Collaborative Group Assignment

This is my final blog post for this group assignment.

This will be a reflection on the group assignment required in the SMS modoule.

We had to prepare a presentation using slideshow and Google Hangouts for voice narration on social media usage in a company. We selected New Balance, a niche shoe company based out of US.

The interesting part of the assignment was the delegation of tasks. Since no one person was selected to be a group leader, this was a case of everybody taking up their own responsibility to get the job done. 

This non-traditional non-hierarchical approach in the workforce has many proponents and opponents.

Among the proponents, the case made is that former rigid hierarchies lead to demotivate staff and slow down of the process of execution and things have to pass through red-tape through the channels of approval. Companies like Zappos embody this approach as they have literally and figuratively speaking removed as many barriers between the CEO and the most junior staff. This allows for prompt execution and increased loyalty among employees as they feel their work is being recognised by all channels. 

Within our group, this is exactly how it played out. Each one took up the task of self-assigning certain roles through the project in order to make it easy to complete the over all task. By consulting among each other and picking up a task no one was held accountable yet everyone knew that lack of participation would lead to indirect shaming and loss of respect among the cohorts.

Among the opponents of this method, the case made is that the loosey-goosey structure results in loss of accountability and delegation as no one person is aware of who is in charge of what. It may also result in poor performance as some may intentionally choose to slack off knowing that it will be hard to trace it back to them. Additionally, it may affect morale since at the time of annual or periodic performance review, no one person is well aware of the specific tasks completed by the individual.

Within our group assignment, there were times were certain individuals would tend to not participate actively at certain periods of time, including myself! There were various reasons cited such as work, person, holidays etc. This led to lack of accountability and resulted in the remaining members wondering how to spread the tasks among the rest. However, everyone eventually got back on board and participated, especially nearing the deadline date, and the project was indeed a collaborative effort with everybody contributing to various parts.

The above is based on anecdotal evidence and personal readings of various business magazines and there is no specific literature review conducted to support this. Having said that, it would probably be realistic to expect that a literature review search will result in finding some literature or research paper conducted on this subject matter. Overall, it is very intuitive to deduce

Luck and the Internet

Today's post is going to be one of the most controversial and opinionated posts I have ever written. Week 7 of the SMS module covers the benefits of Youtube. No discussion on strategic benefits of Youtube can be had without the mention of the phrase "going viral".

Since the time that Youtube launched, it has become a global behemoth for free video content on the web. There are several competitors that popped up over the years and have successfully drawn traffic away from Youtube, the latter remains the 'king of the hill'.

Nearly every video that has gone "viral" was from Youtube. In fact, the common phrase of "going viral" is implicitly associated with Youtube video. Viral videos have gone to make the careers of some, like pop artist Justin Bieber, while destroying others, like that of a Toronto lawyer who was caught on tape sucker punching a delirious cyclist who then ended up with criminal charges and went to jail because the Youtube video only showed the part him punching but did not show what altercation occurred prior that provoked the lawyer.

The question that every company and social media marketer wants to ask is what exactly makes a video go viral and if the steps can be replicated in order to benefit the company behind a viral video. 

A search for the query "What makes a Youtube Video go viral" on Google resulted in 31,600,000 results! This clearly indicates how much is written about and studied on this topic. 

A cursory review of some the top results suggests that there are indeed some proven methods to make a video go viral.

A whitepaper report prepared by Millward Brown (a brand management and marketing company) suggests these following factors for "going viral": Celebrities, Paid Media Support, Distinctiveness, Buzz-worthiness, Loud and Funny, Edgy, and Sexual Content. 

The internet is abound by similar advice, all mostly from marketing companies that stand to benefit by having readers employ their services to do just what they recommend. 

But it is not just businesses that have done in depth research on this subject. There are also various scholarly research papers on this subject. Thompkins (Seeding Viral Content

The Role of Message and Network Factors, 2012) suggests these three factors: Message Characteristics, Individual Sender or Receiver Characteristics, Social Network Characteristics.

While there may be compelling evidence to suggest there are elements to make a video go viral and possibility of identifying and replicating those techniques in other videos to increase likelihood of doing the same, it is my belief that the part that is evident but not spoken off or researched in to further are the elements of chance and luck!

The evidence in favor of identifiable and replicable techniques is based on the "See, I told you so" paradigm. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Most of the information is post-scriptum, viz. after the fact that a video has gone viral. It is easy to take any thing built or completed and then reverse engineer it and conclude that those core pieces comprise sum of the parts of the finished product. 

