White Collar Social Media

Going shopping? Want to virtually try on some clothes to see what they look like? Target came out with an app called Merona My Look Maker last summer and plenty of other clothing lines have done the same or similar things. Target also has a Facebook, Twitter and even a Foursquare site.

Social media is well known nowadays for its potential influence on businesses and the way they market to their customers. I can’t think of any current business that doesn’t use social media in some form, and for good reason. (That is unless your target customers are 95 years old, but even then…) There are so many people on social networking sites it is a great opportunity to get your company involved with some free publicity and advertise your brand. But there is a right way of doing it and a wrong way. Below is an example of how viral good word can spread about a new business. It's actually an ad for ConstantContact, an email marketing solutions company.

By choosing the right information to put out on the public sites, businesses may get just what they want. Say for example a business needs more employees so they use social media to recruit new employees. On the wrong end of using social media you could annoy and lose customers. By not being consistent with keeping up the site or being too prolific of a poster you could potentially scare off consumers.

Calvin Klein has barely used social media in our new digital age and that’s part of the reason they have fallen from the top of the clothing market since the 1990s. But they are about to launch one of the best planned multi-platform “digital campaigns” of recent history. They’ve revamped their website to allow for more interactivity. They created new apps for the iPhone, Android and Symbian markets. (I downloaded it and so far it looks really cool)

Mashable.com

Social Media Today, a blog done by social media experts, gives 5 new trends for 2011 that will change and shape business strategy. Number one on their list is:

1. Online video. Everywhere.
Online video is not a new phenomenon; however, what’s new about this avenue is that it is increasingly everywhere. The bar has been set high for the level of consumer interaction and this must include valuable interactive video. Video engagement is continuously increasing and in October alone, 5.4 billion videos were viewed -  2 billion of which were on Facebook.

The other trends for businesses to take advantage of are being able to market to a mobile audience at specific locations, dishing out special deals to social media users and being able to monitor what users are saying about the brand.

In closing, I leave you with some new thoughts on how a business should apply social media for a profit.

Tweet of the day:

KirstenSherwood Kirsten Sherwood

I'm going to miss @MayorEmanuel! -- Tweeter pretending to be Rahm Emanuel disappears http://t.co/W2s2X5c

How Celebrities Affect Online Trends

Anything that a celebrity does seems to be out in the public's eye. Their personal business is our entertainment. Nothing is private. And with the introduction of new social media, they are the main source for topics of conversation. Bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers alike, talk about celebs and their offline lives as well as what the celebs post online. This is much like the tabloids such as the National Enquirer and People Magazine. Where celebrities go, fans follow. I like to call this the Ashton Kutcher Effect, as do a lot of people. When someone famous starts using a web site, their fans start using it too. This is just like when celebrities wore something it became trendy but now it has passed on to the digital, technological age.  Douglas MacMillan explains:

“Twitter co-founder Biz Stone credits high-profile users like actor Ashton Kutcher and basketball pro Shaquille O'Neal for bringing attention to the site of 140-character messages but says the company doesn't reserve any "special resources" for them. "Sometimes celebrities who love Twitter stop by and say hello," Stone says. "It's usually just a quiet tour and a lunchtime chat but it's really fun for us."”

And Twitter isn’t the only social networking site that has used celebrities to up their status. John Legend, a Grammy winning R & B singer, has a Tumblr site that brought a ton of people to that certain social networking site. 

Foursquare, the site that lets you “follow” people around, kind of creepy and I call it stalkerish, was made famous by celebrities like DJ Pauly D from the MTV show Jersey Shore. The reason I say it is like stalking is because foursquare users check in at different locations and it posts wherever they are online for anyone to see and creep on them (I know, sort of a technological determinist view). I'm sure Danielle used this site to track down Pauly D at the bar and mean mug him the whole night only to throw water on his face later.

The reason these celebrities endorse these social media sites is because there is money to be made. In fact, there is A LOT of money in endorsements and digital advertising. 

““We are pioneering the celebrity endorsement market in digital media, tapping the $50 billion spend on endorsements worldwide as well as the $35 billion spent in digital advertising," comments Ad.ly CE Arnie Gullov-Sing to Online Media Daily.”

And the reason this works? A lot of people like keeping up with the Joneses’. This is like that, only digital. People will join a certain social network site to feel more like the celebrities everyone idolizes. But on the social determinism side of things, celebrities are benefitting off of these new technologies as they should be. It makes us, the consumer, feel as if we don’t need the middle man to write about the celebrities’ everyday lives anymore. They can just tweet it to us themselves! 

Ashton Kutcher's Twitter account

Tweet of the day:

aplusk ashton kutcher

Can you have lunch at dinner?