Tag Archives: social media marketing

Splash Media presents another social media marketing SplashCast From The Past; this edition was originally published in November 2010 and features Christi McNeill with Southwest Airlines in an interview with SplashCast host Renay San Miguel.

McNeill talks about the beginnings of Southwest’s social media strategy, which platforms the airline relies upon for different aspects of customer engagement/customer service, and how her company uses its social networks to handle everything from day-to-day notifications to public relations issues like the Kevin Smith “too fat to fly” situation.

UPDATE: McNeill tells Splash Media that since the SplashCast was published, Southwest Airlines’ social media team has grown to 10 members, including representatives from the company’s communications, marketing and customer relations divisions. “Our customer relations team is managing customer inquiries and issues online, and our communications and marketing teams are collaborating on the next evolution of social business at Southwest,” McNeill said. “We’ve added a few new platforms for engagement including Instagram, Pinterest and Viddy.”

 

 

 

 

 

Picture this: Facebook – mere weeks away from what should be a stratospheric public offering – buys Instagram for a cool $1 billion. Suddenly the app you use on your iPhone (and just recently Android phones) to dress up your smartphone photos and send them out on your favorite social networks..is owned by the Big Dog of social networks. Now small/midsize companies can truly show and not just tell their stories on their Facebook pages, since Mark Zuckerberg’s company will figure out a way to make its Instagram connection very marketing-friendly for Timeline for Businesses, right?

Or: the same thing that happened to location-based services company Gowalla (remember them?) happens to Instagram, and the acquisition is merely a high-dollar way for Facebook to silence a potential competitor to its own photo-sharing services.

If Zuckerberg’s Facebook post about the acquisition is any indication, that latter option won’t be happening anytime soon. Yes, Instagram will remain separate. No, it won’t turn into a Facebook-exclusive service; you’ll still be able to share your photos accessorized as scratchy tintypes with other social networks. Yes, Instagram’s features will soon make their way onto Facebook’s pages.

“Providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together,” Zuckerberg writes. “It’s because of our dedicated and talented team that we’ve gotten this far, and with the support and cross-pollination of ideas and talent at a place like Facebook, we hope to create an even more exciting future for Instagram and Facebook alike,” adds Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom on his company’s blog.

Yet Monday’s news broke just one week after Experian Hitwise revealed in a new study that the scrapbooking phenomenon Pinterest is now the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter. That rapid rise testifies to the fact that, as Splash Media co-founder Paul Slack writes in his new book “Social Rules!,” more people want to view the Internet, not just read it. The Facebook/Instagram development underscores this and should make it clear to social media marketing professionals that we now have to leverage the visual trend via photos and videos for business clients. We can now help them take customers behind the scenes, show off archival photos from a businesses’ history, and ask for photo contributions on a wide variety of subjects – some having to do with what a business does, and some that just ask potential/current customers to share a part of their lives, thereby humanizing brands and businesses.

Both Pinterest and Instagram became popular because they are easy to use, and play into mobile media-sharing desires among friends and colleagues. That should continue as long as the combined Facebook/Instagram doesn’t screw things up, as illustrated in this post from TheNextWeb’s Drew Olanoff. Otherwise, businesses are now one step closer to visual storytelling goodness.

 Renay San Miguel is the Chief Content Officer at Splash Media and On-Air Talent and Host with Spark360.tv. You can find him on Twitter @PrimoMedia. Click here to see all of Renay’s blog posts.

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Even if it weren’t destined for instant box office success following this weekend’s premiere, “The Hunger Games” is already a blockbuster when it comes to its canny use of social media marketing.

In early February Splash Media’s Rhea Thomas went into great detail on the massive amount of pre-release interest generated by “Hunger Games” studio Lionsgate through a wide range of social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, to name just a few platforms. Now the mainstream media seems to have discovered this as well; the New York Times wrote a story this past Sunday about how Lionsgate used social media to address some of the challenges in marketing a movie that about a government-sanctioned game involving teens killing each other. And Mashable’s Sam Laird spoke with representatives of Fizziology (the social media sentiment-measuring company that was the subject of an earlier Splash Media post) about how “Hunger Games” is comparing with “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” and the last Harry Potter movie when it comes to social media chatter.

Fans of author Suzanne Collins’ dystopic saga are no doubt waiting to line up for tonight’s midnight shows. And when they stagger home in the wee hours, thoroughly energized by Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen, they’ll be able to get on Facebook and play The Hunger Games Adventures, a less-lethal survival game that debuts Friday.

