We believe in friendship!

How one group of friends creates a tribute to their friendship.

Creating a viral video and post it on YouTube, sounds easy enough. However, we created a libdub video with seven of our friends, that did cause some difficulties. First we all sat down together to brainstorm about the topic, song, script and what our message should be. Everybody had several great ideas, several songs to pick from and different opinions on how to execute it all. We quickly decided that a libdub video is the way to go, but what should be the song?! After discussing this for a while, we came to the same conclusion quickly, which is the song “I’m a believer” by Smash Mouth.

Then we started creating a script, who does what and how we portray the song in a video. That brought along some issues, we needed a lot of attributes to portray the song. A small list of this were for example, a magnifying glass, a big hart, a saw, fake blood, fairy wings, fairy dust, water, sheets and so on. After thinking of nice ideas how to show everything, we started deciding who would do what, so we listened to the song over and over again. Seemed easy enough, we were on a roll.

Than we got to the hard part, filming it. In our opinion it would have been good to film it in the street, however, in winter, we didn’t have enough daylight to actually shoot the video. Therefore, we thought of different locations, but our school was the best, with the narrow hallways, we were able to pop in and out from different class rooms. We practiced for about an hour, the first verse, the chorus another verse and a nice ending chorus. It all looked good, everyone knew what to do….However, the actual filming showed that we weren’t quite done practicing yet.

Over and over and over and over…….the end conclusion was that all videos had something good, but definitely something going wrong in them. Therefore, we edited all videos and created a wonderful libdub in the end.This is the end result, it may not look too professional, it was definitely a great way to finish our last half year of school together. After editing we posted the video on YouTube for all of you to have a look. My advice is if you want to have a bonding experience with your friends, make a video together! It will make sure you have hours of bonding time.

We are a group of international friends, who are now going off to work, study abroad and work abroad.  However, we ‘believe’ in that we will stay friends in the future, even though it is quite unsure who will be doing what or going where….We will always have this viral video to remind us that we are great friends.

Cheers!

Easy as that!

How to quickly use google adwords to promote.

Nowadays it is possible to promote anything you want. In previous blogs I looked at findability for a specific audience, how to use monitoring tools and now I will try to promote my blog on google adwords. First, I had a look at this video to see how to do this. Than just go to this website, use your google account and start your first campaign! How hard can this be?! It is quite self-explanatory. 

Without a specific product or service to sell it is quite difficult to start google adwords. I decided to promote my blogs on wordpress, to gain more awareness and to gain more traffic towards my blogs. However, since I do not want everyone to go there, I stopped before I had to start paying.

The setup of google adwords is fairly easy, just type in the market you want to reach and start creating your adds. Within half an hour you can be done and you can already see how many clicks you may receive on a daily basis. I set google adwords to automatic bidding, to gain as many clicks as possible.

Google adwords makes you think about your product more than you already have done maybe. So if you just start and you are not quite sure what you should write, it may take a bit longer. What are your unique selling points? What makes you stand out from the competition? And in my case why would people start reading my blog? For my advertisement I used the words, best blog, since in my opinion it is the best blog ever, people reading can decide afterwards if they agree. The words I also used were:

• Blog on interesting topics,
• Diverse topics,
• Master of the universe, since that is my name on the blog
• English blogs,
• Interesting topics
• Think different etc.

For more exposure I chose all networks and devices, in this case that people are able to find my blog when they use phones, tablets and pc’s. By choosing full exposure and as many clicks as possible, costs can rise quickly. When you have a fixed budget it could also be possible that your advertisement is less effective, in a way that people might not find you.

Google adwords is a quick and easy way to start your advertisement. Make sure though that you actually need it, if you have a limited budget a different way to advertise may be a better choice.

Sources:

https://googleemea.connectsolutions.com/p40122033/

https://adwords.google.com/cm/CampaignMgmt?__u=5703058405&__c=1798450165#r.ONLINE&app=cm

You can run, but you cannot hide…

How easy it may be to find your brand of choice.

The first thing many people do when they want to know more about brands and/or products is go to google.com. Levi’s has two different ways to find out more about them. If you would like to know something about the brand and the company, look up ‘Levi’s Strauss &co’. However, if you would like to know more about the clothes, shops and social media use, just type in ‘Levi’s’. In both cases the first SEA will show the official website of Levi’s. In my opinion, either way Levi’s has great findability.

