Domino’s Pizza Serving Delicious Videos

Domino’s Pizza’s YouTube channel has 209K followers and over thirty videos posted (Domino’s, n.d.). Ten years ago Domino’s Pizza was falling out of favor but now it is a successful company, surpassing Pizza Hut in sales to become the largest pizza chain in the world. They had several different content strategies that jettisoned them into a higher market share and worked to optimize their video content (Gilliland, 2019).

One particularly successful strategy in their video marketing was the content messaging. For example, one of their video campaigns sought to make Domino’s Pizza the ‘official food of everything’. This message was driven home by images and storylines around unifying moments in everyone’s life. For example, they suggested a pizza is a natural gift for Valentine’s Day, New Year’s hangovers, and sporting events (i.e. things most people experience). It also positioned the brand as the best food to accompany your favorite food. It also used its Vlog and video campaign to suggest their pizza could be used for everyday occasions, like celebrations of a pay raise (Cole, 2018).

I found it brilliant to link a campaign goal to a measurable event. With their videos suggesting New Year’s Eve was a good time for Domino’s Pizza, they could track if their sales went up over New Year’s Eve. The sales numbers did increase after this campaign, 6.1% more sales were recorded on NYE and 5.5% more sales were recorded on NYE Day (Cole, 2018). This is a metric they want to track and a good way to track their reaching their goal or not.  

One tactic they can use to improve their video campaigns it to focus in on which videos are working to best for them. Tracking the attention span of a video will show if the content sustains the viewer interest or if viewer interest falls off. If 60% of the viewers are viewing a video all the way to the end, that can be considered a success (Litt, 2014).

Works Cited

Cole, S. (2018, October 30). Domino’s Pizza: How it plans to become the ‘official food of everything’. In Econsultancy. Retrieved from https://econsultancy.com/dominos-pizza-official-food-of-everything-social-media/

Domino’s Pizza. (n.d.). In Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/user/dominosvids/videos

Gilliland, N. (2019, November 27). 10 deliciously creative Domino’s Pizza marketing campaigns. In EConsultancy. Retrieved from https://econsultancy.com/10-deliciously-creative-domino-s-pizza-marketing-campaigns/

Litt, M. (2014, August 5). 3 Ways to Improve Marketing ROI with Video Content. In Content Marketing Institute. Retrieved from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/08/improve-marketing-roi-video-content/

Cultural Branding: Old Spice and Chipotle find their people

Two different companies ran two different cultural branding campaigns, focusing on different tactics. Old Spice ran a campaign using humor to humanize their brand. Chipotle ran a campaign attempting to solicit emotion. Both of these brands saw sales and social media engagement success as a result of their campaigns.

Old Spice is an old brand, one of the oldest in men’s personal care products. The outdated advertising focused on the brand’s efficacy and sales had been lagging. They needed to connect to the customer on a more emotional level, one that would address the personal needs and desires behind choosing a personal care product. It focused on the scent, claiming it was the manliest of scents on the planet (Old Spice, 2010). Old Spice chose humor to humanize their brand as a strategy. The main character of the ads made fun of what it meant to be ‘manly’ and ‘attractive’ (Holt, 2016). The humor made the content likable, relatable, and shareable. The videos were short, some as short as seventeen seconds. This was a new strategy for online marketing. Also, they had a high level of brand participation, with the Old Spice Man responding within 24 hours to tweets with videos, especially if the videos were from people influential on social media. Personalized videos were shared for free on the sites of the influencers, which gained more viewers. The campaign was a huge success. The Old Spice channel was the most viewed company channel on YouTube. The videos had 236 million views. Facebook interaction went up 800%. Most importantly, sales figures increased by 107% (Bullas, n.d.).  Many commentators have recognized this social media campaign as the quintessential case study in viral social media marketing (Old Spice, 2010).

Chipotle focused on soliciting emotion as their strategy. With their Scarecrow video they targeted an anxiety that was prevalent in crowdculture, namely the idea that industrial food production is feeding us garbage and lies. This strategy aimed to positively affect the brand by framing the brand as one of the good guys. They wanted their customers to feel that they were a company that serves fast food but they are calling out the industrial food production industries, they are producing ‘real food’ and the consumer should feel good about eating there. This campaign was effective because the videos aligned with a larger emotion that was circulating through social media. The videos were viewed tens of millions of times and drove large sales and profits for the company (Holt, 2016).

Both of these companies connected with larger ideologies that were pulsing through social media and engaged in cultural branding. Old Spice engaged in the discourse around gender and sexuality and succeeded by identifying with their ‘ironic hipster aesthetic’. Chipotle engaged in the conversation about large-scale food production and positioned themselves as a player the preindustrial food movement (Holt 2016).  Both of these brands moved away from just discussing the virtues of their products and instead positioned themselves as influencers in the larger conversations their products fit into. They were both successful in their efforts. I don’t think one was better than the other.

