A Nike Ad produced by myself

Haha, here I post a fresh Nike Ad produced by me and my video team. How do you think of the idea? Hope you will like it and enjoy your watching:)
                        
                              

Introduction

User-generated-content (UGC) in social media is obtaining significant power overtime. It is important for marketers to understand the actual influence and embrace the shifting communication hierarchy. With the chance of creating our own YouTube video, we try to express our passion for Nike. Then we further excel this process and try to extend Nike’s predominant image, whereby a sport brand, to a unique life style.

Through posting our UGC on YouTube and other social media platform, we try to foster positive atmosphere by encouraging active participation/engagement among fellow female consumers. We expect the whole process would generate a positive buzz and aid Nike in creating positive brand image.

Motivation

• Co-creation: The underlying motivation for creating Nike ad is to take part in co-creation process so our (i.e. consumer) voice is heard and hope this is incorporated in shaping positive brand image.
• Community: We would like to send a message to the fellow consumers that Nike is part of our life and we hope to share our experiences associated with the brand. Through this activity we would like to foster an environment for enhanced social interaction for UGC users (fellow Nike consumers and other consumers in general). As a result, we hope to contribute in shaping positive brand value for Nike.
• Intrinsic enjoyment: Create YouTube ad for the sake of creation in which tech savvy and artistically behaviors or tendencies promote the motivations to create something for the playful enjoyment one gets out of the process. In other words, it involves the engagement and relaxation components – the anticipated satisfaction to be derived from immersion in the creative process itself. What happens to the creation, and the effect the creation has, are secondary to the intrinsic creative process.
• Empowerment (change perception & influence people): Create YouTube ad (activist ad) with the intention of placing specific effect of the ad on a target audience. The goal is to change hearts and minds, to influence people. The ad is merely the means to the ends of a specific result. The interest is to promote the brand with the focus is on the message (information, image, connotation designed to elicit change) rather than the creator. When in promotion of the brand, the style of videos produced tends to be factual or humorous.

Objectives of the ad

• Create/enhance positive attitudes among consumers about Nike brand name or product: Resulting in brand loyalty, positive associations and a perception of high product quality and impressive brand name. In other words, this relates to the underlying value of the Nike brand name that comprises its set of associations – its meaning to people. Creation of positive attitudes/feelings is a possible mean where associations create value to the customers.
• Engagement: Objective of Nike ad is to promote engagement amongst fellow female consumers, young and sporty, that are emotionally invested in Nike brand. Through this ad, we would like to create an atmosphere that would allow the fellow consumers to communicate why they like or dislike the brand and perhaps change perception of latter consumers (also help the co-creation process in general).  We would like to illustrate our experience associated with Nike brand and further the step to generate more “likes” for the brand. Then this goes further and indirectly influences the male consumers whom are associated with the target audience.
• Generate significant ‘e-word of mouth’: we would like to generate significant ‘e-word of mouth’ to remind consumers that Nike can be part of their lives. In order to generate significant buzz, we will use the methods listed below:
• Asking friends and classmate to view, comment and share
• Share links in the place where target audience and potential viewer will be, for example, glue transfer Facebook page, Nike homepage, female sport discussion board
• Uploaded in YouTube, Tudou (China), and Korea, Malaysia
• Promote active engagement by commenting on viewer comments to encourage people to join in the discussion and/or knowledge sharing process

Type of the ad

·   Concordant: When surface text and subtext are in accord, ad is often generated by the concordant consumers themselves. Here the nominal text of the ad is in general agreement with that of the firm’s brand message, and any underlying subtext or message is positive in attitude towards the brand.

Approaches used in the ad

• Advertising appeals: Emotional appeals are used, which relate to the customers’ social and psychological needs for purchasing Nike. Many feelings can serve as the basis for advertising appeals designed to influence consumers on an emotional level, such as love, happiness, arousal, recognition, and involvement, etc. The combination of romance and humor appeals is used in the ad, because romantic messages in a humorous way attract and hold consumers’ attention. They help enhance effectiveness by putting consumers in a positive mood, increasing their liking of the ad itself and their feeling toward Nike.
• Creative execution: In the ad, slice-of-life is used to demonstrate the Nike shoes. This type of ad portrays that consumers should use different shoes in different situations in their daily lives. The ad then shows how the Nike shoes can meet these needs even in several abnormal scenarios. Since the success of slice-of-life ad depends on how well the actors come across and execute their roles, we will try our best to achieve credibility and ensure high quality. Drama is used in telling the story to draw the viewer into the action it portrays. At the end of the ad, the humorous execution is particularly added in on the Nike shoes. 

