Sishi's Digital Mind

5 “W” Your Client Have to Know about Digital

Posted on May 4, 2015 by sishizhu

Where did time go? It’s already the last week of this semester!

Today, I am going to do one thing that I have always wanted to do since the beginning of this semester. Draw some pictures!(All pictures draw by Sishi Zhu. Please don’t use it without noticing me~)

Since it’s a review of what we have learned this whole semester. I will talk about what 5 “W” you have to tell your clients before you create a digital strategy for them.

As always, here is a VideoScribe that will tell you the 5 W in 1 minute~

Why they should consider digital?

More people have access to Internet than access to safe drinking water and electricity in our world today!

Digital is different from traditional.

Who is going to be the target?

1. The customer journey is changed from funnel to circle. The post-purchase experience is what makes it a smile!

Past:

Now:

2. It is important to build a tribe. Loyalty matters!

What should be post?

1. Content is fire!

2. UX (User Experience.)

We have to understand science behind the human thought!

Google now ranks your website search result based on if it is user friendly!

Where to put your content?

There is various digital tools and platforms: social media, email, mobile, paid media, beacon, search and so on. You have to make sure you choose the right one based on your objective.

Several facts to have a quick understanding.

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When should we do it?

There is a simple chart can tell you the proper time to update your social media.

(This form is created by Mycleveragency)

That’s it! Hope it will be helpful!

Love you, my dear followers. Hope you all have a great day!

I am almost crying to say goodbye to you guys.

Contact me through Instagram: vanelovelife or Email: zhusishi@hotmail.com

I will be there for you! XOXO!

Wait! There is a sponsored ad for you~

5 Tips to Be Better at Social Media

Posted on April 27, 2015 by sishizhu

Good afternoon, my dearest followers~ I said I won’t say goodbye!

Those days, social media is so popular. No matter it is company or individual, we all want to be successful on these platforms. Today, I’m going to tell you 5 tips about how to handle social media.

If you are in a hurry, just watch this videoscribe I created. It will provide you the brief ideas about those tips in 50 seconds.

If you want to know more in detail. Here we go.

First of all, you have to have a clear objective in mind.

Create awareness about your brand? Generate sales? Attract new customers? Or trigger brand loyalty?

Only when you know what you want to achieve, you can handle the social media right. Always have the objective in mind and do the following things based on the objective. Or else, you will have no direction and get lost easily.

Second, choose the right social media platform.

There are numerous social media platforms out there and all have their own specialties. You have to know your audience and choose the right platform to reach them properly.

Here is a infograph I just created about the hottest social media platforms and their differences.

% Base: Online adult people

(Source from PEW Research Center, 2014)

And you also want to know different characteristics of those platforms.

Just bear in mind that you have to choose the right platform before you say something. For example, if you are going to target women, you can’t miss Pinteret.

Thirdly, social media is gasoline, and content is fire. (@JayBaer)

This is one of my favorite quote. For social media, content is the queen. We have to provide valuable, entertaining and attractive content to gain followers.

And also, we have to be careful to make our content short and sweet. One of the smartest thing is to have more picture instead of words. Because people don’t read on internet, they scan.(Said by my Professor Joanne)

Here is a simple but useful rule to follow when we want to post something. (Source from Professor @JoanneTombrakos)

Forth, post wisely at the proper time.

Design by Mycleveragency)

Besides, we can also use some tools to manage social media. For example, use Hootsuite to schedule posts on desirable time. There are a lot of tools out there: SocialOomph, Tweepi, Spredfast, Buffer, Bitly, SocialBro and so on. We can use whatever we like to manage social media.

Finally, act like a human to engage with your audience.

Great social media account has its own personality: Energetic like @Disney, elegant like @Tiffany and creative like @BarbieStyle. We have to build up our own brand image on social media.

It has to be some real human-being behind the screen to talk and listen to its audience.

Instead of a Frozen Robot……

Use a lot of #hashtags;

Post more than one time but less than five;

Comment and reply quickly;

Be considerable and think for your audience( Just like what I did at the beginning. Provide the VideoScribe for those busy audience).

