The boat of marketers

     Slide Share has been founded in October 2006 and it has been acquired by LinkedIn on 3 May 2012 for $118,75 Million. It is a PowerPoint presentation tool, which could be more easily and more successfully done online.
People choose nowadays to use Slide Share for marketing in a better way their product and according to socialmediaexaminer site, it represents the boat of marketing on social media. It doesn´t have the ability just for marketing, but also for teaching, where many are using it already for presenting useful education material.

     For marketing, many companies had already got enough with YouTube.
I personally like Tesla Motors cars, because are electrical and environment friendly. I choose one example of their YouTube channel which represents the company.
Tesla Company use YouTube for sharing different videos about their cars so, that they could show why to buy their products. So the videos are made so well, that it really make you think about which car you should buy.

     So we see that many are using Slide Share so pages, others videos, but there are also big amount of people and companies who choose picture sharing. For this, there are many social media sites, which allow customers to share picture. For example Pinterest is made for sharing pictures.
Its customers can freely take picture from everywhere and just share and Pin on Pinterest with others. So there are milliards of pictures and every day are coming more and more.
Companies choose Pinterest in social media to show their brand, to maximize their followers so, that later will become their customers.
For companies there is a strategy why to post, share, comment and so. There is a big competition in winning customers and clients, so the companies have to be careful how to maintain and how to win more clients.
I think future marketing will be more online, than in reality, because of increasing number of people spending their time on internet.

-          Gabriel

Branding yourself

In past years, the trend of a good employee has been described indirectly and nonverbal as a multi-skillful person who could do as many things as possible so, that the employer could keep him in stead of two or three employees with one profession.
In order to this, the working-life has been shared in two categories: much and cheap (not good quality) and less but expensive (good quality). We see this big gap of these two categories, between countries from the West and countries from the East.
In West (well developed countries), companies are looking for people who are masters in one thing, so they could develop the product as fast and as far as possible.
So because of this, self-branding has started to occupy an significant place in job seeker´s life. I realize that nowadays most employers are searching for those kinds of employees, who cannot offer anymore a variety of skills, but a well prepared and skillful person concentrated on one thing.
A good help in how to brand yourself, you can find into a simply search on internet. Something that I recommend, is the LearnVest´s site, which presents consistent knowledge of how to personal brand.
I believe that personal branding is the future CV.

- Gabriel

Sharing Tools in Social Media

Slideshare in marketing purposes

Slideshare is a web site where for example companies and schools can share educational materials. Our assignment was to find out how to use social media sharing sites for marketing. I found out that LinkedIn has its own channel in Slideshare called LinkedIn Pulse. They share videos and slideshows like “How to Reinvent Your Work and Never Get Stuck” and “Everything You Need to Know About Quitting Your Job”. Of course they have also slideshows like “Why LinkedIn is the Best Place to Publish”. At the same time they are publishing useful information about working life they are also marketing their own company. 

EDIT: I just realised after reading other’s posts that I understood the assignment wrong and wrote this from another point of view. The assignment was to read from Slideshare about using social media sharing sites in marketing, not about marketing in Slideshare. So here’s little about the actual topic: Because Instagram was not so familiar to me I decided to look for a guide about it and found several. This was one of them: How to use Instagram for business. One of the “steps” was to learn from big brands how they do marketing in Instagram and I found it useful and interesting. Big brands use for example high quality photos and they post photos about lifestyle rather than their products all the time and they communicate with the customers in different ways.

YouTube

I chose Adidas as a good example of a company using YouTube. Their company message goes: “We give everything we've got, then go back for more. No doubts, no holding back, no giving in. From the court to the catwalk, the stadium to the street; whatever the game, we play the same way: Heart over head. Inclusion over ego. United by passion, we go all in.” I watched one of their videos called Adidas Climachill: Uncontrol Yourself. I think that video reflects really well their message. I watched other videos from their channel too and they are all share same kind of features so I think their videos reflect well their company.

Instagram

I chose Instagram as a third example of a sharing tool in social media. I don’t use Instagram at least at the moment but I decided to choose that still because I wanted to get to know it better. I selected Coca-Cola because that is one of the most known brands in the world. I looked at their Instagram and explored the hashtags about Coca-Cola.  Especially #shareacoke is really popular and their whole campaign Share a Coke is really famous. Instagram users have shared pictures of Coca-Cola bottles with their name on it and have written things like “I finally found my own name” or they have tagged their friends.

