Salty, the salt shaker of Knorr

Another brand that knows how to use social media is Knorr. Recently, Knorr introduced ‘Salty’, the salt shaker. Salty is used by Knorr in Canada to launch a low-sodium meal line on the market.
How does Knorr use Salty though social media? Salty shines in several YouTube videos and can be followed by Twitter (+ 600 followers). Furthermore, you can become friends of Salty on Facebook (+4.000 friends).
Salty is very coddled and the videos are funny!

Salty: a fun and innovative social media campaign of Knorr. Do you think this is an effective social media campaign?

Meet Salty




Salty: a fun and innovative social media campaign of Knorr. Do you think this is an effective social media campaign? Please vote on the right colum.

Vodafone Madame TreSesti

This morning I had a guest lecture at the university which was very interesting. The guest speakers spoke about Vodafone and their online marketing activities. In their speech they also discussed the use of social media of Vodafone. A particular example was the Vodafone 360 campaign. The guest speaker did not show us the video which was used for this campaign. However, I remembered the campaign from my last visit in the cinema and I really have to say you must see this video!
The video is about a virtual fortune teller, Madame TreSesti, who combines personal data of Hyves, Facebook and Twitter to confront somebody with her of his social online status. It is a campaign in which uniquely three major social networks are brought together and analyzed. Madame TreSesti reads, just like the Vodafone 360 application, your social networks and thus comes to surprising and sometimes confrontational conclusions about your online alter ego. This application draws on a database with more than 600 different audio and video clips, specially recorded for the campaign, to create a profile of somebody’s online personality.
The campaign gives an answer on the question how consumers deal with a growing number of user profiles on different social networks.

Which Facebook friend do you systematically ignore?
Are people really waiting for your tweets?
Is your work/life balance right?

Click here for more information

Burger king: one of the most big brand is active in the social media world

In my previous blog I said the consumer has the power. One of the biggest brands has listen to their consumers and anticipates on what their cunsumer really want. I am talking about one of the famous fast food chains: Burger King. For example, they started already with whoppervirgins.com and recently they entered the social space with the 'sacrifice ten friends' facebook application. The campaign quickly went viral and was adopted by over 20,000 users, sacrificing 200,000 friends for free whoppers.

Sadly, the application was shut down as quickly as it started by Facebook, citing privacy concerns. Regardless, the application was beautifully built and the idea was perfect. Burger King built in the ability to share it, the incentive to use it, and added just enough humor to make the campaign a hit. These are key factors to make a campaign successful in social media.

Thus, for all companies who want to express themselves trough social media: pushing the envelope can create the buzz that makes your campaign memorable.

The consumer has the power!

Have a look at your friens and think about them who are doing something with media. For example; Tim from Tilburg has a better online shop with less costs and a better service than many advertiser because he sells via eBay. Sven form Eindhoven gives faster and extensive response than the customer service of many organization because he uses Tweakers.
Let's now have a broader look and think about things you bumb into when you are using the Internet.You probably mention that Nu.nl loses scoops on Twitter and more people use Hyves (approximately 9.9 million) than live in Switzerland (approximately 7.3 million). Today the day it is all about community management.

Communication is not any more about sending and receiving. Online communication starts with listening. People and their opinions are everywhere and the advertiser is topic of the conversation; products are priced on Vergelijk.nl, assessed on Kieskeurig.nl, judged on Radar.nl and sold on Marktplaats.nl. Communication becomes more and more complicated, interaction with target groups is difficult and the attention and time advertisers receive turns down. At the moment there is an information overload. Consumers become more and more aware of time constraints and media use is often more fragmented. It is all about what the customer fascinates; with other words their interests are leading!

Internet is a big source of information and the advertiser stands right in the middle. How do we know where, who, what, how and why anybody talks about anybody?
To excel at this online web it is important that someone creates order in the online community mess. The need for someone who really maximizes earned media presence and build and maintenance the community. This all to obtain a footprint within different forms of social media. Furthermore, responding to trends of the target group, occurring as question-answer machine and boosting discussions within social media are other factors which have to be realized.

How does it work, affiliate marketing via social media?

Look at yourself, you are certainly more likely to buy a product where a friend or family member family is enthusiast about than you assume of a seller how good a product is. Everybody knows a seller has just one goal: selling. Mouth to mouth advertising is still one of the best ways to acquire customers or sell products. As you can see affiliate marketing can be compared with network marketing.

Because the fact that more people buy products online, affiliate marketing is a growing market. The origin of affiliate marketing is in America; Amazon.com introduced the “associates program” in July 1996, which was a great success.
Affiliate marketing is a technique to promote products through another website or mailinglists by using a special link which is connected to a system so sales can be followed. If there comes a sale trough the link the affiliate has right to an agreed amount or percent of the sales. Businesses can also see which banner or link is the most clickable.

Businesses use affiliate marketing for several reasons. First of all, it is much cheaper than expensive marketing campaigns. A business only pays if actually a purchase has been made. A business which do not make use of an affiliate depends on own marketing campaigns and acquires customers on that way. By using one or more affiliates multiple customers can be attract which ensures more revenue.
The most common used terms to determine earnings are:
- CPC (Cost per Click): compensation per click on a banner or link;
- CPM (Cost per Mille): view x 1000;
- CPL (Cost per Lead): fee for subscription to a service, requesting a brochure or making an appointment;
- CPS (Cost per Sale): fee for each sale.

