Pickle Club #2

In my final blog I want refer to my first blog. For those who cannot remember what it was.
My first blog was about Pickle Club on Facebook. Soon after my blog post. Pickle Club has undergone some major changes. First of all they switched from a Facebook Group to a Facebook Page. Furthermore Pickle Club expanded - from one single Mc Donalds restaurants to meanwhile seven Mc Donalds (Malvern East, Holmesglen, Hawthorn, Elsternwick, St Kilda Road, Ormond, Kew). Also the members on Facebook almost double from 6400 to 12,500. Today they celebrated the #10,000 members, actually the celebration was postponed until today as they were expecting a massive customer response for the 30 cent Big Mac offer and therefore had to firs top up the stock. When I went there today at 4pm there was indeed a big que of Caulfield grammar school pupils (around 40) waiting for their 30 cent Big Macs.

What I want to say is, that Social Media used in the correct way has such a huge reach. Nowadays even children are playing with their iPhones and other smartphones from a very young age on. Not to mention young adults and students in our age group. Social Media has become the new playground online. I do not want to evaluate this new trend, whether it is bad for the health (when sitting all day in front of the computer) and its other impacts on the future social behaviour. But its marketing potential is just boundless when used correctly.

Finally I want to thank everyone for making this unit so great. I really enjoyed coming into class, enjoying the nice atmosphere when sitting around the island shaped tables having several screens around me.
Special thanks to Wags making the unit as interesting as it was!

Hope everyone is going to hype social media!

"adidas all in" only enabled through social media ?

According to adidas, the “all in” global brand campaign launched on March 16, 2011 has been the biggest marketing campaign in the brand’s history.

“Directed by Romain Gavras, the campaign is built around a 30- and 60-second version of the commercial for TV and Cinema as well as an extended 2-minute version for Online.” The adidas “all in campaigns” is aimed to cover the whole scope of the brand in one video.

Have a look at the online advert.

Actually the Youtube video was launched on March 9^th, one week prior to the official launch of the campaign to generate awareness and curiosity.

Viewers and fans can then continue the conversation with adidas online through social platforms such as Facebook, where adidas serves up daily, in-depth exclusive content from the various parts of the brand.

A week after the official launch, there was a 3D mapping projection on a palace in France showing several aspects of the brand. It was also uploaded on Youtube.

Both Youtube videos soon became viral sensations after being picked up by a number of interested websites. It has recorded over 2 million watchers on Youtube and Facebook groups of more than 20 million members.

In my opinion 10 years ago adidas would have never been able to launch such a massive, successful and well integrated campaign. From that we can all see how effective social can be.

ASOS Facebook Store

ASOS won in the category of “Best Use of Social Media” awarded by the e-Commerce Awards for Excellence in 2011.

ASOS is a typical example of having suitable business for social media marketing.

For those who have not heard about ASOS nor read our collaborative writing project yet, some brief facts about ASOS. ASOS is a UK-based global online fashion and beauty retailer and offers over 50,000 branded and own label product lines across womenswear, menswear, footwear, accessories, jewellery and beauty. It was established in June 2000 and has developed quickly. In its recently announced 2011 financial results, the company revealed that sales had reached £339 million, up 52% compared to 2010. It ships in over 190 countries with zero shipping costs. The target market are fashion forward 16 to 34-year-olds.

On Facebook it has over 1 million fans and in addition it launched a Facebook shop in January.

Accoring to Marketing Week ASOS was the first brand to allow people to buy directly from a brand without leaving Facebook.

Previously brands had used third-party social commerce providers or used Facebook as a shopfront, directing shoppers to their site to complete the transaction.

In this blog post I do not want to talk about the reasons why ASOS is that successful in social media marketing, but to discuss the benefit of the Facebook shop.

I tried out to use the application embedded in Facebook and found it quite uncomfortable to browse through it. On the ASOS Homepage it takes me around 10 seconds to find the product I am looking for. On Facebook it took me around one and a half minutes. The fact that the application is integrated in Facebook makes it much more slower than on the ASOS shop and therefore make the shopping experience much more unconvenient.

