mercredi 14 mai 2014

TwitterToolsReviews

TwitterToolsReviews


Eurovision on Twitter: a look at what happened on the night

Posted: 13 May 2014 11:33 PM PDT

James Todman

conchita eurovision 2014

“We was robbed” is what many people were saying as Molly Smitten-Downs only managed to come 17th, even with the most credible Eurovison song the UK has had in ages.

But UK supporters should not be disheartened. On Twitter Molly fared far better. In fact she was the second most mentioned act, just behind the winner Conchita, the ‘bearded woman’ from Austria.

SocialBro have created a fab infographic with interesting Twitter stats from the night.

Russell Brand, not one to shy away from an opportunity for publicity, became the most popular tweet on the day with this brilliant homage to the winner:

Graham Norton did the UK proud by achieving top spot for being the most tweeted Twitter handle mentioned on the night, pushing the BBC Eurovision handle, @bbceurovision, into second place.

On the night over 47,000 tweets where sent every minute from more than 1,124,000 users.

Check out some more of the fascinating Eurovision 2014 Twitter stats:

Eurovision on Twitter:  a look at what happened on the night

Featured Image Source: cnnturk.com

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Apply the Latest News From LinkedIn, Twitter and the Hotel Industry to Your Localization Strategy

Posted: 13 May 2014 08:31 PM PDT

Rachel Chilson

Apply the Latest News From LinkedIn, Twitter and the Hotel Industry to Your Localization Strategy image communication magnifying glass 300x300All of us at Sajan are localization junkies. Yep. We're always scouring the Internet to get our fix of stories on everything translation and localization. Sometimes we come across a few that really grab our attention and warrant more than a status update or tweet.

That's the case today. You see, a story on an interesting business practice as well as some recent breakthroughs in global social media offer some good takeaways that I couldn't resist sharing with you.

And the best part? You can easily apply these tips to your own localization strategy to help build better customer relationships and boost sales all over the world.

Sounds good, right? Sit back and let me fill you in.

Engage with international audiences more strategically on social media

LinkedIn's new "target by language" feature

If your global company is on LinkedIn—and you're the one juggling each profile for every language need for your various audiences—you can let out a big sigh of relief thanks to the company's recent announcement. Seriously . . .

Want to know why? Its new "target by language" feature lets you choose a language preference for status updates based on who you're targeting. Now a company in the United States with a large Spanish-speaking audience, for instance, can make posts in Spanish specifically for these users without using a different page thanks to this option that supports 21 languages.

This means more targeted verbiage and less page maintenance (as a page for each language is no longer required).

Now, I know what you're thinking. You don't want your audiences to come to your company page and have to filter through hundreds of statuses in multiple languages. That goes against every principle your localization strategy was built on.

Don't worry. LinkedIn took care of this concern. Your users will see a personalized page based off their user settings. LinkedIn identifies the user by language preference and shows them only messages earmarked for them.

Twitter's targeted language feature for promoted and sponsored ads

But wait. Let’s not leave out Twitter. Twitter also announced a new feature that makes global social media managers' lives easier.

You can now target customers with promoted accounts and tweets in 20 different languages so your audiences can see relevant ads in their preferred language.

Twitter also stated that it uses a number of different signals to determine a user's language—not just the language selected in their profile settings. The company looks at the languages associated with their tweets, which means that users can be targeted by multiple languages if Twitter sees that they use more than one.

Takeaways: You can use these social media enhancements to help step up your localization strategy, tailoring messages to meet your audiences' unique language needs. This can help you build better relationships with social media users and target them specifically to garner a better ROI. If you're ready to get started but want to learn more, check out this best practice brief: 5 tips for kicking off your international social media program with machine translation.

Usher in global customers with a solid localization strategy

Outside of the global social media world but in line with customization, this next story offers some good advice for your international business.

According to CNBC, U.S. hotels have made an effort to localize their accommodations to meet the needs of Chinese travelers. Noticing a recent upsurge in Chinese visitors, the New York Marquis hotel, as an example, has done more than translate their collateral. Hotel management replaced carafes so guests could make tea instead of coffee each morning and trained staff on Chinese culture, including lucky numbers, unlucky colors and more.