Lionsgate and its partners are setting the bar very high when it comes to leveraging social media marketing to not only tap into the existing “Hunger Games” fanbase, but also to get those who haven’t read the Collins novels to consider buying a movie ticket. It can be argued, naturally, that the same youthful fanbase that is eagerly awaiting the movie is the same one that has considerable fluency with Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. But we say there are lessons to be learned for any studio that’s offering up genre-friendly films like “Hunger Games:” give the fans plenty of chance for interactivity, know the audience, stay in character for some of the social media offerings, and make the content exclusive and original. We’re betting that the studios behind this summer’s forthcoming crop of special effects extravaganzas are taking notes.

Come to think of it, those lessons can be applied to any business wanting to use social media to get closer to customers – without having to use a bow and arrow to fight for their lives.

What about you: do you already have your ticket for the midnight shows of “The Hunger Games?” Will you play the Facebook game based on the movie? And what do you think of Lionsgate’s use of social media to sell “Hunger Games?”

Renay San Miguel is the Chief Content Officer at Splash Media and On-Air Talent and Host with Spark360.tv. You can find him on Twitter @PrimoMedia. Click here to see all of Renay’s blog posts.

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Image source: Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

This week, we are pressing the Rewind button and going all the way back to our inaugural social media marketing SplashCast with Trey Ratcliff.  We hope you enjoy this Throwback Thursday!

In our inaugural SplashCast, host Renay San Miguel interviews Trey Ratcliff, the blogger/photographer behind Stuck In Customs, the leading travel photography blog. Ratcliff tells us how HDR (high dynamic range) technology is adding more colors to the photographer’s palette, and reveals how hearing from his readers through social media helps him expand his own artistic range.

Ratcliff offers HDR tutorials on his blog.

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You started the new fitness program on January 2nd, after taking New Year’s Day off (of course) for one last fling with french fries. But here it mid-February and your willpower and motivation are starting to wilt like…well, like six-week-old french fries.

Why Join the Fitocracy?

A new fitness-themed social network claims to have the answers in keeping people from abandoning the gym. Fitocracy, which has received a lot of positive coverage over the past year in the social media blogosphere, uses gamification to create a social community that is at once competitive and supportive. A number of apps already allow users to log their workouts, but Fitocracy goes a step further by awarding points to users for tracking their fitness activities; those users can climb a series of levels by totaling a certain amount of points and reaching special achievements and quests. And all of this can be shared with the Fitocracy community via leaderboards and its social community.

Fitocracy is making a strong case for becoming the next Pinterest or Instagram. It’s a niche-based social network that can easily break into the mainstream thanks to its clever use of game-style incentives (think Foursquare for fitness lovers). But it’s also providing a very healthy exercise for businesses on how they too can target like-minded people (customers), create a community for them to share support and content, and give them something special for their time.

That is, after all, the essence of social media marketing/content marketing. Yet Fitocracy isn’t limiting itself to its social network, which is still in the beta phase and requires an invite to join. The company is using its own Facebook, Twitter and (surprise) Pinterest pages to pass along motivational sayings/photos, instructional posts and videos, healthy recipes and humorous graphics. It’s also using them to start conversations with followers by asking open-ended questions and soliciting feedback about Fitocracy.

A quick trial run of Fitocracy shows it’s easy to set up a workout log; many exercises are included in the menus but Fitocracy gives users a chance to suggest those that aren’t yet in the mix. You can share your workout results with your own networks via Facebook and Twitter, and Fitocracy is promising to hold onto your personal data with all the grip-strength needed for a 300-lb. bench press. Building that kind of user credibility/trust is key in the early stages of a startup company’s life.

I’ve reached out to Fitocracy to ask questions about their use of social media for building brand awareness and a strong user base; I’ll let you know if/when they respond. In the meantime, are you a Fitocracy user? What’s your take on it – is it fit enough to last in the social media world? Please share your thoughts in our Comments section.

Update: Fitocracy CEO/co-founder Brian Wang told me via email that in addition to Facebook, Twitter and most recently Pinterest, his company also uses Tumblr for easy-to-digest, engaging content about health and fitness. The platforms also help the community motivate its members to stay on a healthy path. “We see the highest amount of engagement and referral traffic from Facebook with Twitter coming in second,” Wang said. “Despite our relatively low activity rate on Tumblr, it’s been a great channel for us since a lot of our users cross-post their Fitocracy activity to Tumblr and then discuss it with their own communities there. It’s too early to tell how effective Pinterest will be, but our follower number is growing steadily.”

Wang also said that niche or specialty-themed networks are a natural next step for social media as Facebook and Twitter keep on growing, “and the signal-to-noise ratio deteriorates rapidly. Even the big guys understand this and hence we get things like Google Circles, Facebook Lists, etc. I could share a million things to my networks but perhaps the content is only relevant to ten percent  of my peers at any given moment. If I’m interested in sharing and discussing my workouts, why broadcast it to an apathetic and tired audience when I can interact with a community that’s focused on a shared interest and thus get a much richer, more focused experience?”

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