It is not easy to be good at social media. We have to devote our heart and soul into it.

But it is also not hard to do it. Just think carefully, post boldly and engage delightfully.

See you next week, XOXO~~

Want to target Chinese? You have to be on this platform!

Posted on April 20, 2015 by sishizhu

Hi, my dearest followers. Time flies. This is almost the end of this semester. I just can’t say goodbye to you.

Today, let’s talk about something I want to share with you for this whole semester.

I bet you have notice that there are more and more Chinese around you wherever you are. And since Chinese has stronger purchase power than ever, a lot of companies are now paying attention to this growing market.

As for digital marketers, here is one thing that we can never ignore to target Chinese——Wechat.

How popular is Wechat?

1.1 billion accounts, 500 million active users, 100 million users use Wechat outside of China, 10 million messages are processed per minute on New Year’s Eve through Wechat. ( Data updated 2015, from DMR )

What can Wechat do?

Basically, it is like a combination of Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Tinder, Uber, ApplePay and so on.

You can text message your friend, or you can just talk to your friend by press the voice message button. Moreover, you can call your friends just like an at&t call or you can have a video call like Facetime. You can have a group talk or a private one. (Getting into those group is one of the things we can do to target)

And here is something that amaze me. You can have a Wallet in Wechat by bond your credit card (or debit). Then, you can recharge various bills, make some investment, call a cab just like Uber, shop online, pay for what you just eat, buy an airplane ticket or a movie ticket and so on. You can transfer your money to anyone or within your own accounts which is what Chase App can do. You can also use Quick Pay to do what Apple Pay can do.

Besides, you can search people nearby and say hi to them like Tinder. Or if you want to find someone actively, you can shake your phone, and Wechat will find you someone shake his or her phone at the same time with you nearby.

There are also official accounts that people can follow on Wechat and they can push contents to you. That is definitely where marketers have to be to engage with customers.

Wechat also develop diverse games in it. I just can’t name all the functions of this “impossible invention”.

It is because Wechat has so many amazing functions that Chinese people are now spend tons of time on it everyday!

No matter it is parents, grandparents or even primary school students, they all have a Wechat!

For me, I wake up with Wechat in my hand and I browse my Friends’ moments and Official Accounts I follow for an hour or more. I just asked in one of my Wechat groups with more than 200 people, and 32 of them came out and told me that they are the same with me.

Wechat has legs for sure! I love it so much that I can’t name even one minus of it except it occupied too much of my time.

Recommend it to your client? Absolutely YES!

Not only Chinese, Wechat now has various language settings and embedded with a convenient translator. It is becoming international! So, besides Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I would recommend every brand to build an official Wechat account.

Put your QR code everywhere for customers to scan and follow. Be sure to have entertaining, educational or functional contents. When your followers up, it is easy to transfer interests into sales since Wechat has payment ability.

Isn’t it fascinating? Let’s do it now!

XOXO, my dear followers. I won’t say goodbye. Love you!

Are you watching in the Big Data Age?

Posted on April 10, 2015 by sishizhu

(Lovely reminder: Please pay attention to the words in the Gifs, they are related!~)

You are been watched, there is a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.

The other agency may consider you irrelevant, but we don’t. Not matter you are ordinary people or superman, we are here to observe your habits and try to provide you the best services and products.

Dear followers, have you ever watched Person of Interest? Or most recently Furious 7? If yes, you are already familiar with the “God’s eye” that knows every movement of you. (If not, try it!~They are both fun to watch!~)

In this Digital World, our life is almost like being watched. Big data gave users the power to look into others’ life and analyze their habits.

The good thing is most of these analysis result in a more convenient life for customers and a more accurate and visualized prediction for marketers. But sometimes it will also have some side effect—-Privacy. Is there anyone enjoy being watched every minute?

So, next time, you’d better make sure to delete the cookies on your computer if you don’t want to be traced or close your “location” while you don’t want to be bothered.

