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Our group has decided to choose The Book Café to research on for our group project. The Book Café has been open since 2000 and is not just a typical cafe serving food. It is a book-themed café that provides a diverse range of reading materials, which means that customers can browse through any of the several hundred local and foreign books, magazines, and newspapers available while having good food at the same time.

In addition, The Book Cafe offers a relaxed ambience and casual dining featuring an extensive cosmopolitan menu that reflects modern food trends. They also provide free Wi-Fi, electrical power-points, and an all-day breakfast selection. Since its opening, The Book Café has also hosted events including cocktail parties, club meetings, product launches, and various private events.

Being such a prestigious and exciting cafe, we thought that the Book Cafe would be very popular online amongst Singaporeans aged 17 to 35. However on further analysis, we found several problems with its use of social media platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram and its website. For one, they lack followers on Facebook and Instagram, and they rarely update their social media platforms. Their website is also sorely unattractive, thus less appealing to youths today.

As such our research question is: How can The Book Café become the top hangout choice for youths, given that there is an increasing coffee culture and habit of café-hopping in our youth today?

In order to tackle our research question, our group will try to raise online awareness of The Book Café, re-modify their usage of social media to have more engagement online, improve their image, and increase brand loyalty as well. This is to reach out to more youths and to get them to frequent The Book Café more.

We look forward to sharing with all of you this Friday!

Group members: Leong Jia Qin, Loh Jia Wei, Melvin Toh, Tan Wan Ting, Darren Chong Hi Class! For us, we have chosen GoPro. Here’s a background of the company and why we would like to research about it 🙂

Background and Analysis of Organization: GoPro

GoPro is America’s fastest-growing digital imaging company. They develop, manufacture and market high-definition action camcorders specializing in action videography and photography. The company currently offers its HERO line of cameras and accessories that enable consumers to capture content while engaged in activity. Currently GoPro dominates the action camera market, but is seeing burgeoning competition from the likes of Garmin, XiaoMi and smartphones.

Research Question

How can GoPro use social media to diversify its customer-base and grow its brand community?

For GoPro, high-quality user-generated content is the key to their social media success. They offer users the chance to share experiences with the rest of the GoPro community and the world, from their point of view. From January to December 2014, GroPro increased their total monthly output of Instagram content by 71%, indicating the effectiveness of their social media strategy.

However, Nick Woodman, the billionaire founder GoPro Inc., has recently seen earnings plummet by $1.4 billion this year amid a slowing global economy. Compounding its situation is competition from Apple Inc. and other companies.

Hence, we have decided to base our project on how social media strategy can enable GoPro to pull ahead of the competition and recoup its losses. The reason for its failure to meet its bottom-line is attributed to a lack of innovation, poor product cycling, and its dependence on a niche market. We believe social media is a highly effective way to expand its market share, appeal to a wider audience, and build up a strong, loyal brand community that ensures its long term sustainability.

Value of Study:

Objective 1: Increase outreach beyond GoPro’s current customers

Objective 2: Build up a strong brand community of like-minded individuals

Objective 3: Create greater brand visibility of GoPro amongst its competitors


Tracking of social media activities against competitors.

To evaluate its current social media strategy, we will track GoPro’s social media platforms, and carry out quantitative metric analysis and qualitative analysis. We will infer trends and customer preferences from our data analysis to supplement our recommendations.

2) Analysis based on secondary research.

Additionally, we will carry out secondary research to gain greater awareness on prevailing trends regarding GoPro and related products (i.e. cameras). This allows us to better understand what drives consumer interests, so that we can better tailor our recommendations to maximize impact.


Our final deliverables for GoPro would be a structured social media campaign tailored to each of its specific social media platforms, over a specified timeline. This overall strategy aims to improve GoPro’s appeal to a wider audience, increase brand loyalty of its current customers, and ultimately increase its brand visibility amongst competitors so that GoPro remains the premier choice for camera products.

See you guys on Friday! 🙂

By Kenneth, Ming Fai, Jeremy, De Zhong & Tian Xin Stumbled across this Facebook post and it reminded me of what we learnt in class where providing good quality customer service is essential for companies as customers are going online to air their complaints. But then,  questions arise in my mind, do established restaurants and cafes need customer service on social media? would the reputations of McDonalds and KFC be much impaired because of this?

