When are you tweeting?

Are you a 9-5 tweeter? Only found tweeting Monday through Friday? Or perhaps you only tweet once a week, once a month, or even less often. Engagement truly is the key to success on social media. Are you engaging your consumer - BUT it also matters when you are engaging. Will consumers be looking at your tweets (or other social media posts) at the time that you are posting them? Definitely something to consider. You should move to the consumer, not require your consumer to move to you.

Pinkwashing?

We hear a lot about greenwashing - companies changing their packages to be green, placing leaves on advertising, or tossing the word sustainability anywhere they can to appear as a more environmentally friendly company. More and more research shows that consumers are becoming more aware of what companies are doing making it more difficult for companies that are truly engaging in sustainable behaviors to convey the truth of their sustainable efforts.

A new term is arising today for a similar problem - pinkwashing. The term originated with regard to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation being found on just about every product out there - from tshirts to yogurt lids to buckets of KFC chicken to 5 hour energy. Why? What connection do each of these products have to the cause? And does the money actually make it to the cause? Initially cause-related marketing was extremely beneficial in increasing overall attitudes and purchase intentions toward products. These beneficial effects are decreasing today because of the overwhelming presence of cause marketing which has also been shown to decrease perceptions of the cause - i.e., pinkwashing. We need to start considering today when it is beneficial for companies to partner with causes.

Social Media Marketing

It's funny how quick marketing tools come and go. When I teach any marketing course, I try to emphasize to the students that we are teaching what the current tools are but by the time they are in a marketing career, these tools will change. Just three years ago, Facebook and Twitter were the hot tools. Everyone had to have a social media presence - in fact, the social media presence was more important than anything else. We see today that Facebook is again trying to unveil a new layout to the social medium in an effort to make it more user friendly, and I'm sure bring in some more advertising bucks.

And no, I am not saying that Facebook is a thing of the past. Having a social media presence is still important for just about any brand - ESPECIALLY for those brands that don't even have a website. However, a brand should not rely on this alone. You need to figure out what the lifestyle of your consumer is - what groups are they participating in? What activities are they engaged in? Where do they spend most of their time? Connecting with them on a more personal level while not bombarding them with advertising (what some folks call stealth advertising or stealth marketing) is going to be more and more important in the coming years.