Susanne Jensvold Ruud Assignment 3 Soc 167

Social Media. Assignment #3.

Susanne Jensvold Ruud.

The page I have chosen to look at is the official page for McDonald’s on facebook. They have over 29 million people who like their facebook page. So in other words there are a lot of users on this page. To me the page seems boring at first sight. There are a lot of picture updates but that’s it. It’s nothing about that page that makes me want to like it, because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to give me anything in return.

Premiums: It doesn’t look like McDonald’s give away any free stuff to attract customers. I went all the way back to 2011 and couldn’t find anything that they were giving away.

Participation: I couldn’t find any surveys or games or other stuff for users to participate in. It was more informational things on the site like for example new food or drinks etc.

User-Generated content: they don’t have any user-generated content.

Customer service portal: the only thing I could find is that they have a page called “reach out” where you can give feedback on you visit to a McDonald’s. But this feedback goes to customer service and cannot be seen by other users. They don’t have like a forum or anything like that. They did have some status updates a while ago where they encouraged users to reply to the status. For example they had one that looked like this: “If you could travel to a McDonald’s anywhere in the world, where would it be?”.

Content flow: they provide new materials on the page regularly but it’s almost the same every time. It’s only pictures of products, and food and drinks. So I think it’s boring even though they update regularly because it’s the same kind of updates all the time. And almost nothing that makes the users participate. 

Logan Hwang Assignment 3 Soc 167

Logan Hwang (22926285)

Assignment #3

http://budweiser.com/en/us/all/all/

The Budweiser website has a very quality-designed and well-organized template with attractive features in it. The website requires each visitors to verify his or her age (possibly through signing in on Facebook), and it offers premiums – special offers and promotions – if a visitor decides to subscribe with the website. The website involves visitor/user participation through logging in on Facebook and providing comments for many of the posts on the Budweiser website. The Budweiser Facebook page also contains a lot of neat photos of events.

The Budweiser main website also has a lot of enjoyable videos, photos, posts, and etc. that visitors and members can “have fun” watching in their spare time – categories such as “EPID ADS”, “GREAT TIMES”, and “GREAT CAUSES” contain footages of events held by the Budweiser company. Furthermore, few (2 to 5) posts are uploaded on the Budweiser Facebook page every day and most of them seem to be engaging with the audience. On the Budweiser main website, there is a “Contact Us” category where users can ask questions or comment about the company.

In my opinion, the Budweiser website is doing a very effective job of social media marketing. 

Melanie Diggs Assignment 3 Soc 167

Laney Diggs

21956066

October 29, 2013

Soc 167 Homework 3

Yogurt Park is one of the most popular frozen yogurt places around the UC Berkeley campus.  Upon looking at their Facebook fan page, I realized that they are not doing an effective job in the marketing department.  With over 4,600 “likes” from fans, the page does not supply adequate characteristics to keep fans excited and engaged.

To start, the page does not engage individuals in anyway; they do not stimulate participation.  The page is filled with updates on their newest flavors offered in their stores and thanking the fans for their continual support.  However, there is no promotions, give a way’s, or premiums to thank their customers or promote their new flavors.  In addition, there are no polls to get the audience involved.  They could ask their customers to vote in a poll for the most popular flavor or comment with their favorite flavor.  They also have a grand total of 3 photos on their site and the last time they updated their page was October 6, 2011.  This shows how their content flow (supplying new, exciting information) and user-generated content are lacking.  There are small conversations in dialog through commenting on their status updates but compared to the number of “likes” the page has only about .2% of people engage in comments.

All in all Yogurt Park could really use huge improvements.  There content flow is severely lacking, they do not promote active participation, they do not have promotional give a ways, etc.  Everything we learned in class that makes an effective social media page is not represented in Yogurt Park’s.

Oerjan Moy Assignment 3 Soc 167

Assignment # 3:
Analysis/evaluation of Cadbury Milk Tray (www.cadbury.co.uk) by Oerjan Moy

The home page to Cadbury Milk Tray has a very easy menu; there you can choose between several different options. Cadbury is not giving out free stuff but are promoting several different competitions, such as winning a real gold bar, cinema tickets and other Cadbury products. If the customer wants they can make their own chocolate bar and buy it. 

The webpage have a lot of interesting information such as their entire product with nutritional information, the history of the company and their Cadbury World that is a type of amusement park. It is important for a customer to have information easy available, 
Cadbury have a Facebook, Twitter and Google + those they regular updating and answering question from customers. It is also possible to contact Cadbury through their homepage. They seem very serious to maintain happy customers. Companies with bad customer service often get an even worse reputation. Cadbury promote their different competitions and often uploads new content on the social media sites.

