5 Tips Before You Launch Mobile Campaigns
Almost the entire world gets to frequently concentrate on their handheld smart phones, staring at the tiny screen on the whole time they awake. The gradually transaction from desktop and TV to mobile device brings the marketers new opportunities to boost sales as well as engage with audience. Though it does have tremendous chances and benefits, there’re still some tips and concerns you need to think over before you decide to do mobile marketing.
TIP #1: PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER MOBILE USING BEHAVIOR
Different target has different mobile using behaviors. Before you jump into mobile campaign developments, do a research to find out how your customers use mobile devices. Do they mainly use Android or iOS? Are they using mobile or tablet? What applications or functions do they spend the most time into?
TIP #2: APP OR WEBSITE?
Another aspect you need to keep in mind and assess before you invest in mobile marketing is whether you should invest in an app or a website. Not every brands need an app although a good app enables customers to access your offerings in the easiest and most convenient way.
—-Fiona Rom
Most of company choose to invest in APP just because their competitors do so. However, not every company needs an app, instead a clear and optimized website can meet most of requirements that your customers need.
TIP #3: SOCIAL MEDIA HELPS YOU ATTRACT AND ENGAGE WITH CUSTOMERS
People get to spend more time on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr…Men engage with each other and build communities on social media platforms with massive topics from what to eat today to what did you buy yesterday, which was where ‘word from mouth’ from.
Social media is the best way to acquire users although there’re many other distributions to do so. You can promote advertising, create digital campaigns, as well as to know what your customers think of your products.
TIP #4: DESIGN IS NOTHING BUT IMPORTANT
Responsive design refers to automatically adjust the layout and the content depending on the type of the device and the size of the screen. Audience prefer to go through the similar website when they use different devices since it’s convenient for them to manipulate.
TIP #5: TEST ALL THE TIME
—-Egencia’s Shearer
To create the best experience for the users, it’s important to test different version of your webpages to determine which color, headline or call to action works better for mobile users.
ARE YOU READY FOR 3D PRINTING ERA?
3D printing now is nothing but a hot trend these days since you can produce everything with 3D printer machine. It was rare and high-tech in 1984 when it was invented by Charles Hull, moving from theoretical to a reality, but now it’s become cheaper and easy to produce. The products range from small design models to medical organs and experts predicted that it would be commonly used in households in the following years.
HOW DOES 3D PRINTING WORK?
Basically everything starts from designs.The virtual design is made in a CAD (Computer Aided Design) file using a 3D modeling program (for the creation of a totally new object) or with the use of a 3D scanner (to copy an existing object). This scanner makes a 3D digital copy of an object and puts it into a 3D modeling program.
COCA-COLA MINI ME 3D PRINTING
Coca-Cola used 3D printing in a campaign called “Mini Me” in 2013 to promote its mini bottles,a new size of its packaging. Coca-Cola released their mini bottles in Israel and instead paired the new bottles that are with 3D printed mini statues of their customers.
For now, although the technology is pretty mature, but still not many people are accessible and affordable to those products. “Mini Me” campaign required consumers to download Coca-Cola’s app and create the little mini statue of themselves, feeding those mini-me and playing with them. After that, 150 of those people would be chosen to have a real mini statue by 3D printing machine.
IS 3D PRINTING A FAD OR A TREND?
To me it’s absolutely a trend since it already lasted for many years. This technology applies in everywhere and in recent years we can easily see many 3D printing products, such as apparel, food, sculpture and even medical staffs. It not only save us time and shorten the manufacture time but in other words, it can accomplish those sophisticated and delicate commodities as well. I can’t wait to see it become accessible in our home. Imagine that if you are bored with your cloth and don’t know what to wear today, just design one and print it! I hope that day will come soon.
Is Big Data As Good As You Think?
Big data is a broad term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. As oppose to traditional data warehouse, big data contains characteristics including large volume and complexity in analysis.
In “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think” which was written by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, he indicated that big data is not using sample survey, but adopting all data analyzed instead. In terms of the features of big data, big data is known as its 4V characteristics, which refers to volume, variety, velocity and veracity.