Why go through all the trouble? Management saw the benefit to adapt their business model —as the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of Travel and Tourism expects numbers of wealthy Chinese tourists visiting the United States to rise significantly through 2018.

Takeaways: This business practice doesn't only apply to professionals in the tourism and hospitality vertical. It's a good lesson in how simple changes to your localization strategy—whether it's tailoring your product, store or more—can help you grow your revenue potential. Check out Big brands and marketing localization: Real-world takeaways for tips on how to apply this local flair to your business.

Apply what you learned

I hope these news stories provided you with some valuable advice to enrich your localization strategy and enhance your global business practices.

If you're like us at Sajan and still haven't gotten your fill on global marketing fun, continue the learning with Marketing localization: Diversifying your approach for cultures around the world.

Got some other valuable localization news stories to share with your peers? Post them in the comments below!

Photo credit: www.123rf.com

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Outsourcing Your Social Media Management: Yay or Nay?

Posted: 13 May 2014 08:24 PM PDT

Nikhil Jain

It’s no secret that great customer service is one of the key points towards achieving a successful business. Whether you own a large chain of department stores or a small mom-and-pop pizza joint, you cannot deny just how important customer service is when it comes build an image, make sales, generate leads and in a nutshell, create a flourishing and viable business.

Outsourcing Your Social Media Management: Yay or Nay? image social media

Enter the world of social media management, where you can literally solve your customer service woes, and more. With proper social media management, you’ll tap into a wealth of benefits including:

  • Branding impressions: this makes your brand visible and memorable.
  • Online reputation management: know exactly what people are saying about your brand or business, so that you can effectively negative remarks (and improve yourself in the process).
  • Develop trust: by becoming a social media influencer, you’ll gain your target audience’s trust and get honest feedback on what they want out of your brand.

Questions to ask yourself before deciding on social media outsourcing.

1. Do you have what it takes to effectively handle continuous social media management efforts?

In other words, do you have the right staff to take care of your business’ social media management in the long run? Believe it or not, according to Forbes.com, it can take 32 hours a month or more for a medium-sized organization to manage a single social media platform. This is certainly not a small amount of time anyone can dedicate their time to doing, unless it’s a designated person like a social media manager. To ensure truly effective social media management, you may want to consider outsourcing these tasks in order to encourage regular content and engagement throughout your accounts.

2. How do the outsourcing costs weigh against increased revenue?

Ideally, when you opt to spend money on outsourcing social media management, you’ll want to spend your free time bringing in new business, otherwise it would not be wise to spend your cash there. You should calculate the cost of possible increased profits that are obtained when your time is freed up to perform other non-social media related tasks, versus actual outsourcing costs.

3. Can you find the right person to manage your social media efforts?

One well-known grave customer service error is failing to train staff properly in order to handle customers’ concerns and interact in the right manner. Similarly when deciding whether or not to outsource social media management, you’ll want to ensure that the best person for the job would be well-trained. If you approached a social media management agency, you won’t need to worry about training an in-house social media manager. Let the agency do all the work and in turn, you can effectively let your brand message be heard via your outsourced team.

To outsource or not to outsource: the cons of outsourcing social media management

1. You need to give it a unique “voice”

Some businesses I know are fussy about how their brand is perceived by others. If this sounds like you, then you probably don’t want to leave your all-important social media efforts to a third-party. Instead, you’ll want to run the show yourself and have full control over what to say, when to say and how to say it. In other words, your brand will sound as authentic as you want it to be.

2. You need to hear first-hand feedback from your audience

Social media networking is a two-way street. When you engage your audience, you get to head their feedback and thoughts too. Issues may arise when you start to outsource your social media management efforts as you may be missing out on vital insights from your audience. Merely getting reports at the end of the week or month may prove to be insufficient as you are losing out on the chance to INSTANTLY respond to your audience.

3. You need to improve yourself, eventually

When you decide to put your brand out there on social networking sites, you are undoubtedly embracing this culture. However, you cannot fully comprehend and delve into it if you outsource your efforts. You’ll want to increase your own thought leadership, and deep down inside, you know this is only possible if you you're the one having the conversation and involved in audience engagement yourself!

