Tag: Updates

Social media monitoring

Social Media is at a busy messy stage.  It offers great potential, but also great complexity and confusion.  In order to demonstrate the benefits from a well designed social media campaign, an in-depth analysis and monitoring program has become a key success element.  Most of the action in social media is around other people’s comments, and the power lies in getting these people to talk you up, not in simply using the internet and social media communities as another channel for the same content and publications.  You need to find the discussions and engage if you want to win, and there are some great tools out there, but this one from Perspctv is so simple.  These can be put together quickly and provide a decent snap shot of the baseline that a campaign starts from.  At present its a beta with a few wrinkles, but the reporting content and graphical result is on target.

A more basic version of this type of reporting (but currently more robust) is offered by Google trends (click on graph to see full version).

The additional level in investment of time in monitoring the “buzz” on social media platforms is well worth it.  Increasingly there is a need to prove an ROI and alignment with objectives.  Results like these may be the start of mainstream corporate understanding and acceptance of this powerful marketing and communication medium.

Leveraging social media to generate sales

Social Media has long been seen as a new channel that could be leveraged to generate sales and increase market awareness of brands.  Now the results achieved by the earlier adopter companies are starting to show up.  As reported by Reuters,  Dell announced sales of more than $3MM yesterday.

“Dell said on Thursday it has raked in more than $3 million (1.8 million pounds) from Twitter followers who clicked through its posts to its Web sites to make purchases. The company, which has posted to Twitter about two years and tracks the sales with proprietary software, made more than $1 million in the past 6 months.”

This is one of several recently reported e-commerce successes and once again highlights the growth and increasing importance of social media for businesses.  Other well known companies include Whole Foods Market, Woot.com, Zappos.com, JetBlue Airways.

Social Media and Sports- a Winning team

Image via Wikipedia

The idea of leveraging social media in sports has been around for a while now, as teams and individuals use various platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to engage with fans. Its a great combination for both as social media thrives on sources that provide engaging content, and sports teams build and succeed financially on engaging fans. The direct nature and immediacy of twitter has made it a particular favorite for athletes to use, and with significant success. Athletes such as Danica Patrick are now being paid to twitter (in this case by Tissot), and others such as Shaquille O’Neal, Lance Armstrong, Mark Sanchez, Lamar Odom, Derek Fisher, and Dwight Howard are all attracting large numbers of subscribers.

Sports Illustrated ran a piece recently highlighting the growing importance of social media in the industry and the widening use of Twitter by the leagues

“The tool is scoring for the pro leagues too. All the majors — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR — shoot their followers useful information like scores, schedules, and highlight clips” Mainstream indeed.

For those facing the challenge if getting started in Social Media, here are a few of the key reasons why you, your team, or your sponsors should invest the time to get involved, and build a strategy to stay involved.

1. Your fans want to be in touch with you. These systems allow you to engage and provide customer service that is personal, and yet also manageable.
2. Fans like to have news from a vareity of sources, but some news is best coming direct from you. You have authority and only sometimes choice of when to issues the news. Use those advantages.
3. Sponsors keep many athlets and sports running. They give based on what they get. Social media gives you a chance to bring them in to conversation, thank them and send your fans their way.
4. Your fans are a great source of ideas and solutions. They are thrilled to be involved so, so asking questions is a great way to engage and costs little.
5. They are talking about you already. Some good, some bad. Either way, you can only influence the outcome if you are in the conversation
6. Its not just a scoreboard, you can put rich content and bring in people that might not like your “official sites”.
7. You can always send people back to the official sites. It will bring in new fans and add to traffic, rarely does more contejnt of interest reduce your influence.
8. Finally, you can actually see what is happening. Official sites will appeal to a part of your fan base, but not all. By engaging in social media conversations, you get in on a broader and much bigger set of conversations. By engaging social media business intelligence services, you can hear and see what is being said and use this feedback to assess you success relative to targets.

Its important to also get involved before you need to. If you have been an influential part of the community by creating great content and commenting on other peoples ideas and issues, highlighting ideas, events, dealing with issues or celebrating, it is not self serving as a simple marketing piece, and is infinately more effective.

Advertising and Public relations – Blue Horse and Trumpet

Blue Horse & Trumpet partners with Epic States to provide the highest quality, relationship-appropriate, effective content possible.  BHT works closely with Epic States throughout the process to develop a holistic understanding of the client’s position in the social media landscape. They take that understanding and help develop a strategy and then create the tactical communications that will achieve the campaign goal.

Started in 2004, founding brothers, Karl and Todd Backus combine their international agency experience in advertising and public relations, to form a more effective approach to marketing. As their company name implies, the goal of the company is to get their clients noticed and heard. The approach, they and their team take to achieving this, is to be creative, media agnostic and goal oriented. They provide solutions that get the job done in the most elegant and effective way possible and achieve the results that define success for their clients.

Sports Marketing & Management- UCLA Anderson Summer Institute

 Epic States has been working with the  Entertainment and Media Management Institute to provide academic materials and marketing for the  UCLA Anderson Summer Institute in Sports Marketing & Management.

This summer the Sports Marketing & Management Institute is holding a course from June 22 – July 31 that will give students a one-of-a-kind opportunity to study the changing global landscape of sports entertainment, marketing and management, while also undertaking a high-profile experience project with a major sports enterprise.

 The Summer Institute offers:

• Experiential, for-credit curriculum utilizing the famed Harvard Business School case study method of learning, customized to action-oriented decision making in sports marketing and management
• Experience internship projects that add real-world context to case learning and that provide student with high-impact and high-profile professional experience to serve as a foundation for a career in the industry
• Personalized career management to help students define their career objectives, identify resources, strategize opportunities and make critical networking connections.
• Expert and inside knowledge from industry thought leaders and top business professors with expertise in sports marketing and management
• Day and evening industry networking activities  that allow for exclusive access to industry leaders and academic thought leaders in media and entertainment

Students will learn to think and act like seasoned leaders in the sports business, understanding the complexities of on the field and off the field, contemporary sports issues and maintaining the aptitude to navigate industry challenge.

Go HERE for more information!!!

Social Media

Epic States provides strategic planning, monitoring, and creative management services using new as well as traditional media approaches.  Our strategic approach to leveraging social media ensures that the campaigns and media presence developed by our clients are delivering targeted results aligned with corporate goals and objectives.

Using advanced monitoring tools and searches we can identify relevant and active communities wherever they are established across the vast range of social media platforms.  In the initial stages, we bring our clients into online communities and help to establish their relationships and presence prior to the implementation of any campaign or promotional activity.

Social media communities are growing exponentially and conversations are occurring in greater volumes, through these social networks, than through official channels. We provide our clients with detailed reports and intelligence of the current conversations including sentiment, languages, geography, identification of key influencers and core platforms being used.

Our clients are using Social media to:

• Monitor brands and the conversation around them
• Launch products
• Run marketing campaigns
• Build corporate or personal brands
• Manage customer relations / customer service
• Manage crisis communications
• Generate sales leads
• Launch promotions
• Provide detailed competitive analysis

Contact us today to request a review of your historic performance where we will use our systems to run a detailed analysis on your brand or a recent campaign.