Fake News, Fake users as well as fake accounts. Many of these start arising since the introductions of social media. Such things greatly impact the lives of daily social media users as well as marketers, due to the fact that fake news are usually more attention seeking and garner a lot of traffic and attention.

There is a lot of heat on the debate about Facebook flagging and removing inappropriate content or deleting fake accounts. In 2018, it is stated that Facebook removed 1.3 billion fake accounts out of the 2.2 billion registered active users per month. That means that more than half of the users on Facebook are fake. This however is just news, which could very well be fake media as well. The main reason why Facebook, or even online games, sometimes do not quickly take action or ignore the amount of fake accounts or hackers, is because of a simple reason, which their number of active users, which boils down to money.

Well, Facebook is a social media platform, and what are Facebook’s greatest assets? Yes, the USERS. Without user accounts, Facebook has no meaning, because Facebook run advertisements in which the higher amount of users they have, the more they can charge companies for sponsored advertisements!

Let’s take a look at a good example of fake posts, and how it affects both marketers as well as consumers.  Below is a picture of a BMW giveaway back in 2014, where a page named BMW ///M POWER created a post that promised to giveaway 2 BMWs which you can stand a chance to win simply by following the steps on the post. The amount of traffic the post garnered was over the roof within a single day, and the page itself has a huge amount of following, which led people into believing that this giveaway was real.

It was not until the actual BMW page stepped forward to address that there is no such promotion going on.

What about the consequences?

In the short run,

High Traffic

Fake news is a sure-fire way to increase your click-through rates by many folds. Marketers can create a giveaway that sounds promising but a fake winner is picked in the end, which will also lead to many users wanting to participate.

In the long run,

Credibility Issues

Consumers will start to question themselves every time they see an online promotion ongoing, and if it sounds too good to be true, they might just ignore it. This will affect marketers because their posts might not garner the actual amount of traffic that they paid for.

With digital marketing, marketing team from different companies are trying their best every day to get new ideas and find ways to promote products or services through social media posts. It would be considered a major breakthrough if just a single post were to reach out to millions and more. Previously on the topic of viral marketing, we have discussed on how 6 STEPPS from Jonah Berger makes content go viral.

So, when content does not go viral, it can be a missing a factor from one of these 6 steps, or maybe it is just too complex for the some people to understand.

Here are advantages of integrating brand strategy when executing a viral campaign.

Building your brand

When your marketing campaign goes viral, the amount of leads it can generate will grow exponentially. You can create viral content without any means of integrating a part of your business into it, but why wouldn’t you? Your audience will instantly learn about your company, product and services. The more people your content reaches to, the more shares it will get, which means it will be exposed to more and more people at a faster rate over time.

Credibility

Recognition creates trust and acceptance. When trying to improve your brand, recognition is one of the more important aspects, and what better way to gain recognition than allowing a viral campaign to do its job circulating around?

Lower advertising costs

It might be expensive to start building a marketing campaign, for example hire videographers and professionals to edit and perfect a marketing video, however, in the long run, it is still cheaper than constantly spending on traditional advertising methods.  This also brings about future prospects, because if one campaign goes viral, there is much higher chances that the second and third campaign that follows would too, due to the awareness that the initial one brought.

A very good example of a viral campaign that use tactics that is integrated with brand strategy is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

The Ice bucket challenge brought in a total of $115 million in donations to the ALS Association, which was a huge success.

Why is the Ice bucket challenge so popular? Well, it targeted the emotions of the public, for which there was a cause to the challenge, which brought about a purpose for the donation. The challenge itself though may seem to poke more fun than seriousness, was a huge hit because people of many different ages and even celebrities have participated in this challenge, which raised enough awareness about the whole campaign.  The challenge raised more than 5 times the amount as compared to the previous year’s fund raising techniques.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. The current recorded worth for the SEO industry in 2018 is $72 billion, and while many blogs and experts are saying that SEO is dead, is it really?