Measurements

The video will be considered as success when following goals are met.

objectives	goals
Create/enhance positive attitudes	Viewings: achieve over 500 viewing in different (areas) within one month.  Achieve total over 4,000 viewing in two month. Ratings (Like or dislike) achieve over 70% liking after two month of upload.
Engagement & eWOM	Comments: Leximancer software overall positive comment. 20 more than one sentence comments in two month. Mention in social media. Blog Puse, Google blog watch… 100 mentioning in their blog in two month Mention by the mass media. Once would be consider great success.

Durex Sex Tree (Facebook Application)

In last week’s class of Advanced Marketing Communication, the guest speaker showed us a Youtube video, which caused a heated discussion in class that day.

It is very interesting that Durex created an application on Facebook, the most popular and growing social networking community in global. However, after thinking deeply, you will find it is an innovative and meaningful action. This Facebook application for Durex (The Durex Sex Tree) is an application that aims at promoting safe sex and heightening awareness of the youth about the importance of using a condom.

Social medial marketing programmes could become central to the work of the Durex Network since their aim is to overturn attitudes and behaviours that impede safer sexual practices. Social media programmes use the same techniques as commercial marketing but applies them within a social and healthy context to encourage people to change their behaviour. Its approach relies on the identification of specific, achievable and measurable behavioural goals which are reached through systematic processes phased to address short, medium and long term issues in specific target audiences. According to USAID, social marketing has been the single most important contribution that the family planning field has made to the prevention of HIV/AIDS and other STIs. The Durex network, including application on Facebook, is committed to promoting responsible and safer sex in an innovative vivid way to support the sexual health initiatives as wide as possible.

So will the next step for Durex is creating an application on iPhone/iPad or even a 3D vitual game to promote safer sex?

My Ideas on Virtual Community

Today, I would like to share some of my ideas on virtual community.

 

Advantages of virtual community

Virtual communities, which rely on Internet, offer the advantage of instant information exchange no matter how far away they may be, which is impossible in a real-life community. Users of online communities can build good relationships by forming specific discussion groups that sharing information and ideas in various topics easily and very fast. What’s more, the communities can give the members a feeling of membership and belonging by intensely participating in all kinds of net-based social gatherings, and giving and receiving support and advice from one another.
Virtual communities can serve as an appropriate netbased business model, as VCs meet the needs of members for communication, information, and entertainment. By identifying and reaching a group of audience with similar interests, VCs provide chance for marketers to define the target consumers precisely, and then to reach them in cost- saving ways for marketing of specific goods and services. Since virtual communities serve as a rich source of information, companies are able to have better understanding of consumers’ needs and desires. Besides, companies can also use virtual communities as a platform for co-creation of new product development with the consumers. What’s more, with constant interaction between members, lead users and opinion leaders exert great influence on the purchase and consumption decisions of the potential consumers. Communities that satisfy both relational and transactional needs will harvest the benefits of greater customer loyalty.

Economically, virtual communities can be commercially successful by making money through membership fees, subscriptions, usage fees, and advertising commission. People are able to engage in many activities at home, such as shopping, paying bills, and searching for specific information. Consumers generally feel very comfortable making transactions online as long as the seller has a good reputation throughout the community. Virtual communities also provide the advantage of reduction of wasteful marketing expenditures and customer service costs by connecting buyers directly to suppliers. 

Owing to their unique advantages, virtual communities have now become part of many brands' social media strategy.By constant and direct communication with the customers and get them highly involved, companies can build brand by boost brand awareness and maintain brand loyalty. Therefore developing online communities and understanding online behaviour can significantly strengthen a brand.

Challenges for virtual community
What are the challenges?
While instant communication means fast access, it is possible that information is posted without being checked or edited. It is also common for people in virtual communities to live out a fantasy as another type of person as identities can be kept anonymous online. Besides, as information spreads with great speed, any negative information about something will do great harm or even ruin it, especially to brands, forword-of-mouth communication between consumers impacts the attitudes and the buying decisions of potential customers.