First, the volume of big data available for a specific campaign is extremely massive. In the past time, people can only accumulate and record datas manually, but now data is generated and collected from machine, internet and community interactions. Whatever you are doing on the internet or phone calls is accumulated to a TB data. The range of data is diverse and it can be classified as two parts: structured and unstructured. As for data velocity, the data streaming is continuous and fast paced because of increasingly machines and internet users. How to reflect and respond those data and materials in a short time becomes their challenge as well.
Big data is high volume, high velocity, and/or high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization.
—-Doug Laney
Although big data saves your time and gives you more information and support to analyze and make better marketing decision, it still has lots of limitations. At the time you are happy for the large volume of data you found, you can be overwhelmed in it as well. Besides that, the timeliness and veracity of data can be a big issue and problem when you make the decision. Not all of the data online is updated and true. How to filter the out-of-date, bias, forgery and abnormal part and prevent those dirty data impairing the complete and veracity of information system should be taken as the most important part into consideration. The other concern about big data is how to use it appropriately. Only data can only be a reference but never be enough and sufficient to make a marketing decision.
An Impropriate Frat Chant
I believe that many of you have seen the video of Oklahoma’s racist frat chant happened last month, on March 13. The white students, of the most are members of SAE (Fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon), singing in the bus with those racist words with joy and enlightenment:
There will never be a nigger SAE. There will never be a nigger SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me. There will never be a nigger SAE.
The video spreads out wisely on YouTube and sparked a furious condemnation on Twitter and Facebook.
The national condemnation resulted in closing fraternity house and punishing the involved students by David Boren, the president of Oklahoma University, as well as a former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator. Mr. David has made a progress, trying to build reputation of the college by focusing on school football team, but it seemed that the improvement and efforts were ruined by those members who were caught because of the video.
—Boren said in a statement
Besides, one of the boys’ father sent an apology letter by email and the fraternity’s house mother issued a statement to appease people’s sentiment, claiming that “deeply sorry” and “it was a horrible mistake”.
The most important, the party, Levi Pettit publicly apologized,
After the video exposed, the school seemed to do all the things they could do to make up: apologies from the involved boy, the parents and the school, and the shutdown of fraternity house. But from my opinions, you can never let people wait a long time for your solutions. It has been two weeks until the president came out to make a statement. People can be furious and impatient during the waiting time and it will absolutely cause a social media crisis.
See Impossible
On October last year, Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging solutions, is proud to announce “Canon See Impossible” – a branding effort aimed to inspire customers to see impossible with Canon products. As part of the multi-year campaign, Canon added its logo and new tagline, shifting the marketing focus to customer feelings from products through storytelling form. This campaign narrated the stories of those people who used Canon’s products (not just cameras) and eventually overcame obstacles and accomplished their dreams that sounded impossible.
There are three 45-second video of See Impossible series broadcasted mainly on YouTube: Author, Director and Dad.
Except making sure that the ads can be seeing everywhere with takeover ads on YouTube, Canon also put those videos on CNNgo, CNN’s new time shifted platform, as well. As for social media platforms, Canon is trying to engage with audience through Twitter and Facebook, announcing this multi-year event. Its new See Impossible Microsite houses a series of digital videos that highlight how customers us a range of products.
“We’re going to use it as a messaging vehicle, but we’re also going to use it internally to organize and marshal our resources in a way that’s much more customer-centric than just strictly approaching everything from a product viewpoint that we’ve done over the years. Our current Web properties do a great job of talking about the specific product, but nowhere do we have a really good place to say a particular company or a particular photographer are using our solutions.”
—- Michael Duffett, VP and general manager of marketing at Canon USA.
But most of audience didn’t buy it with lots of negative comments like “Who cares?” “Such a disappointment”. The site is slow to load; the technology falls behind the advertisement; devoid of informational content….all these reasons make up to why this campaign failed to be accepted and aroused disappointment after the countdown reached zero.
I have to say these series of advertisement are similar to one of Apple’s famous “Think Different” commercial in 1997.
For Canon, it’s more than a good idea that Canon is away product-centric and starts customer-centric, but its technological advancements that far behind makes the whole campaign upset and superficial.