Works Cited

Bullas, J. (n.d.). https://www.jeffbullas.com/11-social-media-marketing-lessons-from-the-old-spice-campaign/. In JeffBullas. Retrieved from https://www.jeffbullas.com/11-social-media-marketing-lessons-from-the-old-spice-campaign/

Holt, D. (2016, March). Branding in the Age of Social Media. In Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://eds-a-ebscohost-com.vlib.excelsior.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=dd1f7d51-0c1a-4d36-a489-520f97096d96%40sdc-v-sessmgr03

Old Spice Case Study: Effectively harnessing social media in personal care. (2010, October 1). In Business Source Complete. Retrieved from https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.vlib.excelsior.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=c521412a-86af-4c4f-8e73-b6fe56ac5031%40pdc-v-sessmgr03

#SFGiants – Listening In

Trending hashtags allow a company to gather valuable metrics, metrics that can then be used to make decisions. It is important to listen in on social media in an effective way. After listening, a company can move on to set goals and benchmarks in order to monitor and measure their social media efforts. (Module 3, n.d.).  I will be discussing the trending #SFGiants used in the example Twitter snapshot report on Unionmetrics.com (Union Metrics Support, 2017). I will look at what the data says about the topic and what it means to the company. I will also talk about recommendations moving forward.

There is a credible way to listen in to conversations on social media in order to glean valuable information from the metrics. Using trending hashtags you can observe which communities are talking about you and what they are saying. You can observe what your fans think you are doing right and how you can make improvements. Most importantly, listening will allow a company to set goals moving forward (Module 3, n.d.).

For the #SFGiants topic, we learn that the reach is 1,813,508. This is the number of unique Twitter accounts that received information containing the SF Giants hashtag (Union Metrics Support, 2017). While this is impressive, you have to be careful not to let high numbers for to your head. This is a vanity metric, a metric that only makes you feel like you are doing well but has no translation to success unless tied to another metric. For example, you reached 1,000,000 people and 10,000 of them followed the link you shared therefor you had a 1% click-through (Harper, 2015).

Tweet activity is a helpful metric because you can observe at what time of day your followers are most actively talking about you. For #SFGiants the most active time was 11pm. (Union Metrics Support, 2017). Knowing this, you can make sure someone from your company is live on Twitter to interact with fans at that time. Finally, it is important to track your contributor metrics. This shows you who is most actively talking about your hashtag, and how many potential people will receive your message based on their following. It was not surprising to see that the top contributor for #SFGiants was @SFGiants, because self promotion is important on social media. Knowing the next top contributors will help @SFGiants know who can be potential influencers. (Union Metrics, 2017).

After listening in to who is talking about #SFGiants on Twitter, I would recomment that @SFGiants be active on Twitter around 11PM and also during events like games and drafts. I would recommend they focus on their top contributors and see what they are talking about using the hashtag, and encourage them to promote the brand. I would not focus on total impressions.

Harper, B. (2015, April 09). Social vanity metrics: The top 4 worst offenders. Retrieved from Social Media Today website: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/2015-04-09/social-vanity-metrics-top-4-worst-offenders

Module 3: Module Notes: Basic Social Media Measurement. (n.d.). In Excelsior College. Retrieved from https://excelsior.instructure.com/courses/15614/pages/module-3-module-notes-basic-social-media-measurement?module_item_id=1347131

Union Metrics Support. (2017, October 5). Union Metrics Help. In Union Metrics. Retrieved from https://unionmetrics.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201201556-Understanding-the-TweetReach-snapshot-report

#hellohashtags

For a class assignment we were asked to follow the conversations around the term #highered for 48 hours. I will discuss the type of information being spread with this hashtag, the common themes around the hashtags, the influencers who were using the hashtag and what made their communication so effective.

            Hashtags were first used on Twitter to categorize information and also to make that information easier to search. A hashtag is a grouping of letters and possibly numbers. Now they are used for even more than simple classification of messages. They are used to form conversations with likeminded individuals, to promote brands, and to profess opinions and beliefs. They can be used to emphasize, discredit, disclaim, support, emote, promote, and numerous other functions (Caleffi, 2015).  

             From 1/24/20-1/26/20, there was a lot of activity surrounding the highered hashtag. The tweets came from people working in higher education, higher education institutions, and also political activists or social commentators discussing higher education. They focused on themes of the value of higher education, the ways to improve access to higher education, and also hiring efforts of higher education organizations (Twitter, 2020).