What would rather help is research or development of a predictability tool than can foretell the probability of a style of video to go viral in the current moment. The online user sentiments are dynamic, so one video posted yesterday and gone viral may not have the same outcome if posted the day after tomorrow. This is the element of chance.

Furthermore, the part that requires a video going viral involves user participation. Since any given person on this earth is busy managing a multitude of tasks at any given time, it remains the truth that of all the gazillion videos posted the likelihood of several people sharing one video is remotely low. This is the element of luck where the stars are so well aligned towards one video that going viral is all but obvious. 

This blog post does attribute some elements to the unpredictability and randomness factors for going viral. It remains to be seen how much of such factors can be quantifiable in order to make predictive analysis of "what is going to go viral" and simple click of a button!

-Abi

Is Pinterest right for your business?

In Week 6 of the SMS module, we covered a timeline of development of various other social media platforms.

One of the most popular ones today and a rapidly growing one as well is Pinterest. 

It is setup like a web bulletin board but instead of textual content, it has visual content with some accompanying text.

When I first checked out Pinterest, it seemed to have a focus mostly on food recipes, women's fashion and landscapes. The images were engaging and enticing to hang around for a while on there. Over time of course, the content grew in to more subject areas. 

Now Pinterest is often cited as being one of the fastest growing social platforms in existence, even faster than Facebook or Twitter. It is the new darling of the social media world. The question that arises is whether to incorporate Pinterest in to business marketing just because of that. The answer to that depends a lot on the type of business in question and the level of marginal resources available to dedicate to Pinterest marketing. Here are some common tips on when to use Pinterest for business marketing:

1. If your business is visual content dependent, like clothing retailer, then Pinterest would be a great platform to showcase the product line in an innovative way. 
2. Visual content by itself is not enough. This is a common mistake many novice users make. The fact of the matter is that "Pins" are not just randomly discovered most of the times although this does happen quite a bit. Typically, a user will search for an area of interest and the results will be displayed accordingly. That means that all Pins must be accompanied by relevant text in order to be found on the search.
3. Use it to get feedback. Many companies just focus on "Pinning" away and then forgetting about it. That is a big mistake, because there may be valuable user feedback that could help in developing or improving the product line. There is a Pin history button located on the top right corner of the platform window and by clicking that one can review what pins were "repinned" and commented on. By seeing which pins are being share more than others and listening to commentary on the pins will really help gauge user interest on the product. If a Pin is being positively commented or repinned extensively, it is likely that users are likely going to be interested in purchasing that product as well if it meets all other requirements that one may have.
4. Encourage sharing of your content by providing a "Pin It" button on the website. Many small businesses still think that sharing content on Facebook and perhaps Twitter is good enough.  That would be a big mistake as there is a lot of engagement on Pinterest (according to this article), particularly from the female demographic, who could be potential customers of your company or purchasers of your product. 

-Abi

How Twitter Can Help You Find your Life's Passion and Ideal Career Path

In Week 5 of the SMS module, the focus is on Twitter as a popular social media platform. 

For those not in the know yet, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is setup in a time-line format with messages (Tweets) of 140 characters or less. The tweets may include handle names of other Twitter users and/or hash tags that refer to a specific subject of the tweet.

An interesting aspect of Twitter is the variety of content that is available. Once you start following Twitter handles (user accounts), Twitter will recommend other handles of similar interest to the ones you are following. This in turn, will lead you to possibly follow others of similar interest.

Now what does this all have to do with finding your life passion and career path?

Well, a lot in fact. For those who are not focused on any specific career path or sort of undecided and have made attempts to answer the question "What should I do with my life?", Twitter may just be the tool to help you find that answer.

Unlike Facebook, where users tend to mostly connect with friends and school mates, Twitter is more about connecting with influencers, celebrities and companies. It can also be used to follow other authoritative sources of information. While the spectrum of what and who to follow on Twitter is massively huge, one can commence on Twitter by simply following a couple of their friends who are on Twitter. The fact that they are friends of this person, means there is some alignment of interests to begin with. These friends will have a list of others they follow and one can see their list of followers and followings very easily. Also Twitter will recommend others to follow based on the initial follow list.

If one spends enough productive time (say a total of an hour on Twitter through the whole day) and peruses little snippets of information and starts to build up a decent "Following" list over time, it is likely that the things being followed are of great interest to that person. In addition, by also tweeting out to the twitterverse, and developing a "Follow" list will indicate if the messages have enough intensity behind them to generate interest for others to hear more from you.