As a marketer, today I want to talk more about what we can benefit from Big data and what we should be careful about it.

Why we want to use Big Data? Because the data size is huge, the source is diverse and the speed of accessing those data is almost in real time. Most importantly, Big Data is objective. We human beings are so emotional and tend to have unconscious bias. For example, marketer XYZ may prefer choosing white people to be his target since he is white while the Big Data can objectively tell him that based on all the sample data, black people are more likely to be his customers.

However, Big Data can never replace human. Because they can only tell you what you asked. What kind of data to look into? What sample size we want? What survey to conduct? Big Data can’t answer those questions till now.

We need those experienced marketers to set the direction, to guide us to take advantage of the Big Data and to find the flaws in it.

Big Data is a powerful tool, but it’s not Aladdin’s Lamp. It is a precious mineral field that waiting for marketers to explore.

Sure we can make predictions and decisions based on the past behavior data. But we have to analyze and test those predictions to be more precise and we must let human be involved in the process. Because machine don’t have a mind that we have. Did you remember Pinterest’s Joke(See details in James’s blog) that they simply trust every bit of data they got and send out the emails to those customers congratulating their new marriage. However, it turns out a lot of customers just browse wedding related stuff for other reasons rather than their own marriage. The data simply assume that browsing wedding related things equals to getting married soon. This surely pissed off some sensitive single lady.

The lesson we learned from Pinterest is that data alone is not enough to make marketing decision. Hah, cheers, we marketers are not going to lose job because of Big Data!

But, there is always a but.

Big Data has 4 V: Volume, Velocity, Veracity and Variety. (Click here for more in detail) Accordingly, marketers in the Big Data Age has to be familiar with statistic measurement, be quick at handling new data, be agile of segmenting the data, and be versatile to deal with diverse data. See, the tool is upgraded, therefore we have to upgrade ourselves too. There are a lot of things to watch in the Big Data World.

Are you watching?

XOXO, see you next week!

Watch out, Delta! There are always threats behind the scene.

Posted on April 6, 2015 by sishizhu

Good afternoon, sweethearts, hope you all had a happy Easter~

Today we are going to talk about social media crisis.

Have you ever think about one day your social media account might be hacked and posted a lot of embarrassing content? Sounds scary, right? You might need a long explanation to your mom or even worse, your other half.

But when it happened to a brand’s social media account. Things get even more complicated. Unfortunately, 10 Feb 2015, Delta’s Facebook was hacked and posted X-related content. If you are curious about what it looks like, click here. (Be careful, it is objectionable)

It took almost one hour for Delta to find out the situation and they can’t get the account back at that time. So they post a tweet out to explain it.

And later a follow-up message said the airline was investigating. (NyDailyNews) And later, when they regain the control of the Facebook account, Delta explained the situation and apologized on Facebook again.

Overall, I think Delta handled it properly. What surprise me is that it looks like people forgive Delta very quickly. In this 2 months after this hack, Delta got 400,000 more visits. (I subjected the visitors on Delta FB today to the visitors on the screenshot of 10 Feb, 2015) For me, I got a chance to look up to their posts and “Like” a few. Not bad, hah? If they handle it right, the social crisis may transform into a social buzz.

My only concern is that they should react faster to minimize the bad impact. An hour is a little bit too long for a big company to react.

If the account is been monitoring by human 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, things might be better. And I believe the cost is worth it compare to the possibility of endangered reputation.

Moreover, they can protect their account more seriously. Using password protection or change the password frequently, or whatever it takes to stay away from hacker.

Social media can give a brand a lot of benefits, but there is also threats behind it. The Internet is fast and irreversible, we should be careful of every step we take.

As for who’s most responsible to handle this kind of social crisis. I think both PR and Marketing’s should watch out. Because social account management is part of the digital marketing. And the social media is also part of public relationship. Moreover, if two departments can join together, they might react more fast, active and creative!