Before signing up for a social media class I was unaware of the program, Tweetdeck. Among other things, this program allows you to monitor and search hashtags on Twitter for free. You can also perform these advanced searched on Twitter. Looking at #highered on Twitter from 1/24/20-1/26/20 I searched for tweets that received at least five replies. Retweets and likes are good but can also be seen as vanity metrics that only serve to inflate the ego of the user who posted. Replies can show more engagement (Harper, 2015). The majority of posts involving more than five replies were positive in content. These posts shared useful resources for other educators, recognized the efforts of fellow educators, and/or asked for the engagement of fellow educators. These posts received the most engagement (Twitter, 2020).

Hashtags are more than just categories they are ways of engaging an eager public looking to connect with likeminded individuals and organizations. It is possible to search a term that links to your area of interest and find a conversation about it, and searching for posts with high levels of engagement will get you to the heart of the topic.

Works Cited

#highered search query. (2020, January 26). In Tweetdeck. Retrieved from tweetdeck.twitter.com

highered since_time:1579845600 until_time:1580104799 min_retweets:20 min_faves:20

Harper, B. (2015, April 09). Social vanity metrics: The top 4 worst offenders. Retrieved

from Social Media Today website: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/2015-04-09/social-vanity-metrics-top-4-worst-offenders

Twitter. (2020, January 26). In Twitter. Retrieved from

https://twitter.com/search?q=highered&src=typed_query

Caleffi, P.-M. (2015). The “hashtag”: a new word or a new rule? SKASE Journal of Theoretical

Linguistics, (2), 46. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.430169061&site=eds-live&scope=site

Oscar de la Renta – Social Media Innovators

Oscar de la Renta is maybe not a brand you would expect to see interacting on social media because they are a luxury brand. Maybe social media would be beneath the creators of thousand-dollar clothing pieces? On the contrary, Oscar de le Renta utilizes social media and has been at the forefront of strategy and presence on social media platforms. At the beginning of their social media ventures they utilized live streaming, a dedicated social media persona account (OscarPR girl), sample giveaways, and crowd sourced photo coverage of events (Inkvik, 2011).

Oscar de la Renta realized that they needed to utilize social media to keep up with the changing times and trends. At first they did not believe that they would sell their products online. Once they realized that it would be a necessity they knew their marketing would also have to take to the online world. They were one of the first companies to live stream a fashion collection reveal. This was in 2011 and they also took questions live from Facebook and Twitter. Their main goal with this tactic was engagement. It wasn’t clear whether or not the live streaming led to sales but they could clearly see that interested consumers were highly engaged with their brand through their participation in the live streams (Inkvik, 2011).

The OscarPRgirl campaign gave a face and personality to the brand. Oscar PR girl, Erika Bearman, gathered over 300,000 followers and made them feel like insiders to the brand. She brought the followers backstage at fashion shows, introduced them to models, took them on celebrity press tours, and to Mr. de la Renta’s home. For a while, this campaign led a ‘character tweet’ trend in the fashion world, where a single person would use their voice to represent a brand (So Long, 2015).   

One of the main challenges for Oscar de la Renta was learning about ecommerce itself so that they could in turn learn how to best use social media to market. Originally they were treating ecommerce as an extension of their brick and mortar stores. They soon realized that ecommerce played by different rules and quickly reacted to form an ecommerce branch in their marketing department. One of the successful campaigns this branch ran was the launching of a new perfume through sample giveaways to their Facebook followers. They were surprised by the success and sales it led to. Engagement has been the main thing they are pursuing. Making the consumer feel like an important asset to the brand is a way they breed loyalty, like when they ask their fans to send in photos from events to use as official brand coverage (Inkvik, 2011). The hope is this loyalty will convert to sales.

In 2011, Oscar de la Renta was already realizing that the conversation they were having with consumers through social media would be changing their product offering (Inkvik, 2011). They used many innovative strategies to enter the social media landscape, meeting with their successes and challenges. Nine years have passed since the writing of their entry into the world of social media and I would be interested to learn more about the evolution of their tactics to respond to consumer interactions and feedback. Also I’d like to learn more about how they gauge if a social media campaign was successful and if their brand is still valuing in-print marketing more than digital (Inkvik, 2011).

Works Cited

Inkvik, L. (2011, September 20). Why Oscar de la Renta Is So “Haute” on Social Media.In Mashable. Retrieved from https://mashable.com/2011/09/20/oscar-de-la-renta-social/

So Long @OscarPRGirl: Is @Fashion Having a Social #Meltdown?. (2015, August 12).In Yahoo Lifestyle. Retrieved from https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/an-image-from-the-popular-oscarprgirl126523062203.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANhq_1ydk1IbZXLFq2lXwI_twaSmNCh

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

  • Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
  • Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

  • Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
  • What topics do you think you’ll write about?
  • Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
  • If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

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