Nostalgia has definitely made it’s way back into retail marketing, but it is also making an impression in other industries as well, with social media facilitating nostalgic brand and marketing strategies.
As Shell fast approaches five million followers, today it’s Facebook banner features a nostalgic 1960/70’s image. Even as the brand talks innovation, a high-tech future and advanced technologies, the old Shell station resonates with thousands of Facebook followers liking and sharing the picture.
Brand nostalgia is not a mutually exclusive strategy, as proven by Coca-Cola time and time again. Social media now provides several unique platforms to marry nostalgia with other seemingly divergent strategies as refreshing (excuse the pun) and social engaging content.
Note the branding is consistent over the years, the Shell logo from back then is still representing the company today, creating continuity.
As we speak, social media marketing teams are raiding their corporate museums, archives and googling for “cool” retro images to fit in to their current brand strategies. Social media provides a ready tool for the quick, low cost, distribution of historical images allowing fans and followers to further engage with fond memories, simpler times (pre-social media) when the brand was with them.
On Tuesday Telstra hosted the 2013 Australian Digital Summit in Melbourne, social media and the #DigitalSummit hashtag went into overdrive.
Tools, strategies, innovations and techniques are constantly evolving in the digital space.
If you have not seen Storify before, please take a look at what it does here and also check out our story as a resource to catch up on what you may have missed at the Digital Summit!Today we spent about an hour using “Storify” to create a record of the #socialmedia chatter that surrounded the hashtag #DigitalSummit this week.
Good article here on the US challenges of managing employees with smartphones. It will be interesting to see how things unfold in Australia too: in this global social community, you can have an international legal, moral, commercial and/or personal crisis in seconds.
Social media teams in particular need to be ready at a moments notice to respond, in some cases not just to protect intangible and physical property, but also as a precaution for personal employee safety. We saw angry customers of one Bank identify and target one employee this week in Australia – effectively bullied online by customers.
Here’s a link to a blog by Matt Austin, a US labor law attorney:
Is your small business on Twitter? Do you understand how Twitter works and why so many small businesses have jumped onto Twitter?
The above two minute video from Twitter gives a basic understanding of how you might use this social media for your organisation or business. Optimize Business uses Twitter as the main form of social media to engage, communicate ideas, develop business relationships and keep abreast of the latest news or trends in business.
Social media is an investment in our brand. Five years ago, people would use a search engine like Google to find your website, learn about your business and assess if they want to do business with you. Today, consumers and businesses also look at your social media presence to gauge “who you are”: YouTube is now one of the most popular search platforms and Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are also being used to find businesses.
Unlike Google and Yahoo!, if you are not ‘present’ in Twitter (for example), you will not appear in the results of a search that is done within Twitter. Your business will be Missing in Action in the Twitterspere, this is unless your customers are talking about you (good or bad!), or worse, your competitors are filling your void.
The absence of “your voice” from social media platforms, like Twitter, says something to the world about your business. For those who have used social media to find you, or to talk to you, your absence from their preferred channel will be noted and probably not in a good way.
It is important not to just jump into social media. You should speak to other businesses that use social media, and make sure it is done in a planned way, as part of a social media strategy that suits your brand, your business and your customers. A failed social media presence is perhaps even worse that no social media at all.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn and other forms of social media, each “Tweet” is limited to only a 140 characters. Other forms of social media have larger word limits. Tweets therefore need to be short, engaging and easy to understand. The 140 character limit is quite helpful in helping you take the ‘padding’ out of your business communications.
So back to Twitter. It is a great tool for start-ups, small and large businesses alike. You can easily share (tweet) links to videos, blogs, webpages and photos to provide richer content with your short Twitter ‘broadcasts.’ If you content is engaging, you will probably find each tweet brings in additional new followers and people may share your communications by retweeting (RT) your message.
Twitter is a free social media tool that provides an incredible networking and communication channel into the hands of even the tiniest business, NGO or NFP. You can do a lot of targeted ‘campaigns’ yourself for free:
Twitter can provide almost perfect customer targeting, for free! Just search for a topic relevant to your organisation on Twitter.com and look at the people that are engaging in discussions or following others on that topic. Then search through the “followers” of relevant people and you will find people, businesses and organisations that are interested in the topic. These people will therefore be likely to follow you back if you follow them. Be a little selective in who you follow (avoid those who you would not really want following you) and you can easily build up your own followers by simply following those with common interests to your own.
Businesses, large and small, can also pay to have their products or services promoted on Twitter, via promoted “accounts” and promoted “tweets”. This video gives you a good sense of how you can pay to promote your organisation, but most new Twitter users would initially try the free approach outlined in the paragraph above.
For more information, Twitter publishes a great guide to get your organisation started on this exciting social media platform: Twitter for Small Business.
2012 Andrew McIntosh CPA Optimize Business @Optimize_Biz
Get your Tweets posted on your Facebook page automatically! It is easy to set-up, go to the Twitter Help Center to learn more.
The Facebook Settings page (when you are logged in as a profile Administrator in Facebook) has a “Link to Twitter”button. This is a good way to post onto Twitter if your primary social media tool is Facebook.
But remember the most Twitter users will see of your Facebook post is 140 characters. This means you need to fashion your opening Facebook wording carefully to still make sense once it posts on Twitter. The link to your Facebook post in the Tweet will also decrease your available characters.
Optimize Business suggests doing the reverse: log into your Twitter account and then have your Tweets automatically post onto your Facebook page. This will mean that you have more control over the final text outcome that is communicated on both social media platforms. You can carefully craft your Tweet to 140 characters and this will then look and ‘feel’ better across both mediums.
You will probably find you end up doing more Facebook entries as well, because avid tweeters often end up tweeting more from their mobile devices…. so why not communicate to your Facebook crowd too!
If you want big, attention grabbing photographs or links to interesting articles, simply post direct to Facebook to ensure you do not get a thumbnail of the Twitter photograph.
For the sake of business, don’t for get to “Allow Subscribers”!
If you are running a business page on Facebook, don’t forget to go into your Facebook Settings (found on the top right of your page) and tick the “Allow Subscribers”check box.
Optimize Business 