To understand more about SEO, let us first get into the base of SEO, which is the search engine itself. A search engine is a program for example Google search, that will provide information from a database that corresponds to what keywords or characters users type in. To put into context, these are the 3 main steps in which users will get their information from a search engine.

• Web crawler

A web crawler is a program or a bot in the search engine that helps to collect information about the search from the web and copies it over to be stored in a data centre.

• Indexing

The stored data will then be organized by this process called indexing so that the pages can be browsed quickly for relevant results according to the search query.

• Algorithm/Page Rank

This is the step that makes us see what we is on the first page on any Google search. The algorithm is a complex equation that ranks all the web pages found in order of relevance to the search query.

This brings us back to the term SEO.

SEO links back to the Algorithm in the search engine, which enables certain web pages to appear at the top of the list for a Google search, IF your website meets certain criteria, such as,

1. High quality content
2. Web page layout
3. Keywords with high volume searches

The reason why SEO is so important is because 91.5 percent of traffic only goes to the first page of google, which means if a website appears on the second page of google, only 1 in 10 people might view it.

Another reason why SEO is so important is because of a service that is called Pay-Per-Click advertising or (PPC). PPC allows for websites to be ranked on the first page of Google but it is a paid advertising. However, reports still show that sites with high natural ranking still gains more views over sites that use PPC.

The main reason why people speculate SEO is dying is due to Mobile Technology

Mobile apps and other social networks are allowing the more tech savvy generation a more targeted search option, instead of relying on keywords to find out what they are looking for. Applications such as Eatigo, allows users to find restaurants and promotions from the app itself, instead of having to google it!

That being said, SEO is not dead and still very relevant and important, because having a brand that is being found organically and getting ranked on Google is still useful. It is proof that the content is high quality and also a sure-fire way for any business to flourish.

Hello everyone and welcome to the blog again. Today’s post will cover something quite interesting, which are Big Data and the Internet of things and how these can be used to enhance marketers and consumers experiences.

So, what exactly is big data? Big data describes a very huge amount of unstructured and randomized data that has the potential to be mined for information. Data will be converted to information using a medium and this is where Big Data Analytics come in, which is the process of converting all these data into smart and usable data, to discover market trends, customer preferences and more useful information that can help companies make future business decisions.

Now, let me show you two good examples of how Big Data have been put to good use, bringing value to both customers as well as marketers.

• Spotify

Spotify uses big data to find out what songs each individual usually listens to, and came up with a Discover Weekly feature, that allows each user to listen to similar music that they have not heard of! 

• YouTube

YouTube, likewise, shows you recommended videos based on the type of videos that you have previously watched. 

Then now, you might ask, where does all these Bid Data come from? It all links to the Internet of Things (IOT). Big Data is PRODUCED from the Internet of Things mainly. Internet of things refers to the connection of everyday products, such as cars, clocks, and lights to computing devices via the Internet.

Here’s a good example of IOT – Automatic Car Tracking Adapter

There are applications such as Dash, which helps to track your driving habits, fuel consumption and much more, just by connecting your phone with the car. It will provide users with useful information to enable more efficient driving.

Now that we understand what Big Data and the Internet of Things are, here are pros and cons it can bring to marketers as well as consumers:

New Products

Almost anything that is connected to the Internet can create good customer engagement. Marketers will innovate further with current technology such as smartphones. Nowadays there are such things as touchscreen fridges and cars, and there is room for much more innovation here.

Improved Contextual Marketing

IOT devices generate enormous amounts of data every day. These data are used to understand consumer’s behaviour, patterns, places they go to which provide marketers with predictive capabilities that have previously been unavailable. Marketers now can send out push notifications for example promoting a product near their location, rather than waiting for them to enter the store and then promote it.

However, with great data comes great responsibility. When there is more data being transferred around, the higher the chances of having a data leak, which would greatly compromise businesses as well as consumers security and privacy.

