CMOs: 3 Tips on Improving Your Brand’s Social Media Strategy

As a CMO, you know that mastering your brand’s presence on social media is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Despite your confusion, you’re still responsible for building and revising a social strategy daily. As an IMC grad student and marketing professional, I’m fascinated with how a brand is supposed to know their place within the constantly evolving world of social. I’ve come across two articles that provide basic yet important principles for guiding your brand to a strong social strategy. In the article Marketing Tips for Awkward Brands in a Social Media Era” by James Jorner, he gave the reader strong but simple suggestions such as "Infuse Humor” or “Be Interactive." Published in Adweek, the article took a macro-level approach in offering easy-to-remember tips to build or maintain a strategy around. Jorner also provided a relevant analogy on how a brand should view their place within the social media landscape: being at a party, and figuring out who to mingle with. You can approach the guests however you’d like, just make sure you don’t pass up the opportunity.

Source: AOK Marketing

In the article “See How These Brands Pranked Their Fans on April Fools’ Day” by Mary Sollosi, she allowed the social media content of 22 unique brands to speak for itself. After reviewing Entertainment Weekly's published pranks, two points became clear: each brand created their social content well before April Fools’ Day, and they followed the tips from the article posted above (i.e. Infuse Humor, Create Interesting Content). The concept of a brand injecting itself into the day’s news is called Newsjacking, and it can be an extremely relevant way to use social media. Each brand took a constructive approach to their holiday-themed content, and made sure their material was fun and inoffensive.

Based on the articles’ insight, and my own professional experiences, I’ve listed three action items to help your brand get started (or maintain) a social media strategy:

• Don’t Abandon Social - No matter what your brand does, maintaining a social presence within platform/s you feel comfortable with is key for long-term success.

• Be More Entertaining – Your brand’s content should preserve a balance between promotion and engaging followers with fun/interactive materials.

• Think Newsjacking – Producing social content directly related to real-time news can be a great way for your brand to stand out.

Remember CMOs: social media trends will evolve, and new platforms will emerge. But utilizing these three tips will always be helpful to begin your strategy.

Ryan McDonough is currently a Master of Science Candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Medill-Northwestern University. He is also a Chicago marketing professional with 10 years’ experience in brand communication and marketing strategy. He is graduating in June 2017, and can be reached via email (rmcdonough32@gmail.com) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-mcdonough-60a10235/) 

Media Execs: 3 tips on the importance of Bullet subtitle

As a media executive, it is important to know that variable online video services offer online videos for audiences to watch, such as YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and etc, and it is becoming harder for these companies to attract audiences in the market. As a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program with an interest in media management and digital marketing. I have found two articles on festivals you will find interesting. 

According to Weijing Zhu’s article, "BULLET TO THE HEAD: INTRO TO‘BULLET SUBTITLES," the interactive feature is called Dan Mu in China, which literally translates to “bullet subtitles”. It basically refers to the commentaries shooting across the screen, in the style of an arcade shooting game. This “Bullet Subtitle” feature has been adopted by the biggest online video services in China such as Tudou and iQiyi. Besides online video services, the “Bullet Subtitle” was even appeared during a theater screening of a movie, Tiny Times 3. 

                        (source:  www.iqiyi.com)

According to another article "Bullet Comments of Bilibili",which is written by October 4, 2014, Bilibili is a China-based video sharing website, which its core feature is a real-time commentary subtitle system-- The “Bullet Subtitle.” If people have an interesting thought when they are watching a video, then they can pause the video and type the comment to share with others. The other audience can read these comments directly on the screen when the video is played till the same time. Instead of discussion in a chat room or fan page, this real-time commentary subtitle system gets audiences involved in “video sharing.” This feature will enhance streamers’ word-of-mouth effect and encourage them to engage with video services. 

After reading these two articles and from my studies in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three action items you should consider in your next:

1. Understand it Role - you might never hear of this feature, so you can try it first to experience how people engage with Bullet subtitle. Understanding Bullet subtitle technology and function is a important step to use it in future. 
2. Test Bullets -  you can offer this Bullet subtitle to some target audiences.  It could help you understand whether audiences will enjoy this new features.
3. Collect Feedback -  based on target audiences' response of Bullet subtitle, you can determine whether you can apply this features to all audiences in future.

The Bullet subtitle is quiet popular in China now, and many audiences enjoy this feature to share comments with others. It is worth to try it in U.S. market. Since there is no video services add this feature in U.S., it is a great opportunity to differentiate its services by using this feature.

  

Fuyuan Yao is a graduate student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and major in Integrated Marketing Communication. She is interested in marketing analytic, media management and digital marketing. If you have any feedbacks, please contact her by @FuyuanY and LinkedIn.

