The Blind Side

I really want to talk about a movie called The Blind Side we watched today in the Public Relations Administration class. It is a story about Michael Oher, a black homeless and traumatized boy who became an All American football player and first round NFL draft pick with the help of a caring woman and her family.

I was touched, and cried, many times during this movie: when I saw this boy wares a short-sleeve T-shirt and sit alone in the public laundry room, when I saw his bio-mother cried because she couldn't see him, when I saw the woman did anything to help him learn, live and grow.

Michael Oher is lucky, he received help and encouragement from his foster mother, from his whole family, from his teachers in school, and from his peers. But what's more important is, the love and hope from all the people who have helped Michael, is something we should think about.

This seems to have nothing to do with public relations, but it is essential to any leader - the meaning of spiritual leadership. A good leadership needs vision, courage, and management skills, but to step into further, a good leader offers hope and love. Like the woman, Michael's mum. What she did was not only just offering him a bed, but love and hope. If she didn't do so, Michael would continue to live a miserable life, he couldn't get better education, or even would have been shot to death in his own town. It is this woman and his whole family that gives Michael hope, love and success.

Every people have a blind side, it is important that we see through it, an offer of love and hope, can change a person's life.

Second Life

Second Life is a 3-D online virtual world for people to live, connect and play. In my childhood I used to play the game Vitural Life, so when I heard about Second Life about one year ago, I was kind of excited and registered at once. It is a game but more than a game. It is a community where you can live your own life, meet new people, play and travel.

Even though I registered Second Life early, but my experience on it has been limited. Mainly because I usually don't have that much time into it. I like it though, for the reason it is a networking in a relaxed way, which is different from other social media sites such as Linkedin.  However, the networking through Second Life is uncontrolled to a certain degree, you have no idea when and where you are going to meet another person, and you have no idea who he/she is gonna be. Interesting and challenging right?

For me, the most exciting part is the fashion part. I love to shop in Second Life, decorate my character and change my look with different dressing styles. I think this is one of those features that attract people, especially females. You can live in here totally different from yourself in your daily life! You can try something on here which you like but won't put on in life, you may realize  something new inside yourself, that's a wonderful feeling!

There is a chat bottom in the view of Second Life when you play, this bottom allows you to talk with people who are nearby you. But sometimes people are really not into a "talk mode," many would like to enjoy themselves in this world. It happens on me as well. The good thing about Second Life is that it is entertaining. Many people would like to play and explore it after they get done of their work in the day.

In Second Life, you can live the life you want, I shop, play with dogs, drive my car to anywhere I want...Overall, I like this unique social media site, though time-consuming, at least I feel free to live, and meet new people...it's an exciting thing as well.  

Social Media Measurement

In reaction to our social media measurement presentation, I want to do some written summary of it since we don't need to turn in any report or paper on it. 


Social media measurement refers to the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media.There are both entry level free tools and enterprise platforms available for use by digital marketers and PR professionals.

The three most powerful things that social media does for your business are:
1.) It drives traffic to your website: 61% of companies said that social media led to an increase in their website traffic.
2.) It allows you to engage with prospects: The whole idea behind social media is to engage with your network. Having a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter profile allows you to interact with local businesses and your fans and followers in an easy, accessible way.
3.) It builds your brand: There are more than 500 million users registered on Facebook and over 190 million users on Twitter. The more active of a social media presence you have, the more fans you’ll get, and more fans means that more people are aware of who you are and what your brand is.

I would like to talk about the concept of ROI: return on investment -- A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. This is usually what the company management and stakeholders wants. For an organization, it is important to tie their social media to business objectives and metrics, which helps the organization see a clearer picture. There are many social media metrics among different people's mind. Here I adopt these four: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic Value.

There are many platforms that we can use to measure the performance of our social media, including Google Alerts, Radian 6, Google Trends, Google Insights, Twitter Trends, Linkdex, etc. Many of these are free, so you can measure your social media at any time.

