Hoot Suite-Real Time Marketing

One of the GREAT features of Hoot Suite is how easy it is to perform real time marketing. What is real time marketing you ask? Real-time marketing is marketing performed rapidly to respond to a person at a certain time and place. The most important word to remember here is “time” if you do not have quick enough timing, it looses its effect. An example of the real-time marketing was during the Super Bowl when Oreo took advantage of the black out that occurred  If they had tweeted about that 3 weeks after the incident, it would not have been as effective.

 

Moving on, lets talk about how this relates to Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite, brings up all of your platforms one website, so that you can monitor all of them at once. Yes, this may seem overwhelming but could make or break your business. How you ask? Without Hoot Suite, you are monitoring all of the websites separately. So what happens when you are on Facebook messaging someone, and meanwhile someone else is tweeting you a very important question. It might be minuets or even hours before you have time to switch back over to Twitter. What does this mean? You just lost out on your chance for real-time marketing, and potently insulted a customer by not tweeting them back in a timely fashion. Hoot Suite makes it possible to balance everything at once, with just the click of a button.

Hoot Suite-In the Future

When I first heard of the name, I thought of the movie Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, when they invited the candy called “toot sweets.” Although I am not as in LOVE with Hoot Suite as I am Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, I do think it has a lot to offer. One of the most interesting things that I like to point out, is the fact that not that many people are certified in the program. When we were first given this assignment  I figured that their would be hundreds of people in Louisville that were familiar with the program. To the contrary, I found out when I got online that not many people know the program at all. This gives college students such as myself, a great edge for finding jobs in the future. When going into an interview, I could bring up that I am certified in the program. If the employer was unfamiliar with program, with a little bit of pre-interview research, I could explain to them what it was and how to use it in their line of work. Not only could I teach them about it, but I could teach others how to be certified in the program as well. As we learned from the lessons, the more people you have in your company knowledgeable about social media practices  the better off you will be. In the future, I hope to continue to use this program, and stay updated with program. A great thing about this program is that you can go back and take the tests over and over again, so if you need to brush up on your facts, you can! 

Gamification

As I have said before, I love info-graphics. BUT,I feel like I have used way to many of them recently. (If that’s possible) I don’t want people to get bored with them. Instead this week, I used this bathroom visual. Which I must say, I really love. This blog is about Gamification. Gamification is the process of using games in  a non-game context to engage users and solve problems. In the picture above, I showed an example of toilet paper as a game board. This is considered Gamification because it is taking something like going to the bathroom and making it into a game. Sure this is fun, but what does this have to do with anything? Making things that are not normally fun into something fun can REALLY motivate people. Motivated people are what marketers wants, with the use of games, we can get people to market for us, or at least expose them to our marketing. An example I can think of happened to me when I was a kid. There was a website with free games that linked to me one that was all about honey comb cereal. Nowhere in the game did it just come out and say eat honeycomb cereal but, after playing it I really wanted some. The whole game was you running around and dodging things, not a hard concept, but the visuals were amazing. You would hop on honey comb pieces, swim through milk, or dive into honey. I am just getting hungry thinking about it. The next smart thing they did was ask you to advertise a little for them. At the end of each round they would have the “Share with a friend” button, for extra coins. If I was behind in the game, you best believe I would send it to all my friends. Gamification is a great way for business to get out there, and let’s their customers have fun doing so.

Passport Problems!

It’s that time of week again when I write a blog about what ever I want. Many people use blogs to share about what is going on with them, or things they need to vent about. Up until this point I have refrained from doing so, but I just have a lot going on here lately. Most people who are close to me know that I am a positive person, but I do have high anxiety levels. Last Thursday night, I parked at the blue lot on campus because I needed to get something out of my sorority suite. I parked there 10 minuets before it was time for anyone to park there, thinking I could sneak back and be gone before anyone noticed. Needless to say, I earned myself a big $30 ticket. Annoyed, I went home a paid it. Friday afternoon I got out of class and went to work til 9. I wanted to go home (3 hours from here) but I needed to work Saturday to make some extra money to pay for the ticket I just earned. I worked all day Saturday, until I finally got off. I was so eager to get home and see my family for Easter. I knew dinner was waiting for me on the table. Eager beaver me got a speeding ticket on the way home. Yes, there goes another $180 that I didn’t have, and I just defeated the whole point of staying in Louisville to work. I told myself not to worry about it, and that I have a month to pay it off. Once I got home, the rest of my weekend went pretty smoothly until Sunday night.