Conclusion:

I think www.cadbury.co.uk is doing an effective job of social marketing. They manage to get a lot of attention from their social media sites with promote different competition and add a lot of pictures. The webpage is very easy for customers to navigate, and find information of different things such as recipe or tickets to their park if the customers want that. It is also easy to contact Cadbury, and they are generally fast to answer

Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen Assignment 3 Soc 167

Sociology 167, Fall 2013

Assignment 3: Social media marketing analysis

Ole Martin Ellingboe Nilsen

UC Berkeley

I choose to evaluate the Facebook page of DNB, which is Norway’s biggest bank company. It’s being evaluated in terms of premiums, content & content flow, participation & user-generated content and finally customer service portal.

There is hardly any free stuff or gifts to collect by following the page, so the bank is clearly not trying to attract customers on the basis of offering exclusive premiums.

Most content on the page could be classified as commercial for the bank’s own product and neither of which is participatory, meaning user-engaging. However, there is one big exception to this. Last spring, the company launched a major multiplayer online treasure hunt, where the treasure was hidden somewhere in the physical world. The game immediately went viral in Norway. The rest of the content is informing about on-going campaigns and offers for its many different products. Events held by the page are usually information seminars about different financial topics, which are considered to be both educational and relevant for today’s economy.

When it comes to content flow, the page is providing new materials on a weekly basis.

The company always seems to find new ways to attract interest from the public due to an innovative marketing strategy. Examples of the types of contents are links to articles written by the company’s CEO. As well as uploading the bank’s own TV-commercials (which is really cool, as long as the commercials are funny!). Once again, I’ll emphasize that most of its content is clearly meant as commercial for the banks own product.

The page does not offer any user-generated materials, beyond (1) conversation treads and (2) the ability of Facebook to allow for pages to be tagged in private photos. Thereby resulting in the bank being tagged a very high number of times by its many Facebook followers. All these photos are made available for the public to look through, from DNB’s tagged photos album folder.

The banks customer service portal is answering questions and concerns from users very fast and at every hours of the day. Also, the page is replying to its own posts, if it got additional information about the topic in question. At the moment, many of the different conversation treads are warning other people about recently on-going 419 scam attempts. These treads are all written using interpersonal communication style.

The bank is for some reason liking other volunteer organizations pages on Facebook. One example would be the Norwegian Red Cross. This might be due to some sponsorship/partnership related stuff, or it could simply be due to controlling its social appearance, namely impression management. Getting associated with well-liked organizations and ideals are a good idea to achieve this.

My overall impression of the page is very good. The most important reason for this, in my opinion, being that the bank is offering fast responding- and easy to use customer support service through its Facebook page. The downside here is the increased risk for its users to engage in information oversharing. Such as revealing private and sensitive information, through a medium where everyone on Facebook can read it. However, this is not the banks fault.

Reference:

https://www.facebook.com/dnb

Lena Kardos Assignment 3 Soc 167

Lena Kardos

21699958

Assignment #3: Social Media Marketing Analysis: Starbucks

Starbucks’ Facebook page provides accurate and relevant information as well as many engaging features for customers to enjoy. Initially upon visiting their page, I noticed 35,360,277 people have liked their page. This shows that either their company is popular or their social media page is popular, or both. Next, their latest post was 1 day ago, which means they provide regular new content. This post is a picture of a girl and a boy holding up pumpkins as heads while holding Starbucks cups. It entertains audiences while also advertises their product.

Another post shows that they changed their cover photo to one that a customer posted on Instrgram, which demonstrates that they showcase user-generated content. The Starbucks page also provides premiums: “Get a drink of choice free when you join our loyalty program by 9/22.” By offering this deal, they attract new customers.

Yet another post provides participation of users: “Like this post to add your voice to the #ComeTogether Petition that we are sending to our leaders in Washington D.C tonight: 1. Reopen our government. 2. Pay our debts on time. 3. Pass a bipartisan budget by the end of the year.” About twenty-nine and a half thousand people liked this post, which provided a way them to participate and have their voice heard through the Starbucks’ page.

Although Starbucks’ attracts many users by their regular content flow, entertaining posts, user-generated comments, and premiums, they do not do a great job providing a customer service portal where users can communicate their thoughts and concerns. Some users have tried to comment (i.e.: “ONE OF THE WORST WEBSITES TO SHOP ON… ALWAYS HAS A PROBLEM…”), but Starbucks has not responded with any comments. Furthermore, none of their commercial posts encourage any kind of customer feedback or allows a space where customers will get feedback on their concerns.

Overall, Starbucks utilizes social media positively to market their business and attract customers. Although they do not provide all the features of a completely successful social media marketing strategy, they have shown that they can effectively engage users with their content.

