Social Media Webinar

This noon I joined a webinar for social media named “10 keys to social media success: Social Media for results” which was conducted by Social Media Marketing University. It was a good webinar and I did get some useful information from it.

In this 45-minute webinar, three big questions are talked—first, how social media is impacting today’s business; second, leveraging web2.0 for business success; third, 10 keys to social media marketing success. There is no doubt that social media can play a really important role on business’ success and web2.0 provides a broader way for social media.

One interesting thing I noticed in this webinar is that the speaker talked about “the big four social media outlets” which are Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And he explained previously they talked about “the big three” which did not include YouTube. But nowadays they noticed that YouTube is really a important social media platform which they could not ignore. I quite agree with this decision since YouTube has been the second large search engine on web. And recently I did a research on how Starbucks use social media to boost its success. I found that Starbucks pay quite attention to its YouTube channel.

The ten keys for social media success are: Leverage LinkedIn Groups to become a thought leader; Use blog comment sections to foster relationships; Integrate video into social media marketing mix; Leverage mobile to drive business; Use Facebook groups to find best customers; Integrate search engine optimization into social strategy; Create high performance PPC campaigns; Tie-in email marketing with social presence; Use strategic PR to increase visibility; Localize your presence.

I was happy to find that much of the strategies mentioned in this webinar are also covered in our social media class which means these strategies will really have a big influence on the business’  success of social media.

Commercialization in Weibo

This time I want to talk about the advertisements and commercials in the first page of weibo account. In the front page of every user’s account, there is always a flash column which usually contains three to five advertisements for merchandise or activities. Since I never see these kinds of ads or commercials on Twitter, I believe weibo is operated more commercialized than Twitter. And the following I will make some description of the content of ads by using yesterday’s ads as examples.

The first advertisement is for a hot topic on weibo at that time—UEFA Champions League, Milan Football Club VS. F.C. Barcelona (Figure 1). This advertisement is to invite users talking about this game. By clicking the advertisement, users are leaded to a specific page which includes the introduction of this hot topic and tweets written by other users and marked by hash tag.

Figure 1

Yesterday’s second advertisement is for hint fiction competition (Figure 2). In the first half year of this year, weibo organized a hint/macro fiction competition which achieved great success. So in the second half year, it is organizing it again. In this competition, users need to create a story in 140 words according to the limit number of words by weibo. All the weibo users can vote for their favorite stories during a certain period of time. At the end, the authors of first 100 novels will get rewards from weibo.

Figure 2

The third advertisement is about Beijing government offices create weibo accounts for publishing news (Figure 3). From my point of view, there is really a big development for Chinese government using social media to contact with individuals. The forth one is also for a hot topic—Golden Horse Awards of Movies in Taiwan (Figure 4). Weibo invites users getting involved talking about it and guessing which movies will win awards. The fifth advertisement is about a new weibo badge available now.

 Figure 3

Figure 4

Coincidentally, all these five ads were not for commercial. They were all for activities in weibo. However, in some other days, there are commercial ads for particular products or brands. Weibo does go further in the commercialization way.

Reaction for privacy in social media

This week’s topic on social media privacy is also my interest. For personal, I’m kind of concern of privacy in social media a lot. No matter on Facebook or Twitter, or other social media, I try to not release too much personal information and pay attention to my “good image”. I do this just because I feel unsafe when I use social media. I don’t know who is watching it and who will watch it in the future. So I want to try my best to keep it seeming good. However, I got more ideas about why we really really need more attention to our privacy in social media and re-concern what information we should never ever put onto our social media website.

The first reason we need to pay attention to privacy is that the information we put onto social media may release our individual privacy and affect our personal security. Our birthday day, home address, and some other information may be used to open account illegally. And the timely location we pointed on Foursquare or other social media may reveal where we are and cause troubles. The location information is more important if you are in bank dealing with money or in a hotel when you are on business trip. Be careful with this.

Another reason is that some “bad” personal information we post online may cause troubles on our jobs. For example, an indelicate photo in which we are drunk or some dirty words we complain. This is the reason why some people suggest we need at least two Facebook accounts—one for our friends and family; the other for business. Never link them and set up certain limit to which people can see it to hide the “bad image” away from public view.

Actually a few days ago, I saw one post about personal privacy from Chinese microblog. This post said he/she totally understand the happy feelings of parents being mom and dad. But he/she suggested not put babies’ information such as name, time of birth, date of birth, weight, or photos onto blog or microblog. This information might be used by human traders. Anyway, this tells the idea that personal privacy should be concerned by everyone.

WEIBO POPUPS

I know I have already written a lot about the Chinese version twitter—Weibo, and it seems that I just focused on describing some detailed designs of Weibo and did not paid much attention to the compare and contrast of Weibo and Twitter. It is quite random and not systematic or academic. I know, but I cannot stop myself. Every time I see a tiny different thing on Weibo from Twitter or some smart design or some changes or improvement, I want to talk about it.