I think what motivates customers are clever and funny campaigns and basically just things that they like. Some people like also taking part to competitions to win something.

- Jenna

Why to choose Facebook Business?

Facebook is the most powerful fluencing and manipulating weapon in MASS. Is not wonder why most businesses are taking advantage of it so, that they´re coming liked by millions and by that winning significant number of attends and funs who later will become clients.

New companies should know that in the ocean of business there are big fishes and sharks that they will face. What I mean is a big challenge and competition how to win clients. To solve this issue, Facebook comes with its “weapon” to help; but how?

Facebook has its own rules that are mentioned on its business pages and they had to be obeyed, so the game can smoothly keep going to success.

There are few important things to remember when using Facebook as a boost of company which are classified in different parts.

First of all it’s needed to know what kind of success the similar companies have and what could be learned from their procedures.

Secondly is about to get familiar with Facebook-world in the way of knowing how frequent the message, posts, picture and other tools of sharing are needed to keep the new “audience” up to date and active.

After that, it depends of company how far wants to go in promoting and boosting itself. According to this, company needs all kind of advertisings and ways of winning clients that Facebook and other companies are offering. These can be easily found on internet.

The moto of a success company which is active with own page on Facebook could be: “Win likers and treat them with honor”.

The statistics says that 61% of consumers who interact with companies on their social networks to receive discounts. It also tells that 51% of consumers who said they are more likely to buy a product after “liking” the product on Facebook. Other 55% of consumers are following companies on social networks just to receive general information. On Facebook 73% of companies thinks that the consumers are following them to learn about their products.

For example TeslaMotors has almost 1 million likers and is in growing every day. It communicates with its funs every day by posting whether a picture or a post where telling how good electric cars are and why it deserves to be bought. There are thousands of active funs who respond and give good feedbacks to every post and share them with others too.

This is how it works. Company post something, people see and like, then what they like, appear in their friends notification bar, so it´s a bit more trustful to like, when friends do it too.

- Gabriel

Branding yourself

To me branding yourself sounds something that only big and famous managers do. But in today’s working life there is so much competition that branding yourself is probably something that should be considered when trying to stand out. Not everyone have to brand themselves like Oprah or Donald Trump but it’s good to keep in mind that when for example looking for a job you’re actually marketing yourself to possible employees.

   

I found many articles from the internet that are written about "the tools" of how to brand yourself. Blogs and social media overall are good ways to create and keep up your brand. I know that not everyone like to post a lot in social media and they like to keep their private and working life separate. I think that branding yourself at its simplest level is to invest in job applications and communicating with colleagues, employees and everyone else especially in working life.

At success.com there was three things listed to keep in mind when expressing your personal brand and they were “be real”, “be vulnerable” and “be transparent”. I agree with Success’ article and I think that the most important thing in branding yourself, whether it was done really professionally or not, is that you are true to yourself and to others and don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Of course you should highlight the best sides of yourself but still keep it honest.

- Jenna  

AM FB marketing and branding

1. When comparing the two materials about FB marketing, I enjoyed reading the 10 day guide to mastering marketing in FB. The other one focused more on the basics of FB, it was like it was wrote to 80 year old.

The most important thing for a company who uses FB is to remember posting current/interesting photos, cut of the long texts and keep it fresh, visually pleasing. This, especially if your target group is mainly the generation who actually grew up with some.

2. Since I already found myself interested in Starbucks in the last weeks task, I'll continue with that. :)
This company uses FB to spread information about their ethics/ideas that are important to them, about what's happening right now and especially to let their customers know about the newest Starbucks-products. They lean on humane emotions in their posts and things that they write about.

While addicting people with mouth watering posts, they are actually thinking about the client. Their comments are read and questions answered.

Starbucks have one main FB-site or it is the site for USA, original. However it has also several other sites for their activity in certain countries or part of the world, for instance: Starbucks UK, Starbucks  Espana and Starbucks Malaysia.

When concentrating on the main FB-site, Starbucks, it has succeeded very well in FB: the site has 35 million likes and 23 million people have marked that they've been in a Starbucks-shop.