Feminism’s Fight Never Ends
The topic of Feminism and Discrimination Against has become emerging gradually in China. It is still inspiring although the topic has not involved in extensive participation of discussion. Nevertheless any kind of revolution seems to last forever, it begins to sprout by people’s conscious and awareness of the problem. The doodles according to International Women’s Day in Baidu and Google just like a bomb hit everyone’s heart and compels people to think and discuss.
Baidu’s doodle shows a girl rotating in a music box, while her apparels, toys and jewelries are changing by her side. If you move your mouse to the doodle, a sentence will pop out “Happy International Women’s Day to Every NYMPH”. Not girls, not women, but nymph. The doodle reminds me of A Doll’s House, which is a three-act play in prose of Henrik Ibsen.The heroine, Nora was beautiful and pretty and was taken good care just like the doll on the music box, but she was under an unequal relationship with her husband and was not even able to have her own mail box keys. When we take a look of Baidu’s doodle, the accessories around the girl range from feeding-bottle and toys to rings and necklace. Is that how people treat women? Grow up like a princess and just need to be beautiful and please men?
The theme of Google’s doodle is “Make It Happen”, which depicts those women who are in different occupations and diverse culture backgrounds, and accomplish their personal values through their efforts.
Just as Google says on Twitter that we should respect the diversity of women’s age, occupations, and life styles and celebrate the achievements of women everywhere, and that’s why IWD is worthwhile to celebrate and praise.
2014: A video displaying women who are making effort in different fields
2013: Leading a happy life under different race and language background
2012: Showing respect to women by adding women’s symbol to the logo
2011: Also the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, Google was trying to call on people eliminating the challenges and difficulties what women face with
We have to say Google has a better understanding and description of women, but the discrimination between men and women exists everywhere, even in America, and those who fight for women’s rights are treated as bizarre and impenetrable. BuzzFeed collected a lot of quotes in accordance with feminism by celebrities last year:
Emma Watson
Taylor Swift
Leighton Meester
Lena Dunham
Feminism teaching girls to be somebodies instead of somebody’s. Modern women are independent and no longer under the shades’ of men, and they deserve admission and respect from all of us, so don’t take IWD similar to the mixture of Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, instead it should be the celebration of the fight for women’s rights.
Fighting With Instagram, Vine Still Has A Long Way To Go!
People are no longer satisfied in sharing only pictures but tend to be more enjoyable in videos. Similar as Instagram, which a picture sharing platform, vine is a short-form video sharing service, letting users record and edit five to six-second-long looping video clips and revine, or share others’ posts with followers.
I didn’t use vine until I started doing this assignment, so I downloaded one and saw how it worked.
After I created my account via Twitter, I’m pleasantly surprised that Vine offers classification on its ‘explore’ page. We can personalize our followings by choosing different categories, covering animals, art, comedy, style, diy, news, science and so on.
Of course, as a social media platform, we can absolutely connect our friends on it, via both twitter and your phone contact. I even find my digital marketing professor through twitter!
I randomly chose some categories and began my exploration. For the home page, it has no much difference comparing with Instagram, just changing to videos from photos. We can click like (smiling face), leave a comment, and share with the video. On the right hand above the video, there’s a loop count, which indicates how many times people have looped with this video, including in Vine and in embeds across the web.
Then I started uploading my video! Vine video is six seconds or so long, which was proven by Twitter and Vine as the best length for video consumption after doing a mass of researches. We’re allowed to shoot disconnected and multiple video clips and joint them together to a 6-second episode as Instagram allows 15 seconds. Nevertheless, to my surprise there’s no filter in edit page and we cannot pull video from camera roll while in Instagram style, it does have this function and offers more than ten filters beautifying videos. It doesn’t seem that Vine will do filters in anytime soon cause at some extent Vine is still trying to make users creating interesting, natural and beautiful moving imagery, and jointing the different clips in a creative way, instead of appealing people only by making videos prettier.
For me, Instagram is more like a mass platform that everyone can share their moments in life, like feet, coffee, pet, and selfie, while Vine focus more on a niche market for those creative-oriented people. Instagram video absolutely slows down the growth of Vine and we can just grab a coffee and see how this story goes.
