Hazel House Marketing 2.0

Yet another shift in social media marketing is among us with the increasing popularity of viral videos. If you’re trying to stay ahead of the curve, you should at least have a YouTube channel. Check out Vimeo as well. It’s a new video website, like YouTube, but with more stats. Once you have a channel, start uploading your videos. From there, embed them into your blog and share them with your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and everyone else in your digital network. If they are as catchy as this one, they could go “viral!”

By: Rebecca Butler

Social media has put a new spin on how politicians connect with their constituents.  This was evident in the 2008 presidential election with Obama’s use of the internet as a campaigning tool and his supporters using “meet ups” as a means of fund raising. Technologies such as Facebook and YouTube have granted a new opportunity for candidates to be viewed as more personable and for them to directly contact a wider audience base.

This trend is evident in our upcoming elections; Travis Childers and Alan Nunnelee, both Mississippi congressional electoral candidates, are both Facebook users.  Childers has a “government official” profile on Facebook, while Nunnelee has a “personal” profile and an “fan page” titled, Elect Alan Nunnelee. Personal profiles allow a candidate to show a more personal and relatable side of themselves and break down the preconceived “politician” notions the general public may have of them.  Through Facebook Fan Pages, voters have a forum to “like” and communicate with one another about candidates and issues.  Although Childers has neither a fan page, nor a personal profile on Facebook, his government official profile has far greater supporters and activity than Nunnelee’s profiles combined. Nonetheless, Facebook users are quick to show their appreciation to politicians who serve as legitimate sources for electoral news on social media.

Youtube has also become a tool in political campaigns, type in a candidates name and you will get dozens of videos and clips of them.  This has the greatest potential to do damage to a politicians career, any slip they make can be video taped, uploaded, and go viral in minutes.  Politicians must be extremely mindful of how they handle their public interactions.  YouTube is not one big smear campaign though, both of our congressional candidates have taken advantage of it and created their own channels, this provides a platform to upload positive videos. Nunnelee’s channel has 11 videos and 16 subscribers, while Childers’ channel hosts 14 videos and 40 subscribers.  YouTube has provided a good place for new voters to research and see the positive and negative views alongside each other and communicate with other voters via the comment section.

It will be interesting to see how the campaigns for next year’s election will go with the ever increasing popularity of social medias like twitter.  Candidate Alan Nunnelee has already jumped on this bandwagon and has over 400 twitter followers.  It seems candidates will be elected based on their whole persona rather than just their platforms in the future.  With such easy access to electoral information, it should be no problem for voters to make an informed Election Day decision. Social media platforms are too young at this point to determine their effects on the election process but it seems politicians and voters alike have really embraced the concept.

Sources:

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/pages/single/travis-w-childers-for-congress/10306727353/
http://www.sunherald.com/2010/10/28/2593361/childers-nunnelee-in-tight-congressional.html
http://www.politicsdaily.com/tag/mississippi%20elections/?sem=1&ncid=searchnew00000004
http://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-huckabee/mississippi-vote-alan-nunnelee-for-congress-today/395998323615
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Congressman-Travis-W-Childers/206217375056?ref=ts

Truth is, we’re not so sure about current Twitter figures like the size of their user base and other details about their overall demographic, but we’re willing to bet that practically everyone with access to the Internet and have established their identities online have set roots on the microblogging service. We can thank celebrities like Oprah Winfrey , Ashton Kutcher and Wil Wheaton among many others for bringing Twitter to the mainstream.

Naturally, where people flock in huge numbers, marketers and advertisers are sure to follow.

Anyone can easily sign up and start tweeting; after all, once set up, all you need to do is summarize your thoughts in neat 140 characters and then send them adrift to the Twittersphere. But there are a few extra steps to optimize Twitter for brands intending to use it to reach and engage with their followers. Here are some of them.

Twitter Profile/s

Nowadays, it’s common to find brands represented on Twitter, but one may not be enough to satisfy your client base and your overall marketing strategy. For instance, Whole Foods has over 150 Twitter accounts under its belt. Naturally, they’ve delegated a @WholeFoods profile to represent the entire company. But to further lay specialized focus on their customers per location, they’ve also created Twitter accounts per individual branch in every state in the US and Canada. This allowed them to address customer service issues in real-time and actually engage with people within their different locations.
Aside from these, the company also has three accounts for the store’s larger areas of gastronomic specialties; their wide variety of gourmet cheese , their selection of wine and beer products, and a tweet for sending recipes .

Profile Settings

When creating a Twitter account intended for social media marketing, never forget to personalize your Twitter page by going through your Account Settings.
Privacy. For starters, never protect your tweets. This limits your reach and discourages other people from following your brand on the microblogging site—because nobody wants to hit the Follow button first reading the existing tweets and viewing other embedded content.

Bio. Tell the world who you are, even if you are an internationally recognized brand. Leaving this blank could leave people clueless as to who you are, what you’re about and what you can offer. You’re only allowed 160 characters to do relay these though, so carefully think of brief but creative write-ups to fill this space.

Links. Enable your e-mail to be publicly displayed and make sure to include your brand’s URL. These will give your followers other ways to connect with your brand while sending more traffic to your Web site.

Brand Images

Twitter won’t allow you to remap its interface but it will, however, give you some semblance of customization to visually establish your brand’s identity through your photo and your page’s background wallpaper.
For photos, it is common practice to use your company’s logo, but there are other cases where you can use other images as long as they still align with your marketing approach. However, you should avoid putting severely outdated personal photos (like those taken during middle school), pictures of your pet or the face of your favorite celebrity. These are big no-nos for branding since they could misrepresent your brand. Similarly, avoid images with disturbing content (like nudity, controversial images, etc), groups of people and distracting animated GIFs with blaring colors. These are also big no-nos as far as decency and aesthetics are concerned.

These same rules also apply when creating a background for your tweets. You can either go and grab one of the ready-made backgrounds off sites like TwitterBackgrounds or Free Twitter Designer , or for better design freedom, simply create one yourself. Aside from photos or the company logo, include contact details, some of your company links, and a more comprehensive (but not very wordy) brand profile.

Article by Social Media Marketing