1.a) Identify and elaborate on two factors that impact the success of a social media
marketing campaign? Provide one example of a successful social media marketing
campaign that has incorporated any of these two factors.
In my opinion, I think one of the most important factors that impacts on the success of a social media marketing campaign would be word-of-mouth.
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is considered one of the most effective marketing strategies to encourage individuals to pass on a marketing message, thereby increasing the exponential growth of the message’s exposure and influence. With the flexibility to transmit via almost any form of communications and especially with popular social media tools like social networking sites, WOM has reached beyond its anticipated capability to massive crowds of various demographics and beats other communication methods like advertising hands-down as it would take greater exposure for consumers to take a significant action as compared to the greater likelihood of consumers responding to their friends/experts/acquaintances’ strong recommendations of a product/service on social media. According to Neilson Global Research, only 14% of consumers trust ads while 78% of people trust consumer recommendations.
On social media, there are basically 4 reasons people have conversation about the brand/organization/product/service: 1. Because they love it 2. Because they hate it 3. Because they were asked their opinion about you and 4. Because their community is talking about you. Nonetheless, there are 3 ways you can leverage conversations like these in your favour; through avoiding issues, research about the conversation category or consumers and thirdly, identifying and engaging people whom you want to approach to spread the message about your marketing campaign.
With more social networking sites increasing its influence as people use it to keep in touch with friends, connect with new friends etc, this would be a good opportunity for marketers to make use of WOM to spread their message. Marketers would be able to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) — and have a high probability of being taken by another competitor — and create viral messages that appeal to this segment of the population.
Through using WOM on social media, it would be easier for conversations to be spread at light speed around the globe and be heard by millions within minutes, especially with the interactive nature of the Internet. Australia, for example, has got 74% of Internet users and 75% of these users use social networks to communicate with friends, indicating how fast these social networks have grown in reach and influence. Moreover, popular social networking sites like Facebook alone have gotten 400 million users by Feb, 2010, therefore imagine using WOM on Facebook, before you know it, your message could have reached and even influenced as many as several million users when people spread to their friends etc. All it takes is just one person to pass on a message to as many people that the marketer wants and then these people pass on to more people and so on for the message to go viral. Just like how Microsoft says it, “the old model was ‘informing, persuading and reminding’, the new model is ‘demonstrating, involving and empowering’. This is the era of customer participation. To have a successful social media marketing campaign, you need to get consumers to participate and spread your message to others on social media. In other words, you need to let people do the talking for you and to connect with people like themselves.
A second factor that impacts would be people involvement. By people involvement, it refers to the involvement of the executive team. The success of a social media marketing campaign or any other form of marketing campaign requires the Board of directors (Board)/key executives/supervisors to be involved or else it wouldn’t work. If the board doesn’t get involved, they wouldn’t be well-informed or know exactly what is going on.
You may be the brain or mastermind behind the creative approaches and it can be such a fantastic idea that ‘wows’ people, but your brilliant creative idea can be easily crumble without proper management, execution and monitoring of the campaign. Also, it would be more effective if the people behind the big idea likewise be responsible for the campaign implementation as they had probably done a feasibility study beforehand and would probably know clearly the functionality and operations of the campaign. Ultimately, the success of a social media campaign or any campaign all boils down to proper planning and execution which involves people.
In addition, people involvement is also closely tied to word of mouth (WOM). In WOM, you cannot expect the leveraged influencers that you have approached to know what to say, especially when you have freshly picked them. Hence, it is essential for the Board/committee/supervisors to get involved and collaborate with your influencers, especially if you intend for them to be your long-term collaborators.