That’s it for now, see you next week, XOXO~

A mango flavor dream with Frooti

Posted on March 30, 2015 by sishizhu

Hello, my dear followers, I AM BACK!~

Hope you all had a great great spring break! These two weeks seems to be two months long! I miss you so much!

Spring finally comes to the city, so today I want to tell you something bright and energetic.

The mango beverage brand Frooti is rebranding this March( March 15, 2015), using new logo, new package and new campaign.

They got a very interesting theme——Tiny people.

The campaign starts with a 50 seconds “absurdly ear- and eye-catching little film”See more in ADWEEK. In the video, several tiny people struggle to transform a huge mango into Frooti. And in the end, the Frooti is drank by the spokesperson. To make Frooti the hero and center, the beverage itself is in real size in the video where everything else around it becomes tiny. The whole video is bold, entertaining, fresh, playful and energetic! I really love the idea that exaggerates the product in the center and let those tiny little characters to create story around it. It is like a fairy tale that brings you into the mango dream with Frooti.

Here is the video~

Except the adorable video, Frooti created a lot of attractive posters and present them on each social media platform. They use #theFrootiLife to engage with the customers. With those fascinating contents, they gain a huge success.

Go diving in the “mango sea”!

Climbing in the “mango mountain”!

Fall in love under the “mango sun”!

And moreover, the mango is healthy! See it is shaking Hula Hoop!

On Facebook, they got 961K followers and people are consistently Like and Repost their content.

On Instagram, their followers are increasing and the hashtag Frooti got 3,470 posts. Actually, when I find out their page, I start following them immediately! The delicate pictures are so creative and the bright colors give me a good mood!

On Twitter, they got 8,594 followers and those lovely contents they posts have been retweet a lot.

In addition, this campaign should contribute 50 percent to the brand’s growth. Read more here Parle Agro rebrands Frooti

It’s only been 2 weeks and I didn’t find anything goes wrong with this campaign till now. Moreover, the comments online are mostly positive.

Personally, I really love this sweet and juicy campaign. If I have to say something that I think they can do better. There are two.

First, I checked Frooti website’s developer source and find out there is no keyword. They only did SEO that customer can find them by “Frooti”. But if you type into “mango juice”, there is nowhere to find Frooti above the fold. Therefore, I think Frooti may want to spend some money on SEM and buy a basket of profitable keywords like “mango juice” and so on. “Search” is essential in this digital world.

The other thing is that maybe next time Frooti should act faster because the Frooti instagram name is taken by someone with only 5 followers now. For customer who are interested in you , you want them to find you by your name easily. So maybe Frooti can buy the name?~ And this is a lesson for us, you have to be quick and visionary in this digital battle!

That’s it for now, beautiful, see you next week! I am going to get a bottle of Frooti and enjoy the “Juicy Mango Dream”! XOXO~

Want to dig into someone? A name is all you need!

Posted on March 9, 2015 by sishizhu

Hi beautiful, hope you all had a wonderful International Women’s Day. No matter how busy you are right now, hold on, because Spring Break is only one week away!!!

When I scroll down Forbes today, a thumbstopper caught my eye. There are websites that you can dig into whoever you want as long as you know the name! Backgroud Alert and BeenVerified.

Have you ever Googled yourself on the Internet? If not, I highly recommend you to have a try. (That’s what my professor told us. ) Trust me, you will be surprised how many information others can get about you on the Internet. I was terrified at first and start to be aware of all the digital devises I use afterwards.

And now, things became even scary. I opened both of the websites. It says that they can provide almost all the public records, criminal records and so on when you type into the name. (The picture below is a screen shot of what a Background Alert report can let you know about the person)

I just can’t believe that all those information you can easily get by paying them several dollars. It is so crazy that the first thing comes to my mind is that if they are legal.

Find someone’s personal information, address history and phone numbers online is too much for me. In my opinion, those are privacy. I will definitely be annoyed if someone paid to find my contact information. Privacy is so important for everybody. Personally, I am terrified about what those websites will do to offense our privacy.