During the discussion period, Prof. Melissa brought up the concept of ROE - Return on expectation, which is really valuable, since social media mainly is effective to build up confidence, trust, satisfaction, and commitment, which are hard to measure. These definitely will increase an organization's economic value overall, but more importantly, it builds up the image and reputation, which is valued by many organizations right now.

Reference:

1. Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-social-media-metrics-conversation-amplification-applause-economic-value/utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OccamsRazorByAvinash+%28Occam%27s+Razor+by+Avinash+Kaushik%29

2. Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Qualitative and Quantitative Metrics: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/social-media-analytics-twitter-quantitative-qualitative-analysis/

3. Social Media Measurement, it’s not impossible: http://jiad.org/article127

4. 6 Key Metrics for a Social Media Dashboard: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067457/6-Key-Metrics-for-a-Social-Media-Measurement-Dashboard-Best-of-SEW-2010-4

Dealmoon and Its Social Media Saves People's Time and Money

When I was thinking of what to talk about of this blog post, one idea that came across my mind. Right now an account gets really popular on Chinese micro-blog site - Weibo.com. This account is the official micro-blog account of Dealmoon.com in China. It's near Thanksgiving and the annual Black Friday. I can feel that Dealmoon will lead us rock this shopping season out again.

Founded on March 8th, 2009, Dealmoon is a site for Daily Deals and Coupons created for families. Upon establishment, Dealmoon aimed to become the best shopping deal site. It offers latest news for shopping deals, coupons, and price drops to customers. 

All the year around, Dealmoon researched on all kinds of deals and compile to resources list. Especially during Black Friday Sale, it will offer a huge list of stores on their Black Friday Deals page. People can download a sale flyer from countless stores, learn what time each store opens on Friday, and find where each store is located. For customers who are looking for any particular items, the website offers Black Friday Shopping Guide.  Click on what item you’re looking for and find a detailed list of what stores carry those items.  You’ll be able to compare prices so that you can find the best deal and map out your shopping day to be most efficient.

I think Dealmoon is now a success, one major reason is that it does something free for the customers to save their money and maximize their interests. But how to reach to the customers? I believe Dealmoon has been doing quite well. 

It has its greatly functional website http://www.dealmoon.com/, which includes all the deals:

It has its micro-blog accounts - both on Twitter and Weibo. Using micro-blogs to reach customers is really an effective tactics for a company like Dealmoon to share information and convey messages. Because (1) the information it shares are short, basically includes what the deal is, where it comes from, what's the deadline, that's it! (2) Deals come out in every minute from different stores, once Dealmoon gets the deal, it will post it out. So for the nature of content and time requirement, micro-blog is a perfect tool.

Any Dealmoon is clever to reach mass publics in China who has extremely huge potential of purchasing products. Reaching out Chinese publics by Weibo is the fastest, cheapest and most effective way. And Dealmoon on Weibo gets much more followers and fans than on Twitter or Facebook - it has nearly 60,000 followers on Weibo!

Of course it has its Facebook page as well. 

For me, receiving updates from Dealmoon simply by following it makes my purchasing selections really time-saving and money-saving. I just purchased a Macbook Pro, the deal is from MacMall, really a good bargain, thanks to Dealmoon. 

Whole Foods Market, a Leading Social Media Brand

Why I want to research on Whole Foods is because once in a class, we group members were talking about brand reputation. Someone said, "Okey, let's compare Publics and Winn-Dixey..." I was suddenly feeling confused because I went to Winn-Dixey quite often, because of what? Because things a cheap and I didn't find anything that's really bad. The he said, "fine, let's compare Whole Foods and Publics..." At that time, I knew that Whole Foods enjoyed a really great reputation among customers. Actually I like Whole Foods, because it makes me feel I can be healthy and balanced by eating. But the price of foods inside is really expensive. I felt like I wanted to dig more about this brand. I did, and after the research, I decide to make this topic as my social media integration paper. 

Whole Foods Market is one of the biggest international foods supermarket chains. Since its first launch of e-commerce and development of social media in 1997, Whole Foods has implemented well-rounded and authentic social media strategy, which enables the company to play a leading role in social media branding. Whole Foods incorporates its communities and core brand values, and actively participates across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Flickr. 