And now, here are the pros of outsourcing your social media management:

1. Frees up your time for things that matter

When you outsource your social media management, you will inevitable free up precious time to helm other tasks, namely, seeking leads, creating strategic advertising and marketing plans, and other things that matter.

2. More money in your bank

Sure, you’ll need to pay a fee to outsource your social media management, but you’re not only buying into an individual’s talents, but you’ll also be leveraging on the expertise of a whole social media management team. This will save you a lot of money in the long run, considering it costs so much more to train a couple of in-house social media managers (think: salary, benefits, training, just to name a few).

3. Tap into a dedicated social media manager’s wealth of experience

When you sign up with a third party social media management company, you’ll leverage on their professional expertise. They know what to expect, and they have the means to perform tasks that you didn’t even know existed.

4. Let the experts provide quality content

Talk to a content marketer and he or she will tell you just how difficult it is to churn out unique content day in and out. With a third party social media management firm, you’ll have none of these worries. With their help, you can be sure of a tailor-made social media strategy that best suits your company to project a positive and professional image for your brand.

Bonus: best social media management tools and tips

Whether you choose to outsource your social media management efforts or not, the fact remains that you have to be socially-savvy in order to grow your business as you tap into the power of social media.

Any social media manager will tell you that juggling multiple accounts across different social networking sites is tricky and may be mighty pain-in-the-neck without the help of useful tools like the ones suggested below:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most best-loved social media management tools, and for good reasons too. This (almost) all-in-one app allows you to monitor your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi accounts – all in one cozy dashboard. Not only that, you also get to schedule your posts so that you won’t be perpetually tied to your electronic devices as you monitor your social media pages.

Outsourcing Your Social Media Management: Yay or Nay? image hootsuite 600x372

Tip: Save precious time when you use Hootsuite’s Bulk Scheduling feature by creating a spreadsheet of tweets, then uploading it to the dashboard’s scheduler all at once. Check out other tips for Hootsuite power users here.

2. Tweepi

For some, managing Twitter accounts can be a daunting task considering the massive influx of information flooding the stream every second of the day. With Tweepi, not only can you manage your account(s) and its content better, you can also organize and clean up your followers, reciprocate follows, and filter your list.

Outsourcing Your Social Media Management: Yay or Nay? image tweepi

Tip: Check out Tweepi’s premium features, including access to shortcuts (follow, unfollow, filter and more with just a single click from the dashboard!) starting from $7.49 per month.

3. Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster doesn’t really help manage all your social media account the way Hootsuite and Tweetdeck do, but what it does is equally just as amazing. With social media analytics at your fingertips, you can easily gather data that helps you view how well your Facebook and Twitter posts are performing (or under-performing). Being able to analyze impressions, total reach and engagement will ultimately help you improve your social media strategy.

Outsourcing Your Social Media Management: Yay or Nay? image crowdbooster 600x378

Tip: Connect with your Bit.ly account and you’ll get even more analytics and recommendations to improve your content.

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Social Media for Lead Generation

Posted: 13 May 2014 07:44 PM PDT

Lavinia Tauro

Social Media for Lead Generation image Social Media Lead Generation

Social media helps you promote and market your goods and services to people in every nook and corner of the world. Nevertheless, most content marketers fail to generate valuable leads through social media campaigns. Most companies feel that the return on investment (ROI) from social media campaigns is meagre. To generate leads from any social media campaign, most B2B marketers need to know that social media campaigns cannot be just restricted to creating brand awareness.


Use Gated Content


One of the easiest ways of generating leads is by promoting gated content. A generated filled-out form may be included on the company website to generate leads. However, to accelerate the process of generating leads, we need to make use of social media channels that entice consumers toward that gated content on the company website.

You may tweet about the latest promotional campaign and add a requisite picture to increase the brevity of the tweet. Whenever any consumer clicks that link, they must be taken to the landing page that includes a short, simple form. In this way you can increase lead generation. In this manner, you can see a sharp increase in lead generation.


Use Relevant Social Ads


You must not restrict to just Facebook engagement ads for engaging the audience. Presently, we also have Twitter lead generation cards to increase the brevity of social media campaigns. These lead generation cards can be used to create a long list of leads. They appear in the form of promoted tweets. Whenever a person clicks on these lead generation cards of Twitter, it automatically presents a sign-up form where users have to provide their name and email address for availing any offer.


