CA2 RJ

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.

There are many factors involved in making a successful social media campaign. However the two which I feel make the most impact would be the human presence as well as the integration with offline marketing.

The human presence on a social media platform refers to either a human face/character being represented or a human (more personal) voice is used. While humans are very literally behind the social media accounts and their content, not everyone succeeds in relating to their consumers in a personal manner.


Humans are social beings. We like talking to other people and mixing around. However, with the anonymity of the Internet, people can’t get cues to emotion such as body language and tone of voice. It is even harder to differentiate between the well-meaning and sarcasm. Hence the things you say on the Internet can be interpreted very differently from what the sender has intended to begin with. Sure, we have emoticons to aid our expressions but even then they have their limits.
Therefore enabling a human presence on social media platforms eases the way to being accepted in the eyes of social media users. They can establish a certain rapport with the users this way.


While many companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon and establishing their presence on popular sites such as Twitter and Facebook, not all of them succeed. For corporate companies, there is a delicate balance between showing professionalism and providing a personal touch for their publics. Those who use a human spokesperson for their brand (e.g. Virgin Air, with Sir Richard Branson) may be able to relate closely with their consumers, but run the risk of being too closely associated with their human personality and subsequently, their scandals. The ones who insist on a formal, almost robotic clean image for their social media platforms might be disregarded by the online population as boring.

After all, social media is about being social and sharing information simply because it has a certain value to it, be it entertainment or goodwill. People are not going to want to talk about some boring company page with corporate stuff. In the case of bad publicity, bad news is better than no news.


The other factor would be the integration with offline marketing. This comes in many forms ranging from online competitions with real tangible prizes to providing memorabilia relating to online content (e.g. Popular Internet memes printed on clothing).


Social media campaigns in the end, only takes place online where everything is virtual. Once the users leave the sites, they take nothing tangible away with them, only memories and conversation fodder. Hence with the added integration of offline marketing, it provides that extra incentive to be more involved in the campaign as they would stand a chance of winning a souvenir of sorts
One campaign which integrated offline marketing and achieved unprecedented success was the publicity campaign for the Dark Knight movie. The campaign made use of online media platforms to create a real-time warring game for its audiences worldwide. Fictitious comic characters of the Batman universe (Batman, The Joker and Harvey Dent respectively) used the Internet to spread the call to action, with each faction gathering its own army of netizens. The game quickly became real as each side set a series of tasks with prizes set in real locations for their followers, in a bid to reclaim the fictitious Gotham City. This resulted in hundreds of fans taking to the streets in mock protests and real-time scavenger hunts. Through this game, the organizers had excited Batman fans worldwide and in turn, empowered them to promote the movie.



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.

My group who is in charge of the Youtube side, was to created videos which would attract viewers to watch. We decided to use a human representation for our videos in order to enable the target audiences (i.e. Professionals and students alike) to better relate to them. For the students, we are trying to demystify the media hype surrounding Media & Communications courses like ours and show that we were once them and that they can be us one day. For the professionals, we will show them that they were once like us and we will eventually become like them one day too. The human representation in the videos had added on more considerations for our marketing campaign. We had to choose our rep carefully to portray the right image, film everything in real time, and so on.


In integrating offline marketing, we had initially hoped to tie in the events in the videos with actual events happening at the Conference, just like the Dark Knight campaign. However, with our woefully inadequate level of experience in dealing with events of this scale, we decided against it in the end. However, we settled for a subtle call to action in the video as well as a feature of the real-time people in real-time settings.



Elaborate on two strengths and two weaknesses you see in yourself when working in a team.

Patience
I don’t mind waiting for people if they are late. I’m alright with working late because someone else was late. Hence, when I can handle the pressure of last-minute work and can stay relatively sane through such periods. However, that is provided the tardiness is not deliberate nor due to some frivolous reason like being too immersed in a DOTA game or something.


Persistence
It is crunch time and everyone is stressed/in desperate need of sleep. I believe my strength lies in being able to continue on despite sleep deprivation and other priorities. I can drop other activities such as my job and my CCAs if it means working for my projects. In the end, a project is still graded.

Pessimism
To begin with, I am not one bit optimistic. I prefer to envisage the worst case scenarios and mentally brace myself rather than pray and believe everything will be fine. Needless to say, it puts a damper on my general motivation in life. To be frank, my expectations and the reality of the situation had differed greatly (especially when crunch time came around and never left). And thus, I’m not able to motivate my team well whenever our morale drops because I prefer not to deal in false hopes.

Punctuality (or lack thereof)
Despite spending half my life waking up at the crack of dawn every day, I still can’t get up without additional help. Resulting in me being late for early morning meetings ever so often, and having to be filled in on what happened in the end.