Mediaboss Marketing

May 23, 2014 Updated May 23, 2014 at 12:28 PM CDT

Duluth, MN (NNCNOW.com) --- Whether it's Facebook or Twitter, the world social media is ever changing... and you've got to be able keep up.

World renowned and local social media experts shared tips and tweets during third annual, daylong Zenith Social Media Conference in Duluth. Industry leaders gave presentations about how to integrate social media into marketing campaigns.

Others talked about how people can use social media to promote themselves. One expert talked about how social media has become a two way conversation between companies and their customers.

So instead of talking directly to them 'hey buy my stuff buy my stuff' lets talk about something we both share. So if I'm trying to sell oranges, instead of saying hey buy oranges, let's talk about all the things we can do with oranges. Let's make orange juice or orange cakes right? It's a different approach to marketing, President of DragonSearch, Rick Dragon, said.

Our very own social media expert Kevin Jacobsen also gave a presentation at the conference about how to use social media to advance an organization or company. More than three hundred people attended the event.

Kati Anderson Kanderson@kbjr.com

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May 24, 2014

Narendra Modi, who will be sworn in as Prime Minister of India on Monday, used Twitter actively during the elections, which his party BJP eventually won. The Malaysian Insider pic, May 24, 2014American social networking company Twitter is planning to replicate parts of its India election strategy across countries that go to polls this year, after it emerged as a key tool for politicians and media companies during the world's largest democratic exercise.

In India, Twitter Inc worked closely with politicians including the victor Narendra Modi who used the platform for election campaigning, and also partnered with mobile and media firms to distribute tweets online and offline.

Now, with polling due in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and the United States later this year, the San Francisco-based company plans to take its India lessons abroad to expand its foothold in the political arena and increase its user base.

"The election more than any other moment provides a nice microcosm of the value Twitter can add ... we are sharing widely the lessons of this Indian election around the world," said Rishi Jaitly, India market director at Twitter.

Last week, the company sent its top political strategist to Brazil to explain the potential of the social network to senators, who are likely to use Twitter's six-second video app Vine for campaigning after it was used by Indian politicians, the company said.

For the US election, the company has started looking for partners to replicate their "Tweet To Remember" feature used in India, which enables users to add the voting date automatically to their mobile calendar using a tweet.

Twitter widely emerged as a political tool first during the 2012 US presidential elections, and then during the Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Today, US President Barack Obama has more than 43 million Twitter followers.

In India, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) embraced the technology ahead of rivals, collaborating with thousands of volunteers to spread the Hindu nationalist leader's message and counter criticism on the web.

It was the country's first major Twitter election, and the novelty of the technology gave an advantage to the politicians who adopted first especially the BJP, said Milan Vaishnav of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

23-May-2014

Contact: Albert Ang press@inderscience.com Inderscience Publishers

Word-of-mouth marketing is recognized as a powerful route from long-tail sales to blockbuster, whether one is talking about the latest fishy ice cream flavor or a Hollywood romantic comedy. In the age of social media and online networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, the potential for spreading the word could mean the difference between consumers seeing a product as the best thing since sliced bread or the most rotten of tomatoes.

Chong Oh, Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA, has analyzed social media measures from the well-known microblogging Twitter and movie box-office data from "boxofficemojo.com". He found that not only does activity on Twitter, which is a surrogate for, or the online equivalent of actual word-of-mouth chatter, has a direct positive effect on how many people go to see a particular movie. Not surprising given its quarter of a billion global users. Moreover, he also demonstrated on the basis of this analysis that studio-generated content and online engagement with the putative audience has an indirect effect. His research is published in the International Journal of Information Systems and Change Management.

Fundamentally, Oh's research shows that: "The more a movie studio is willing to engage with its followers via social media the more likely it is to have a higher WOM volume. This subsequently increases the likelihood of having a higher opening-weekend box office performance."

Oh cites two very different outcomes with respect to two well-known movies. The first, John Carter, is a science fiction thriller released in 2012, that lost the studio $200 million and led to the resignation of its president. By contrast, Paranormal Activity, a low-budget movie from 2009 shot in a week on a $15,000 budget grossed $107 million at the box office. These, of course, are stark outliers, there are many more, and most movies lie somewhere between these two extremes. For the marketing department ensuring that their next movie is a Paranormal rather than a Carter is partly, according to Oh, now down to online word-of-mouth.

Simply having a presence (or profile) on social media is not sufficient. "The key activity of sending outgoing tweets in the seven days leading up to the release weekend was a good indicator that correlated to word-of-mouth volume buzz about the movie," Oh reports. He has some advice for movie marketers based on the findings from this research. "Social media represent an opportunity to reach an audience and establish relationships at a personal level that traditional advertising is not capable of achieving," he explains. "Incentives to encourage more interactions such as competition or tweets from the movie's cast members should go hand-in-hand with other advertisements to pump up word-of-mouth. He also suggests the same approach to social marketing might have a similar impact in other areas, such as music sales.

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Oh, C. (2013) 'Customer engagement, word-of-mouth and box office: the case of movie tweets', Int. J. Information Systems and Change Management, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.338.

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