Google Analytics & Social Ad Optimization


You can measure the success of your social promotion strategy by integrating Google Analytics tools to track the efficacy of your campaign. One of the best ways is to define the goal of lead conversion. Google Analytics is instrumental in this process.

Google Analytics campaign is fundamentally associated with three components: campaign source, campaign medium, and campaign name. Some people may also include campaign content, a component that is non-mandatory. Make use of Google's Campaigns URL builder for tagging these promoted links that form an integral part of any Google Analytics campaign. After furnishing all the details, you may submit so that a newly tagged URL is generated. The link that is generated must be used in creative ad campaigns. This would enable Google Analytics to track the conversions.

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‘Harry Potter’ Spinoff ‘Fantastic Beasts’ To Be Released On November 18, 2016

Posted: 13 May 2014 03:16 PM PDT

Amanda Peterlin

'Harry Potter' Spinoff 'Fantastic Beasts' To Be Released On November 18, 2016 image 4815441718 71e77f9a02 b

Back in March, J.K. Rowling agreed to write three films for the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Remember, this movie trilogy would be an extension of the wizarding world taking place 70 years before Harry's story begins.

Well, the wait is over (kind of). Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling's first installment of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has been set to hit theaters November 18, 2016.

Even though this set of films would not be the same and only resemble the wizarding world we all grew to know and love, they have certainly kept a similar timeline as 4 out of 8 other Potter films were released in mid-November.

A cast, crew, producer, or director has not been decided since the film has been confirmed back in September of last year. We are all still hoping Emma Watson's wish to be in the films comes true.

The Fantastic Beasts Magizoology collection has been published since 2001 raising money for Comic Relief. A 54-page book that was written between the fourth and fifth installment of the Harry Potter series.

Okay you can get comfortable again. At least now there is a date to wait for.

[Photo credit: Scott Smith]

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4 Steps to a Customer-Centric Approach to Social Marketing

Posted: 13 May 2014 02:00 PM PDT

Alinn Louv

The ever changing nature of social media tends to keep brands on their toes. And with all the new Facebook updates and changes, brands are at more of a disadvantage than ever before. In order to really stand out from the crowd, brands have to focus on the customer in every aspect of their social marketing strategy. Showing your customers appreciation will help turn them into loyal brand advocates in the long run. Here are 4 steps to creating a customer-centric strategy to increase customer retention.

1. Acknowledge that your customer's time is valuable
Your customers already spent time browsing your site and picking out items for their shopping cart, don't take up more of their time with a long checkout process. Instead of asking your customers to fill out long, tedious forms to register and checkout, use a to fast track your shoppers to their order confirmation page. They will appreciate the one-click checkout process and you'll still be able to collect rich, verified data from social network APIs.

4 Steps to a Customer Centric Approach to Social Marketing image sl signin account

2. Get involved with your customers
Create engaging social content for your customers to interact with your brand. Keep your social content focused on getting to know your customer more, instead of the other way around. Ask interesting questions or host polls to find out more about your top fans. But don't just leave it at that, respond to your fans comments and get involved with your fans' social engagement.

3. Segment and personalize your strategy for each customer
Utilize the social data to run personalized marketing campaigns. Create birthday campaigns to give your customers a surprise on their special day. Segment your social strategy and target customers based on their likes and interests. If a majority of your customers have Nicki Minaj in common, use tickets to her concert as a prize for your next contest or promotion. Use Social Login to discover their preferred social network and make sharing more prominent on that platform. If more of your customers prefer Twitter over Facebook, you'd benefit more from running a Twitter contest over a Facebook contest.

4 Steps to a Customer Centric Approach to Social Marketing image instagram shout out

4. Show appreciation for your most valuable customers
Publicly acknowledge your top influencers for their brand advocacy by showcasing their Instagram photos alongside your product photos. Your fans will appreciate being featured and new shoppers will be more willing to purchase your products. Give your customers shout outs on social for creative outfit ideas or for being a long time fan. Your fans will feel special and be more likely to share your posts.