Participants of virtual communities get together because of the similar interests, or some social or life needs of their own. Therefore what can attract their attention, keep them interested in and make continuous contributions to the communities is a difficult issue. And it’s even a greater challenge for companies that wish to use virtual communities to facilitate communication between customers and themselves and turn the participants into potential buyers.  

How to meet with the challenges?
To achieve the marketing goals, companies should initiate websites of their own and set up company-managed virtual communities so as to steer them into course that is expected to reach their community objectives. To do well, virtual communities should be created according to the members’ needs and desires instead of those of the company by constant analysis of the evolution and trend of the members’ interests and needs. Besides, virtual communities should act as a guide for topics that consumers can actively exchange and share their ideas and opinions and activities that members will enthusiastically participate in so that VC satisfy the consumers’ emotional and social expectations. Only by fostering members’ participation and involvement with the communities can companies strengthen members’ attachment to the community and lead to “affective loyalty”.

Trust in virtual communities is extremely important for interactions to occur and for communities to survive.Trust in the members and inwebsite lead to the reliability of information shared and contributed and also members’ purchase behaviors. Therefore  trust in communities lay sound foundation for enthusiastic participation, good relationship, sales increase and brand loyalty. To gain trust, companies should use virtual communities to provide valid and reliable information, communicate with consumers as much as possible to know and meet their needs. What’s more, efforts should be made to promote cohesion in the community for better interaction among members.

What is also important is to develop positive influence in a virtual community, as members’ opinions can affect others’ attitudes and purchase decisions. So try to reduce negative voices by providing chances for discussing with consumers on how to make improvement on products and services. Thus the consumers’ roles of critics are changed into advisors and co-creators of new products. 

Consumer-generated content Ad for Self-enjoyment

There is a distinct shift in communications from a one-way“one-to-many” model represented by traditional advertising toward a many-to-many, interactive model has been well documented. The new communications environment, however, has thrown up even more novel ways to create and deliver value. Focusing on consumer-generated ads, one study identified three main motivations for the creation of such ads: (Berthon et al., 2008)

• “Intrinsic enjoyment,” wherein the focus is on the development of an advertisement created simply for the purpose of self-expression

• “Self-promotion,” whereby consumers draw on a brand to promote themselves

• “Change perceptions,” wherein the goal is to make other consumers view the brand differently.

Here, I would like to share a good example of "intrinsic enjoyment" on Dove’s Youtube Ad.

This is Dove's Commercial Ad

This is a consumer-generated-content Ad imitating Dove's Commercial Ad just for self-enjoyment.

5 ways Google+ could steal music fans from Facebook

Google's social network, Google+, is late. Facebook has a big lead, having ousted MySpace, which in turn deposed Friendster, the site that started us all on this path towards recreating our social fabric as a network of connected personal nodes.

Facebook is an excellent tool for sharing music -- usually in the form of Google's YouTube videos -- but even the developer of the top music app on Facebook says it doesn't do enough, musicwise. Google+ may have a tough time making a dent in the popularity of Facebook. But on at least on the music front it can make a lot of inroads, fast. Fact is that music apps on Facebook are lacking -- and this is a real opportunity for a quick win.

Here, we can spot five ways in which Google could become "besties" with music enthusiasts to Facebook's detriment.

1. Easy sharing

YouTube music videos, which make up many of the most popular videos on YouTube, are all over Facebook in the United States, and from what Google itself told us, the same is true for Spotify song links in Europe.

Facebook is reportedly planning to integrate more tightly with multiple music services, the way it recently did with MOG, but still has a ways to go on that front.

Meanwhile, Google has thousands of engineers, all of whose yearly bonuses will be tied to how "social" they can make its offerings. Clearly, Google+ could give Facebook a run for its money when it comes to sharing music from (and across) all of the music services upon which it depends.

The preponderance of YouTube music on Facebook is an indication that music fans want to use it to share music, so why doesn't Facebook help Google+?

2. Group listening parties

Google+'s online video chatroom can let you know when your friends are hanging out. And if you've yet to sign in to group listening service Turntable.fm, consider how many music fans already love the way the recently-launched service lets them get together to spin music and talk about it.

By combining those two concepts -- with or without the video component -- to create real-time music listening parties with push notifications, Google+ could run "circles" around Facebook in the group listening department.

And music fans would start evangelizing Google+ in order to get their friends involved, the same way they are currently doing with Turntable.fm.

3. Live musicians plus live music

Google+'s Hangout feature could do something else, and surely this one has already occurred to Google engineers pining for that "social bonus."

