So you're telling me social media is not free?

There seems to be a misconception with social media being a free advertising or marketing platform because so many people use it on a day to day basis without having to pay a single cent since there are no fees to sign up or continuing to use Facebook, Twitter and the likes. That is true if your intention is purely to socialise with your friends, following your favourite celebs or athletes etc however if you run a company wanting to use social media as a marketing channel, there several other aspects that need to be considered and likely is going to cost you.

Running a marketing campaign is time consuming, and so is running one through social media. Social media needs to be continuously monitored throughout the day so it can pick up on what the positives and negatives potential customers or current customers are saying and respond to the issues as soon as possible before it blows up to another social media mishap.

They need to actively update the content of the social media page or tweets, synchronise what they are promoting with traditional means of advertisement.

BP and Coles became a victims of not monitoring their social media websites and and American Express became a victim not having continuous updated content with the appearance of a hoax Facebook page having more fans because the hoax page has more updated content.

More and more companies are now paying, to advertise in Facebook's advertisement column which may potentially be targeted advertising because of Facebook's database on the users with a whole lot of information (what they like, hobbies, gender, sexual orientation etc).

Sure social media is free to register but there are costs tagging along to maintain the marketing channel.

Where is the dislike button?

Facebook has been using its like button since april of 2010, first on status updates and expanded to photos, comments and shared links. Though there are a lot to like in this world, there are times when people don't agree or 'dislike's' someone else's posts or comments making users wonder, where is the dislike button?
 

So to answer that question, here's my take on part of the reason. Take YouTube for example, first off it's pretty evident that there is a dislike button, there's even a bar showing the amount of likes and dislikes. Secondly, YouTube because of the anonymity of users without videos of themselves, can post a lot of negative or hateful comments without repercussions. On top of that, having a dislike button adds fuel to fire, it insinuates people to harbour negative feelings stronger than a mere dislike. Although people are still able to post negative comments in Facebook, they are identified with a full personal profile making them perhaps more reluctant to do so and without a dislike button, they can perhaps look at things in a more positive manner.

Twitter blunder

Twitter in US is used very frequently with companies promoting and encouraging the usage of Twitter amongst the employees.

A niche company called UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) offers Twitter bonuses of $5000 per category with 3 categories: most followers, biggest increase in percentage of followers and the most creative tweets. In the case of UFC, their employees are fighters who gets paid per showing of an event (usually 3-4 times a year) to compete with another fighter. The fighter's pay begin at $6000 per showing with a win bonus of the same amount and only a handful of the top fighters earn six figure fight money making a bonus of $5000 to be more than enough of an incentive for the employees to get active on the twitter network.
People who have yet to have a twitter account would jump at the opportunity no doubt. The problem with this is there were several tweets that went out of hand with the intention gaining more followers and get creative through generating humour and shock value with their tweets.
Forrest Griffin, a popular UFC fighter tweeted on November 2011

In a sensitive world like today where everything public is expected to be political correct, this has sure to offend a lot of people. The fighter copped a lot of flack and an earful from the boss for the idiocy and however there were no fines from the employer for this misbehaviour.

A month later another fighter Miguel Torres quoting from a sitcom tweeted
“If a rape van was called a surprise van, more women wouldn’t mind going for rides in them. Everyone likes surprises.” which he later changed the word 'rape' to 'windowless'
it was too late, the damage is done, this time the consequences were a lot harsher, an immediate termination of Torres's job.
The treatment of the Torres was felt inconsistent by many also due to that another fighter Rashad Evans, not in twitter but in a public avenue, at a pre-fight press conference 'in the heat of the moment' clearly referenced an incident about a school staff and the act of sexual assault on children and received no formal repercussions.

 The president of the company Dana White retorts "We don’t come out at the UFC with these canned statements that are written by our lawyers. We handled everything on a case-by-case basis with the idea that people are going to make mistakes and it’s how you handle yourself after you make that mistake", and concludes "When you’re getting ready to twitter, or you’re getting ready to say something, think about what you’re going to say. Think about what you’re going to tweet and use a little common sense."

While he did bring up a good point of using common sense which all should, the treatment between fighters has been biased and unfair because there were no official guidelines as to what would happen and what makes one more message tolerable than the other. The two fighters that were safe are a much bigger draw of audience for UFC events meaning more revenue, hence the lesser known fighter was to be made an example of. Since there were no pointers on how to conduct oneself in social network so people will only find out after the damage is done however to their credit till now no one else has been stupid enough to post controversial and/or offensive tweets.

For public companies, they know it is better to prevent problems than to fix, could this have been prevented had there been guidelines or policies?

Fancy 'The Fancy'

For those of you who are familiar with Pinterest, you'd know that it allows users to 'pin' images they find interesting or photos they took onto their pinboards to be organised categorised and shared to people around the world. What if there was a social media network that allows you to purchase the things you pinned on to your image collections, this is where 'The Fancy' comes into play.

Fancy provides a platform where people can browse through categories or random photos, see what they like, 'fancy it' and if they like it enough and at the same time can afford it they can simply purchase it through the fancy website/app itself.

There's the ability to follow other users especially on the people who you think have shared or similar taste with yourself so in the future your customised wall will be filled with photos based on your interests. This emphasizes the peer to peer recommendation which seems to fare better than advertising through the brands themselves.

An incentive to invite friends and convincing them to make purchases within 60 days is that there are credits to be earned when they accept the invitation and make a purchase. Bloggers are also rewarded with 2% of the purchase price on the product to their fancy account when a person buys a product through the 'buy with fancy' button on their blog via a javascript code.

High fashion brands such as Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent have associated themselves with fancy and integrated a 'fancy' button on their site perhaps seeing the e-commerce opportunities with the avenue of fancy the reach to potential customers will be greater than before.

Although it does provide great convenience to people who want to buy products or services that appeals to them, it doesn't always work seamlessly as people would want it to. One of the issue of the system is that unless the poster puts the appropriate web link to the image he/she posts, it'll only take the person to the URL of the image and won't allow them to make a direct purchase through fancy. Another problem is the fact that while one may fancy a lot and frequently, chances are they are likely not to be able to afford all that they fancy especially if they are luxury goods.

Compared to the main social media networks, fancy can be considered not so well known outside of US, however they do have a more than adept board including Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Chris Hughes of Facebook, also a celebrity following including Ashton Kutcher,  Marc Jacobs, Kanye West and Pink, even Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg  has a fancy account with the id 'zuckd'. Recently there's even news that Apple are interested in purchasing fancy. With buzz like this it won't be surprising that fancy will grow in popularity more so currently than previous years, could 'The Fancy' be spearheading a new form of e-commerce?