Your Ocean's Getting in my Oil, Your Social's Getting in my Coffee

In the case of Startbucks social media was used to support branding and drive in-store sales by developing interaction and community around Startbucks themed-events and content.

Starbucks is not selling coffee anymore; they are selling a culture, a community and a set of rituals surrounding their 17,000 locations (and growing). I have friends who work for Starbucks, and they have even said it’s all about the experience now and a “coffee culture”. They have used a strong internet presence that not only includes info on the brick and mortar stores, but also different offshoot organizations that they have started including everything from support of the arts, to environmental organizations.

In an attempt to offset negative publicity after its gulf oil spill, BP used social media as part of a larger PR effort, which included search marketing.

As Ian Capstick stated in the article, the biggest problem with BPs digital PR campaign after the big spill was that it “lacked a human or colloquial tone”. There was very little sense of urgency or true emotional impact of their videos chronicling the cleanup. They all felt like innocuous PSAs, or like a commercial for some local criminal lawyer. Also they kind of created a person to despise, Tony Hayward, instead of dispersing the heat of the situation over several higher ups in the company.

For this week’s blog post you’ll consider both cases. You’ll then select three digital channels of your choice and suggest tips for how marketers in your industry could best use these channels in their digital campaigns.

I believe the three most effective digital channels for someone in my industry are as followed:

Social Media/Viral Marketing:
This is obviously the biggest and many times cheapest way to educate and update people about your product or service. In the music industry, people aren’t signing new bands anymore unless they have a certain number of friends on myspace or facebook. They leave the grunt work to the bands, creating their own buzz before the record label puts any real money into them. So one tip is to have a very strong Internet presence that is tiered across multiple web sites. Having a Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reverb Nation, Soundcloud, CDBaby and may seem redundant, but the more places you are on the Internet, the more ways people have to find you.

SEO:
This is an obvious one too, if people can’t find you when they use search engines they probably will just give up on it. And even if you have all of the Internet presences, people generally go to search engines first to find all the avenues they can get a hold of you through. So my suggestion to people in my industry is to hire someone who understands the ins-and-outs of SEO if you don’t have someone already, and don’t try to cut corners. This is the first step to securing your online presence and making your company visible. You have to lay the foundation for your house before you start building.

Affiliate Marketing:
This may not be as obvious as the others, but it’s a channel that is becoming more and more widely used as time goes on, and in very subtle ways. Finding a symbiotic relationship with another company opens your company up to new audiences, new interest groups, and new opportunities for mutual capitalization. Having advertisements floating on Youtube videos, for example, is a great way to make money, while at the same time providing the viewer with the opportunity to purchase or learn about products related to what they are watching. This can lead to great relationships and opportunities with other companies in the future.