To preface this situation, I have been invited to go to Canada for a fraternity formal. I am so excited about getting to go, I have never been to Canada, and my date is going to be super fun. This is not my first time traveling outside of the country, I went to London a few years back. My dad on the other hand, goes to Canada every year to hunt, so he knows the in’s and out’s of traveling outside of the country, passports, and what not. Do you know where this story is going? Well, I asked my dad about a month back when I was first asked to go, when passports expire. “OH EVERY TEN YEARS OR SO,” he said. I was good to go. Not thinking about it twice, I didn’t think about my passport again until I came home to retrieve it. My mom carefully put the code in the safe, and got it out. “It’s expired.” I laughed out loud. Nice joke, I thought to myself, but she wasn’t lying. It turns out that I got the passport a month before I turned 16, so I was considered underage. It had expired a year ago. I am leaving for Canada next Friday. I didn’t have time to get it, what was I going to do??? I got online and found a website for expediting passports. It wasn’t directly through the US government, so I was a little worried. Luckily, my mom helped me to pay for this one, and I started the process of getting all of my paperwork together. I frantically drove back to Louisville at 5am on Monday morning so that I could get all my pictures and documents together to send them off.

Tuesday afternoon, I finally got everything together, and was ready to take it to the post office to be sealed. I finally felt a sense of relief…I then called the post office to tell them I was coming. Because I had gone through this process before, I knew that all they had to do was watch me sign off the document and seal it. The first post office said they only took appointments and that they were booked  until April 30th. It turns out ALL 20 POST OFFICES in Louisville that I called were booked up. I finally found a place that took walk in appointments…an hour and a half away in a small town. I hoped in the car and drove there as fast as I could. The lady couldn’t have been more helpful. She made me feel a little better about the fact I had to take three hours out of my dad and $20 worth of gas to get this done. So, after a very crazy first part of my week, it is in the mail and out of my hands. Let’s hope and pray it gets here in time. 🙂

Communications Blog #9 Blogging

Well ,it has been a semester of blogging for two of my classes. How am I feeling about it? It’s 2:29 in the morning and I am writing all my blogs due for the weekend so that I can watch my CARDS play in Atlanta, so maybe this isn’t the best time to ask me. I am blogged out. In all seriousness, I think that after this semester I have new feelings about blogs both positive and negative. There are many positive things that I enjoy looking at and reading. Therefore, I do see the importance of this assignment in teaching us how to write our own. I however, would like it better if I could just write freely without a topic assigned to us. Again, I understand that we are given one for the class so that we don’t go off on crazy topics, I just think it would be more enjoyable. Most of the blogs that I enjoy reading are where a person is passionate about a certain topic, so their blog only focuses on that. I think that it would be hard for me to come up with one thing to constantly write about. Before this class and my social media class, I didn’t blog because I didn’t feel that I had anything important enough that the rest of the world would want to know about it. I like recipes and sharing them, but 10000000 other people do to, so I just felt that I had nothing that set me apart to make people want to look at mine. After this class, I realized this is a really crappy attitude to have, especially with the field of work I want to go into with social media. The social media field is constantly changing and you have to find what sets you apart from those thousands of other people. Not trying at all is not an option. Its the same thing with when I graduate, thousands of other people will too with my degree, so I better come up with something creative that sets me apart. After these classes, I am not as discouraged. I am sure at first, I won’t have many followers in whatever subject I choose to write about, but I do know I have family and friends. It just starts with a few people. Just like the article we had to read for this blog. It only takes one comment to spark someone’s interests to make it go viral. 

I think that blogging has an important part in our society to get all types of perspectives. Today, we are living in a society where our news sources are more biased than ever before. It is nice to get different people’s thoughts all on your own at the click of a button. The issue comes up with this is when people don’t remember these are mainly thoughts and opinions not always facts. People think that just because its on the internet that it is true. Here is my favorite commercial to illustrate my point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmx4twCK3_I

This seems so silly, and still people trust things that they read online. I think that people will continue to blog because it is a great marketing tool and companies expect you to be able to execute this tool. As we continue to use this as a society, we will continue to have situations where people lie, or claim to know the facts. It is important that we educate our society on this issue so that they are aware. People need to learn to take things with a grain of salt. With this being said, if were were to take away or limit what people could write, then we are taking away the whole point of a blog, individuals sharing their thoughts and  emotions. 

