Social Media Is a Double-edged Sword--final project

I don't know why I can't post my powerpoint on my blog, this is the link to it, sorry about this.
http://www.slideshare.net/sarah-liu/final-project-12507646

social media monitoring of Nike- final report

Nike started its social media activities early. When other companies were still struggling in the technology of Web2.0 world or stay in online picture advertising, nike has already built up consumer brand loyalty though nikeplus.com. Nike launched Nike + five years ago, this technique can track and upload the information of every running exercise of people, and connect running lovers all over the world though the nikeplus.com.

Nike are using more social media to engage and communicate with their consumers, so I used several different tools to monitor Nike in social media like twitter, Facebook and Youtube. I also used websites like IceRocket.com, SocialMention.com, Addictomatic.com, and blogsearch.google.com.

Nike’s website is http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/en_US/. It shows the event they hold recently on the main page by some pictures and several response they got from twitter. On the left site are the links of their products which are divided into different categories for visitors to check easily. The “shop” button links to Nike’s online store.

The website has a friendly page and clear direction. Its design and color are fashion and attractive.

It also has links to nike’s twitter and facebook page, but people can’t leave message on the website itself, there is only a phone number in the customer service section that you can contact to.

Nike’s website is http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/en_US/. It shows the event they hold recently on the main page by some pictures and several response they got from twitter. On the left site are the links of their products which are divided into different categories for visitors to check easily. The “shop” button links to Nike’s online store.

The website has a friendly page and clear direction. Its design and color are fashion and attractive.

It also has links to nike’s twitter and facebook page, but people can’t leave message on the website itself, there is only a phone number in the customer service section that you can contact to.

Nike has several Facebook pages: one main corporate one, and several Nike’s branch like Nike football, Nike women, Nike golf etc. The main pages are well organized and updated frequently. 8,588,043 people likes it. the number I got on Mar. 14^th was8,411,050,so 0.1 million more people are like nike on facebook during half a month, I have to say it’s a big growth.

Nike cooperated search engine giant Google and established asocial networking website Joga.com in 2006 to let the global fans communicate with each other by the Internet.

Joga. com is the world's first website that only can be visited by getting invited, it opened to fans in 140 countries around the world with 14 languages.

However, Joga.com can not be visited now, but it still showed that Nike walk in the front of social media, at least it has the spirit to try.

Recently, after 11 months of negotiations with unions, Nike companies were forced to pay $1 million overtime pay to the workers in a Nike factory in Indonesian. In the early 1990 s, Nike was notorious for open overseas sweatshops and use child labor, and Nike was forced to put forward a series of measures to improve these problems, and some people also praised that Nike was on progress. "Brand reputation management". It seems nike still need more improment.

According to Socialmention.com, from March.14 to Mar.28, Nike had a neutral and positive brand in social media in general.

There are many key words to find nike, to my surprise, I thought the first one would be adidas, but not. However, there are still some of its competitors on the list, like puma. nike appears in many different kinds of social media, it got 14269 mention in different kinds of social media per seconds in mid-March, but the number drop to 824 at the end of March.

Nike finds great value in connecting with businesses of all kinds on social media to:

Share their experiences, both good and not so good. Provide feedback on recent events or launches. Discuss product ideas. Learn about exclusive deals or offers.

No doubt that social media can shorten the distance between companies and their customers, coexist with various marketing and activities, and become the best catalyst.

Nike is successful in social media; I would like to give some suggestion to Nike which I think is just look for a bone in an egg.

1.      nike could use more friendly tone to communicate with their customer. It is not to say they are rude, but I would like they try to use some casual language to talk to people like their friends on social media such as facebook and twitter.

2.      nike need better brand operation and do better itself to avoid things happened in Indonesian.

3.      I think it will be the best if they can classify them into different categories like “our new products”, “how we make it”, or “what do our company do”. That will make people feel more convenient to find the video they want.

4.      Don’t limit your campaign to one social-media outlet

Social media monitoring of Nike -midtern report

The brand I choose to monitor is Nike. Maybe its high-tech method of making shoes makes it become one of favorite brand of athletes. But for me, it is comfortable and fashion, I like it, so I choose to monitor it.

Introduction

I found the introduction of Nike in Wikipedia.

Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded clothing, footwear, sportswear, and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area. It is the world's leading supplier of athletic shoes and apparel and a major manufacturer of sports equipment.