There is the Levi’s app, for android phones only in Spanish, which is a good way to see if they have something in store, before you have to go there. For iPhones however, you can get the English version. You can look up gifts, clothes etc. for him , her and children. You can straight away buy it via the app. In my opinion this is really nice, to make it even easier. No need to go to the store anymore, no laptop necessary, with an tablet or phone you can buy it all.

Facebook is a good medium for Levi’s, they have over 16 million likes and over 130,000 people who are talking about Levi’s. They use instagram, post videos, links to their own official website and sub brands and show in subtle ways their corporate social responsibility.  Events, sales and discounts for a certain period are promoted.

On YouTube you can find commercials and the official video website of Levi’s where you can scroll through all sorts of videos. And of course some videos of people doing stunts with the Levi’s jeans. However, the videos are over 4 years old on YouTube. The official video website is good up to date. Next to that, if you look up Levi’s Strauss & co, there are about 12,000 videos on the company and their efforts.

Levi’s is a calm brand, there is not a lot of fuzz about it. They do what they like, they promote a lot for themselves, but also aware of their corporate social responsibility. I found very little remarks or comments on the brand or the products, which shows me that they are doing a great job towards their audience, there is no ‘I hate Levi’s’ Facebook page, which happens a lot these days.

They made good use of the way they post their products and information about the company. If I would be looking for jeans or another product I would most likely use the keyword ‘Levi’s’. When I want to know more about the company, I would use their official name ‘Levi’s Strauss & co. I like that they make a difference in this, it is a very smart way to make a distinction on how people look for their products and company.

Sources:

https://twitter.com/LEVIS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2aAoKXej7Q

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Levi%27s+&oq=Levi%27s+&gs_l=youtube-reduced.3..0l4.10056.11477.0.11888.7.7.0.0.0.0.185.802.4j3.7.0…0.0…1ac.1.R_BaISKawm0

https://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&gs_nf=3&gs_rn=1&gs_ri=hp&cp=15&gs_id=gw&xhr=t&q=Levi%27s+Strauss+%26+co&pf=p&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&oq=Levi%27s+Strauss+&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1355325884,d.d2k&fp=1cc0b53149b1cdf6&bpcl=39967673&biw=1525&bih=712

https://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=Levi%27s&oq=Levi%27s&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.3740536.3741455.1.3742539.2.1.0.1.1.0.299.299.2-1.1.0…0.0…1c.1.x531WzGzfd0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1355325884,d.d2k&fp=1cc0b53149b1cdf6&bpcl=39967673&biw=1525&bih=712

https://www.facebook.com/Levis

Let’s talk about it!

Where people are talking about my brand.

For previous assignments I have been using Levi’s Strauss as my brand, therefor I decided to continue with this. Unfortunately, Levi’s is not a brand that is talked about a lot. In this case, I will comment on the monitoring tools, how they are and how to use them. For brands it can be quite scary to see what people post about you, people trust each other’s opinions more than the ones of company. In that way anybody can make or break you, without it even being true.

First of all, Google Alerts is a tool is fairly easy to use, just type in your brand, what type of news you want to read about, how many times a day and what type of results. As I decided I want to see everything there is on Levi’s Strauss, there was one post on marktplaats.nl, to buy a necklace. I did choose the button immediately let me know when someone somewhere posts something about Levi’s. I received three emails in one week that there was something said about Levi’s.

Next, Technorati is the largest blog engine. A nice website with sub headers where you might want to go and a selection to see what you’re interested in. Since I did not get any results for Levi’s, no posts and no blogs, I do want to see how it works. Therefor I looked up Samsung, there must be something about that. Luckily, there was loads on Samsung. There are 405 results, which is when you are looking for something specific too much. This tool has a ‘refine’ button. It is not possible though to pick out the negative results. I did find one difficulty, that if you want to receive notice when someone writes something about your brand, it’s not possible…At least I have not been able to, without signing in that is.

Twitter is one very important tool, which is used more and more often every day to post about literally anything that comes to mind. By using the Twitter Search tool it is easy to find tweets about your brand. This way you can quickly browse through all the tweets and see the positive and negative ones. Separating the positive ones from the negative ones is not possible. You can respond quickly by replying with a tweet or you can decide to disregard them.

SocialSeek is a tool you can get the latest blogs, news reports, messages, photos,  videos on your brand in an easy overview. You just type in what you are looking for and immediately it shows all results of Social Media websites. It is at the same time uploading everything that is posted at that time.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor is a site where you can compare your Social grow trends with a competitor, you can see how many fans, likes you received over the past period of time. To me this seems a great tool to keep track of your competitors and how you are doing as a brand.

