Honesty

When reading the about the principle of Honestly, you would think that most people would know what this means. It is sad to think about how many people are dishonest in social media; because they think that no one will figure out who they are. In class we talked about a case where a blogger Crystal Cox started making up things about Kevin Padrick. He was involved in a bankrupt company, and she blog about a lot of false accusations about him. She ended up getting sued, and had to pay a huge settlement.  However, many people believed what was said and he lost creditability.
The article I found talks about the show Catfish on MTV. The shows is all about how people lie on Facebook. The host of the show finds people in online relationships, that have never meet the other person. The host will then do research about the person who seems to be lying, and will find a way for them to meet. Most of the time the person is lying, and not really who they say they are. Sometimes it is little things like weight or jobs. It can also be gender, or they are a completely different person. I have seen a episode where someone took all of these pictures from someones MySpace page, and created an entire new identity. It is really weird that someone would go that far.

Control

The principle we talked about in class was control. It seems to me that there is a fine line when it comes to control. A company wants to have control, but it is not possible to have complete control. One of the cases we talked about in class was about Marie Callender's. The company that owns this brand decided to have a dinner, and invite top food and mom bloggers to attend. The invitation made it seem like a top chef was going to be cooking their meals. The plan was to serve Marie Callender's lasagna as the main dish, and see what their reaction was. Many of the bloggers got upset, because they had special dietary needs that were ignored. After the dinner the bloggers went and blogged about their experience. That is when ConAgra lost control, because they have no control over what they post on their blogs.

The article I found, was about McDonald's and how there newest twitter campaign went all wrong. They wanted to engage with their customers, so they created to hash-tags for customers to tweet with. McDonald's wanted people to talk about the good experiences they had at the restaurants. Instead many customers started telling bad experiences they have had there, and all kinds of bad stories. When this started to happen they lost control of this campaign. It completely backfired on them. It is hard to keep control of this type of social media, because people can post whatever they want to.
  

Tone

This week in class we talked about the second principle of post-engagement, which is tone. The cases we talked about this week were all pretty interesting. One case was about KLM and how they interacted with its customers. The airline would monitor tweets, and when someone would mention the airline they would look to see what it said. In cases where customers talked about waiting for their flight, the airline would try and gift something for that customer. KLM would look at their customers Facebook pages and see what their hobbies were. When they found out, they would meet them at the airport with a gift. An example they used was giving a runner, a sports watch. This sets a great tone with the airlines customers, it shows that they have an interest in them. The company is treating them as friends, and not just random people.
The article I found was about Disney and its social media. The article talked about how Disney has multiple Facebook pages. They have pages for all of the their different audience groups. They have a Facebook specially for parents with infants called Disney Baby. Having different pages allows Disney to set different tones with each type of consumers. Companies want to set they right tone and speak in a language that their customers understand. Disney being such a large company, split things up in order the reach all if their markets.

Endurance

This week we started to talk about the post-engagement principles. The first one we talked about was endurance. The case that stood out to me was about the NRA. When the Sandy Hook shooting occurred, the NRA was under a lot of pressure. Many people were writing on the NRAs websites, and many of those people were very upset with the organization. The NRA didn't comment on any ones opinions, the organizations basically stayed quiet for days. I don't think the NRA handled this the right way. In my opinion the organization should have said something. There should have been a statement issued, saying that their thoughts and prayers went out to the families of this tragedy. Something along those lines. The organization should have showed that they cared about the huge loss. I agree that the NRA made the right decision not to address the gun issue, but it is important to show compassion.

When trying to find an article about endurance, I came across the new Mellow Yellow campaign. This article talked about several different unique campaigns. Unique content is something we discussed when we talked about endurance. Mellow Yellow has been around for a long time, but has been pretty much unknown in recent years. The company decided to use a new approach by starting a Facebook page for Mellow Yellow. They used a retro theme, and customers were able to upload photos and get a retro look in a photo generator. This allowed the company to reach a whole new audience. They found that 80% of the pages fans were 24 and under. This company went through a time when they were pretty much forgotten, and now have a whole new fan base. This case of Mellow Yellow shows how endurance can pay off.

