Last week we saw the Virtuosa team heading to The Venue at Melrose Arch for the Habari Media Facebook Launch. The line-up of speakers included Mike Stopforth a leading local social media expert, Blake Chandlee a fairly important guy at Facebook and Mark Cohen.
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
Among some of the topics discussed were social media and how it is changing the online world, its evolution of discovery, and the Facebook story itself. The interesting bit for me was the evolution of the Facebook ad.
The Facebook advertising strategy has evolved from the common banner and text ad into something much more engaging and informative for advertisers. For them communication in media is changing because the user has changed.
Facebook ads are evolving to drive user engagement and connections just as social media does.
They encourage users to interact and share advertising with engaging ad formats which range from the following:
Facebook campaign formats include:
- Quizzes: Brands can ask questions about your brand or find out what consumers of your product like.
- Contests: Brands can advertise contests and promotions.
- Coupons: Brands can give away free samples to the people that chose to interact with the advert.
- Gifts: People are able to give brands gifts or recieve branded gifts.
- Sign up forms: People can opt in from the ad to receive promotional material and product updates.
- Fan Pages: People can become fans of particular products and brands. These fan pages can then in turn create connections and can be used for PR, Customer Services and Market Research.
- Polling: You can find out what people feel about your product and what they prefer.
This allows the user to engage and interact with the ad allowing a unique dialogue between the brand and the audience as well as share the advertising to others within their social network.
In recent years email newsletters have become one of the most important traditional online marketing strategies used to drive leads and traffic to a company’s website. Ben’s Beautiful Email Newsletters is a website dedicated to publishing creative and innovate company newsletters.
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It is not news that print media such as newspapers have experienced losses due to the growing power of digital publications. With news that the Irish company Independent News & Media (who owns a number of South African news titles such as The Star and Cape Times) might be declaring bankruptcy by Friday, 24 July ‘09, it really takes this concept home.
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Filed Under (Advertising, Industry news) by Michelle Nicholls on May 22, 2009
Again this year we were able to attend Tony Koenderman’s Adreview held on 23 April 2009, and as in previous years the event did not disappoint. Emmanuel Castis as MC, entertainment like that seen at Madame Zingara’s and keynote speaker Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, who left the audience with food for thought. So for those of you missed this event have a look at the photos on flickr and be sure to diarise for next year.
Every time a new report by Hitwise or Nielsen Online is released we continue to see amazing data in terms of Search usage growth and increased interaction with Social Networking tools. These trends should come as no surprise and it could be expected that we will see more astonishing data being released in the few months ahead.
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Although I use to be a buyer of various magazines and enjoyed kicking back with a good read my habits have changed a lot since I spend so much time online these days. There is however one magazine that I do spend my cash on every month which is the Finesse.
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The bright eyed bushy tailed crowd (who apparently rode bikes up a mountain early in the morning of day 2) and the red eyed party bunch (need I say more) gathered for the last day of the symposium. Admittedly, the weather was much better than the day before and after the previous day’s socializing it was almost difficult to concentrate. Read the rest of this entry »
The Panel Discussion – Are we winching?
Okay, so after hearing speeches from Tom Bowman and Matthew Bull, the symposium continued with a panel discussion. The panel discussion was scheduled for 90 minutes and was due to cover several topics. But as you can imagine, with all the heated debate and discussion we were not able to cover everything. Read the rest of this entry »
Most marketers know that December is normally an unpredictable period as the year winds down, and the festive holiday season puts the consumers in a another mind space. This causes consumers to use the internet differently. But how different?
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Day 2 of the Tony Koenderman’s Cracking the Digital Code is upon us and based on feedback from yesterday, it should be a blast!
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