learnthe4ps.com - For students of marketing.

What is that next big thing? Many of today’s trendsetters can be found in high schools. So Jeremy Hobson reporter for the radio program Marketplace visited a New Jersey high school where he interviewed students and a tech teacher. You can listen to the radio story at “The next generation unfriends Facebook” (May 3, 2013). It is 12 minutes long, but worth it. Scroll down for the Audio Extra — a four minute interview with the tech teacher.

While we should be cautious in how we interpret the results of a small convenience sample, there are some quick takeaways that merit attention:

• Facebook is fading in popularity
• Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram are hot
• These kids care about privacy issues — I had not heard that before

What are your favorite apps? websites? social media tools? Are you spending less time on Facebook?

When Cape Town Tourism sought a creative way to increase visits to the South African jewel (see photo to the right), it decided to highlight its “unexpected side.” Cape Town Tourism understands that many of the city’s charms are those “never heard of places” that don’t even make it into the travel guidebooks. They designed a creative Facebook campaign that offered people a “virtual” trip to Cape Town; a trip they could “share” with their friends. Results data from this case study indicate the campaign worked.

What do you think of this campaign? What other products might be sold in this way?

[UPDATE] Last week we made a post, “Does Facebook Advertising Work?” (Learn the 4 Ps, May 17, 2012) with a number of links. One of the links was to a blog post at the Planet Money blog. Well, this morning I listened to the Plant Money podcast “Facebook: Now What?” (May 22, 2012) and it provides a lot more details about advertising on Facebook. So if you would like to understand a bit more about how Facebook advertising works, give this 22 minute podcast a listen.

With Facebook going public this week, there is a lot of talk about whether its advertising works. Since the social network’s valuation is based on an uncertain business model, that is a good question. But we are not here to evaluate the worthiness of the investment in the stock — instead let’s look at whether Facebook ads make sense for marketing managers.

GM offers one answer to that question in “GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Pay Off” (Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2012, non-subscribers click here). A case study reported by NPR found equally dubious results – “Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d It Do?” (Planet Money Blog, May 16, 2012).

To answer the question in the headline, you should recognize the various ways a brand can use Facebook.  Marketers can create a Facebook fan page and invite customers to “like” the page. After liking the page, posts to that page appear in that person’s news feed. The cost to the marketer is to create the page and keep it up — but there is no media cost. There is also no revenue to Facebook, so the firm has developed other types of advertising. In theory and probably some time in the future, Facebook knows so much about users (through elaborate analysis of likes, posts, photos, the user’s network, etc.) that it can target customers.

Do you ever click on Facebook ads? Have you “Liked” any brands?  Do you read brand posts in your news feed?  What messages appeal to you? Why? What can Facebook offer advertisers?

Getting back to the question in the headline — the jury is still out. Time will tell, and the value of Facebook stock will likely follow.

I recently gave a talk at Colorado State University’s Future Visions program titled, “Marketing and Social Media: Creepy or Cool.” As I prepared for my presentation, I was surprised to see that some marketing practices I thought were years away — are being practiced now.

For example, did you know that Facebook apps are gathering data about users and user’s friends? You can read more about this in “Selling You on Facebook” (Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2012). Looking ahead, you can be sure that Facebook and Google are developing techniques for mining many types of data — everything from your “likes,” gender, and political leanings — to your status posts and photo stream. Facebook wants to be able to anticipate your needs — so that it can help marketers address those needs. Yes, that is the reason the company is worth $100 billion.

What do you think of this practice?  Are you concerned about these apps taking your private data — or your friends’ data?  Do you look forward to marketers having this information about you — so they can better serve your needs?

Who is the target market for this Toyota Venza commercial?   What is Toyota’s objective?  Does this ring true to you?  Would it ring true to your parents?

Marketers have always been excited about the idea of turning consumers into powerful Promotion tools for their brands — but fostering word-of-mouth isn’t easy. Now Facebook is hoping they have a strategy that makes it easy for consumers and marketers to work together to promote brands and products we “like” (as in pressing the “Like” button on Facebook).

No one is quite sure where this is going, but many consumers are already clicking the Facebook “Like” button on their favorite brands — or maybe mentioning in a post a recent purchase of the brand. Now it seems that Facebook will mention this ads targeting that customer’s friends. So for example, if I “Like” a brand like Ikea on my Facebook page, an ad could appear on my friends pages that mentions “Joe (and perhaps more of their friends) Likes Ikea.” In theory, knowing that Joe likes Ikea may make the store more appealing to my friends. This short article at Fast Company suggest that Facebook’s sponsored stories work – see “Facebook Sponsored Stories Performing 2 Times Better Than Standard Ads” (July 15, 2011).

What do you think?  Will you be more favorable to a brand if you know that 10 of your friends like it too?  Does it both you that your “Likes” might appear on your friends page as ads?

Or maybe, like most companies, a bit of both?  Facebook’s image has always bounced between good and evil. Privacy advocates have complained about the company. It turned out that most users didn’t much care about privacy. “The Social Network” did not paint a very pretty picture of founder Mark Zuckerberg. Then along comes some positive press — this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek cover story lauds the company’s COO and #2 in “Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg,” (May 12, 2011).  Bad timing for Sandberg — now Facebook is getting bad press for more bad actions “Facebook Admits It Hired PR Firm to Smear Google” (Adweek, May 12, 2011).

Yikes, lots of stuff here. The Sheryl Sandberg story in BusinessWeek provides a neat profile of the COO and gets you up to date on some Facebook initiatives — like advertising and whether the firm should enter China.

Perhaps the more interesting issue is the ethical lapse by both Facebook and its PR firm.  Makes you wonder who came up with the idea.  But if you are a PR firm and Facebook asks for this help — do you comply?  What could you tell Facebook?

As social media began to attract more consumer eyeballs, marketing managers were confused about how to deal with it.  Now some best practices are emerging. Marketing managers have a better idea about which marketing objectives different types of social media might help achieve.  This article, “Are You Talking to Me?” (Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2011, non-subscribers click here) suggests five best practices used by companies with some success in social media. Many of the lessons come from “listening” closely to customers via social media. The early heavy users of social media are listening, learning, and adapting.

What marketing objectives do you see social media working best to achieve?

Branded content ties a brand to some form of entertainment or useful information. It goes beyond sponsorship because typically the content is “found” when customers search online — or it is passed along to friends (think viral ad).  Levi’s offers an example of branded content; it brought rock band Nada Surf live to the Levi’s Facebook page. Levi’s picked up 45,000 new “Likers” with the promotion. As you may know, after a Facebook user indicates they “Like” a brand, the brand’s content appears on the user’s Facebook news feed — and can be seen by the user’s friends. Read about it in “Levi’s Rocks Facebook With Branded Content,” (ClickZ, October 29, 2010)

As a consumer, what do you think of Levi’s efforts?  Is this a way that might win your loyalty?