In fact the Facebook shop is a detailed copy of the original ASOS shop, but with a sharing function of the products, so that the customer can show it to friends and ask them for advice.

I do not think that many people will buy from the Facebook shop as it is too slow and might have security issues for payments. But it is a funny gadget to show friends clothing you like and share their opinions. 

I think that the main aim of ASOS’s Facebook store is to finally drive Facebook users to their normal store.

What do you guys think ?

Second hand mp3 for sale ?

Yesterday, when I was heading to uni from city I grabbed one of those MX Newspapers.
Interestingly I read on the cover page the following article: Buy a digi-redo; secondhand tracks are going for a song.

In fact ReDigi.com is a marketplace for digital second hand music. The user can sell their old or new mp3 songs. According to the MX Newspaper, since its launch at the 13th of October, it attracted more than 130,000 users. A verfiying process will ensure that the traded songs were legally purchased, and also that the seller's source will be quickly deleted.

The prices of the songs will be a fraction of the prices charged at itunes or other popular sites.
Even the artist and labels will get a small part from the revenue.

In my opinion it is a really good way for the customers to get rid of old digital music and trade songs.
If there is a online market for second hand physical products such as ebay.com, why should there not exist a market place for digital products.
By charging only a fraction of the new sale price, customers have an incentive to trade.

Cola wars

For the collaborative writing project I was analysing the cola wars and the different social media campaigns from PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.

Both companies generated massive public awareness.


Coco-Cola's Expedition 206  has generated 650 million media impressions around the globe and engaged billions of people.







Pepsi's Refresh project  received more than 87 million votes - compared to about 89 million for the 2010 U.S. general election.

In terms of sales Pepsi's started to slip compared to Coca-Cola. For the first in time history Pepsi was overtook by Diet Coke as the second largest beverage brand in the U.S.

Can you think of reasons ?

Tescos virtual supermarket

I came across this video during the International Retailing class. It is simple but still so innovative.
Tesco was facing fierce competition on the South Korean grocery market, especially from Emart. After doing some research on the purchase behaviour of South Korean people, Tesco introduced a business model which could allow them to increase sales without increasing their number of stores.
Tesco found out that Koreans are one of the hardest working people in the world and therefore grocery shopping is big effort for them. Furthermore Koreans are mobile phone affine people.
Tesco combined all given factors together and launched a matching business model for time sensitive hard working korean people.



This kind of business model opens several other industries new doors for marketing approaches.
Would that kind of marketing/sales be successful somewhere else in the world ? What do you guys think ?

SoundCloud

Sorry to everyone, has been a while since my last blog. Was too busy with all my assignments and was moving out as well.
Eventually I am able to blog about SoundCloud, as announced.
SoundCloud was founded 2007 in Sweden but established in Berlin. It is basically a platform for artist to share their music. It is the equivalent of Vimeo/Youtube for videos or Imageshak/Flickr for photos, but in this case for music. It sees itself in competition to Myspace but differentiates from Myspace through several features.

I don't know how many of you have experience with Myspace ? Actually I discovered Myspace in 2007 and joined the network, even before joining Facebook. At that time I really liked the idea of being able to lisitening to the newest releases from the artist I liked.
But I was really struggling with the speed of most of the artist's homepages. As most of the artists had extensive designed Myspace pages, it become very difficult to buffer the songs. Sometimes it took me 10 minutes to listen to a three minute song. In addition I was only able to listen to it and was not allowed to download it.

A key feature of SoundCloud is that it lets artists upload their music with a distinctive URL. This contrasts to MySpace, which hosts music only on the MySpace site. By allowing sound files to be embedded anywhere, SoundCloud can be combined with Twitter and Facebook to increase its audience reach.
Furthermore the artist can allow fans to download the songs or offer a puchase opportunity.
What makes SoundCloud especially interesting for DJs is, that there are no limitationa for the maximum size of the uploads. Therefore DJs are able to upload whole DJ sets.

Another feature of SoundCloud is that the user can comment at a specific part of the tracks, making it easy for fans to ask for a specific track within a whole one hour duration DJ set.

Meanwhile, a lot of blogs I mentioned in my second post are using SoundCloud.

