Notes from week-long class on social media and internet marketing. Meant for other participants of this class.

1. Day 1<br />Slideshare is a social media platform for PowerPoint’s and slideshows. Poplabs is a consulting company that uses slideshare to advertise their services. They create PowerPoint’s on general topics that others can use and view.<br />Watched various YouTube videos:<br />Social media revolution (socialnomics) 2011<br />History of social media<br />Markets are conversations – Cluetrain Manifesto<br />Social media in plain English (how is social media applicable in business?)<br />Oreilly.com – what is web 2.0 vs. 1.0<br />Spoke a little about Stumbleupon and Digg. The question of social bookmarking.<br />Double click: Google owns it. It is focused advertising. The new version is Google adsense.<br />Assignments<br />Group 1: What are social media trends? Look on YouTube, find more samples and media statistics concerning the social media. Is it interesting to add comments, impressions or star ratings to movies/social media/etc.<br />Group 2: What is the Cluetrain manifesto? Any interesting videos or links to share?<br />Group 3: Wikipedia – how do universities represent themselves on this media? How can the University of Liechtenstein improve their wiki page?<br />Group 4: Same as group 3<br />Group 5: What is Stumbleupon? How do we use it? What are its features? Share the most important parts with us.<br />Group 6: What is Web 1.0? Web 2.0? Explain the shift, and what it means.Day 2<br />Started with presentations from the 6 groups. Covered trends & statistics in social media, the Cluetrain Manifesto (“markets are conversations”), representation of universities on Wikipedia, introduction to Stumbleupon, and a comparison between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.<br />~ Coffee Break ~<br />Viewed a YouTube video. Discussed Facebook, Company Pages, Zynga<br />Facebook has own page. They have so many followers (people who “like” their page) that they do not have to put much effort into their marketing.<br />Zynga: game tycoon within Facebook. Major brands pay thousands just to have a virtual advertisement within one of the Zynga games. There is a lot of money to be earned in this market/game(s).<br />How can companies create their own apps and engage the Facebook users?<br />Click stream behavior – customers can be tracked/observed while shopping online. It is an interesting way to determine customer behavior. Some research includes giving participants a certain amount of money to spend (e.g. 150$), and then they go through a normal shopping experience and speak aloud about their decision process. They were not required to spend the entire amount. Some even left the store without making any purchases. (Research was done in 1979)<br />PowerPoint 1: Consumer behavior on Facebook (from cmb Chadwick Martin Bailey, Social Media Quickstarter)<br />PowerPoint 2: Facebook Pages 101 (from Social Intent)<br />How do we market on Facebook (or Twitter, …)? We will dig deeper into this.<br />YouTube video from technoshrink on marketing on social media site Facebook. Pages are for companies and businesses. It gives a lot of information in a compact 7 minute video.<br />Applications represent a custom functionality that can be added to a page. A game is an example of how you can increase your brand awareness. E.g. Clorox (bleach product) company created a game where the user had to bring certain types of clothing in the same basket. When the user obtained a certain amount of points on this game (took a long time) then they could receive a discount on the product.<br />Newsfeed – you can receive information on the company’s activities. Good way to inform your customers.<br />An add / social add can be targeted to a certain demographic. Facebook knows an enormous amount about their users. Advertising can be targeted to such a precise level (e.g. they know what instrument you play, what sports teams to like, where you went to school, where you work, …).<br />Social Graph is a concept that was mentioned yesterday in the Mark Zuckerberg interview video. How is A connected to B? B to C? A to C? How is the network put together? This is the social graph. Do people in this network communicate via messages, do they upload pictures and tag each other, or do they share videos with each other? This social graph is a powerful concept. When you log in to Stumbleupon with your Facebook login (or even if you use another login name, it still can compare email addresses and connect your various accounts across the internet) they can gather more information about your movements and actions online. Your Facebook friends are also dragged into this new dimension – you can click on a button where you find friends who are using the same services. You are slowly giving up more and more of your privacy. Watched a video about a Google employee working on a new project related to social graphing.<br />~ Lunch ~<br />The web has become a personal experience. If you conduct a lot of shopping online, it will begin to realize what your preferences are. It will adapt to your preferences and show you advertisements that fit your needs and likes. It uses algorithms. We will not go into further detail on these algorithms – that’s for engineers and programmers. They apply filters etc.<br />Is filtering good? Filtering makes it so that you get messages and advertisements that are closer to your preferences. Danger: only hear what you want to hear. Do not get new ideas or new topics. E.g. only getting technology news, and nothing about animals. Could lose your sensitivity to animals (or your knowledge thereof). Interesting video. Google and Facebook can personally tailor your query results. There is no longer any standard, everyone’s search results are different. Is this a positive advancement? More and more sights are starting to use personalization. Even if you are not logged into a site, it can create filters and tailor your view.<br />Top Prospect: Company that tries to connect “great people with great jobs”. Friends give each other referrals via Top Prospect. If the friend is hired, then the friend who referred gets a share of the money as a reward. Interesting concept of bringing the job search and recommendation together with social media. It’s about having the right connections to support you in your job search.<br />In the Door: another company that works with job searches. It analyzes your Facebook friends list and their connections with the working environment. If there are openings in the companies your friends work for, these will become visible for you and you can apply, and get recommendations from friends. Basically notifies you of where there are job openings in your network.<br />How can you use Facebook ads? We watched a video concerning this topic. There are two different types of ads. The first is the Facebook page ad. You appear on select persons pages based on the individuals profile. E.g. you want to reach people who claim that they like dogs.<br />Facebook ads keyword tool video. This company has created an app (Cash Keywords Pro) to then further help you use keywords in placing your advertisements. You have to look at various synonyms e.g. gardening, flowers, … different people will enter different keywords when actually looking/searching for the same result. When placing an ad you have to take this into account and not just place one keyword e.g. garden. You will not reach as large an audience and your campaign will be less successful if you ignore this extra knowledge. The Google Addwords (?) system is also something to check out.<br />Another example was given, this time of social ads. A further explanation (rather long and dry, also in a somewhat annoying robotic voice) of this tool was shown in another video.<br />~ Coffee Break ~<br />Introducing sponsored stories is a video that we viewed. It shows how companies can help increase word of mouth. E.g. When someone checks in at Starbucks this could show up in their profile. A link to the Starbucks website, Facebook page, etc. could be added to this post so as to make it easier for friends of this person to see advertisement about this company. An explanatory video on how to do this was also shown.<br />Assignments<br />Group 6: Look at Facebook users, what kind of companies would like to market on Facebook. Implication of user demographics on marketing. Men, women, age, etc. What is of interest to marketers and companies?<br />Group 5: Show, form your own point of view, interesting brands. How can brands increase the amount of involvement from users? How can corporations increase the conversation with their customers, or even increase their customer base?<br />Group 4: Look at the area of social graphs in the context of Facebook marketing. Find something interesting to share. You can talk about privacy issues, marketing issues, …<br />Group 3: How can the Facebook ad be improved? Are there any special techniques that can be employed?<br />Group 2: Find additional information about social ads. Look for campaigns, methods, underlying plans, demo, …<br />Group 1:<br />