Social Media, the new Sales Person?

As we all know, social media is on the rise in the advertising world. From Facebook likes, to Youtube  views, and to retweets, social media is one of the fastest methods to getting your brand noticed by the current and future buyers of America. One of the more popular twitter campaigns has been Starbucks’ tweet-a-coffee, which is a three step process, using twitter, to send a friend a $5 e-gift card.

All a person has to do is link their Starbucks and Twitter account and then they’d be able to tweet a friend a coffee by using @tweetacoffee.  Starbucks was also very smart about when they launched this campaign, launching it around the holidays to play into the holiday spirit of giving. Starbucks’ social media team was able to understand, identify and target their audiences with this campaign and it proved to be very successful. Starbucks had over 27,000 unique users tag @tweetacoffee over 37,000 times resulting in $180,000 in sales. With this campaign Starbucks proved that selling on social media works, and that connecting their Starbucks app to Twitter was one of the best decisions the social media team could have come up with.

The future of Big Businesses?

Everyone I know is connected to their phone, and one of the most useful apps I have on my phone is my email. Being in college, and staying connected with professors and news on my university is what made me decide to connect my email with my phone. But now it connects me to so much more, I’m connected more to my  sorority now, I’m alerted when people repin my things on pinterest, when I get a LinkedIn request, and through RSS I can get notifications from my favorite blogs when they post, get news articles from Huffington post and etc.  As more and more companies and social media directors take advantage of RSS, alerting customers and keeping them up to date with new products, sales, and general information will create a stronger bond with the customer. A stronger bond will help create brand loyalty and brand loyalty will help with future sales from old and new my customers.

Another big thing for companies is SEO and SEM. From personal experience I know that when I use google I type in a few words to describe what I’m searching for and when I get the results I will 99.99% click a link that is in the top 5 that pop up. Through class discussions and readings I learned that these top 5 aren’t just there because they’re what I’m looking for but because because there is a complex algorithm that most search engines will keep locked up in a vault. And if you had to choose between, clicking on something that pops up from SEO or SEM, definitely go for SEO. Not that SEM is bad, but these are the links on the side of a search page, that are paid to be there. But, if you’re feeling generous, go for SEM, this will help companies gain awareness an most of them are paying to be there because they know they are worth value, just havent gained “SEO” value yet.

RSS, SEO, and SEM will definitely benefit the future of business, mainly when trying to communicate to customers. Whether it be through emails on the latest product,  being the first link to show up on google or to be the side link, these tools are generating growth everyday.

Twitter Fame

I’d like to say that I’m not addicted to twitter, but in all honesty, I’m addicted to twitter. When I wake up in the morning I roll over, grab my phone off the night stand and pull up my twitter feed. How have I gotten to this point in my life? Well, it all started in 7th grade, I heard about twitter through a few classmates of mine and decided I wanted to jump in the twitterverse. But, I never really got the hang of it, so my account was inactive for a few years. Fast forward to my freshman year in college and my core group of friends were all on twitter and were all obsessed with tweeting, tweeting each other, and tweeting at celebrities. After hearing about them constantly rave about twitter, I decided I would sign back into my old account and give it one more try, and after many failed attempts at guessing my 7th grade password, I was finally able to publish my first tweet in years.

It went downhill from there. I soon became obsessed with the microblogging site, connecting with friends, following strangers and hopelessly tweeting at Adam Levine and asking him to marry me. But even though I’ve been active on twitter for a couple years now,  I have yet to hit twitter fame

One person that appears on my twitter feed, isn’t even old enough to know what twitter is. I’m talking about  the 2 yr Chole from vine, if you happen to live under a rock, here’s the meme that is frequently used for reaction pictures on twitter. She’s become so famous through social media that she even has parody twitter accounts dedicated to her. Even though i doubt her parents seriously knew how famous she would become after posting her unimpressed reaction on vine, they did know that by putting it out on the internet and using hashtags, and sharing it with friends and family would ultimately give up some of Chole’s privacy.Millions of people have her face saved to their computer, laptop or tablet just so they can have easy access for a reaction picture of gif. If you used google images to search “Chole from vine”  you will find all sorts of phrases added to her iconic expression.  Her face  is so recognizable that the other day when my sorority sisters went to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, for a retreat, our president was able to recognize her and take a creepy picture of her from a distance. Even though I would love to be twitter famous, I don’t think I would be able to deal with all of that, and that’s coming for a 20 yr old. So props to Chole and her family. 

For the past two summers I was lucky enough to intern for an Alaskan telecommunications company in their marketing department.The most recent summer I noticed a very drastic change in the department as they created a subgroup for a social media marketing. As Safko states in the first chapter of The Social Media Bible, Social Media Marketing needs to be acknowledged and need to be given the opportunity to connect with customers. Someone high up must have read Safko’s book, because within a years time, the company’s facebook and twitter account went from being inactive, to posting comments and responding to customers every few hours, and even has a Instagram account that they post pictures on weekly. By being active, and communicating within the community they have created positive relations with customers, and their outreach in the community is growing everyday.

I personally hope that more company’s follow these footsteps and interact with their customers, because it will not only show the community that company’s care, but it can also prevent unnecessary crises in the future. Here’s a helpful article I found that explains how a social media crisis can be handled. 

Now, moving towards a different yet similar topic, I think that social media will be able to promote individuals as we use social media for a more personal reason. I think that if we use social media as a respectful representation of ourselves, it will be a powerful platform to essentially market us. We can use twitter, and blogs to create an online presence and use that to connect with an audience all of whom have similar interests as we do. By creating this presence we are given so many opportunities than ever before,  such as being offered our dream jobs, being able to influence hundreds of people, or by being able to make a friend. I hope that from creating this blog I will be able to obtain one of these. I hope to continue my online presence, whether it be this blog, or maybe another blog I create in the future (which will most likely be about food) so that I can lucky enough to broaden my horizon.