Compare the 2 responses given by KFC India and McDonalds India. You can’t fault them for not responding but which response would you prefer as a customer? KFC India answers this question by being consistent and personalized in responses on Social Media while McDonald’s India merely copies and pastes standard lines.

As you all know, Taylor Swift and Kanye West have been in a very rocky relationship since 2009. Even in the recent 2016 Grammy Awards, Taylor Swift took a dig at industry sexism and rebutted Kanye West’s insulting song lyrics.

The ball was in Swift’s court, when 1989 won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Her response was impassioned and as clearly directed at West as it could be without mentioning his name: “As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I want to say to all the young women out there: there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/taylor-swift-vs-kanye-west-a-beef-history-20160216#ixzz41RwSqVwZ

Before this, Kanye had taken his unhappiness for Taylor winning the 2009 VMAs to Twitter, causing an uproar amongst audiences. Even President Obama weighed in on the issue. In 2013, Taylor had two VMA nominations in the MTV Video Music Awards, and she tweeted: By going online, their conflict dragged on for the past 6 to 7 years and sorely affected the reputations of both artists.  Although names were not mentioned in public, it was obvious who the statements were targeting online. As such social media can be extremely dangerous and detrimental to relationships and we should be more cautious before posting anything online.

Some areas for thought:

Hi all!

Facebook recently introduced new reactions to their platform and here’s an article that I think is pretty insightful.


The article describes how advertisers can now use these reactions to identify the reactions of their posts and shares. As social media is often used by many organizations for their marketing efforts and outreach, this new feature will effectively allow the team managing the campaigns to gather feedback. This feature will also provide more individuals who are unwilling to comment, but yet are unwilling to ‘like’ a post express themselves with these emojis. Advertisers can thus accurately identify their outreach and target audience. Hi class,

Our group has chosen to present on The Body Shop in our Social Media Research Project. A brief history of Body Shop – it was founded by Anita Roddick in 1976 after she had visited a shop of the same name in Berkeley, California selling naturally-scented soaps and lotions. Since then, The Body Shop has experienced exponential growth and now has 2,500 stores in over 60 markets worldwide.

The Body Shop has branded itself as a socially-responsible organization. In fact, its corporate mission is “to dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change”. Causes which the organization stands for include being against animal testing and emphasizing fair trade. However, controversy arose when Body Shop was sold to French cosmetics giant, L’Oréal, in March 2006. Activists called for a boycott of Body Shop products as they had strongly opposed L’Oréal’s policy of testing cosmetic ingredients on animals.

Fast forward to today, our group believes that Body Shop has been struggling to uphold and preserve its original image of being an ethical organization, even though its parent company, L’Oréal, has explicitly stated that it now no longer tests its products or ingredients on animals anywhere in the world. Consequently, positive impressions of Body Shop have waned in recent years.

Thus, herein lies our research question: How can The Body Shop use social media to revitalize the brand, specifically in Singapore? We have decided to focus on the Singapore market because it is more practical in that we understand the market well enough to come up with viable and objective suggestions. In addition, we believe that Singaporean consumers are confused as to the values that Body Shop embodies. As such, our group project is based upon the premise that Body Shop can leverage on the use of social media to spread brand awareness and subsequently, engender a stronger brand identity here in Singapore.

To provide answers to our research question, we intend to conduct social media tracking of Body Shop’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts and compare the results to that of its more notable competitors, Lush and L’Occitane. We also intend to carry out a survey to gauge sentiments and perceptions of Body Shop among Singaporean consumers. Using the data collected, we hope to be able to propose workable, yet creative, solutions and strategies that Body Shop can adopt to communicate brand awareness and values to Singaporean consumers.

We are excited to share with you our project proposal in the coming lesson and look forward to any ideas that you want to share. Thank you!

Dasuki, Yu, Nicole, Shermaine & myself Under Armour was founded by Kevin Plank in 1996. The idea first started in 1995 when he was in Maryland football team as a team captain and found out his teammate apparel is always soaked with sweat. Under Armour soon became one of the most popular sports apparel in the United States (U.S.).

Under Armour is quite popular in the U.S. but not in the Asian market. Through our research, we will identify the reasons and following which, propose a social media strategy to market the brand in Singapore and to maintain its foothold the U.S.

From: Group 8~

Hi everyone, I came across this interesting piece of news and thought I should share it here.

