BEWARE: APP BURNOUT – The struggle is real

Apps burn out. That is just how it is and the struggle for marketers / app developers to keep their customer’s attention is very real. A study by Localytics found that 26% of downloaded apps are opened once and never used again.

Apps tend to have push notifications, emails, and texts to get customers to come back… but you better give them something to come back to!

Apps meant to re-engage in the long run due to their nature:

Apps that are circumstantially driven:

What about apps meant to sell something? Bacardi is a good example of a brand that designed an app to provide value to customers by repeatedly updating content

Non-disparagement Clauses – The YELP bill

“You ruined my wedding and you’re suing me?” $350,000 lawsuit over a bad review said the bride.

$110,000 in fines due to bad reviews on Yelp and DoctorBase against a dentist

“There will be a $500 fine that will be deducted form your deposit for every negative review of Union Street Guest House placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event.”

Disparagement clauses are becoming more and more popular in contracts and online terms and conditions! How did this happen? Customers are signing agreements, online terms & conditions, and contracts giving up their freedom of speech. That fine print that one one really pays attention to. Is this ethical?

Earlier this season, Governor Jerry Brown of California signed law AB2365 aka the Yelp bill. This bill prohibits the use of non-disparagement caluses in consumer contracts. This means that all the crazy stories of companies suing customers for writing a bad review online will never happen again starting January 1st, 2015.

Some may be shocked to hear that non-disparagement clauses exist but more and more companies, from wedding photographers to dentists, are adding these clauses into the fine print of their consumer contracts. In fact, with such clauses, some customers could even be fined for such acts.

I think the popularity of such clauses goes to show how destructive bad reviews online can be and how valuable companies are finding their reputations online.

If you are planning on doing business with California consumers, best check all contracts and online terms and conditions!
Litigation Alert: California Bans Non-Disparagement Clauses in Consumer Contracts
http://www.fenwick.com/Publications/Pages/California-Bans-Non-Disparagement-Clauses-in-Consumer-Contracts.aspx

You ruined my wedding – and you’re suing me?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/you-just-gave-up-your-first-amendment-rights-2014-03-19

we just can’t LET IT GO~

It has been a year and FROZEN is still a big hit! It is everywhere! All my co-workers’ little girls have Elsa’s dress and all of them know the words to the tunes! There’s an Ice Palace at my local mall and you can take a picture with Oolaf! Momentum has only picked up since it’s release in 2013. Disney expects to sell $1 billion in licensed merchandise this year! That’s a huge amount!

There are many reasons for Frozen’s continued success, particularly providing a steady stream of “Frozen” content, starting with the sing-a-long version in January. Disney has been all too secretive about their strategy but emerging media is definitely a part of it.

Social Media: Frozen’s social media presence grew naturally with little buzz stemming from Disney itself. The content and the songs made it easy for everyone to post on Twitter and Facebook. It started there but it grew to much more! There are Youtube and Tumblr posts dedicated to hair and make-up tutorial. #theColdNeverBotheredMeAnyway has appeared repeatedly on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Vine.

Youtube: Clips on Youtube – more than 100 clips were posted including how to create Elsa’s French braids. With the already large number of followers, posting a steady stream of content just lead to more and more views and continuous buzz! “Let It Go” posted by Walt Disney Animation Studios currently have over 382 million views!

What is also most impressive about the Frozen presence on Youtube is that there are hundreds and hundreds of videos of people filming their children singing songs from the film! This was extremely important to the movie’s success for all the buzz made more and more people go to theaters to watch the movie or rent it on DVD. Almost a third of moviegoers who watch a movie promo would purchase a ticket to watch the film – according to Business Insider.

Mobile: Disney has made it easy for consumers by convincing both Apple and Google to share rights to the media giant’s digital content. Consumers who buy the movie from the Apple store or the Play store can watch it on smartphones, tablets, regardless of the operating system.

Now there has been plenty of buzz about how Frozen’s marketing campaign just does not do it justice…thoughts?

What Marketers Should Learn from Disney’s Frozen

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottdavis/2014/01/15/what-marketers-should-learn-from-disneys-frozen/

How Disney Has Managed to keep Frozen Red Hot

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/disney-managed-frozen-red-hot/294757/

“Frozen” Likely to Turn a Billion-Dollar Profit

http://adage.com/article/media/dvds-tv-rights-push-frozen-1-billion-profit/292159/

Kickstarter: Crowdsourcing is ‘IN’

“Crowdsourcing is distributed problem solving. By distributing tasks to a large group of people, you are able to mine collective intelligence, assess quality and process work in parallel.” -Mashable

Crowdsourcing has really caught on these past few years. It may have seen threatening to many ad executives at first but now, at five years old, is a real part of the ad business. And emerging media has made it possible for the many creative people in the world to do what only big organizations could do before.

Have you heard of Kickstarter? A platform that turns people’s dreams into a reality… or it at least gives them an opportunity to. According to Forbes, in less than five years, Kickstarter has been able to get contributors to pledge close to $1 billion to fund the 55,000 projects they have. Crowdfunding through Kickstarter has become an extremely attractive option for first-time entreprenuers and even established businesses.

Below are a few campaigns that were particularly memorable:

The Coolest cooler – the #1 most-funded Kickstarter project of all time. It ran 52 days and was featured on news outlet all over the nation

Another lesson Kickstarter has really shown us is the power of people and the community. Reading Rainbow was a campaign that raised $5,408,916 in just 35 days with a mission of brining literacy to millions of kids.

The power of consumer voices can be heard loud and clear with emerging media!