By doing both, in time, if one goes in to the lists to see the overall theme of what it is they follow and what they most write about, one will be able to see patterns forming that may suggest an area of particular interest to that person.

For instance when I started out on Twitter, my lists grew organically as I followed and was followed randomly. But over time, I realised that a disproportionate number of areas that I was following and also was being followed from were travel bloggers. Soon I realised that travel writing was something I was very inclined to pursue and also something where I had an authoritative voice. I also learnt that I loved to get tips on ways to save money and gave out advice on how to save money on Twitter. This led be to develop a blog focused on saving money and travelling more, which soon became a semi-professional gig for me.

So if you are one who has not yet found your calling, I encourage you to spend time on Twitter and just let yourself loose there without thinking too much about why and who you are following. After some time (say a couple of months) evaluate your lists and see if you can tell any patterns from it. It is likely that it is telling you what you like to enjoy doing the most. And if you think you have something very interesting to say about that subject area, then you may just be on your way to identifying your ideal career path. 

-Abi

My Blogging Transformation Experience

In Week 4 of the SMS module reading the content covered is on blogging. In this post I want to share a personal and anecdotal experience of my blogging experience to show what it takes to create an effective blog.

I never understood the concept of Blogging for most of years since it first arrived in the social media scene around 2002. It took almost 10 years since the formal introduction of the concept of "Blogging" to the time I took my first dabble at writing a Blog.

It began as a Lark.

I had done some travels, and I was reading the occasional travel blog sites and realised that some of the writers were getting paid to write and travel. It sounded like an interesting task to explore so I just started posting some photos and writing about the travel experience. The first post receives several views and even had a couple of comments. That was the hook. It was almost addictive. It was like a power trip. Something I wrote that had an impact on random folks around the world and suddenly it felt that I had a voice and it mattered.

Soon I was posting and writing original content regularly. I realised that I had a latent writing bug (Something I had as a child but ignored it over the growing years). Incidentally, writing actually solved another problem related to trauma that I was facing around this time. To me, writing was very therapeutic but I also enjoyed the recognition that came with letting my inner creative out.

My original blog was focused on five different subject areas: Travel, Money Savings, Arts & Design, Career Tips, Social Commentary. I set up these specific categories because I discovered through prior Twitter usage (see following blog post on this aspect) that these were the areas of great interest to me.  The image below is a snapshot of the original blog format.

However, in some time I was starting to see a plateau in new unique visitors to my site. This confounded me because I knew I was writing great content (which writer does not?) so maybe it had something to do with Search Engine Optimisation. I spent the next several months researching, updating and hiring professional help to optimise my site for Google rankings. I soon started to receive comments from the professionals that my blog site lacked focus since it was dealing with multiple subject areas. I countered that arguments by referencing many popular blog sites that deal with multiple subject issues (eg. Huffington Post) and the fact that I was not exactly a blogging expert on any one subject. It just was that I loved to blog about those specific subjects so I cared more about what I wrote and what I "pushed" out there in to the blogosphere and hope everyone reading it really liked it and shared it or commented on it.

This kept on for a while but I continued to see a steady decline in readership and views. Coincidentally, it was around the time I enrolled in the Durham SMS module that I started to re-evaluate my blog design and format. After picking up some of the social media strategy tips in the course module and working with a social media professional I set specific goals (see this earlier post on this) for a major revamp.

The new layout and design narrowed the focus down to primarily my travel and money savings topics so it appeared to be a travel focused blog site, something that appeals to tourism officials who prefer travel focused bloggers to work with. Since I still blog on my other subjects, I provided a link to readers to those posts should they end up exploring my site beyond the travel stories. The new site started to see a steady increase in traffic and it helped in securing new clients for my blogging services. A sample shot of the new layout is below.

Lessons learnt from this experience on blogging success are:

1. Develop the theme and content focus from the get go. Getting this task out of the way will ensure that once up and running, the blog will have dedicated readership and no confusion of what exactly it is all about.
2. If you can't decide, well then go ahead and write whatever it is you feel like. This will of course allow you to get your writing experience going and eventually allow you to find your focus on one or two areas of writing. But keep in mind that it may be prudent to launch a new blog site once you have found your focus as a sudden revamp may also disengage some existing readers.
3. Focus does not mean only one subject. You can write on two or three other subjects, as long as they are related or linked to the core content. 
4. Do SEO and learn about SEO writing from the beginning to help write content that will get found faster and ranked higher.

