Social Media Management Tools

            Last week I talked about the advantages and disadvantages of using social media in marketing for small business. After much research I found that social media is a great component to a diversified marketing plan but should not be a small business’ main source for advertising as it can get very expensive. One of the articles I researched last week referenced not only financial expense but the drain on time for a small business owner in having to create content, respond to messages and comments, and maintain consistency across several platforms. Time is a great resource when you are trying to run your own business and having to spend copious amounts of it managing social media is just not a good option.

              So what is a business owner to do? Not surprising there is an app for that, or software in some cases. I was unaware of the tools available for social media management out there. They range from hiring a private firm and paying sizable fees to free apps that do little but can be a good starting point. I chose to dig a little deeper into the management tool called Hootsuite. I would never have a need for this kind of tool for personal platforms but I do run a small business that I can see would benefit from this tool. One of the reasons my partner and I have been so hesitant to start multiple social media pages for our business is because neither of us has the time to dedicate to be consistent so instead we have a rarely updated Facebook page. If we were to purchase a paid business plan on  Hootsuite we could open a business page on Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, or any other social platforms up to 50 that we could manage with Hootsuite. I don’t even know if I could name 50 social platforms so it is impressive that they have built an infrastructure that allows business’ to manage all their social media from one place.

              I think the best thing about social media management is that it gives time back to those that are running small businesses, which can be a huge thing. In my case where I also work a full-time job it has just never been a priority to utilize social media but with a social media management tool I can see how it would be not only easier but could really help the business. 

Organizational Uses of Social Media

            When reading up on the idea of social media uses for organizations I recalled a seminar I attended where I asked the speaker, a small business owner, if social media helped him grow his business. To paraphrase, he essentially said that social media is such a buzz word right now in marketing but to use it for organic reach is really difficult because social media platforms are charging for a lot of things that they didn’t use to. He pointed out that many of them are now publicly traded so they are trying to drive up their revenue and one way to do that is to charge for business reach and for many truly small business it is just too much money for not enough results. I found his opinion to be very insightful since I had mainly heard the opposite, that social media was a great way to market a small business and that it gave you visibility that is hard to reach otherwise. In doing a little research I discovered that both sentiments are true.

              The owner of lullubee.com, a website that sells craft making kits wrote a series of articles for Forbes about being a start-up company and the mistakes they made involving social media. He says that his biggest mistake with Facebook was not realizing that what they posted wasn’t even being seen by those how had liked their page. They worked hard to build a Facebook Business page then they noticed that only a small percentage of their followers were seeing their content. They found that you have to pay to reach your own followers, which essentially takes away any organic reach you might have had. They said that they started by paying because they figured that they were working to get leads for their website and my favorite quote “The irony of spending money to promote our Facebook page instead of our site was not lost on us.” Eventually they learned that the traffic they were getting to their website from Facebook meant they were paying anywhere from $6-12 per click which isn’t viable for a small business start-up. So they found that for them having a Facebook page was only as good as having a social media presence but was not a place to spend their advertising money.

              On the flip side there are small businesses that have found great success with social media marketing. According to Susan Friesen, a founder of a digital marketing firm there are benefits to social media marketing that don’t necessarily require you to pay for marketing. She provides some ideas of things that social media can do for a small business that you can’t do anywhere else really. You can build relationships with people in your industry, out of your industry, customers, and potential customers all around the world all for free. You don’t have to pay to interact with prospects and social media provides a great base for that. You can also show your customer service acumen through social media platforms. Quick responses, helpful comments and consistency can all show potential customers your worth. Friesen points out that there is still a cost to this type of exposure through social media, it requires time and a lot of it.

              What I took away from my research into this topic is that having social media platforms as a small business isn’t a bad idea, in fact it can be very helpful, but a small business should not use it as their main source of advertising. A diversified marketing plan is always a better answer and using social media as a part of that plan can reap great benefits. 

Social Media Case Reflection 2

           Viral videos, we can all name a few, or even better reenact some of the most viewed videos of our time. In the beginnings of YouTube and social media the formula for viral videos was elusive, they ranged from a panda sneezing to news interviews gone hilariously wrong. Now we see companies who entire basis is creating viral content and they have a “formula” for what a video should have to make it viral and business can be built in one day with a viral video. One of the first groups to tap into the idea of consistent viral videos was the band OK Go which found YouTube stardom with their first music video, then their second, and then their third. They seemed to tap into the formula that was needed to make a video go viral and they were doing well. They went from a garage band to a household name within a matter of days thanks to YouTube. So when they released a new video in November of 2016 but chose to release it somewhere that was not YouTube, people were confused even a little miffed.