An example of a successful social media marketing campaign would be Ford. They wanted to promote the new Ford Fiesta, but instead of going the conventional way, they decided to use WOM through social media. Ford’s Fiesta success could be attributed to the Ford Fiesta Movement campaign, where it involved selecting 100 socially vibrant individuals who were provided with the European version of the Ford Fiesta 18 months prior to it being manufactured and released in the USA. These "agents" would get to use the cars for six months in exchange for completing monthly "missions" with different themes. They’ll share their experiences through YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts Ford created for the campaign. Ford believed that people trust corporations less so with the rise of social media they needed to allow other people through word of mouth create trust for them through Social Media which helped amplified their message. By turning the marketing over to social networking sites, Ford provides its target audience with content generated by people within that audience and let them know that they are all real people who are passionate about what they do and the Ford brand.
As a result, there were a total of 11 million Social Networking impressions, 5 million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving), 11,000 videos posted, 15,000 tweets (not including retweets), 13,000 photos, 50,000 hand raisers who have seen the product in person or on a video who said that they want to know more about it when it comes out and 97% of those don’t currently drive a Ford vehicle and 38% awareness by Gen Y about the product, without spending a dollar on traditional advertising. Ford Fiesta campaign also ensured that the executive team and the board of directors of Ford get on board and participate in the campaign execution as well.
1.b) In relation to your group’s social media marketing campaign for DMC, provide one
example of how each factor identified in 1a has impacted the execution of this
campaign.
Our social media marketing campaign was centred mainly on Facebook.
First of all, we used word of mouth (WOM) through the identification of socially vibrant individuals (i.e. specific current DMC students) who had the potential and relevant contacts of approaching the maximum number of other current DMC students, potential students as well as graduates and get them to join the DMC alumni and students’ group. Thereafter, we intend to care and nurture these leverage influencers by giving them something to talk about: from DMC-related matters such as fun media facts of the day to the latest gossips/happenings in DMC and DMC-related fields. Hence, through this, we hope to be able to spread DMC’s exposure and influence across graduates, present and future students as well as keep the pages alive and active.
Secondly, I wouldn’t say that our team is actively involved in the execution of the marketing campaign even though we had drawn up a list of creative ideas and plans for Facebook. So far, we only had a few postings and edited the profile and name of the SP DMC group. As such, without being actively involved in the execution of the campaign, it reflects on the stagnant pages – the target audiences are not active on the page and some even joined for the sake of showing that they are part of the DMC. Moreover, we failed to create and maintain active conversations partly because of the administrators of the group are not even active. Hence in a way, this has some negative impacts on the campaign although plans are still underway.
2. Elaborate on two strengths and two weaknesses you see in yourself when working in a
team.
A strength I see in myself when I’m working in a team is cooperation.
In a team, depending on the various projects that you undertake, would bound to have some occasional arguments or conflicting ideas but at the end of the day, it all boils up to cooperation. Somehow somewhere, either the teammate or myself would give in or we would enter a compromise or else the project cannot proceed.
Another strength of mine would be an eye for details. It’s a habit of mine to check and vet everyone’s parts or if due to time constraint, the more crucial parts of the project to ensure that everything makes sense and is smooth-flowing. If there are ever any mistakes or information that I doubt, I would bring it up during project meetings or simply edit it (but informing the team later). Maybe that’s why sometimes my teammates tend to be dismal about it as there are times where I bring up such issues especially when the project is due soon.
Nonetheless, my weaknesses when working a team overwhelms my strengths that it sometimes brings me down as a teammate.
First of all, I get jaded easily by projects. Not that the projects assigned are not challenging or difficult enough but it’s due to seeing too much information everyday that I simply want to turn away and give up. Information overload you could say and also, dejection from seeing the same type of information and handling the same project daily.
A second weakness of mine would be poor time management and that is probably the reason of my lateness for school, projects and meetings. I tend to do what I feel like first thing in the morning while leaving the important stuff for later, with the mindset that “there’s always a tomorrow”. As a result, my team mates are so used to my “punctuality” that everyone starts to follow suit and be late for every meeting etc. That’s why my group is often caught doing last-minute work and we often have to pull an all-nighter just to finish it up.