Social Entertainment

According to Wikipedia, Online social entertainment “blends entertaining interactive functionality and content including live video streaming, video chat communications, multi-player gaming, music and videos streaming, with social networking services such as social graph management, forums, reviews, ratings, and geo-location options.” This seemed a little too wordy for me, so I looked more in formation in our book. Social entertainment includes games, music and art. Now more than ever, these things impact our life. Besides em 

Email is the reason that I get online, and Social Entertainment is the reason that I stay. I am not the only one that works like this. Marketing people know what keeps people online. This is why Social Entertainment is such a huge industry. As we all know, I love info-graphics, what did I did without them? The one that I find to be most interesting is the music statistic that says in 2010 music was a 168 billion dollar industry! Think of of the music apps you can purchase for your phone these days. Pandora, Spotify, etc. What is even more interesting to think about is how ads are thrown into the mix of these. Not only do you have audio ads between songs but visual ads and banners on the side of the pages. The last thing I wanted to talk about was how many Americans are playing video games. Now more than ever, when I am in a line somewhere or stuck in traffic, I am playing a video game. No wonder that advertisers have gone into this business too. Look forward to more on the topic of gamification in next weeks blog 🙂

Frozen Toes

Every time that I have to write the blog about whatever I want, I always struggle to figure out what I want to write about. Talking for me is not a problem, all my friends know me as the great story tell because no matter what the situation I have a story that can relate to it. So, when it came time to this weeks blog, I thought I would tell a story that happened to me once.  I am not sure what made me think of it in particular, except for maybe the fact I am sitting here freezing in the library, the story goes like this…

It was my freshman year in college on a cold December night. I was getting ready to go to one of my first fraternity socials and I could not be more excited. I brushed my teeth and hair, put on my favorite lip gloss and I was ready to go. I went over to my closet to slip on my favorite fuzzy black boots only to find that one of them had a hole in the bottom where I had worn them so many times. It was so cold outside and I didn’t have any other shoes that matched, so I slipped them on and went on my way.

Shortly after getting to the suite, the boys came to pick us up. All of them held up their fingers to show how many people they could fit in their car. Soon everyone had a ride but me. I could see one fellow holding up 1 finger, but I was worried to go all by myself. I told myself to suck it up and that I did. I walked up and introduced myself to him and then we walked to his car. When he originally put one finger up, I pegged him for the type to be driving an S-10 pick-up truck or something like that, boy was I wrong. We walked out to the parking lot where I found he was driving a 2010 convertible BMW. After getting into the car, he grabbed his coat and moved it out of my seat. I could see that the tag said “Brooks Brothers” and he had on a Versace watch. I was out of my element, and all I could think about were my holey Target boots. I tried not to think about it, and struck up a conversation.

Before I knew it we were there, the soccer stadium. My heart sunk. We were going to be watching a soccer game out in the freezing weather. I got out of the car and went and found a standing spot in the fence line to watch the game. Things weren’t bad until it started to snow. Not just a light dusting, a heavy snow that was sticking to the ground. Soon the snow piled up around my feet and a puddle began to form. I was in trouble. I could feel my boot soaking up the ice cold water like a sponge. My entire foot was soaked. I didn’t want to tell my date because I was so embarrassed so instead, I decided to sit there and just ignore the tingling feeling in my foot.

An hour passed and tears began to fill my eyes, my toes had gone from being in severe pain to the point I couldn’t even feel them at all. I had to do something. Luckily, my dorm was just a few blocks over. I told my date I was going to go grab us some scarves, grabbed my best friend and limped away as fast as I could to my dorm room. After what seemed like miles, I was in the elevator of my dorm, I reached down to pull off my soaking wet boot and sock, what I saw horrified me.

Looking down all I could see were that my toes were black. Not red or purple black. I was shocked, what was I going to do. I ran in my room and fell on the floor. My room mate started to google “home remedies for frost bite. I started sobbing “I don’t want to loose my toe” I said. My friend told me she was going to take me to the ER. Panicking, I crawled over to my nail polish box and started to paint my toes nails “I don’t want them to look bad for the doctor.” I yelled. Quickly, my friend ran over grabbed the nail polish remover from my drawer and grabbed a cotton ball to get the polish off. What were we thinking, here my toe was black and all I was worried about was how presentable my toes looked. Luckily, our craziness  saved me a trip to the ER. As she rubbed the nail polish off, my toes returned to their normal color as well. Turns out, the dye from the boot had turned my toes black.

What a feeling of relief, followed by one of the hardest laughs I have ever had in my life. Moral of this story, don’t worry so much about what people think of you, or you could loose your toes over it. 😉

Comm #8 Privacy

When it comes to privacy on the internet, I feel that the two words don’t go together at all . When you think about it though,I feel like its common since,  why do people act so shocked when they have a privacy breach with their information when they are the ones who uploaded it on the internet in the first place. I guess that this is a strange way to compare it but I think about it like telling a secret or being abstinent. If you don’t want anyone to know a secret, don’t tell anyone. The more people you tell, the more potential there is for other people to find out. Or, don’t want too have a baby, then stay abstinent. Sure there is birth control but  its not 100%, JUST as setting your privacy settings online is not 100% sure your information is not going to be seen by those you don’t want it to be seen by. You take the risk of your information getting linked the second you hit the upload button. Solution? Start monitoring what you are uploading to others. As you know, I love infographics, and I was in luck when I found the one bellow to help explain the state of our online social media privacy.