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Channing Tatum To Star As X-men’s Gambit

Posted: 13 May 2014 01:33 PM PDT

Amanda Peterlin

Channing Tatum To Star As X men's Gambit image 6835578825 48c2639b43 b

Who would have thought becoming a magical stripper would lead to being cast as the superhero Gambit. In an interview with Total Film, X-men producer Laura Shuler Donner confirmed Channing will be the future Gambit and explained why he was the perfect fit for this role.

"Well you know, he's a rogue, Channing, he's a rascal, just like Remy LeBeau," said Shuler Donner, "and he can handle the action—we all know that! And he's got a really good heart. I know him personally, I did a movie with him. So, I think he will be great."

She continued on saying even though Channing isn't from New Orleans, he's a Southerner and understands that world.

http:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP5HSbh3PF8

Tatum spoke with Total Film last year and brought up his interest in Gambit, of course, not knocking Taylor Kitsch's performance in X-men Origins: Wolverine.

"I'm from around that area, and my dad's from New Orleans. And I like to do a Cajun accent! I actually like his Gambit, but I've always lived in and around the Cajun people… Gambit was always like the woman loving, cigarette smoking, drinking—you know he was the punk rock of all the superheroes."

What do you think of this casting idea? Is Channing the right fit? Share your comments below!

[Photo credit: discutivo]

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Snapchat Added Messages, But It’s Not a Messager

Posted: 13 May 2014 01:30 PM PDT

Taylor Loren

When my childhood best friend got engaged, she announced it by sending me a photo of her ring via Snapchat. While the photo disappeared after a few seconds, the joy of that moment has always stayed with me. The lighting wasn't perfect and the photo wasn't filtered like it's "Facebook and Instagram Official" counterpart, but it was raw, in the moment, and it was sent directly to me.

When Snapchat turned down Facebook's $3 billion offer, many wondered how a "messaging app" could ever be worth so much. Yet since then, Facebook has acquired WhatsApp for a cool $19 billion, Line brought in $338m in revenue from 2013, and Viber was acquired for $900 million. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to focus on building out its standalone Messenger app and will turn off messaging in the native mobile app, forcing users to download Messenger if they want to chat.

The messaging space right now is hot and crowded, as both tech giants and startups compete to become the universal messaging app of the future. In a recent interview with the NYTimes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the different use cases of his messaging applications, explaining that "Messenger is more about chatting with friends and WhatsApp is an SMS replacement." He added that private communication is a larger market than most realize, and that WhatsApp and Messenger "fit into this framework of private communication. That's what people like to do, and that's why there are so many different services." Zuckerberg concluded, "I think there is going to be even more stuff like that."

Enter Snapchat. The app has always been oriented toward privacy, allowing you to share self-destructing photos and videos with your friend circle and be notified if someones takes a screenshot. Often derided as a "sexting app" for teens, it has grown to over 20 million users who share 700 million photos per day—more than Facebook, with a fraction of userbase. In a world full of filters, Snapchat brought the fun, silliness, and ephemerality back to photo sharing by baring down it down to the essentials. Knowing that the photo was going to disappear, users started sharing more frequently and casually because they weren't concerned with any lasting effects. Instead, they were focused on sharing a moment as it was happening in order to convey the emotion behind it.

Now, Snapchat hopes to recreate their photo-sharing success with messaging. Their recent update added both a text and video chat component, allowing users to now respond to a snap with text (which disappears once it's read) or easily launch into a live video chat once both users are "here." But unlike Zuckerberg, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel isn't trying to make a different messaging app for a different use case: he recently told The Verge that he's trying to "make our digital conversations better reflect our real ones." Instead of building an app that's focused on the different types of content users are sharing with each other—be it text, photo, video, or even a sticker—Snapchat wants to focus on just the content and emotion of your message. "A modern chat app should feel like you're actually in the same room as the person you're talking to," added Spiegel.

It's a huge goal for a small app, but Spiegel is determined to evolve Snapchat into the best facilitator of personal relationships. Only time will tell if he is successful, but the next time one of my friends decides to share an exciting life moment with me over Snapchat, I won't have to leave the app to say, "Congratulations!" As I'm composing my response, Snapchat will send my friend a notification that I'm typing. Hopefully by the time I've sent my regards she has opened Snapchat to be "here" with me in the app, allowing us to naturally transition into a brief video chat. When we're done squealing, all we just lift our fingers from the screen to end the chat.

