Fox Sports just announced that all their commercial spots for Super Bowl next year are all sold out. Super Bowl starts around first week of February every year, commercial airtime from previous years was sold out around December or even January.

We’ve been hearing companies shifting their marketing budgets from tradition marketing/ advertising to social media, Pepsi made huge buzz last year when they decided to skip Super Bowl ads and went for new media. Last year’s ads cost around USD 2-3 million per 30-second slot, companies could do highly viral and effective campaigns with the similar amount of investment. Does it mean social media didn’t give high business impact for companies like Pepsi? What’s the reason for them to get back to advertising this year?

My view:

I’m expecting there will be more social media integrated TVCs in this coming Super Bowl, meaning companies are likely to try and use tradition media/ marketing to drive online engagement activities, such as a Facebook campaign. But of course, the sex and humour in the ads will still be as good as usual.

What do you think?

I wasn’t too impressed by the movie Inception, maybe I set the expectation too high because of all the great buzz online and offline. This movie, however, reminded me about how social networks are structured these days.

Many people said that the Internet is like their second life, they can’t live without it and it’s nothing eventful for them to be on it.

What social networking sites do are actually designing a layer beneath the Internet, to try and group the most Internet users in one place, they do so by planting the idea and make users believe that everything on this layer allows us to do certain things like how we do traditionally, or sometimes, better than offline communications, very similar to the first layer of dream in the movie Inception.

More interesting thing is how more and more “designers” are actually trying to create another layer under the social network layer. These “designers” do not have the ability to create a layer with a scale as big as the first layer (like Facebook), but they still try to group as many users as possible under that layer.

Company like Zynga does a good job in designing this second layer, products like Farmville and Zynga Poker do a really good job with almost around 30 million daily active users.

Now, will there be the 3rd layer under the 2nd one?

Many of us are aware of how fast the luxury market has been growing in China, it is currently the second largest market in the world for luxury goods. China is also a country with most internet users, so it’s pretty obvious that luxury brands should start targeting netizens and let Internet plays huge role in their marketing strategies, but they all face the same problem; Chinese people still don’t purchase online.

Weak e-commerce

There’s no Paypal in China, other than popular site like Taobao (Chinese version of eBay), Chinese people do not trust many online payment platforms due to safety issues, so purchasing online is not as common as other countries. Especially for industries like luxury fashion goods, consumers prefer to buy at offline stores so that they can actually try them on.

Why many brands are still not on Chinese Social Media

There are of course many reasons behind brands for not engaging on Chinese social media, but I can see 2 major reasons for it.

1) Complexity of Chinese social media landscape – People (including most agencies in China) still can’t figure out how to develop a proper social media strategy for China as the online space is very different from any other country in the world. Government and mainstream media still play a huge role on social media in China as they have so much control over it.

2) Unclear ROI – As I mentioned above about the weak payment method, many luxury brands have very traditional marketing teams that are not very comfortable with the ROI when considering investment on social media since e-commerce is very weak in China, they don’t see, and perhaps don’t know how to measure how engaging on social media can directly benefit the brands financially.

Why are brands on Chinese Social Media?

China is the world’s youngest luxury market, high Internet penetration with users who are extremely active on social media, Chinese also love to share branded messages online more than any other countries. But beside all these obvious reasons, there’s one huge opportunity in China that many brands have ignored…

I’m not expert in fashion, but lifestyle and fashion trends are extremely driven by social media in China, people are influenced by what other netizens think, the peer is the true trend setter. For example, whenever a product is featured on Taobao, or most voted by other users, it would become the new trend in fashion. Singers/ celebrities actually dress themselves based on what people like, or what’s hot on social networks like Kaixin, not the other way around like most other countries where celebrities can easily influence purchase decisions. Although they don’t purchase it online (yet), the power of this peer trend setter drive obvious sales offline, and the good news is… there are ways to measure it!

Photo Credit: Ivan Walsh @ Flickr

GlobalWebIndex has recently launched a free tool that allows users to quickly get a snapshot of their data on social media insights, this free tool was built based around the data they have gathered from Wave 2 database from January 2010. The latest data, Wave 3 from July 2009 is only available for GlobalWebIndex clients.

This tool comes very handy when you are looking to create quick slides with valuable data that gives brief understanding of online behavior for specific group of people from different regions.

I tried to embed the tool to this blog post but I failed to adjust the size of it.

Start playing with the tool now

When I was a child, my parents used to give me long lectures all the time. I realized they would stop after awhile if I tried to act like I was listening. I wasn’t learning though.