              As a nod to their beginnings shouldn’t OK Go stuck with the platform that started it all for them? The answer is a resounding no. Anyone with any business and marketing acumen can tell you that what worked for you once isn’t going to be the answer forever and the companies that have lasted the test of time have done so because they have been able to adapt to changing technology and marketing strategies. Do you think that Macy’s Department store, founded in 1830, would still be around if they were using the same marketing strategies that worked in 1830 now? A couple well-placed billboards, printed posters in restaurant. Every business has to evolve with technology if they want to survive and in 2017 that means using social media in your marketing and advertising.

              So back to OK Go’s decision to release on Facebook instead of YouTube. Both are influential social media platforms, both have huge following and potential viewership in the millions, so why was Facebook the smart move. According to http://www.epica-awards.com/news/723 Dmitry Tutkov, owner of the Russian Agency who produced the video,

              “Logically we should have released it on YouTube, because that’s what everyone does, but we needed to make it viral. The solution was Facebook, because on YouTube you can’t share very easily – you have to copy a link. On Facebook, you just click ‘share’. So the Facebook model is ideal for viral videos. From this experience we realized that videos get traction much more quickly on social media than on a video hosting website.”

The idea that a video can be shared so easily on Facebook was a huge draw for OK Go and Tutkov’s agency. Tutkov was approached by the Russian Airline S7 to produce a marketing video for them and he presented the idea of doing a music video in one of their planes. They contacted OK Go and the rest you can say is history. S7 Airlines supplied the crew and the airplane for the shoot as well as financial backing for the video in hopes that they would see an increase in sales from the video. Here is where things get a little messy. OK Go made their plans to debut exclusively on Facebook for a 48 hour period and S7 released a copy of the video on their YouTube page before the Facebook debut, quickly the video was removed and viewers were greeted with a copyright message. The video was then released exclusively to Facebook and eventually added to both OK Go’s and S7’s YouTube pages.

              The question remains was S7 outside of their legal and ethical limits posting the video to their YouTube channel. Without knowing what sort of contract was involved I can’t say for sure but according to the US Constitution Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 if OK Go was hired to be in the video for advertising purposes S& Airlines would own the copyright to the video. I am going to assume that this is not the case and that this was merely a sponsorship, not a work for hire. If this is the case according to that same clause in the Constitution OK Go and S7 Airlines produced a joint wok and S7 Airlines would then be “co-owners of a single copyright in the work,” giving them every right to post the video on their own YouTube channel.

              Obviously there is too much information that I couldn’t find to really make an accurate determination. There is a possibility that there was a contract in place giving OK Go sole ownership of the video, or placing sharing restriction on S7 Airlines but if there wasn’t then S7 airlines didn’t do anything wrong legally speaking.

http://www.ibtimes.com/heres-why-ok-go-just-broke-youtube-2305476

http://www.theroguemag.com/features/ok-go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Authorship.2C_Ownership.2C_and_Work_for_Hire

Class Cloud Experience

              Last class we had an experiment where we invited people to join our class through an online conversation using twitter. Since I am so new to the social media world, I had a hard time following along with how fast paced the conversation was.  It seemed we were constantly moving onto to new topics before we ever really got started on the previous one. When it first started somebody asked a question from there it exploded into multiple conversations going in all directions.

              I’m not sure if this type of large-group conversation works on Twitter. As I previously mentioned I don’t have a lot of experience with Twitter but I have found it to be more of a post and give a response type socializing as opposed to continued conversation. My thinking though could be largely affected by my experience with Twitter being limited to Jimmy Fallon’s funny #hashtag skits. There have also been times where my brother who follows the UDOT Twitter feed will call or text me to tell me that the canyon is closed, this seems like a practical use of Twitter. From what I gathered nobody outside of the class participated and if they did I didn’t catch it.

              During the class we invited Katy Perry to join the conversation by asking her how does social media affect change? Luring her with popular hashtags #changeforwomen #endwomenssufferage #notmypresident. Not surprisingly she didn’t join the conversation, of course she only had 15 minutes of time to respond before the class ended. Even if she had read it I’m sure she would have been confused as to how the hashtags matched the question since they did not at all. They were used as a way of making the Twitter post more popular and easily searchable. That is one thing that I learned thru this experience, ways of making your posts more widely seen. At one point I made a post about a drink at the fast food establishment Wendy’s but instead of tagging them with the @ symbol I just used a hashtag. I was corrected by my professor and it helped me to see the difference between the two and why someone would use one in certain situations to evoke a response.

              I ultimately I wish we would have followed some type of agenda or plan that would have been more organized to get a better understanding of how twitter can be used in a productive way. I can’t make suggestions for how that would have been accomplished and I am not even sure that it could be accomplished on a platform like Twitter. Based on this experience I will not be using this platform after this class concludes for large scaled conversation like this but I do plan on using my account in the future. I found this experience to be very entertaining, I learned something things about optimizing a posts and ultimately I had fun. I am however very disappointed that Chuck Norris didn’t respond to my invitation.

https://twitter.com/mattweed11/status/837118652679770112

https://twitter.com/mattweed11/status/836860560650166274

https://twitter.com/mattweed11/status/837024816427323393