Moreover, Backtype is a blog tool to monitor blog comments. Recently it has been acquired by Twitter. I have no possibility to go further than the homepage. It doesn’t say that backtype itself is of the air, since they are bringing their team and technology to Twitter, however in this case I think that is what happened, they just don’t mention it clearly.

Last, Big Boards is one of the largest message board and forum website. This is to me a confusing website, I was already expecting that there wouldn’t be any results for Levi’s, but this time neither for Samsung. On the link of Forum Directory it is possible to find all kinds of topics you might be interested in.

In conclusion, for Levi’s SocialSeek is in my opinion the best tool, because it combines several Social Media websites with all responses and on other monitoring website it gave no results.

As I found out, there is nothing that cannot be found on what people are saying about your brand. Thanks to the monitoring tools, it is possible to track the tweets, blogs, posts, forums etc down and decide to respond or ignore them.

Sources:

• http://www.google.com/alerts
• http://technorati.com/search?usingAdvanced=1&q=Samsung&return=posts&source=blogs&topic=overall&authority=all&sort=relevance&x=55&y=10
• http://www.backtype.com/
• http://socialstrand.com/2012/07/23/10-free-brand-monitoring-tools/
• http://www.big-boards.com/
• https://monitor.wildfireapp.com/comparisons/665921/fans_followers/levi-s-vs-gap-on-facebook#&data=cumulative&range=all
• https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung&src=typd
• http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/
• http://socialseek.com/app/main?q=Levi%27s

Virtual lives; a virtue or a vice?

Due to the ‘Social media revolution’ offline life has become redundant. Everything we want to do in life can be done online. What happened to meeting people in person, going on a date, getting to know each other over a cup of coffee? Playing soccer, basketball, hockey or just playing outside? What about having an actual game night with friends to play boggle, poker, rummy etc? Secretly hiding porn magazines underneath your matrass? That’s not necessary anymore, just go online!

It struck me when I was watching this video did you know that 1 in 5 couples meet online and not only that, but 3 in 5 gay couples meet online. Next to that, 1 in 5 divorces are blamed on Facebook.  Is this fair to assume or just an easy way out? 1 in 5 divorces, that means that 20% of the divorced couples blame it on Facebook, maybe the relationship that you were in, was not that healthy and stable to begin with. It is easier to say that it is not your fault, however it seems scary and confusing  to me that the “revolution” of social media is capable to do so. Facebook was only introduced in 2004, so who was to blame before that?

Next to that, if you want to meet someone, there is no need to go outside. You can look for a specific criteria to find your perfect match.  Just make a video, post this and let others find you. Does this mean that love at first sight is not possible anymore? We can already do so much research on the other person through social media. So why would you actually go on the first date, you already know each other( probably better than you’d prefer), like what you see? So move in, get married and then blame it on Facebook when it doesn’t work out. Sounds like a good deal. Everything a person says on the internet is true anyway.

Then there is another issue, how do you know to what website you have to go to meet your perfect partner? The site for beautiful people, higher educated or just random? Who decides that I am educated or pretty enough to sign up?

In my opinion it’s a shame that our first instinct is to go online to go look for entertainment, people, activities instead of looking for them in our offline lives. This may seem easier, but in the end it can make us lazy, closed off from the outside world. Is that really what we want?

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpMZbT1tx2o, 21-11-2012, Socialnomics 3

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february8/rosenfeld-online-dating-02112010.html, Stanford News, 21-11-2012, Forget Cupid. Online connections have valentines falling in love, Stanford researcher says

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/common-causes-and-reasons-for-divorce.html, 21-11-2012, Buzzle, Intelligent Life on the web

http://www.echtscheiding-informatie.nl/redenen-scheiding, 21-11-2012

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/dating-websites, eBizMBA, 21-11-2012, Top 15 Most Popular Dating Websites November 2012.

http://www.lexamore.nl/misc/howitworks_g.php, 21-11-2012, Official website lexamore

http://www.pof.com/, 21-11-2012, Official website Plentyoffish

https://www.zoosk.com/about.php?from=footer, 21-11-2012, Official website Zooks

http://www.eharmony.com/about/eharmony/, 21-11-2012, Official website eHarmony

http://kw.parship.nl/over-ons/index.htm, 21-11-2012, Official website Parship

http://www.dutchcowboys.nl/socialmedia/26188, Dutch Cowboys, 21-11-2012, The history of Social Media (1971-2012)