Eileen Zhao Assignment 3 Soc 167

Eileen Zhao

Oreo Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/oreo

One of the main reasons why I love Oreo is not just because of its chocolate deliciousness but also because of how engaged the brand is. Their Facebook page is a clear representation of its active engagement with its audience by providing continuous content featured not only on their Facebook page but also on their twitter handle as well. Their “Daily Twist” campaign where they featured new content every day for 100 years to celebrate their 100 years in business was gorgeous, touching on monumental days such as Gay Pride, the Mars Rover landing and even Elvis week. By offering creative advertising to celebrate the small things that their audience was familiar with, they created themselves as a more active and fun brand.

While their Facebook page does not offer premiums or participatory events such as games or surveys, they do provide a place to share user-generated content and a platform to serve as a customer service “portal,” where users can go to complain about their products or even rave about it as well. While the user-generated content aren’t actively featured on the wall (it remains exclusive to only Oreo released content), audience content is listed under the “Recent Posts by Others on Oreo,” where users post pictures of their baby having their first Oreo cookie to creative arrangements of their Oreos. Most importantly, Oreo is best known for releasing creative and heartwarming content. Their “Daily Twist” campaign really solidified them as a leader in creative content within the advertising community, a title which they have consistently held to this day, especially following their Vine compilations of their #OreoHorrorStories videos. With over 34 Million Likes, they’re definitely doing a great job at keeping their audience happy.

Daniel Kulsvehagen Assignment 3 Soc 167

Assignment 3
Daniel Kulsvehagen

AT&T

AT&T is a telecom company selling: wired and wireless voice and data, broadband Internet, TV and messaging services, as well as many of the leading innovative devices.


In this assignment I have checked out their facebook page to look for things such as: free givaways, creation of events, showcasing of materials, dialogue with the customers and content flow.


AT&T seems like they upload user-generated content almost daily, and they use this content to make a dialogue with the customers. For halloween they uploaded a picture of a dog in a pumpkin costume (this was all a picture on a phone) and wrote: Introducing Blankograms: I'd rather be a ________ (noun) than a pumpkin. People then answered and AT&T commented on the answers. This is a mixture of Participation, User-Generated Content, Content Flow and Customer Service «Portal». They also take part in campaigns such as «Anti text and drive» campaigns.


As for Premiums, AT&T use public figures such as Baltimore's Ravens starting center Gino Gradkowski who signed autographs at the AT&T store in Towson Town Center. After scrolling through almost a year of posts I could not find giveaways or competitions to win free prices on AT&T's facebook page.

I think AT&T lacks Premiums and Participation on their facebook page. More free giveaways perhaps from events or sharing-competitions (share this picture to win a price etc.) would make the page more visited and used. Even though there are lots of posts (Content Flow) there needs to be more interaction between customer and company on the facebook page.

Link to the facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/ATT

Jonathan McGowan Assignment 3 Soc 167

Assignment 3 Soc 167

Jonathan McGowan

I looked at Blizzard’s Facebook page for this assignment, and have come to the conclusion that while their page is not bad, it’s also not good.  The biggest reason for this is simply that their page does not appeal to the user visually nearly as much as it could.  The graphics are decent, but ultimately the page looks very amateurish.  It could be much more organized, and have a much more appealing cover/profile picture.  What they have is fine for people that are already interested in Blizzard and its products, but they are not attracting any new potential customers with their run of the mill Facebook page.  Beyond this their participation consists only of users commenting on photos that Blizzard chooses to post.  This is not very interactive at all, and enables as many trolls as it does legitimate users that are just trying to get more connected with the company.

The remaining four categories: premiums, user-generated content, customer service “Portal”, and content flow, are all present on Blizzard’s Facebook page, but each of them has significant room for improvement.  Premiums on blizzards Facebook are few and far between, and even where they do exist, it is not simply free in game content for anyone that uses it, it is a link to a raffle they are holding for beta keys to games that are coming out.  This is better than nothing, but it is not as good as interesting content that is accessible by everyone, raffles bring in fewer users than free in game pets for world of Warcraft.  The user-generated content is very limited, and even then it isn’t interesting enough where others could join in, it’s simply a picture here and there of users wearing blizzard gear at one place or another.  The customer service “Portal” is a link to another blizzard Facebook page, it’s hard to tell how effective this is, but at the very least it is present.  Finally Blizzard’s content flow leaves a lot to be desired.  While they do occasionally talk about things that are happening with their company, it has less to do with games they produce, and more to do with advertising.  At times while scrolling through their page it feels as if you’re looking at ads, not the Facebook page of one of the greatest game designing companies in the world. 

Ultimately while Blizzards Facebook page has some of the key qualities needed to have a successful online presence, these qualities are lacking and do not do a good job of attracting new users.  For this reason their Facebook page is neither bad nor good, but resides in neutral territory.

Link to Blizzard’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Blizzard