Listening is Easy

More and more companies these days have started to gather data on what their consumers/ potential consumers say about their brands on social media. Since there are tons of free and paid tools in the market that claim to give comprehensive results, companies started to think that they can do “social media listening” by themselves or just hire summer interns to gather everything they need to know in the online space. But what do these numbers mean to their business?

Agencies’ secret recipe for listening

Many so-called social media agencies started to offer “Listening Programs” and try to hide their listening tools from clients and competitors because they feel like they can lose business if they give out their “secret recipe”. Truth is, the secret recipe an agency needs to gather valuable online consumer insights is not about the tool they use, it’s about how these tools are used and how these data are connected to the brand/ product positioning and link them all with opportunities that help the business.

Start Learning from consumers!

Many people argue there’s no social media experts in the field, but it does take certain level of knowledge in new media and branding to properly gain useful insights through social media, which a blogger with 70,000 followers might not know how to give. Stop listening only because all your competitors are doing the same, try to take advantage of this new media and tailor your products/ services to give most value to consumers through “learning” what they say about brands!

Why Tweetup?

Some of you might have seen tweets about the Ogilvy’s APAC Digital Influence Summit lately. Ogilvy’s DI Summit is an internal event held by the Asia Pacific Regional team where all the digital experts from around the region will be attending a 3-day event in Hong Kong to exchange digital knowledge, connect and bond with other team

Although the event is not open for public, we would like to offer you a chance to meet our team, head of the global digital influence team John Bell will also be flying all the way from Washington DC! It is a very rare opportunity for you to meet all of us at once, in the offline world!

When?

Tweetup will be held this Sunday, June 27th at 7pm. Not the perfect timing for tweetup but due to the World Cup schedule, this is the only time when venues are available.

Where?

Tweetup will be held in RED Soho as usual.

How to sign up?

Here

See you there!

Remember the marketing textbook from University? There were all these marketing principles, rules, and graphs, marketing funnel must be one of them.  I don’t think we need further explanation on the tradtional marketing funnel with Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, and Loyalty.

This graph by Forrester explains the new marketing landscape, most of us rely hugely on recommendations before purchase. With the help of social media and other communication platform, recommendations, peer reviews, and user generated content really play a really big role during consumers’ purchase decision. As the graph suggested, the landscape these days is more complicated than ever!

I’m often very sad about the music culture these days, when songs are all produced for profit and how they make people love their music with all the lifestyle marketing tactics. Cuban music (or any other non-mainstream music) on the other hand don’t do that, they aren’t desperate for attention, they aren’t playing music for money, they just love music and believe in it.

PR/ Social Media Agencies that produce Pop Music:

Social media is this new shiny thing to all business owners and decision makers, like a new trend of music culture comes up. What agencies do is that they create proposals filled with useless tactics (aka “creative ideas”), they go into client meetings and propose some sort of viral campaigns to the clients. Many clients like to give it a try, they think it’s too good to be true, but they don’t have enough knowledge on it and got greedy after seeing all these viral videos with 2 million views.

Obviously, many agencies like that might not know what they are talking about (like how some pop singers don’t know anything about music), for them it is only business, they just have to do what they can to grab the cash, so they just have to tell the clients whatever they want to hear.

PR/ Social Media Agencies that produce Cuban Music:

There’s another type of agencies, these agencies have great understanding of what social media is, and they know what’s best for their clients. However, not many clients would take the offer, because the process doesn’t sound as exciting as viral campaigns.

What should clients do?

I’m not saying Lady Gaga is bad, and I’m not saying short-term viral campaigns never work for business. I think clients should get the balance and start to think from both perspective when deciding to engage on social media.

This is the question that most Digital Marketers have thought about. In a recent research by Sherastone, only 2 digital marketing “tactics” had increased in budget in 2009; they are email and social media.

Social Media is NOT killing Email Marketing

I don’t think email marketing is dying. I think marketers need to really see social media as a strategy, and email marketing can be one of the “social media marketing tactics” when they are integrated well.

To give, not to sell through email

For example, social media as a whole is a great channel to collect relevant email addresses because it allows us to target personalities and interests through conversations, the key to be successful in email marketing is to provide value to the subscribers. Instead of thinking about what they might be interested in purchasing, marketers should think about what they might be interested in receiving. Instead of following the Direct Marketing nature of Email Marketing, marketers should use it more as a branding and community building tactic that goes hand in hand with social media.

Although measuring is way more complicated than direct marketing, there are still ways to do it with well-planned KPIs.

Email “Selling” is Dead

Direct email marketing (email selling) is dead, people don’t just “purchase” after seeing email promotions. However, with the help of social media, email marketing can still be a very powerful and profitable tactic when the message and execution is tailored to the target.