Hi friends!

I am writing this blog post to summarise our group’s project. We are doing an academic research, and the research question we are curious to study is how one’s perception of Tinder influences others.

Our research is inspired by our curiosity regarding the fall from grace of Tinder – how it used to be the onling dating app, to it now being often seen as a “hookup app”. In our knowledge, bad news certainly does spread fast, and social media plays a huge role in it.

Having said that, we would like to examine three hypotheses:

1. Tinder has negative reputation among local university students.
2. Tinder-users from local universities are influenced by other local university students’ perception of Tinder.
3. Local university students prefer other dating applications compared to Tinder.

Hypotheses #1 and #2 are designed to answer the research question on how one’s perception of Tinder influences others, while Hypothesis #3 serves as a check on whether our conclusions derived are true.

Based on surveys conducted, we learnt that Tinder is negatively perceived amongst local university students, being associated as a ‘hookup app’. Additionally, from our survey results and focus group interviews, we also found that local university students are particularly concerned about their peer’s perception of Tinder. Further, such concerns have led to a decreased confidence, and use of Tinder amongst local university students. Finally, our research also discusses the limitations of our findings and potential areas for future research.

 

 

After having read the ROI article, I have the following insights to share.

 

• Brand awareness

 

Traditionally, tracking studies and surveys are ways to track brand awareness. However, there are different ways to track brand awareness online.

In social media, a company gains increased exposure if placed in highly relevant contexts, every time a person uses an application designed by the company or about the company.

An example quoted is that of Starbucks when they ran an ad promoting a free coffee giveaway on the “Saturday Night Live” show as well as on YouTube just days before Election Day 2008. This caused a huge increase in brand exposure due to the vast number of Twitter mentions of Starbucks. If placed properly, increased exposures cause customers’ minds to enhance and strengthen associations of the brand.  

 

• Brand engagement

• Word of mouth

 

what’s the need for this approach?

Employing this supposedly “radical” approach makes the task of creating integrated marketing campaigns less daunting and more closely tied to online consumer behavior. Starting with consumer motivations i.e. consumer investments helps dismiss the assumption that applications are disparate when in actuality they are quite similar if the underlying motivations for use are the same.

Hence, the objectives to be achieved and the tools with their associated metrics need to be correctly identified  in order to achieve them.

1. Raging Cow: In 2003, the company sparked outrage over its campaign in which the company bribed a group of teenagers and some youngsters to post favorable reviews and spread positive word-of-mouth news about its new flavored milk drink. They did not disclose that they had bribed these bloggers and their blogs seemingly appeared impartial and unaffiliated with the company or the drink, apart from a few obviously obligatory links to the Raging Cow site. This caused a group of suspicious bloggers to investigate further and thus uncovered that the company was indeed behind these veiled references due to the bribes of gift certificates, product samples, T-shirts, etc.

Thus, the marketing campaign found itself under fire and the product was subsequently boycotted ultimately resulting in the disappearance of the product from the market.

 

What is to be noted from the above case studies is that zero activity or response is not the worst course of action from social media campaigning. If not handled properly, they can negatively impact brand name for years to come as social media experiments that go embarrassingly wrong can still live on as the brand’s legacy and is just a “search” button away even if well covered up, in this age of technology.

What the above listed companies’ managers did not take into careful consideration was that “rules of engagement” and dynamics of interaction in the social media world are quite different from that of traditional marketing.

 

Hi! I would just like to share an article I came across recently.

When was the last time you used Snapchat? For me, I have never been much of a netizen and did not even bother owning a Snapchat account. So it comes as no surprise that Snapchat is witnessing a decline in its active users as seen in the article here:

Snapchat’s Value Drops $1.3 Billion After 1 Kylie Jenner Tweet

The main reason why Snapchat is losing its popularity could be attributed to the redesign of its interface, which destroyed the familiarity people had for the app. Perhaps Snapchat wanted a new approach as Instagram had discreetly replaced the former with its Insta Stories, but the stark difference in Snapchat’s redesign did not sit well with its audience. The lesson to be learnt here would be that although social media is constantly changing and improving, social media platforms should still adapt to the needs and wants of their consumers instead of blindly chasing the goal of creating something different.

Furthermore, we can also observe how influencers on social media (Kylie Jenner in this case) have such a colossal impact on social media platforms as just one tweet could cause Snapchat’s value to drop by $1.3 billion. The power influencers have on social media platforms is not to be belittled, and hence it is essential to find out how to engage influencers in order to have them work in your favour.

That’s all I have to share for now! (:

P.S If you did not already know, you may check out the most liked photo on Instagram (also by Kylie Jenner) here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Be3rTNplCHf/

Recently, reality TV personality Kylie Jenner posted a casual opinion of how she has started fancying Snapchat (a multimedia social messaging app) slightly lesser off late. Little did she know that it would cause shake the ‘Snap’ stock price by a massive 6% and cause losses worth $1.3 billion for investors. This example goes on to prove how much social  media – and it’s protagonist celebrities – can influence a brand’s goodwill and popularity. Any news spreads like wildfire and is spared by no users opinion and comment. Bad publicity on social media can prove to magnify the problem exponentially. Thus, companies must be aware of the dangers bad social media publicity can have towards it brand as well as disaster recovery tools to mitigate the problems when they occur.

Article link: http://fox4kc.com/2018/02/24/snapchat-stock-lowers-after-kylie-jenner-sends-out-a-negative-tweet/

Ever since the advent of social media, various agencies have used the platform to manipulate the stock market. By spreading false, exaggerated and unfounded news, investors have been seen to get influenced and wrongly take buy/sell decisions. Since social media is so popular and prevalent nowadays, any news – whether true or not – is sensationalized and spreads within seconds. Hence, it is crucial to consider the source and credibility of news we read, before taking investing decisions.