Remember back in 2018 when there was the Facebook Data Breach? 50 million people were affected including Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Things like these could happen anytime and anywhere so heightened security measures must be taken.

Mobile phones have taken over the world. Ever since the first iPhone was launched, a new market opportunity was created for the marketing segment, for example, slotting advertisements in phone games. Technology has advanced so far, and as of 2018, 52.5% of all website traffic worldwide is generated through mobile phones.  And given that people on average check their phone 150 times daily, we can see why now many companies have given up on traditional Television marketing and made the shift instead.

Let’s talk about mobile technology, and how it is changing the marketing world.

• Accessibility

More people owns smartphones now than ever. It is more common to see somebody own a smartphone than to own a personal computer, laptop or even television! Why? What you are able to do on a computer can now be done on a smartphone too! Also, there are many spots that you can get free Wi-Fi around Singapore for example in shopping malls, fast food and coffee outlets such as Starbucks. This enables the majority to have access to the internet, and is already a way for marketers to deliver their messages across, for example with the use of push notifications!

• Personal user experience

Smartphones are not only receivers of information, but also transmitters of information without you realizing it. Ever wonder how sometimes you will receive an email or a notification that mentions your name or something specific about you? Yes, certain apps can track your information stored, and marketers nowadays have access to many of the consumer’s data, which allows for personal user experience. With the right tools and applications, it is easy to convert to a large amount of data to be used for each individual.

• Many ways to deliver messages

Push Notifications – It is a pop-up that will get your attention quickly, which is proven effective as it increases your app open rate as well as retain mobile app users. Even if they do not click on the pop-up, they are still able to read what is advertised.

Email – 67.2% of consumers use their smartphone to check their emails, which is why now emails are something not to be missed out when trying to deliver a message by companies.

SMS/Text – Though it is an old service, SMS is becoming a more popular way to reach customers. Since it is rarer to receive SMS from friends nowadays, when you do receive one, I am sure that you will open it and read it!

Video – Video marketing has the highest conversion rate of all time. 90% of customers report that product videos help them make purchasing decisions. With the help of Facebook and Instagram, it isn’t hard getting your video across to the masses, which also can be linked to my previous blog post about how viral marketing is achieved.

Are you convinced that mobile marketing is the way to go? Let me know in the comments!

In this digital world, we are much more exposed to media through platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, coming across many viral videos and posts that are the hot topics which everyone around us talks about. Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people in their social networks, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another.

I’m sure most of us have heard about the Daryl Aiden Yow saga back in 2018. Daryl is a local photographer/influencer based in Singapore, with a professional Instagram page filled with beautiful photos that appear to be taken with his own camera. However, it was found out that his photos were taken from Shutterstock images and other sources, and then photoshopped himself inside of the photos, to make it look as if he was at the location when the photo was taken.

According to the STEPPS Framework from Jonah Berger, I feel that the message characteristics are the most important in becoming viral in social media. The 6 STEPPS are, Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories.

Social Currency – Since Daryl is a local influencer, many people would have heard about him, which holds high social currency because it is an interesting topic that would get people gossiping.

Triggers – Top of mind awareness comes into play for this factor. Using the viral topic as leverage for promoting a product or service is a brilliant and cost-effective way.

Emotion – In this case, the viral topic can trigger anguish or arouse curiosity from one person to another.

Public – This topic was discussed amongst many and even big companies like Sony were involved, sparking public attention.

Practical Value – There is much to take away from this viral saga, for example how not being honest in your field of work can land in hot water.

Stories – People who follow Daryl on Instagram are his vessels for information travel, where stories are being spread about him.

Check out THIS ARTICLE about how airline company Scoot made use of this saga as a marketing gimmick to promote their own services!

Now imagine that instead of Daryl, the person accused of copying other’s work was not someone who is Instagram famous, but just an ordinary photographer that is trying to get his work noticed? Do you think that the same thing would happen to him? Let me know in the comments!

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton