-contribution-revolution-letting-volunteers-build-your-business> [accessed 8 April 2015]

So, Mangold and Flauds (2009) suggest that the tools and strategies used for communicating with customers has significantly changed with the emergence of social media and go on to propose that social media should be considered a part of a firm’s promotional mix. Now, six years on, Mangold and Flauds couldn’t be more right. The shift towards social media marketing is growing stronger every day and it is now crucial for marketers to become more responsive to real-time activities and increase engagement with their customers.

How firms successfully do this is the golden question!

Audie Chamberlain (2013), an award winning social media executive, gives her view on real-time marketing after attending a social media committee that left her convinced that more ‘in the moment’ marketing is the next big step for social marketers and if done correctly, can lead directly to great results. Chamberlain (2013) highlights the importance for firms to piggyback on current affairs and leading stories, explaining that by doing so, they are creating a buzz around their brand, thus increasing awareness and following, all through the use of social media.

Well, let’s take one of the most recent headlines; ‘Zayne Malik leaves One Direction’ – love them or hate them, you will be wise to remember that there is no such thing as bad publicity. So, the latest One Direction news is dominating search trends across all social media channels, mainly through Facebook ‘likes and shares’ and Twitter ‘retweets, mentions and favourites’. Take a look at just how many times one tweet from BBC regarding Zayne Malik’s departure got ‘retweeted’ / ‘favorited’;

(Source adapted from BBC Twitter account, 2015)

This shows how just one tweet reached so many people, and according to Chamberlain (2013) if a brand can tie this story to their marketing campaign, they too will become a result of this dominating search trend.

Lidl, a UK leading discount supermarket did just that with their Easter campaign, offering 1/5 off the price of their One Direction Easter egg, due to the band now only having four members as opposed to five;

(Source adapted from Author’s Twitter account, 2015)

Take note! Look how many more ‘retweets’ and ‘favourites’ this simple yet effective tweet got. Now we can see exactly what Chamberlain (2013) is talking about and relating back to Mangold and Flauds (2009) theory that social media should be a part of a firm’s promotional mix, this type of consumer engagement highlights the uniqueness in the magnitude of communication. Compared to the traditional word-of-mouth, this social media platform gives consumers the ability to tell an unlimited amount of people, allowing consumers to engage with one another in ‘real-time’, this is known as SOCIAL NETWORKING!

Think about how much it costs to run a TV advertisement for Lidl to promote their One Direction Easter Egg and then think of how much it costs to send one little tweet… Hold that thought! Let’s look at this on a bigger scope, and then think about cost!

Cast back to the 2013 Super Bowl XLVII, yes the ‘blackout’ one. For those of you who don’t know (shocking!) there was a blackout during the third quarter of the Super Bowl XLVII for a whole 34 minutes, in which time the Oreo team seized on the opportunity by tweeting; ‘Lights out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark’;

(Source adapted from Huffington Post, 2013)

The Huffington Post (2013) records that this one clever, witty tweet got over 10,000 retweets in just one hour and was more of a ‘payoff’ than the Oreo’s actual Super Bowl Ad (which cost millions by the way) this exemplifying the value of acting in ‘real-time’ and proving the power of mastering social media. It was not only social marketers that picked up on this master of the art tweet; Oreo cookie fans from all over the world were giving great recognition to Oreo for their fast thinking;

(Source adapted from Oreo’s Twitter account, 2013)

Now we have grasped the power of social media, we need to acknowledge the costs; how much does it really cost to send one little tweet? Angela Watercutter (2013) makes an interesting point in her article (read more here), suggesting that on average advertisers in the US will spend almost $4 million to run an ad during the Super Bowl, and although it is obvious that the cost of a tweet is a lot less, it is not free either! Behind this timely Oreo tweet was a team of 15 people with the ability to react in 10 minutes or less including; copywriters, a strategist, and artists, and a lot of pre-planning for the victory tweet and any other key events should they arise.

Whilst Chamberlain (2013) agrees with Watercutter (2013) that in order to be successful, your team needs to be confident with the brands voice and identity, let’s not be fooled! Seizing the ‘real-time’ opportunity in social media marketing may seem to be more cost efficient way to engage with consumers  and rapidly build brand awareness but, it is also easy for a firm to instantly cause great damage to their brand with just one single tweet.

In answer to the question; how much does reacting in real-time really cost? Well if done correctly it can be worth gold for a brand, but not all current affairs should be piggybacked on just because they are dominating search trends. Firms need to know their limit and respect that some headlines should be left alone else it could cost them their reputation!

On that note I leave you with a tweet from a very well-known clothing brand that used hurricane Sandy to promote their free shipping;

(Source adapted from Holmes, 2014)

Chamberlain, A. (2013) ‘How Not To Suck At Real-Time Social Marketing’. [Online] < http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/how-not-to-suck-at-real-time-social-marketing/ >[accessed 1 April 2015]

Holmes, K. (2014) ‘23 Of The Most Epic Twitter Fails From Big Brands In The History Of Social Media’. [Online] < http://www.smash.com/11-epic-twitter-fails-big-brands/ > [accessed 4 April 2015]

Huffington Post (2013) ‘Oreo’s Super Bowl Tweet: ‘You Can Still Dunk In The Dark’. [Online] < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/oreos-super-bowl-tweet-dunk-dark_n_2615333.html? > [accessed 2 April 2015]

Mangold, G & Flauds,  D. (2009) ‘Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix’. Business Horizons, [Online] Vol 52 (Issue 4), p357-365 < http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681309000329?np=y >[accessed 31 March 2015]

Watercutter, A. (2013) ‘How Oreo Won The Marketing Super Bowl With A Timely Blackout As On Twitter’. [Online] < http://www.wired.com/2013/02/oreo-twitter-super-bowl/ >[accessed 1 April 2015]