The company was founded on January 25, 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Bill Bowerman and Philip Knight, and officially became Nike, Inc. on May 30, 1978. The company takes its name from Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

Market strategies

Nike markets its products under its own brand, as well as Nike Golf, Nike Pro, Nike+, Air Jordan, Nike Skateboarding, and subsidiaries including Cole Haan, Hurley International, Umbro and Converse. In addition to manufacturing sportswear and equipment, the company operates retail stores under the Niketown name. Nike sponsors many high profile athletes and sports teams around the world, with the highly recognized trademarks of "Just do it" and the Swoosh logo.

Social media monitoring

I used several different tools to monitor Nike in social media like twitter, Facebook and Youtube. I also used websites like IceRocket.com, SocialMention.com, Addictomatic.com, and blogsearch.google.com.

These are the data on 14 March and I will match this to the number of next week and the week after to figure out Nike is growing up or not in the social media world.

When I use socialmention.com to find Nike in blogs, it shows like:

There is no negative result. Most of them are news about Nike’s new product, I think maybe some of the bloggers are cooperating with Nike and add advertising in their blog. I found an interesting blog named Your Company Deserves to Have a Logo, it said:

A logo can be distinctively divided into about three distinct elements, namely pictogram which represents a symbol or icon related to the company, the wordmark which mentions the name of the company and a tagline or baseline which mentions a brief description of the company or product. For example, the brand Nike has a pen stroke representing a check for pictogram with ‘Just Do It’ as the tagline. Considering Nike represents a sportswear brand, the logo reflects its relation to the field of sports.

That shows from some aspects that nike did a good job to create a appropriate logo which easy to be recogonized.

YouTube
Nike has its own YouTube channel and several branch channels like nikefootball, and nikebasketball. Its main channel has uploaded 97 videos. Most of them are introduction to their new products, their research and their company. I think it will be the best if they can classify them into different categories like “our new products”, “how we make it”, or “what do our company do”. That will make people feel more convenient to find the video they want.

Facebook

Nike has several Facebook pages: one main corporate one, and several Nike’s branch like Nike football, Nike women, Nike golf etc. The main pages are well organized and updated frequently. 8,411,050people likes it and 430,249 people talk about it. It updates 1-2 post per day and averagely got 100-300 comment on each post. Most of them are positive.

Twitter

Nike’ twitter has 300809 followers. According to IceRocket.com there are 72 posts that mention Nike per minute. I think that’s a lot.  

Conclusion and Future Monitoring

It seems Nike is one of the top brand in sports world and it stands firmly in the Groundswell.  I will continue monitoring Nike

the groundswell reading refection #3

I have finished reading the book Groundswell this week. The last part of Groundswell talked about how the companies can enhance its internal interactions by embracing the power of Groundswell, in another words, how to nurture and foster an internal Groundswell.

Bernoff and Li use Bell Canada’s case study to tell us that” The internal groundswell is all about creating new ways for people to connect and work together, and to that end, it’s about relationships, not technology.” Many companies still not realize that groundswell is a very hard work, some of them think that social media is as simple as to create a blog. After reading the book I find out that it is difficult to operate a success groundswell for a company, as Bernoff and Li mentioned in the book that “Managing and maintaining successful relationships is the hardest thing in the world to do.” In this chapter, it shows that how social networks can help spark employee communication, how wikis can stoke collaboration, and how idea exchanges can harness innovation. Enhance the internal interactions in company will offer a better working environment for its employees, and the company will benefit eventfully.

The author talked about the future of groundswell in the last chapter. People are no longer locked up from others just because they picked a different social networking service, now, it is a big one, it’s groundswell. No matter what our lives will be, the groundswell is always changing and moving forward. At the end of the book Bernoff and Li taught us the principles of thinking which is very usefull: never forget that the groundswell is about person-to person activity, be a good listener, be patient, be opportunistic, be flexible, be collaborative and be humble.

Look back to the whole book, it provides an overview of what social media is at the beginning, and then it introduce some popular social media tools and how to use them. It also lays out some valuable strategies for getting involved in social media and discusses many of the successes and the pitfalls that a company can go through. As you can see, it covers a lot. I really enjoy this book and truly leant a lot.

Protect your online privacy

When I googled the social network websites like foursquare, many of the article mentioned the dangers of oversharing online, and ask readers that they should consider what they’re sharing before they post it. This remained me that it is important for everyone to pay attention to online reputation management.