Ready To Explore The World!
It’ll be a pity if you don’t have an action camera recording your adventure activities when you explore and navigate the world, so here comes Garmin. Founded in 1989, Garmin is a corporation providing superior products for automotive, aviation, marine, outdoor, and sports that are an essential part of our customers’ lives.
I didn’t know Garmin until I did the marketing research for our group project. As the strongest competitor of Gopro, Garmin seems to have a wider range of products, not only limited in action camera, but includes automobile navigation, GPS watch, flight stream and other outdoor equipment. When I search it on Google, all of the ads, official website and social media platforms come out, and also on the right side, it shows a brief introduction of Garmin Corp, information including customer service number, stock price, headquarters and so on, which gives me a basic overview of this corporation.
Then I started exploring their official website and overall the design is oriented and easy to operate. We can readily find out that Garmin’s target audience are those adventure people who are extremely manic about outdoor activities at the first glance. Some scrolling pictures that display the recent products, and underneath are some other information just like other websites, including company information, Garmin sites and partnerships. When you click “Explore” bottom on the top of page, you’ll easily get a general view of the six categories Garmin has, which covers on the road, into sports, on the trail, on the water, in the air, and wearable technology.
I randomly chose a “on the trail” page. There’s a menu bar of different products in this category under the scrolling pictures that links to the shop site. Also we can watch some feature videos which offer you more introduction and directions of using the products. For the shop site, we can arrange the products from name, price or best sellers and display them either vertical or fourfold.
A very practical function that the website offers us is that once we click the “compare” button, we’re allowed to compare two products of their price, functions or performance in a simple and direct way.
Garmin does well in its social media platforms. It collects 297,250 likes on Facebook, 79.5K followers on Twitter, sharing products information and other news. On Youtube, Garmin receives 34,933 subscriptions, gaining 2,738,063 views on its most popular video.
As for the tablet and mobile page, there’s only a slight difference in typesetting comparing with the official website. Associate to the previous Fascination Advantage study, all I feel is that Garmin is a innovation, passion and mystique brand, leading us to explore and navigate the outside world and joint every moments!
See Through Myself
I was the person who never believes the psychological tests until I did this, Fascination Advantage Assessment, but this assessment helps me in five minutes figuring out my personalities and I felt it was really accurate.
According to my own understanding of myself for so many years (lol), I am the person who is outgoing and Optimistic. The test result also said so. My primary advantage is passion, which refers to that if I communicate with this advantage, I’ll be known as most attractive. I’m so glad that I shared the same primary advantage with Leonardo Da Vinci, Audrey Hepburn and Oprah Winfrey. All of us are expressive, intuitive and engaging. We are open to people and feel freely to share opinions and other thoughts. The following advantage comes to innovation. That’s true. I don’t quite follow the normal way but like jumping out of the box and finding a different way. My dormant adventure, which means it is a bad idea to impress others, comes to mystique, but I was very surprised cause I used to think I was a mysterious and charming woman. Maybe it is just because I totally agreed the statement of “All of my friends know most of the things about me”.
I quite like the “Archetype” part, which combines your primary to secondary advantages. On the basis of the primary advantage, how to add your secondary advantage as “The Catalyst” and exert a greater impact is what we need to know. Passion together with innovation seem a corking match. An interesting point I noticed in the result is that under this catalyst I should seek personality-oriented careers such as PR and marketing, which is also what I’m pursuing for all the time.
As previously mentioned, I’m a little stocked of my dormant advantage, mystique. The result suggests me to avoid using this personality to impress others. After I read the whole explanation of mystique, it makes sense. I don’t actually hide my feelings or thoughts so that everybody can easily see through me. It can be either the good side and bad side. People can easily make friends with me and get my points readily, but on the other side, I can hardly keep secrets and have difficulties holding my cards.
After doing this test, I got a better understanding about myself, especially the way how I can impress the world at the biggest extent. Discovering how the world sees you and fascinating others are a life-time subject and everyone should make clear about it.
The Craze 