In order to keep track of all I am doing online, I always write down what websites I have given my information to. I also set up privacy settings on all of them to keep my information as private as possible. With this is mind, I still know that what I secretly message to my friends has the potential to get out. Sure, I might make fun of some girls hair or something silly like that, but I would never talk about life changing events that could ruin my life if they were revealed online. When it comes to tweeting and changing my Facebook status, I always think about who is reading it and what I am posting. I would never want to reveal my information about me going on vacation, purchases I have made, my political views, or rarely just my opinion in general. I even don’t type my home address in my GPS, in-case someone breaks into my car. One time I had a drivers ed class and the teacher told me something that has really stuck with me. He said when you make choices in life “make sure you play the what if game” What he meant by this is that if you play out possible problems in your head and how you would solve them, then you would know what to do if the situation actually happens. Not only does this work in the driving world, but in social media to. Prepare yourself for any situation that might happen.

In closing, we as internet users should be concerned with this issue and the problems that can come from this is the future. As I said above, you can keep your privacy settings on, but they are still going to get to your information. The example you used in class was when the dad found out his daughter was pregnant through the baby Target ads he was receiving  I am sure that this girl didn’t  just post on a site that she was pregnant, she simply had her purchases tracked online. This is not scary to me because I am aware of this, but MANY internet users are not. I think we need to do a better job as a society to inform them. What will it take? Government regulation that is not there. When you think about it, why would they want to intervene. This information is helping them solve murders and crimes, when the only thing its doing to us is embarrassing individuals by showing our deepest secrets. Who knows what will happen in the future.

Comm Blog

Video games have had both positive and negative effects on society today. One aspect we can talk about is the effect video games have had on our military. A positive effect this has had on the military on is training. Because of video games, the military can now use video games to get an idea of what it will be like to be on the battle field. They provide a virtual reality for them where they can practice different military actions. This also can be looked at in a negative effect because when they do get on the battle field, they still think they are just pushing a button when in reality they are actually taking someones life. This brings me to the next point which is the effect on children. Again this can be viewed as a positive or negative effects. One negative effect that video games have on children is how violent that video games teach children to be. It may be true that there are other effects that cause violence in children as well, but we can all be sure that it has some effects on them. Many children spend many hours a day playing games where you run over, shoot, or blow up people. Video games get a bad wrap, but we forget one of the main positive effects of video games which is education. Video games have helped to educate people on all kinds of different subjects in fun ways. It might be a new language, math, or history. No matter what the subject, you can always seem to find a video game to help you out. This brings me to my next point, how video games have effected my life. Because my mother is a teacher, she only allowed me to have educational games when I was a child. I never was one to play racing games or sports games. I always played School House games or Jump Start whatever grade. As I grew up, I lived out in the county so I never really played video games, I was outside more. When I got into high school, I did get some video game systems but only because I liked my friends. I was also the last one to get them in all my groups of friends. I would play them for awhile, but I was so busy with school and after school activities, I never had the chance to play for long periods of time. I have been the same ever since. I think it also has a big difference in genders. Most girls I know are not into video games, boys however love them, and find them as a way to bond with their friends. The theory that I want to talk about in this blog is the long tail theory. 

The Long Tail Theory talks about how there are more video games than ever before. This theory states that “our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits at the headend of the demand curve and towards a huge number of niches in the tale.” This may seem a bit complicated but what this is saying that now, people might not want the most popular game how of days, they want the specific game they want, when they want it. This relates to video games now more than ever because marketers are aware of this theory and are making efforts to fix it. You can download video games off the internet strait into your game console. Its also the games the you specifically searched for instead of those that are made available to you at the store. Video games have influences everyone’s life in some way or another, and it will be interesting to see what they do for us in the future.  

Sports & Social Media

As you can see from my past few blogs, I am getting a little infographic crazy. They are just so useful at sharing information, I could type out everything out above, but why would I when you can get it in a visual. We have been learning in class how important that social media is for sports. One aspect of this is how fans stay connected with people they are fans of. When you follow someone on Twitter, it makes you feel like you are close to them, and know what is going on in their lives. This is why many people follow sports stars, this way they can keep up with what is going on with them. Also, as we learned in class, sports journalist are using this tool now more than ever. This is a great thing for fans who want to keep track of what is going on in their favorite sports. Why would you flip on the local radio to lean about the sport when you could follow a journalist who tweets out live action as it is happening. I also found the fact above about 83% of people check social media while the game is on to be interesting. I love “second screen viewing” during big sporting events. You might not be at the game interacting with fans, but you can from your couch. An example of this for me was at the Sugar Bowl this year. I couldn’t be there because I had a family function I had to go to, but I still felt that I was there because of twitter. It is clear social media effects everything these days including sports, and will continue to in the future!