So this time, I’m going to talk about some activities or topics conducted by the Weibo company (SINA) which are showed on every user’s first page when they log onto their accounts. After changing users’ interfaces forcedly, Weibo started a new way to diffuse its everyday topics—as you log onto your Weibo account, the first thing you will see is a popup including the today’s hot topic which invites you to join this topic by clicking the button on the right bottom. And the topics are managed similar as Twitter—just putting the topic name between two # symbals. Just like what is shown in Figure 1.

If you choose you want to join, the button will lead you to the certain page, and if you cancel, there will be another popup showing in the screen which ask you whether you are sure to not receive this message the whole day (Figure 2). If you choose receive it later, then you will get this popup again later that day with other hot topics. Without dealing with these popups, you can do nothing with your weibo.

It might be a good way to enforce users paying attention to every day hot topics and get people involved. However, I do not like it. it makes me feel uncomfortable everyday morning I log on and the first thing I have to do is to click two buttons which is meaningless for my life. I think weibo should find out other ways to diffuse their products expect forcing their users.

Reaction for Twitter Revolution

The article “When & How to “Talk Business” on Twitter” in the book Twitter Revolution really gives good idea about how companies should use social media to increase their business success and inspires me thinking about how to maximize the impact of social media in brands.

This article mentioned three “early-adopter large corporations” as examples of doing a great job on Twitter marketing their company, products, or services. They are @Zappos, @ComcastCares and @JetBlue. Actually this is my third time of these two weeks seeing Comcast as one good example of using social media to improve their customer service quality and increase their customer satisfaction. I have seen several comments praising @ComcastCares about their fast responses and high quality services to solve problems.

The one this article highlights is @Zappos. Zappos is a retail company and one of the best marketing strategies it uses on Twitter is holding contests. This article mentioned one tweet form @Zappos which I think is a really good one holding contests—“Okay, contest is ON! The first person who tweets @Zappos with their favorite brand of shoe sold on Zappos.com gets a pair FREE!”

Just as I mentioned in my another blog, nowadays the most important part for doing social media well is not about how many people retweet your post, it is about how many people getting involved into your topic. How to make people being engaged is what social media person should think about.

Don't touch my interface

Nowadays there is one thing happening on Weibo which I really want to talk about—Weibo is updating its client interface. It is not a big deal if a social medium just provides its clients a new system interface or platform appearance as another choice. The problem is that Weibo tries to increase its speed of diffusion of the new interface, so it changes every client’s interface forcedly without the agreement from that client which means your interface will change by itself at some time without your click of some button. What’s more, the interface can never be changed back to the older one once it is forcedly changed to the newer one by Weibo system.

This is really a bad experience for users who have really been familiar with the older interface and don’t like to use the new one. Just image this: one day morning, you wake up and log onto your Weibo account and suddenly find that your familiar interface has disappeared forever and you have to use the one which is unfamiliar for you and does not work well without choices. That is what I went through this morning.

I don’t understand why Weibo tries to finish this update in such hurry time. Actually before it started to change users’ interfaces forcedly, Weibo invited a certain amount of users to experience this new interface and it got a quite bad score on customer experience. Somehow, Weibo still decide to spread this unwelcome interface. What’s more, since few users choose to update their interfaces to the new one because of the bad customer experience, Weibo do it without users’ permit.

I do not want to talk about whether Weibo has the right to change users’ interface without a permit. I just want to say the way it spread its new interface has caused so much complain from its users. According to this reason, this update is not a successful one, as least from my point of view.

PR & Wikipedia

I read a research article written by DiStaso and Messner named “Forced Transparency: Corporate Image on Wikipedia and What it Means for Public Relations” which is about what PR practitioners should do since any one can edit and change the content of their companies on Wikipedia. This article analyzed the framing of 10 Fortune 500 companies on Wikipedia between 2006 and 2010. There are really some helpful tips for PR persons about dealing with Wikipedia.

Nowadays, since social media have been more and more important for increasing companies’ success, public relations persons need to regard social media as an important tool to conducting two-way communication with their customers, monitoring market environment, and enhancing issues managements.

Since the collaboratively edited information on social media circumvents traditional media gatekeepers, public relations persons get more challenges— they need to pay more attention to the “forced transparency” about their companies on Wikipedia and make the monitoring of Wikipedia in their social media plans. As DiStaso and Messner said, “Simply knowing about what content is on a company page will provide public relations practitioners with an understanding of what the general public knows about their organization.”

Besides monitoring the content about their organizations on Wikipedia, DiStaso and Messner also give some advises about how to create and change the content about their companies on Wikipedia. As DiStaso and Messner suggest—“Monitoring Wikipedia articles and engaging in the discussions over how the article will be shaped should be a daily task for public relations practitioners”. 

Resource:

DiStaso, M. W. & Messner, M. (2010). Forced Transparency: Corporate image on Wikipedia and What It Means for Public Relations. Public Relations Journal, 4(2).