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Top 5 Social Media Questions

Posted: 13 May 2014 12:30 PM PDT

Donna Papacosta

Working in social media and communications, I get questions. Lots of questions. Here are the top five things people ask me, for this week's marketing tip.

Top 5 Social Media Questions image Clock1. How can I avoid spending an excessive amount of time on social media?
Social media can indeed be a time suck, in two ways. First, you might find an interesting link on Facebook, click through to the publication, and then spot six more things you'd like to read, then four more, and so on. Before you know it, an hour has passed and you're not entirely sure why you're watching a cat video.

Secondly, you will be curating and sharing content. A few tricks can help save time.

First, streamline your perusal of social media by limiting the time you allow yourself to freely traverse the social media world. What works for me is a half hour first thing in the morning, followed by short bursts of social media goodness several more times later in the day, then perhaps in the evening during my "down" time. TweetDeck is my preferred tool for organizing my Twitter stream so I can see my various lists and hashtag searches at a glance.

As for publishing posts, I love Buffer, which allows me to queue up a bunch of items in the early morning and spool them out during the day. I always caution clients against over-automating, but Buffer can be a very handy tool.

2 .We hired someone to set us up with social media accounts. But now we don't know what to do with them.
Unfortunately, some consultants will "set you up" on social media and then leave you hanging. Creating accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, Pinterest and elsewhere is merely the first steps in your tactical approach. You need a strategy first.

Why are you using social media? What are you trying to accomplish? How will you measure success? Answer these three questions first, and then create an editorial calendar. Only then can you start publishing content. Read my post on "Why social media without content marketing makes no sense."

3. How will I know if my social media efforts are working?
What were you trying to accomplish? Did it happen? Sure, look at the numbers, but it's not all about likes and retweets. Getting 100 retweets or 500 likes may boost your ego, but if it doesn't spark any tangible results, what's the point?

4. Is GooglePlus here to stay? Should I have a presence there?
Over the past few weeks many pundits have pronounced the death of GooglePlus, but I think they're premature. If you judge GooglePlus as a Facebook competitor, it comes up short. But it was never designed to go head to head against Facebook. GooglePlus is a social layer, and it's tightly integrated with Google Search. For now, I'd say it's an important communications vehicle. I especially like its Hangouts and Communities. Check out my interview with B.L. Ochman to learn more.

Top 5 Social Media Questions image Slide1

5. Do I really need to blog?
Yes, you do. Websites without fresh content are not likely to attract eyeballs. Your blog can function as the hub for your online presence, with your accounts on other platforms as outposts. You own your blog, so it should be at the core of what you do. Publish on your own blog and then link to those posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. Learn to love blogging! And if you need help getting started, hire someone to put you on the blogging path.

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Can Social Media Force Brands To Rethink Their Ads?

Posted: 13 May 2014 12:27 PM PDT

Vinaya Naidu

Social media has indeed empowered the end consumer. No more is the consumer at the receiving end of insane product advertisements that defy logic or play around with creating stereotypes in the society. Today, the consumers' voice can be heard on social platforms and often travels far and wide when it comes to collective negative opinion on an advertisement.

Viewer voices get amplified as they gather momentum on social media, but do they have the power to get brands to rollback their ad campaigns? We take a look at the changing equation between brand communication and consumer opinion.

This year, more than the previous years that India has seen an active social media involvement, has begun with quite a few examples of consumers taking to social media to voice their anger against a brand's advertisement.

Asian Paints gets husbands angry with 'Husbands are useless' campaign

In January, Asian Paints, India's largest paint company and also the third largest paint company in Asia, launched its 'Husbands are useless' campaign with a series of 4 TVCs. The ads were to promote the company's online website feature where one could upload pictures of their homes and give the rooms a virtual paint to see how it would look after being painted. So the company resorted to showing husbands as useless when it came to contributing with their ideas for home decor, while paralleling them with a block of bricks.