However, in this web 2.0 era, how much privacy could we have in social media world?

I enjoy social media very much and benefit from these variety kinds of tools, but the privacy question is a big issue for me. In order to get more followers, we share more of our personal lives and put our privacy away gradually. We may think we’re being careful enough, but the technology in nowadays is able to track our every single move in social media world and record each information we post online. Sometimes we think we just post things to a specific group, but it always has the danger that our secret information will expose to the one you don’t want them to reach, like your supervisor, or your parents. It is inevitable because people passed things from one to another.

What should I do if I want to protect my online privacy?

Firstly, we should check the privacy settings of the sites we use. I was told that "if you don't want it public, don't share it." Always remember that don’t easily put your personal information like phone number, address, id or the pictures of drinking alcohol. Secondly, we should think through who are the potential audiences for our messages before we post them, and pay attention to what others say about us and on our profiles. We could choose to post the information we would like other to know instead of posting all of them. Thirdly, if you are engaging on a website that you don’t want others know, use a pseudonym, it will be safer in this way.

If you are a job seeker, it is not necessary to be too careful and put nothing on your sites just in case that your future employers will find something they don’t like and have a negative impact on you. We all know that employers are dedicating a significant amount of time and resources to find additional information on potential candidates, so why not to take this advantage by create a positive image for you on line. Reputation management is not so hard, we should start from now on.

Social media is ready for crisis management

I have read chapter7-10 in these two weeks. I think I learnt a lot from the case of Dell’s reputation management. It makes me feel that it’s important to engage with the community.

The dell’s case shows us that people use social media for lots of things, but they often use it to express their opinion about a brand or organization, to tell you where things are good and to tell you where things are bad. And to complain. The brand should reply when a factual inaccuracy is being discussed, or when a customer has had a bad experience and is reporting it online. And this case remains me of another real case study I have read before. It happened in Portugal. Ensitel, a well known mobile phone store, tried to shut up a blogger using lawyers. The blogger is an Ensitel's client who bought a broken cell phone which the store refused to refund and, therefore, wrote some posts about it. This blogger was addressed this week by an order from the court to delete these posts and all social media community reacted very negatively to Ensitel action. Ensitel then began to delete all negative comments on its facebook page and, of course, everything got worse. Not happy with this, Ensitel then sent a press release reinforcing the attack to the blogger. We can image what will happen, yes, Ensitel was on all Portuguese newspapers on the next day and a lot of opinion makers were commenting on that. There's also a Facebook Group with thousands of followers named “I Will Never Buy Anything on Ensitel”. This case tells us that you have to monitor what people are saying because they are always talking about your brand.

Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff emphasize that It's all about engagement in groundswell and I think that means companies need to have the tools to listen and engage with social media and react swiftly and appropriately.

When crisis comes, if you already have a clear process for dealing with complaints and discussions about your brand online，that will be the best. You need a blog or online community that on behalf of your brand in social media let people to be up-to-date on what is happening and able to speak openly and truthfully for the brand. Otherwise, you will find it much more difficult to go in when things go wrong and take part in discussions. All in all, what you need to do is to engage first.

Social media is ready for crisis management, what about you?

Google+ vs. Facebook

When I Start a little tired of facebook, my friend introduces me into a new world: Google+, and I fall in love with it Immediately. It is easy to join into google+, because that millions of Google account user could turn it into a Google+ membership.

There are some special functions that I think make me like Google+ more attractive than Facebook to me.

The function which been most talked about of Google + is the circle. This function lets me easy to management the people I pay attention to and share issues. Use circle function, I can send status updates to specific groups. For example, I can create a music circle for friends, so I can only share the music video I just creates in the circles. Instead of friend people on facebook, I can +1 people to my specific circle now.

Another function which been often mentioned of Google + is the video group chat ---Hangouts, it can let 25 users most have video chat at the same time. When the user chat, each conversation object will appear on the small box, the speaker will appear at the top of the big window. Although recently, Facebook and Skype cooperate that video chat will be introduced into Facebook, but it only supports one-on-one conversation.