A Yelp employee lost her job just two hours after a social media posting about her struggle to make ends meet. Working as a customer service representative, the employee claimed that her low pay meant that she had to cut back on her groceries in order to afford her rent and bills. This was worsened by the city’s high cost of living. Ultimately, she decided to send tweets to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, in a bid to make her voice heard. She also uploaded a post on Medium, entitled “An Open Letter to my CEO”, detailing her struggles. The post has since gone viral on Twitter. (https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73df021e7a#.eyer72cir)

“I was sitting there and thinking, ‘I hope he sees this and I hope my CEO listens and hears me,’ and then it started to dawn on me: I wonder if I’ll get fired for saying this out loud?”

Sure enough, she lost her job just 2 hours later, after being informed by HR that she had violated the company’s terms of conduct. While company personnel avoided elaborating on the situation, CEO Stoppelman denied that the employee’s dismissal was because of her social media posts, and even responded to her tweets by claiming that he agreed with some of her points about the high cost of living etc. However, the employee argued that Yelp is not being completely honest with her dismissal.

“Yelp is trying to make this die down by lying about it,” she said. “Firing someone while their post about pay issues is on the cusp of going viral, that’s like a lightning strike in the middle of a super dry forest. Things have just exploded.”

This case is somewhat similar to the Mark Jen / Google case that we looked at in week 5’s class.

Here are some questions to think about:

 



I came across this article on the Internet and thought it would be good to share with everyone, in the light of what we have learnt in week 3 (:

3 Ways You Can Make PR and Social Media Work Together

Date posted: September 25, 2015 By Lisa Froeling

Public relations and social media marketing are no longer individual entities and should not be treated as so. Companies that are looking to make the most of their online presence need to look into ways on how to best integrate the efforts usually made through various platforms in order to not only save money from the company but also to provide cohesive experience for the customers. By integrating these usually two separate efforts together, you can enhance your small business in several ways unimaginable.

Instead of waiting for the media to write a story on the achievements of your company, many small businesses step their games up by choosing to share those stories via the social media and the main stream media is then forced to take it up from there.

Let’s take a look at some of the effective PR strategies for social media to enhance your public relations and get those to two together since most small businesses don’t usually have separate departments to handle those:

Optimize your press briefings with social media releases

Support your press release by ensuring the social media sharing features are enabled. When picking a platform that sends your press releases, make sure to choose the one that enables the sharing function.

These days, most journalists rely on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking channels when listening to sentiments as well as information gathering.

When doing the public relations internally, companies could look into HARO where reporters usually solicit for expert sources about the topics they’re writing about, giving you an opportunity to share your industry insights and get coverage in the process.

Create and sustain social media campaigns around customer case studies

An important PR strategy is to create customer case studies to highlight the achievements and successes and build an aura of credibility around your organization.

Customer stories and experiences make an extremely good story and write up although people are not really willing to spend a lot of time to read such long articles. Sharing the highlights of the customer testimonials on social media sites can help a lot by just picking out the key facts. However it is important that the testimonials should appear unbiased and honest to help establish authenticity and trust with your customers. People generally do not value propaganda material passed off as customer testimonials.

Utilize Linked In to its maximum potential

Whenever higher level executives engage and interact with professional colleagues and customers, it plays an important role in building and establishing trust with the key stakeholders.

CEOs that are active on social media improve their company’s credibility a lot and also earn respect and dearness with their customers. Apart from LinkedIn, Twitter is also a nice way to establish interaction with your consumers and be able to get deeper insights about your industry.

Traditional public relations are on the brink of a huge make over. It is high time to breathe new life into these old fashioned strategies and make way for incorporating social media in the strategies. By merging both your public relations and social media efforts, it gives you an opportunity of direct communication with your consumers and stakeholders.

Social media PR strategy is important in two aspects: one, the external view by your clients and other the prospects and the internal view by your employees. To develop a coherent social Media strategy, it is crucial to communicate, convince and most importantly convert the social media attention into action.

In the end, it all boils down into 3 important aspects: awareness, sales and loyalty. By combining both, you can accomplish your efforts more efficiently without necessarily spending lots of money on them.

Lisa Froeling is a business and productivity consultant with over 4 years of experience in human resources working for a major retailer in the country before she decided to build her own business. Her interests include technology, mindfulness as well as time management. You may connect with her on @LisaFroelings.

Link: http://www.smallbizdaily.com/3-ways-can-make-pr-social-media-work-together/



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