Digital Marketers: Well Established Contents Arouse Brand Love Through Programmatic Bidding - EDITED

As digital marketers, expand the awareness of their brand is always on top of their mind. In digital marketing, this also means putting the content in the right time in the right place for the right people. Well established contents combine with programmatic bidding can arouse brand love among target consumers in the future.

"Programmatic in 2015: 3 Resolutions for Brands", written by Bod Arnold and published on January 2015. In this article, Bod talked about brand measurement nowadays can be done from awareness to strength. To leverage the quality of inventory, there are also ways such as using private market place and programmatic direct buyers to avoid the inventory quality issues. The article also emphasized the importance of mobile media. In summary, programmatic bidding helps digital marketers to establish a deeper brand connection by helping them to get the right ad to the right consumers on any screen through any channel.


source: http://lighthouse8.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Real-time-bidding.png




Caleb Govsalves' article "Man vs. Machine: From Programmatic to Empowerment in Digital Marketing," which is written on March 2015 is about the 2015 iMedia Summit. In this article, Caleb commented on this year's iMedia Summit and the hot topic "Who will win a fight of man versus machine." Caleb states that there is not even necessary a fight between men and machine on digital advertising. Marketing is shifting to consumer empowerment, and programmatic bidding should give the exact content out to attract consumers emotionally and empower consumers to build a brand love.

After reading these two articles and from my graduate studies in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three recommendations for digital marketers:

• Updating Program - Continuously purify the program in automatically bidding, and embrace the most up-to-date techniques to target the right group of people using valid data.

• Emphasis Consumer Insight - Combine consumer insight into content building, and try to build brand love by touching consumer's heart.

• Mobile Worth Efforts - Mobile platform is important as time goes on. In the future mobile platform could be more popular than other platforms, so build the right bidding strategy and content for mobile to reach consumers in a digital era.

All in all, with digital bidding technologies advancing at a high speed, together with a well established brand content to accurately target consumers, it is proper to expect programmatic bidding to create business miracles.

Grace Song is a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing and Communication program and will graduate in December 2015. Grace has a passion in digital/interactive marketing including social media and SEO&SEM, and is seeking for an opportunity to work in digital/interactive and social media marketing for her career.
Grace can be reached at Tweeter @gracesung1011.

Fashion Marketers: Can Gamification Rescue your Retail Strategy?

Fashion marketers need to use more techniques to engage their consumers and increase shopping experience to compete with the rise of e-commerce.

As a graduate student in Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill, Northwestern University, I've found two articles about how gamification motivates sales that can help you win the battle.

In the article Retailers Must Reinvent Their Stores, reported by BOF team (The Business of Fashion) on January 27, 2015 points out the importance for retailers to reinvent their physical stores to better suit the behaviors and expectations of today's hyper-connected consumers. The article suggests physical stores to retain the advantage of personal interactions, further extend these interactions through new technology to offer deeper and tailored lifestyle suggestions and communal interaction. According to the BOF team, physical retail store has its nature to engage customers and can should learn from e-commerce to enhance services. 

The “mirror” lets the customer see how a current outfit looks in comparison to one she just tried on. 

source: http://bit.ly/1zmDuEd

In How To Solve YourBiggest Marketing Problems With Gamification by Steve Olenski (@steveolenski) and published in Forbes on March 5 2014, introduces how can gamification increase engagements. According to a survey conducted at the end of 2014 by Gartner,Inc, 70% of the Forbes Global 200 saying they are going to gamify. The influence is going to expand with the number of Millennials increase. Steve points out the reason why companies are adapting Gamification is because it can getting people engaged, coming back and feel involved, it can also turn average into the exciting.

Based on these 2 articles and my graduate learning at Medill IMC program, I have three actionable things I would recommend you as a fashion marketer to do:



1. Gamify to Increase Motivation － Use the Gamification techniques to leverage customers’ desire.

2. Start Personalize － Learn form e-commerce and provide each customer with personalized customer service.

3. Start Innovation － Physical retailers can implement interactive gamification devices, to make the static environment more dynamic and increase shopping experience.

Shopping in a physical retail store has its core advantage over e-commerce. It can provide authentic shopping experience and a real connection with the product and retailer. I believe, with the right gamification approach, retailers can successfully manage customers motivation and desire, and provide the experience and service that e-commerce cannot compete with.

Yanran Yan is an Integrated Marketing Communication graduate student at Medill, Northwestern University. She will be graduated in December 2015 and is particular interested in digital marketing for fashion industry. 

Contact her via LinkedIn, or Twitter @YanranY