The Industry has made Peace with Crowdsourcing: http://mashable.com/2014/10/21/the-ad-industry-has-made-peace-with-crowdsourcing/

Interested in Crowdfunding? This article from Forbes includes 7 tips for Kickstarter Success:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/amadoudiallo/2014/01/24/crowdfunding-secrets-7-tips-for-kickstarter-success/

Pinterest

The last post was about an emerging media that had very low commitment and even interaction from individual users. Users can use it to share photos, post and repost, like / promote the photo and they get passed around. It’s a popular form of entertainment. This emerging media is different and really caught my interest these past few years. Imagine you were a teenager again, perhaps back in the 90’s or early 2000’s where we weren’t so heavily reliant on the interwebs because we were still using AOL’s dial up connection. Remember all the magazine subscriptions you would get and seeing neat things and cutting it out or ripping a page to post on your wall? Well that’s what pinterest reminds a lot of people of!

Pinterest is also a photo sharing platform but much different from that of IMGUR. People who pin on pinterest are often creating and up keeping an online collection of photos categorized by an interest. It launched in 2010 and has over 30 billion pins since then! The start up, like many, started right here in San Francisco and despite the fact that it makes little revenue, is still worth $5 billion!! See here for the article that showed up on Business Insider and is also on WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/05/15/pinterest-is-now-valued-at-5-billion-despite-almost-no-revenue/

It really caught on with those interested in creating and organizing their photos and collections. I cannot begin to even share how many of my friends get neat DIY ideas and fun things to do at home from Pinterest. One of my old classmates even sells home made trinkets from Pinterest. Big and small retailers alike tend to have their own boards as well. My Pinterest page consists of 8 boards: one on food, one for christmas, one for favorite quotes, one for pictures that make me “LOL”, one for fashion items, one for favorite marketing ads, etc. Most are repins but some are original pins!

The interesting thing about pinterest is how, like magazines, they are organized by interest hence a huge following. People want to know more about what other people are doing in the fields they are interested in. A visual social network!

In a Forbes article, I read that women basically make up 80% of their users. Just last week, my roommate (the one that wanted to make a pizza quesadilla because she saw it on Imgur), was asked to be a bridesmaid. Shortly after, she was invited to her Bridal board where her bridesmaids and friends were expected to comment and send pins of wedding/Bride related stuff. Do you see why so many people are on it?

Pinterest is steady with it’s popularity and is going up against Instagram and Tiwtter this year. Pinterest has also become a huge interest to marketers. Browsing becomes shopping…Pinterest is also incorporating relevant ads to what people like and are searching for and these ads will allow them to buy these items. More about their rising popularity and advantageous position in marketing here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/10/15/inside-pinterest-the-coming-ad-colossus-that-could-dwarf-twitter-and-facebook/

 

Are any of you guys on Pinterest?

IMGUR

Just last week, my two roommates decided to make a Pizza Quesadilla. My roommates rarely cook let alone make anything out of scratch so it came as a big surprise. When I asked what inspired them, they responded with “we saw it on imgur” – but of course! Imgur.

Imgur is a photo sharing platform that has become more and more popular over the past few years. It has a “gallery” that features images that are extremely popular and popularity is determined by the viewers themselves. My two roommates dedicate half an hour to an hour everyday checking Imgur. “It is the internet’s favorite sharing service for comedy photos and quicky images” and all those on Reddit, Twitter, and Digg use it. It started out as a small project by a computer science student at Ohio University but it grew from thousands of visits a day to millions within five months, surpassing all rivals. Last year they came out with the meme generator and also went mobile, making it on millions of users apple and androids.

The interwebs is changing… just like how we are getting more and more into Instagram and Vine, the once text-heavy internet is now full of images. And Imgur is helping everyone take part in a new social phenomenon!

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/11/imgur-yahoo-image-sharing-reddit

http://imgur.com/faq#what

The Beginning

My name is Shelly and I am a student of West Virginia University’s Integrated Marketing Communications program. I particularly have a strong interest in how new technology and such emerging media really influence our current business and marketing practices. I’m currently based in San Francisco, a city known for being the hub of innovation and technology. I have learned so much living here and am constantly being inspired by the start ups and creativity that surround us. I also travel a bit for my job and am interested in exploring how emerging media changes depending on the market.

My late fall term, IMC619 Emerging Media & The Market, started this week and after our lesson, I noticed more than ever that these new developing media and new technology is everywhere. It surrounds our daily activities and can be a big factor in decision-making. More and more people are spending their time on social media networks, more and more people are creating/posting content on the world wide web, and more and more people are being targeted to purchase certain items based on their past behaviors.

I am currently on a business trip in Tokyo and on my flight here, I watched Chef. The movie is about a Chef who lost his “cool” after a harsh critique. This episode was videoed and went viral, it was even trending on twitter. Soon after, he decided to start a foodtruck business. Well… what does this have to do with emerging media?

First, Social Media is changing the landscape of how we do business: the foodtruck business in the movie FLOURISHED due to twitter and vine and other social media. This business traveled across country from Miami to Los Angeles and just like how real mobile businesses are these days, fans and followers are kept up to date by notifications and tweets of where these businesses will be. Check this link: Food Trucks Share Social Media Secrets http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235455

Second, the difference between growing up with social media and without was highlighted in this movie. The ten year old boy was the main one responsible for driving the social media campaign – he tweeted updates, pictures, vined, etc. He was also the one that helped his dad create a twitter account.

We are really encompassed by so many of the emerging media and it’s extremely important to take note of how these medias are changing our lives and how our businesses and marketing practices must adapt and use it to our advantage.