Fortunately, those website also have some bright sides. You really can dig into the stranger which you are going out for a date. All those criminal records will notice you about your safety. Besides, since they provide you the contact information of the person. It might be a good way to find your old friends who is out of touch for years.

As a marketer, those websites might be a good news. Think about it, if one day all the consumer database is connected to those websites, consumer’s habit is easier to interpret and they can’t fake themselves anymore in front of the marketers. All the data will be more precise and efficient. Marketers can directly target people they want since they know them deeper. Even though, it sounds so scary to the consumers.

Everything has two sides. Digging into someone through all those searching websites can be a sweet dream and a nightmare. What do you think? Feel free to comment!

XOXO, see you next week~

COSTA, what is the APP use for?

Posted on March 2, 2015 by sishizhu

Good afternoon, my dear followers. Here we met again!

I wonder how many of you are watching my blog through the WordPress App on your smartphone now. Yes, we all love App these days because it is convenient and useful. A company can use an App to engage with its customers and keep them loyal. But not every company can create very good one.

This week we are going to talk about the App for Costa coffee.

The storage of our smartphone is mostly limited. So an App must be useful to occupy the storage. That is, it should be functional and create value for users. The Costa coffee App can be connected to user’s social media account and can be a store locator. It also provide a Costa product catalogue, puzzle game and free music. Sounds pretty good, hah?

But when you think deeper, what is all those functions related to a coffee shop App? It serves a purpose that people can locate the nearest Costa coffee and can know about the product of the company. These two functions are absolutely very good. Last week I talked about Cafebene, their App only shows how many stores they have instead of helping customer to find the nearest store. Obviously, on this point, Costa did better. However, Costa creatively offers a puzzle game in the App. It is like this.

I really doubt those days how many people will use this game to kill time. Not to say engage with the brand. It is too boring to attract the customers. If you want to use a game to engage with the customers, at least it should to unique and fun to play.

The function should be mostly related to the company. Costa App also provide some free music. It is good. Starbucks also provide free music. But overall, Costa App’s theme is unclear. On the other hand, Starbucks did a great job. They provide a membership program and you can even swipe the App to pay your bill in store. I really found the App payment thing is brilliant. You have no feeling you are using money but only see the number in an App is decreasing. And then you pay more happily.

A great App should not only be useful but also easy to navigate. If it is like a high-tech software, not too many people will like it. Again, just as we discussed last week, UX(user experience) is important. The Costa App is quite easy to navigate since it does’t contain too much stuff.

The design of the App is fine. It is consistent with Costa in store decoration and Costa logo—-simple and clear. What’s more, it provides numerous yummy pictures of the drinks and snacks. I always love those kind of pictures which looks sweet and delicious.

Overall, It is a pleasure to use Costa App as a store locator but I don’t think customer will engage with the brand through the App. After all, we already got Google Map App that can give us direction. Not too many people will willing to have it occupy the limited storage on the phone just because of the product introduction and the puzzle game. As for me, I will delete it immediately after I did this homework.

4give+me

I really hate say so many bad things about all those coffee shop’s digital marketing tools. No matter it is Cafebene or Costa, they both provide really good products. It is just that the digital marketing is rising, and they should pay more attention to it to stay competitive. Starbucks’s achievement has a reason. And I believe to some extent it can contributes to their gorgeous App.

XOXO, see you next week~

Korean Cafe bene in US——UX has a long way to go

Posted on February 23, 2015 by sishizhu

Hi, my dear followers, long time no see! Hope you all had a great Valentine’s day and a happy lunar new year!

This week we are going to talk about the user experience(UX) across all platforms(Including website, tablet and mobile phone) for Cafe bene.

Cafe bene is a Korean Cafe franchise which provides traditional European coffee, modern creative drinks and delicious desserts. Now, it has more than 1,600 stores all over the world and is planning to expand and compete with Starbucks. Quite ambitious, isn’t it?

However, Cafe bene’s online platform UX is not that competitive compared with what Starbucks has done.