But I can not abandon facebook easily, I still can share cool links to fun or stupid youtube videos, game sites, or music reviews with their friends. And Facebook is always like a party where all your friends are having little conversations. You can listen to, interact with or ignore anyone you want. In addition, there are some advantages that Facebook has and Google+ can not catch up with in a short time, like the huge database Facebook has. According to the estimate of Facebook, every month their users upload 4 billion of articles, including news story, personal status updates, birthday wishing etc, also uploaded 850 million images and 8 million segments of video. Anyone wants to access these things can only through Facebook, and Facebook treat these information as private data, the vast majority are shielding to Google's search.

However, Google+ is still young, it has great potential. One day it will overtake Fcebook and become the most popular social media.

Social Media in Business

I finished the reading of chapter1-6 of Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff’s Groundswell at yesterday. And I keep thinking about it all the time. I always think I am good at using social media tools and know all the things about them, my friends also treat me as an expert, but now I know I am still in the “kindergarten” stage.

Social media networking become more and more important during these years and everybody starts to use them. In this web2.0 world, online social network can provides us more ways to contact with the extensive social capital. It is a huge resource, which can bring knowledge, opportunities, support, and good reputation to us. It will make us be able to accomplish more trade, get more respect, and even get a better job. And we can show more personal information, all kinds of skills, and can obtain others’ help and attention at the same time.

A lot of people (like me) understand social media on a personal usage level, but not when using it for business. In chapter 1 of Groundswell, the authors discuss the importance of companies joining the social media movement. That is because that social media is no longer for us just talking about what party they we will attend this weekend. Social media has evolved into a new way to talk about you, your company and what you do. The authors introduce different type of technologies of the groundswell and show both how they threaten companies and how we can benefits from them, and also introduce the way to evaluate a social networking.

Believe it or not, social media marketing can help your business. But, it is possible to waste a lot of time, so make sure you have a plan. Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff created a four step planning process called the POST method, witch is the foundation of groundswell thinking. The POST stands for people: I think the customers are the most important part in business, so we should know what your customers are ready for; objective: we should clear our goals; strategy: how do you want relationships with your customers to change? And technology: what applications should you build. To achieve your goals, Charlene Li and Josh Bermoff identified five primary objectives (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing) that companies successfully pursue in the groundswell. I learned the listening and talking part from chapter 5 and 6, that is you should do well communications with your customers online. While social media is free, the big resource it takes up is time — blogging takes a lot longer than Facebook (but blogging has such great return). Twitter takes more time than you think. Even you spend a lot of time on it; you may still get negative feedback. However, you should be open to it. I’d rather know when people weren’t happy so I could fix it in time.

I can’t wait to learn more from my groundswell!

The Power of Weibo

I start to use twitter recently, but I can manage it well easily in very short time. That is because I am familiar with the Chinese vision twitter-Weibo (means microblog).

As you know, we maybe couldn’t use twitter or facebook in China, but we have Chinese vision twitter and facebook, even Chinese youtube and Wikipedia. Taking Chinese facebook- renren as an example, it has the same function and similar page design with facebook, so, like facebook in the states, renren is also very popular in China. However, in recent two or three years in China, weibo is getting more and more popular, and it becomes my favorite too. I can get information about the celebrities I followed, the discount of the makeup product I want, and I still can chat with my friends as on facebook.

At the same time, there are more and more company use weibo in business. I saw a story on weibo which is a good example: One year ago, a CEO of a clothes company released a weibo that anyone who has over 10000 followers repost his weibo about the new product of his company can get an ipad for free. Half a month later, he held another event only change ipad to iphone. He spent about $60000 in a month according to the price of ipad and iphone he sent out, but he and his clothes company's popularity have a significant improvement in the short term, the effect is much better than advertise directly.

I think it is because weibo has several advantages like it can shorten the distance between companies and their customers, it can coexist with various marketing and activities, and become the best catalyst, it can gather your target customers groups, and provide customers for any of your subsequent purpose, and the most important advantage: it is free and everybody use it. It already has 50,000,000 users in china so far, and there are 785 weibo been sent every second.

Use weibo in business especially in marketing also has some limitations. For example, weibo needs to have enough followers to achieve the effect of the transmission, and popularity is the foundation of marketing. So how to effectively increase the number of followers is the first step of weibo marketing. Another limitation is that because the new content produced in weibo goes too fast, so if the information did not notice by followers in time, it may be buried in the vast amount of information.

The weibo marketing in China is still in the early stages of development, it has a lot of aspects need to improve and enhance. Such as the awareness of weibo in China still needs to be improved, and the convenience of registration, use, and the processing of information also need to be further improved.