Hangout could be a great way for stars to hold meet-and-greet sessions with their fans. Plenty of other ways exist for this sort of thing, of course, but Google has money and famous people make appearances in exchange for it. If Google doesn't do this, one has to wonder how else they're spending their money.

And, of course, the company could archive these talks on YouTube, creating valuable content that would still be of interest 20 years from now, in many cases, and which wouldn't appear on Vimeo or any other competitors.

Speaking of YouTube, it's been slowly edging into the live online music business. Clearly, those shows could find a place on Google+, with plenty of social-bonus-friendly features for talking about the show in real time.

4. Google music integration

Google already has its own music storage solution for fans, unlike Facebook, which uploads photos and videos for easy sharing but ignores your music collection.

If Google+ doesn't do something interesting with the service still known as Music Beta by Google, its engineers don't just deserve to miss out on those bonuses; they should probably be fired.

There are many ways to go with this, but for starters, they could make your music collection visible and searchable on Google+, use it as a way to introduce people to each other, work on creating DMCA-compliant streams that would allow people to listen to each other's taste, and should probably use taste-combining algorithms to create stations out of multiple Music Beta by Google accounts too. (Just a thought.)

5. Android apps for the win

Facebook doesn't have a popular smartphone operating system, and Google does. Google's finest should be able to figure out how to use Android APIs for slicker integration between music apps and Google+ than Facebook can manage on mobile platforms it doesn't control.

Luxury brands’ social media strategy: globalization or localization?

According to “The World’s Ten Most Powerful Luxury Brands: 2011 Edition” (http://fashionista.com/2011/05/the-worlds-ten-most-powerful-luxury-brands-2011/2/), Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci rank Top 3, and other famous brands such as Chanel, Cartier, Rolex, etc. are also so powerful that are ranked from 4 to 10. Research shows the contribution of more than half of these 10 brands can be traced directly to Asia especially by the renewed interest in China, which include Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier, Hennessy, Fendi, and Burberry, as can be seen in the following table.

Top 10 Luxury Brands (2011)		Compare with the ranking of last year	Global social media platform (i.e. Facebook)	Asian market (especially China) contribute most to this ranking	Local social media platform (i.e. Sina Weibo in China)
1	Louis Vuitton	→	√	√	√
2	Hermès	→	√	√	×
3	Gucci	→	√	×	√
4	Chanel	→	√	×	×
5	Cartier	↑	√	√	×
6	Rolex	→	√	×	×
7	Hennessy	↓	√	√	×
8	Moët & Chandon	↓	√	×	×
9	Fendi	→	√	√	×
10	Burberry	↑Up 86% unranked last year	√	√	√

As shown in the table, compared with last year, all brands have more or less some gains with the exception of only two. Two reasons for this include great appetite for luxury in Asia, especially in China, and the increasing enthusiasm for social media. Luxury brands are wary of the social realm for fear that it will dilute their exclusivity, but many have successfully made the foray into social marketing this year. As a result, all these Top 10 brands have their pages on Facebook. But does this world-wide social media platform really work well for Asia? The answer is not exactly.

Whether going globalization or localization as social media marketing strategy for these Top 10 luxury brands is an issue that I will discuss. As mentioned in previous blogs, almost every world-wide social media is restricted in China. What really widely spreading in China is Sina Weibo, which has gained much popularity in China since 2010, attracting millions of users who have extended its use beyond social networking and turned it into a media platform. But searching Sina Weibo, I have only found three brands set up their pages there, which are Louis Vuitton, Gucci, as well as Burberry. Similar to what can be found in their Facebook pages, what these brands put mostly on Sina Weibo are new products introduction, brand history popularization, commercial photography and also various brands dynamic. Among these three brands, Burberry owns the largest amount of followers in Sina Weibo, which are 182,250 while Louis Vuitton owns 113, 500 and Gucci owns 53,040. As clearly shown in the above table, Burberry shoots greatly up by 86% though it is new to the list this year. And obviously its sales profit mainly come from China, so we can boldly assume that the innovative way Burberry localise its social media platform by making good us of the social media that enjoys the greatest popularity among the locals is one of the reasons that drive its status this year.

How to go localization? The significant step is to find the social media platform that is locally popular in order to draw enough attention to the brand. Besides what is put up should be carefully edited about brand-related information to meet both global interest and local taste so as to make good combination of localization and globalization.