-Abi 

Criminal Marketing 101 (The Social Media Way)

In Week 3 of of the SMS module, the content covered is on market segmentation and creating personas and finding the appropriate platform to deliver the content to the targeted persona.

For instance, let us take the example of a men's shaving company that sells shaving handles and blades priced at the upper end of the price spectrum for such products. Based on market segmentation research the company's marketing team have come up with two personas. First is Sam who is in his mid 30s and holds a corporate job, in mid-management position, has a house in the 'burbs, two cars, 2 kids under the age of 9, and has some  masters level of education completed. The second is Suzie, who is wife of Sam! Early 30's, working mother with advanced education. Suzie has influence on household purchase decisions.

So if the company wants to market to Sam, its message would likely be feature focused like number of blades, strength of blades, material of blades, some new fancy technology built in to the handles. For Suzie, the message may be focused on benefits of using the blade like clean shave, no bristles, smooth skin, tactile pleasures and so forth. 

Given the personas and the messages, now the company has to figure out the right platforms to use. Twitter is known to have more men users and therefore the ideal platform to communicate with all the Sams out there. Pinterest is more women-centric and therefore would be an ideal platform to use imagery to communicate the message to all the Suzies out there.

So what does all this have to do with criminal activity? As catchy as the title may be, this post is not about teaching you to engage in criminal activity by any means. What it is intended is to make you aware of how modern day cyber-criminals engage in routine profiling to steal your data (and sometime more than that!). 

There is strong evidence to suggest that the advent of social media increased the level of cyber crime on the internet as evidenced in this article by Forbes, and this site, and this whitepaper report.

Simply put, it the ubiquity of all our personal information on the cloud, the volume of information published, the permanency of that information, and the speed at which theft can occur are the primary reasons that cyber crime has increased specifically due to social media platforms.

So how to criminals steal the data? 

While I am no expert on such matters (It's the truth officer!) I can assume with some confidence that the persona profiling technique employed by product marketers above is also used by criminal to target victims. One does not have to stretch ones imagination to identify potential targets for theft - Grandma, Grandpa, Teen rocker, Chatty Cathy etc.

And as technology gets more sophisticated, so do the criminals. The messaging is targeted to the personas in accordance with the relevant platform. For instance, Twitter and Facebook are common platforms where users tend to share to the world their next exciting adventure trip including dates and flight numbers! HELLO! Ding dong. It's not that hard for a criminal intent on committing a crime to identify your place of residence.

So while stopping social media usage is not recommended and not practical, it is advisable to educate and become educated on crime prevention while using social media. Here is one awesome recommendation.

-Abi

The Social Media Planning Cycle in action in my personal life

So in Week 2 of the Social Media Strategies module the content focuses on the social media strategies. More specifically, the focus is on the Social Media Planning Cycle (Barker et. al, 2013) which is well illustrated in this diagram:

Source: SMS2014 - Week 2 Durham Business School

After reading this module I decided to implement the planning cycle in to my blogging activity on my travel focused blog.

The step by step implementation of the cycle in relation to my blog is presented below.

GOALS

Increase traffic by 20% to the blog - Unique Monthly Visitors - Increase customer acquisition involving tourism boards. Monitor over a period of one month to achieve results. Increase commentary by readers on the posts - achieve at least one comment per post.

STRATEGIES

Redesign the blog look and feel to make it more reading friendly - make it SEO optimised to increase search rankings on Google - develop an overall brand behind the blog.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Female 60% - Male 40%. 80% readership in Canada and USA. Create two personas - one appealing to women and other to male audience.

TOOLS

Based on research, Twitter was found to be most effective tool to reach both men and women personas, but Pinterest was identified to be more focused to reach women persona.

  

IMPLEMENT

Hire an online social media marketing expert - develop the strategies and implementation procedures -  commence execution step by step.

MONITOR

This task was easy since I could track traffic on the blog's built in analytics tool. After implementation I started to see an uptick in traffic, especially the Unique Monthly Visitors to the site. Within three weeks of implementation, I got Las Vegas tourism members as clients.

TUNE

As I write this blog post, I continue to work on implementing the remaining strategies with the web specialist on my other blog and discard any tactics I previously did if it was not getting me the results.

LISTEN

This is something I have been doing through my blog and twitter a lot and definitely find myself fine tuning my writing based on current trends and what the readers ask for.

Overall, my blog readership is up and I have been able to successfully generate new clients that provide me with actual revenue which leaves my blog in the black in terms of net income.