In this ad at the breakfast table, the exasperated wife is finally advised to log on to the company website and help choose the colors for her home, as her husband (a brick wall) seated opposite her has no opinion whatsoever on how they should go about redesigning their home.

The ad went on to receive much flak from men as well as women with numerous tweets, Facebook comments, YouTube comments and blog posts condemning the company for suggesting that husbands are useless.

The company, however, resorted to humour in its defence, and asked the complainants to take it in good humour.

While the outrage continued, Asian Paints stuck to its guns; it did not accept that the ad portrayed husbands in bad light. Instead, it launched the 'Wives are surprised' campaign that featured real wives sharing how their husbands surprised them by redecorating the home.

Here, Apoorwa Gupta sings praises for her husband Deepak as he works hard to get the perfect antique finish jhoola for the living room.

Deliberate or not, 'Wives are surprised' formed the perfect antidote for 'Husbands are useless' campaign. Asian Paints, apparently, did heed to consumer opinion after all!

Cadbury 5 Star pulls down 'Inki condition serious hai' ad film

Cadbury 5 Star, chocolate bar brand from Cadbury, triggered a wave of anger when it launched its 'Inki condition serious hai' campaign with a TVC. Portraying the bar as a cure for seriousness, the ad film shows very serious kids popping out from their mother's wombs accompanied by a 'pucchak' sound.

The minute-long ad starts with a birth scene from centuries ago, where it says children were born happy while a newborn pops out laughing out loud. Then one fine day, a dangerous disease called 'seriousness' spread like an epidemic. Newborns came into the world with a 'serious' attitude, leading to a world of serious adults. Eventually, a doctor prescribes the 5 star bar as the only cure to get rid of this 'seriousness'.

Viewer opinions ranged from downright anger at the brand showing mothers in a bad light to filing complaints with ad watchdog Advertising Standards Council of India ASCI.

Can Social Media Force Brands To Rethink Their Ads? image Cadbury 5 star comment 600x133

Cadbury 5 Star no longer hosts the ad on its YouTube channel, but is nevertheless carrying on the message of curing 'seriousness' in the society. Another shining example of a brand being compelled to take down its ad, following consumer outrage.

H&S Men 'Zindagi mili dobara' wins against the gender stereotyping message

This March, for the promotions of Head & Shoulders India's anti-dandruff shampoo for men, H&S Men, the brand had launched a 3-month campaign called 'Zindagi mili dobara' with a TVC that chided men for using their wives' shampoos.

In the short film titled 'Gym Revelations', two men on dumbbells are seen chatting about their maid problems, an area of communication that is stereotypically ruled by women. Just then they are knocked down one by one from a bottle of the H&S shampoo for men, while the voice over puts good sense into them, 'STOP before you stop being a man'.

Viewers complained of gender stereotype in the ad, while a viewer also emailed the media manager at Procter & Gamble because the ad offended her for two reasons, namely:

1. It suggests that men stop being men when they share some of their wives' habits.

2. It suggests that by sharing their wives' (feminine) habits they become worthy of derision and therefore get a shampoo bottle thrown at them to 'knock them out' and bring them back to their senses.

Attributing the videos to 'creative expression', the brand thanked the consumer for her valuable opinion and regretted having offended her.

"These videos are a creative expression of the insight that men & women are different and therefore the products they use should cater to their unique needs. Our intent is only to enable men to use products that are meant for men."

A petition was also filed at Change.org asking P&G India to stop airing the ads and a complaint was made at ASCI. The petition was closed, after reaching 1778 signatures but could not bring about P&G to stop airing the ad. ASCI previewed the ad and dismissed the complaint as it considered the ad 'to be humorous and not so objectionable as to cause grave or widespread offence'.

What may be humorous to some, may cause grave offence to others. But, what we can see with the advent of social media, is that brands are slowly waking up to the fact that the consumer on social media is no more a mute spectator, but can raise her voice and be heard far and wide. The consumer opinion finally matters enough to get the ads pulled down!

These might have positive implications at the drawing board where brand managers and their ad agency set about to design a commercial, because now they have two watchdogs to mind about – the ASCI, and most importantly, the social media empowered consumer.

Image credit: ppcdn.500px.org

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