Our education system is in dire need of reform and with budget cuts looming for many schools, could social media be the answer? There are positives and negatives to every argument but we believe it has huge potential as an educational tool.
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Airline Industry Takes Social Media To New Heights
With the economy still recuperating and with oil prices high the airline industry has been hit hard. This has been the case since 2008 and with the huge snowstorms that blanketed the country this past winter—canceling a ton of flights—many airlines will continue to suffer losses in 2011.
Enter social media. If anything can help a brand rebuild itself, it’s the web and the power of social networks. Many airlines are pulling out all the stops and engaging with their fans more than ever in hopes to build a lasting relationship with their audience.
Virgin America is looking to achieve this by engaging with fans on multiple platforms. They provide funny and entertaining video content on their YouTube channel and offer their fans a chance to win free flights by engaging with their Facebook page. Virgin is also jumping on the location-based bandwagon, encouraging passengers to check in at their newest terminal. They also use their Twitter account to engage with their followers—directly addressing issues and comments. They have a great balance of quantity and quality when it comes to their content and they do an awesome job of interacting with their fans.
JetBlue is another airline doing a great job of utilizing social media. Their Facebook page alone is filled with videos (which are also featured on their beautifully branded YouTube channel) and special offers for fans. TrueBlue members can make their way to the ‘Go Places’ tab and register themselves to earn some of these special offers as well as TrueBlue points and badges just by checking in using Facebook Places. Like many companies, they use Twitter to more directly engage with followers and follow up on any issues they may have.
There is also one airline with a small following that is shaking up the social media game with some attention grabbing tactics: Air New Zealand. Their YouTube channel is filled with all of their hysterical video campaigns, promoting the airline through creative content and even enlisting big name celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Richard Simmons to get the word out. Their most notable campaign includes a series of videos featuring Air New Zealand’s flight crew donning nothing but body paint (check it out, you know you want to). They also have a ton of cool content on their Facebook page as well as host a slew of giveaways on Twitter. A few years ago not many people even heard of Air New Zealand but because of their creative use of social media they are gaining a lot of ground.
If airlines are going to bounce back something must be done and what better way to connect with your audience than with social media? It’s the perfect solution. It’s cheap and can be extremely effective when it comes to interacting with your fans, gaining their loyalty and converting them to buyers. If you don’t believe us just ask the airline companies.
YouTube Live Streaming
YouTube is set to unleash a whole new level of interactivity within their site. Although they have done live streaming before, they have recently implemented a beta site which allows a few select curators to provide live streaming content to viewers.
This could be the new wave of the YouTube video, one that allows users to interact by asking questions or controlling the action. The possibilities are exciting. Imagine a webinar where you can stop the speaker and ask him/her to better clarify their point to you.
You can access the live page here and start watching a few live streaming channels as well as subscribe to them to receive notifications of future events. As of right now there are only a handful of curators but as it gets bigger and eventually becomes available to the public or at least brands, we are going to see a lot of companies leveraging these new capabilities to promote their brands and to better communicate with their audience.
Museums and Social Media
It seems as though everyday we hear new stories about how social media is helping businesses market themselves and communicate with their audiences. Centers for art and culture such as museums are no different and are somewhat of a dying breed with budgets being cut across the country. So museum directors and curators have taken to the web and social media to interact with people and get visitors into their museums.
Utilizing Twitter, places like the American Museum of Natural History in NYC created their first ‘Tweetup’, an after-hours, invite only tour free of charge. The only catch was that all visitors had to Tweet, Check-in using Foursquare, share photos using Twitpic and Flickr, update their status on Facebook and record and share videos on YouTube. People love Tweeting and sharing content on their various social networks. It’s one of the biggest trends right now in the digital realm and by recruiting people to share their experience on Twitter as well as other social networks, the museum is able to market themselves to all of these participants’ networks as well as create some buzz for themselves.
Free Friday: Social Media Monitoring Tools
We all know how important Social Media is to a business but with so much out there it becomes a convoluted mess trying to manage them all. So to celebrate Free Friday, we’ve decided to provide you with a couple of free tools you can use to monitor and manage your social media outlets.
Hootsuite is a highly efficient tool for monitoring and managing multiple social media accounts. You can get streams from Facebook (both profiles and/or pages), Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and a bunch of others. You can also schedule all of your status updates, tweets, etc., ahead of time and choose which outlets you wish to publish them to. We like Hootsuite because it also gives users the ability to customize their interface. You can move your streams around, delete unnecessary ones, and even filter them by keywords.
In addition, Wildfire Interactive developed a free social media monitoring service that allows you to measure your performance on Facebook and Twitter, track your competitors, receive alerts related to your social relevance, and get custom-tailored recommendations based on your exposure.
Postling is another great tool that brings all of your social media outlets together in one place. Like Hootsuite, Postling allows you to set up scheduled updates and in addition to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, they allow users to sync social platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr. On top of that, you can track reviews people write about your business that are published on your Yelp or CitySearch pages as well as monitor the web in real-time or via RSS.
These tools are great for managing all of your social media outlets but in order to efficiently monitor all of them you need to seriously consider analytics. You could—in theory—upgrade to a paid version of either of the aforementioned tools and get a ton of analytic and tracking data but since today is Free Friday we won’t get into that costly endeavor.
Instead, consider using free services like Google Analytics which only requires embedding a bit of code into your page. Google provides a huge amount of data and is super simple to use. In addition to this you may have also heard of AddThis. If you haven’t then I’m sure you’ve seen it in action. AddThis adds sharing functionality to content on your pages. It too only requires embedding a bit of code and although you may not be able to use it directly on a social outlet it tracks where your content is being shared. Users can choose where they’d like to share (Facebook, Twitter, Email etc.) and AddThis tracks it all. This can give marketers key insight on where to focus their efforts.
In the spirit of Free Friday if you have any useful Free social media monitoring tools we’d love to hear!