3. I have used FB in a many ways, also in job search. There are several channels that announce jobs with posting about them, for instance "mytech". I have used it for searching for jobs and applied for them in traditional ways.

I'm not that familiar with LinkedIn but I have heard that employers like to use it. So maybe I will learn to use it in the future.

5. I believe nowadays you have to brand yourself. One of our teachers actually said that especially if you want to succeed in sales, the first step is to sell yourself to the employer in the interview. The idea of selling yourself and branding yourself is crossing each other in close way.

However it depends on what kind of future you want for yourself. In certain fields (sales) and countries (USA, China) I would assume that it is obligatory to know how to brand yourself in order to stand out. And even me as a future engineer, I should create a certain "game plan" when graduated because not everybody can get the job they want: you have to show that you're special, one of a kind.

I looked into a site about personal branding (Forbes). The post shows us few steps which will lead you to a successful branded you. There were good thoughts and ideas written and I believe that these things should all be considered at some level at least.

This doesn't however vanish the truth and how raw and brutal the following sentence sounds:
"What adjectives do you want people to associate with you (as the product) and why?" (Forbes)

I would like to believe that after all, no matter how much we brand ourselves, we would be seen as humans with personal lives, emotions, strengths and weaknesses, not as soulless products.

-Azma

Blogs, blogs, blogs..

My choose for a good example of a company blog is Starbucks blog http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/apex/ideaHome. The reason why this is a good blog is their idea of using it. All the employees use to brainstorm new ideas. Customers can send in their ideas of drinks, food, interior, actually anything, and on the blog the workers write about these and brainstorm. The blog has over over 100 000 ideas and improvements already. I see this as a great way to include the customers and to get everybody heard.

Apparently it is harder to find bad company blogs by using google. But for my bad example I chose Nokias company blog, and this only for personal reasons, since I found it super boring. http://lumiaconversations.microsoft.com/fi-fi/. The reason I found it so boring was that the only thing they write about is advertisement for their products. The same thing you can read in every advertisement they have. It is probably good advertisement for the company, but as a reader I found it very boring.

For the successful blogger i chose Caroline Berg Eriksen. He is one of Norways most read blogger and she earns her money with the blog. She first became famous for dating football player in Norway and called her first the Fotballfrue (the football wife). Later on she  started to use her own name instead, to create a brand for herself. Her blog is a lifestyle and fashion blog. It includes post like outfits, food, training, family and travel. I think her blog is so successful because her posts are nice and easy to read. She has a more glamorous life a normal person, but still shows it in a way that everybody likes to read it. She also earns money by modeling and doing host gigs, and she is also studying at the moment, but she started her brand for her blog.  I also personally read her blog and enjoy it.

Wikipedia.. I chose tha brand Ben & Jerry's, because I have a craving for their ice cream at the moment! On their wikipedia site you can find a lot of information, numbers and history of them and probably most of it is true. But if looking for information from wiki, it is always better to just use it as a gate to the real site where you can be sure, that the info is right. Always remember that anybody, for example me, can go and write at wikipedia. Oh god I sounded just like my teachers... :-D

/Nelli

Facebook and Linkeding – networking done easy

I read the learning materials and sight: almost every book I read about facebook is made to the “noobs”. I started using facebook way back. Then the companies were rare and now I follow so many that I have lost my way. One thing that I have noticed thru it all is: if you don’t make good posts no one will notice you. If it’s not inviting to participate no one will. Plus if you keep on posting same thing I will unfollow you!

I took my example from my family: HelsiTar is my aunts business. She uses it to reach her customers and for cheap marketing. She has a lot of pictures where her users wear the products. She has no “models” wearing them but people who are active dog owners who are her target group. She posts her sales, new products on facebook. She uses more pictures than text so that it’s easy to notice. She has gone up and understood that for a small business facebook is good way to meet your customers.

Linkedin is my new hobby.  In business academy we have these things called: “treenit” where we teach each other twice a week about things that we are interested in. I have told about linkedin. I use it regularly but haven’t used it for a job hunt yet. I think I will though, it seems to be easy way to show: I have done this and people can tell that I am good at…  

Linkedin and facebook are good tools if you know how to use them. It is also good to remember who are those people you are writing for and what is their difference. If I see a cat video in linkedin feed I will feel shame.

-Sini O