Integration

When talking about integration in class, we talked about General Mills. In this case the company used different types of media in reach its audience. They started running a series of commercials, that featured its Pilsbury products. General Mills also used social media, by sharing recipes on blogs and Facebook. Another case we talked about was the WWE. The brand integrated using all types of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. I thought that it was a smart idea to continue the story on social media outlets, so the brand so stay in the fans minds. WWE only airs once a week, so to keep the story going all week keeps the fans engaged.
I found an article talks about how A&G uses integration in its new campaign. The company is starting a new recruitment and awareness campaign, and trying to target people from the ages 17-24. The company has decided to use Twitter to reach those people, and created a new hash-tag for this campaign. A&G will also be using broadcast, print, digital, and out of home elements in this campaign. This seems like a good way to reach the target market the company is aiming for. It is smart to also use other types of media, to reach those who are not on Twitter.    

Content

In class this week we talked about content. There are four things that are needed to make content "spreadable". These four components include the campaign being relevant, interesting, unique, and useful. If a campaign has all four of these things, then it's a solid campaign. The GYT campaign that MTV did, met all four of those criteria. It was relevant, because teens need to get tested. It was interesting and unique, because they didn't tell anyone what GYT meant. They used celebrities in the campaign, and they tried to guess what GYT meant. It ended up being useful, because numbers showed that more teens were getting tested after this campaign came out.

Free people is a clothing brand owned by Urban Outfitters. Its most recent campaign incorporated using  its customers Instagram photos on its product pages. This is relevant to the customer, because they can see how the clothes look and what to wear with them. This is interesting, because most companies don't  do this. The customers can see the clothing on many different body shapes, and see how different people style certain items. Its unique for the reasons I just mentioned. It's rarely done, and lets the customers be involved. This campaign is useful to the customers, because they can see the clothing on an actual person. When you shop online, it's hard to tell what the clothing will actually look like on a real person (not a model). This new campaign allows you to do so.

Objectives

In Thursdays class we talked about objectives, and how they are key in figuring out how you want to use social media. There are five different objectives that we talked about they are, listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing. All of these objectives are about how the customer will help the company, and how the company will help it's customers. We discussed five different cases, each one talking about one of the five objectives. The case that stood out to me was the Ernst & Young case. Their objective was talking, and the company used this to it's advantage. The company hires many employees that are right out of college. On their Facebook page when someone had a question about a job, they would respond back to each person. This was a good way to reach out to new hopeful employees, and also many people who probably wouldn't think of working there.
The article that I found, talks about how to acquire new customers using social media. It lists five different ways, and they are about talking to potential customers, and making people excited about the product. Making people excited, reminds me of energizing the customer. When you make people excited about a company, they will want to seek it out. The article talks about making social media personal, so people can connect to the company. It also important to take pictures and post them, to show potential customers what to look forward to.

Listening

In class we talked about, how important it is for companies to listen to it's clients. There were several cases that we discussed that really made that point. The case with PSE, talked about how they listened to their customers and made changes accordingly. They watched to see what they were saying on twitter and Facebook, and then used that information to their advantage. In doing this, they were able to reach many more customers.
When looking to an article about companies listening to their customers, I found one that worked perfect. In this case not listening to their customers was the problem, and the company lost many of them because of it. The case I found is about Netflix. In the summer of 2011, Netflix decided to change the packages that they offered. They wanted to separate the programing into two different packages. When doing this there was a 40% increase in the price of the packages. The company lost 800,000 customers, and it's stocks dropped dramatically. Before they changed their packages they had focus groups, asking what customers thought of the changes. The company then said that, they weren't sure what exactly people had said about the new changes during these focus groups. This is a prime example of a company not listening to it's customers.