Social media is a way to get good quality affiliates. Many people join ´Groups´ when they use social media. A group is managed by someone who, in most cases, can send group messages to all members of the group. The manager must be persuaded to send a group message about the companies product and at one time a large group of your target group has been reached.

How can companies attract attention through social media?

As I mentioned in my previous post, many marketers are guided by hypes. Under the marketers are a lot of trendsetters but especially a lot of followers. Nowadays followers presume the opportunities in social media after the success stories about Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. The multichannel internet strategy is supposed the best way for online success for organizations. In this strategy social websites have a limited function. To develop a successful campaign are marketing research, a considerable budget and patience essential.

Social media is mostly used to stay in touch with family and friends. A much smaller proportion of the social media users uses social media to orientate themselves on new products. This narrow interest has to deal with the way on which people are approached by companies. Social media is a personal matter in which people are centralized. The classical advertisements do not gain profit because users are surfing around in their social network with other purposes. Therefore, companies have to make sure that they become part of the social network of their target group.

Social media is focused on sharing information. Many users surf around in their own network to read the ‘facts and gossips’ about their friends. A company has to behave with a same entry on social media sites. Thus, advertisements on pages are not profitable but designing a company profile and behave like a regular user. Sharing pictures, giving advice and linking trough videos are examples of the behavior of a regular user. If a company is interesting enough for users, then they will get more friends and goodwill will grow. A lot of goodwill in social media means that your sales through other channels increase, for example trough the company’s website.

Social Media Activities as Commercial Tool will Double!

I was nosing around on the Internet and I ended up on the news item ´2010: Extreme much marketing in social media´. The news claimed that two to three marketers reserve a larger proportion of the marketing budget for social media activities. This is according to the research by the American marketing company Alterian. Alterion questioned marketers in the world to their plans in the area of marketing strategies. Almost 40% of the respondents who want to invest in social media said that they dedicate around 20% of the traditional budget for activities on social media. These figures are remarkable because only 16% of the consumers indicate to be influenced by commerce into social networking, as you can see in my earlier post (28 februari 2010).
The marketing activities on social media in 2010 will double, because currently 36% of the marketers use social media as a method for direct marketing. Another interesting point is that 42% of them do not uses ´clickstreamdata´ in their customer database processing. By this circumstance they cannot measure the impact of the online campaigns in social websites. It seems that many marketers are influences by the hype of social media as a commercial tool. The questioned marketers labeled social media also as a prerequisite for success.

What do you think? Is this invested money wasted or will consumers be more open to commercial activities trough social media over time?

Does advertising in social media gains profit?

The news item ´How to increase revenue through social media´ attract my attention. According to research by Knowledge Networks only 16% of the Internet users can be influenced by ads on social sites. While 83% of the Internet users between 13 and 54 years old participate in social media, uses less than 4% social media regularly for product orientation! I found this a remarkable finding, this means that a few customers are open to commercial incentives on their social profiles. The traditional way of advertising in social media is less profitable than I thought because 84% of the users do not read the ads.

Please, watch underneath video and conclude afterwards if social media is a fad!

Leisure surfing increases work productivity

In my previous blog I described the added values of the use of social media in organisations. I have good news because there is again evidence found that surfing for leisure improves the work productivity of employees. Brent Coker (2009) from the University of Melbourne claims that people who surf the Internet for fun at work are more productive about 9%. This kind of surfing is also known as ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’. A lack of concentration is the cause of above finding. We must rest the mind for a quick break which leads to a higher concentration of a day’s work which results in higher productivity.

Activities which among to ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing are: reading online news sites, searching for product information, playing online games, watching YouTube movies. Secretly searching for a colleague on Face Book belongs to the past with this study in mind. Also feeling guilt if you ordered online new jeans during working hours is not any more necessary.

For more information about the study of Brent Coker click here.

Attitude of organizations towards social media

It is expected that the use of social media technologies will only increase within organizations. A lot of organizations are not completely happy with this increase of social media during the work time of their employees. They often think it is a kind of personal activity, an activity that the employee can do at their own time. In addition, security of information plays an important role by the exchange of data. The most often used social media in organizations are: YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. Before an organization decides to quit access to social media they first have to consider which opportunities will be missed.

Underneath overview has to prove that using social media in organizations gain added values and is not wasting time for the employee nor for the organization. The added values of the use of social media in organizations are: the easiness with which employees can use tools to communicate about work related issues, improvement of customer service and by this increase customer loyalty and feedback, improvement of recruitment activities, cooperation between departments in the organization, accelerated decision making of management issues, improvement of the reputation and/or competitiveness and focus on future prospects.

The threshold to apply social media in organizations will just decrease because of the new generation of employees which are better familiar with social media. A nice example of efficiency and affectivity which social media can offer is the following assumption. An employee uses YouTube to watch a 1 minute ‘how to’ video or uses the helpdesk of Microsoft Word for searching half an hour for the right document to solve his problem. What would you prefer as organization? Exactly, the most time saving assumption, the YouTube assumption. This example explains that social media can be used for solving practical problems.
In the world of today an organization cannot operate without using social media.

Are you agree with me that social media in organizations is inevitable?

Hi everybody!

For the course ´Media Use in Organisations´that I am following at the University of Tilburg every student has to set up their own blog about ICT in organisations. The blog has to be promoted on social media like Twitter and must be updated every week. For your notice, this is my first blog, so I am very curious how I can make myself familiair with a weblog.

You will hear from me in advance!

blog is underconstruction