The visual design of the website is good.It is full of delicious and delicate picture of it’s coffee and food, talking about Cafe bene’s story, menu and expanding location. Simple and bright layout of all those things remind people of Cafe bene’s cozy and relaxing atmosphere.Besides, the website provides some related news and franchise join information. But this is not enough. In my opinion, the only purpose of the website is to let more people know about Cafe bene. It is not designed to be useful or to provide some useful functions like membership, online ordering and location reminding.

The content of the website is mostly introducing Cafe bene itself without interacting with its customers. I do like all those yummy pictures of it’s menu! They are very attractive. But they don’t put price on it or online purchase method or at least where is the nearest store to find those good-looking food. I don’t find it entertaining, convincing or inspiring enough. Because it mostly talks about how many new stores it is going to launch. How can it attracts more customers by talking about the store is expanding? With this kind of content, customers won’t have strong emotional reactions.

Cafe bene doesn’t have APP for tablets and mobile phones. The visual on tablets is almost the same with the computer screen which is fine. And the website for mobile phone is customized which means they do employ responsive design. The content for tablets and mobile phones are exactly the same.

If the website on computer doesn’t provide location reminder, I think it is fine. But if the version on the mobile phone can’t do that, it is not desirable. It is highly possible that when people search with mobile phone they want to find a nearest Cafe bene. But the Location button on the mobile phone web page only shows all the Cafe bene stores all over the world. At this time, it is a little bit disappointing for the user to talk about Cafe bene’s achievement. They should locate the customer and give the customer the direction to find a Cafe bene.

Maybe it is because that Cafe bene is just going to start in US. But they do have to pay attention to their online platform UX, there is a large space for them to improve. They can learn from Starbucks and Coffee Bean to design an App for customers. Creating membership card to gain customer royalty is also a way to grow bigger.

Anyway, they do have a long list to check their UX for all those online platforms. It is a digital world now, if they can’t think more for customer, they won’t get what they want.

Oh, my god. I seem to said too much passive things about Cafe bene.

I do have to tell you something they did perfectly! Their milk bubble tea is fabulous! Gave it a try, you will never regret!

How fascinating you are?

Posted on February 16, 2015 by sishizhu

Hi, everyone~ Are you missing me?~ I bet the answer is YES!

This week you might know me better and maybe can get an idea to know yourself better！ Have you ever thought how fascinate you are in other people’s eyes?

No, no, no, I don’t mean what you looks like in the mirror.

I mean the inner quality of you.

Sometimes, you feel so good about yourself out and wonder what other people might think about you. Hope it’s not like this…

tumblr_inline_mifk7qyAWE1qz4rgp

Fortunately, I got the chance to know a little bit about how the world sees me. Our professor told us about Sally Hogshed and gave us the access to the Fascination Advantage test.

I always found of doing self test. It’s like someone knows you better that you to tell you about who you are and what can you do to be better. And looking through the result is like being a detective who is trying to match the evidence with the reality.

This time, I am satisfied.

h5ed07d90

Because I got a 16 pages result report!

Surprisingly, the report is quite me. It says my primary and secondary advantage is passion and prestige and my dormant advantage is mystique. I feel flattered when it says I am the talent. It is almost compliment that makes you more confident. On the other hand, it also provides some suggestions to make you improve. I should be more pragmatic instead of trying to do everything perfect. Time and energy is limited and I should rank all those bulletins in my to-do list. Put time on the most worthy one!

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Besides, as it says, I am not a mysterious person. I always tell my friends almost everything. For me, sharing is important to a relationship. The stories of each person are the bridges to connect each other. And I don’t what to change that. I am what I am. I like the way Sally says you have to be more you to be fascinate. Don’t trying to change yourself to some popular personality. Everyone has their own unique fascination.

Keep true of yourself and be fascinate!

Here is Sally’s TedTalk. She talks about how she use online dating website to test how fascinate she is and how to impress others in the first 9 seconds. Believe me, it is quite interesting and I just want to have a try to see how fascinate I am on the online dating website. Don’t tell my boyfriend.

bart-snicker