There are several features of Whole Foods' social media strategy:

(1) It creates local social media sites. Whole Foods realizes that it is an international brand that sets its goal as "going local." So every Whole Foods local stores have their own social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. Having local accounts means customers in every specific areas can get faster and better response and services. This move also helps Whole Foods to create communities, changing the customers experience from simply purchasing foods into seeking for a platform to communicate and get educated. This tactic is the most effective, authentic and notable one among its social media tactics. 

(2) It focuses on customer interaction. This is the core of Whole Foods' social media value. According to Bill Tolany, Whole Foods’ integrated media officer, responses to customer comments on Twitter accounts make up 85% of all the tweets sent out by Whole Foods Market stores. Just 10% of the tweets are content-based and 5% are promotional. We can see the company's intention to communicate with customers. 

(3) Both on-brand and personal online presence. With so many social media sites and accounts, Whole Foods' employees handle the consistency appropriately. They want their social media channels to convey brand personality and not necessarily the personality of the individual managing the outgoing messages and conversation. However, they also sought individuals who understand their brand voice — friendly, positive and conversation-driven –- to be the social media specialists. They can add their own personality into the conversation while obey the general guidelines. To Whole Foods, what is really important to the customers, fans and critics is that they receive quick, helpful responses.

Below is the "Facebook/Twitter Central Hub" on Whole Foods' Website to provide directory to each local page/account or other specific topics.

Blogs, Blogging, Bloggers

Once my media relations professor told me that blog will definitely be the new trend of social media since it holds tremendous potential in PR functions such as information sharing, issue framing, persuasion, etc. This blog is in response to the article by Michael Kent "Critical Analysis of Blogging in Public Relations." His opinions are interesting and thought-provoking.

Kent acknowledges that for PR professionals, blog is a great place to start in research as a tool for information gathering and environmental scanning. Every blog, especially blogs for information, business or academic use, is usually focusing on certain area or particular topics, thus each blog develops certain audiences around it. PR practitioners who want to understand the publics and public sentiments around certain topics, they'd better check blogs for information. Once some unanticipated issues arises, blog is also useful tools for issue management, like searching for reader sentiment, linking to useful information, etc. In addition, using blogs as a way to influence the audiences is probably most mentioned by PR professionals. Allowing or encouraging visitors to an organization's website to participate in how online news is framed is the biggest strengths of blogs. Many companies hire people to write for their product to frame the public opinions positively towards their products.

However, there are weaknesses of blogs, according to Kent. Communicative risks do exist in blogging, bloggers have two features: anonymous and informal. Bloggers, even act sometimes as opinion leaders, live in virtual world, this is the reality. And, bloggers sometimes cannot even be a representative of publics, because you will never know when a comment of an idea will become the next trend. Informal does not refer to every blogs and bloggers. There are many brilliant PR blogs that I follow during the whole simester. Bloggers behind are smart, wise and thoughtful, and in fact, they are still opinion leaders in their areas. But some bloggers, even some company's official bloggers, are lack of appropriate training on public relations. Another weakness that I noted in the article is the credibility and status of some bloggers. Most bloggers (65%) do not consider themselves “journalists,” most bloggers (84%) post infrequently, only about half of all bloggers (56%) make any effort to check their facts, most bloggers (60%) do not publish corrections, and most bloggers (95%) get their news content exclusively
from the Internet, according to Kent's research. Therefore, it is important for the PR professionals to distinguish whether this blog or blogger is worthwhile of their efforts to reach.

I am currently interning with Alarcon PR and is doing media relations for our client: Actionable Business Training, which just launched a "Start My Own Successful Business" seminars for small business wannabes and entrepreneurs to start and grow their business. I am reaching many bloggers, who write on small business and entrepreneurs. From my experience, the fundamentals of working with bloggers are the same as with traditional journalists at traditional media outlets: respect their schedules; take time to read their material to learn their interests; and only contact them if/when they want to be contacted.

Reference: Michael Kent (February 12, 2007). Critical Analysis of Blogging in Public Relations. Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 32–40