Have a check of my favourite artist - Boys Noize from Berlin on SoundCloud.
http://soundcloud.com/boysnoize


What I forgot to mention, the SoundCloud player is suitable for Iphones/Ipod touches !

The Hype Machine - hypem

Last week I blogged about music blogs in general. This weeks topic is about Hype Machine. If blogs are the source for musics, Hype Machine is the tool to find them.
Actually, this is one of the best music tools I have seen for a long time. Three years ago, I asked my DJ friend how he is getting his music updated and more important: from where. At that time the usual way of getting music involved the kinds of softwares such as: Emule or BitTorrent. But we all know that it was the illegal way of sourcing music and I have heared from some of my friends that they have been receiving fines from the crown prosecuter (up to 5000 €). Therefore it was the "dark path" which we all walked along.

My DJ friend then recommended me to try Hype Machine. Actually it is the Google of music blogs.

According to Wikipedia: "Hype Machine's structure has been described as an "amalgamation of Pandora Radio and Pitchfork Media. It aggregates the most recently posted songs from a selection of music blogs (about 1,500) and lists them on the website's main page".

You have the opportunity to search an artist or song, then listen to the song on Hypem or you can go to the blog directly and download it.
I think to receive and access all functions on the site, you have to sign a membership (which is free).
Apparently the blogs and artists are working well together. The mixture of available free and fee required tracks are still acceptable. Nevertheless I have discovered a decrease of free available music towards - only listen but no download !

I recommend you to have try. Just search any artist you are interested in and have a look if you can find it.

http://hypem.com/

Next weeks topic will be Soundcloud, which is in fact the channel.

Marketing electronic music

As a big fan of electronic music and also enjoying some djing in my spare time, I am going to blog about the current trend of electronic music blogs .

The consumer nowadays is spoilt and greedy. It is so easy for us to get intangible goods such as music (mp3s) or even whole movies for free from the world wide web. Therefore musicians partly resignated and are providing single songs, short previews or even whole DJ mixes for free on popular music blogs such as Earmilk and Fix up. But in fact it is only clever marketing

Earmilk.com for example, is providing nicely designed and written articles about the song releases and remixes. Furthermore they have a weekly chartlist of electronic, independent and house music. All songs can be downloaded for free.

With this kind of product offering and marketing the musicians only offer a part of their music for free and letting customer generated content doing the rest. In addition the customer gets an added value.
If the customer likes what she/he listened to, she/he might buy the whole EP/LP or in the best case, visit the live show.

For those who are interested:

http://www.earmilk.com/

Weekly chartlist of Earmilk:
http://www.earmilk.com/tag/suicide-sundaes/

http://www.djungeltrumman.se/fixup

For the next two posts, I am planning to blog about hypem and soundcloud. Both are very crucial social media markting tools for the music/electronic industry.

Pickle Club on Facebook

Hello everyone, guess I am the last one jumping onto the blogger train.

As a big fan of fast food, I want to relate my first post to Chun's (http://thesocialmedialab.blogspot.com/ -"FB!" A good Marketing tool?) and Chri's (http://i-love-chickenwings.blogspot.com/2011/07/food-and-facebook.html . - Food and Facebook ) posts.

Has everyone heard of Pickle Club ?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pickle-Club/147689095242742

Actually they are having a collaboration with McDonalds Malvern East (its just across the street from Monash Caulfield Campus) and recently started a further cooperation with McDonalds Holmesglen.
Everything you have to do, is to "like" their page on Facebook and you will receive daily updates of special offers at those two McDonalds.

The questions I want to discuss are, whether it is an effective marketing tool in terms of customer generation and furthermore what it means for McDonalds.

From my personal perspective, I really like their offers, it is really cheap and easy to acces. Sometimes I just jump on facebook when I am on campus and check their offers within one minute.
But the effects on McDonalds as a brand itself are very difficult to measure. In my opinion this marketing tool is only effetctive for a local customer base and therefore will not significantly benefit to the McDonalds brand.

What do you guys think ?
Todays offer is an $2 Double Quarter Pounder. Codeword: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY MCDONALD'S MALVERN EAST". Enjoy !