Social Media Marketing in Movies

Film industry has been booming rapidly over the past years. Movie marketers tried numerous marketing attempts to persuade their target audience to come to the cinemas. As a fast-growing and ubiquitous media vehicle, social media becomes an indispensable tool in movies’ marketing campaigns.

Two perfect examples of utilizing social media to market their movies would be Hunger Games and The Twilight Saga. Both of them have millions of likes on their Facebook page. Their social media marketers consistently post photos and stories about the films and performers, keep updated about their coming shows and supply fresh news/information related to production of the films. They try to maintain consumers’ awareness and general publicity of the brand, especially during the slack time when the movies are still in production.

Dissimilar to other products, movies are not continually available in market. To seize consumers’ attention and avoid their brand names got diluted by a clutter of ads, marketers and PR professionals try to create a culture among social media and encourage their target audience to discuss about the films. The Twilight Saga uses vampire stories to leverage their movies and posts photos of Edward and Bella to emotionally appeal to teenage females who build up a huge fan-base of the movie.

Traditional media can hardly achieve film PR professionals’ marketing objectives any more. Utilizing social media to contiguously communicate to consumers  can effectively maintain  brand’s publicity in the market.

Get a closer look at Hunger Games social media campaigns at

 http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-examples/hunger-games-social-media-marketing/

Leveraging Social Media Marketing During Festive Seasons

Festivals are special times of sharing feeling and building connections. It also a great opportunity for corporations to tighten their relationships with consumers by creatively waging campaigns compatible with festival momentum.

During Halloween, Jimmy Kimmel, a notable American talk show, waged a campaign called “Jimmy Kimmel, I told my kid I ate all their Halloween candy”. He asked parents to play a little prank on their children by telling them that their Halloween candies have been eaten.

This creative and interesting idea evoke thousands of responses and participation. Abundant videos were uploaded on YouTube website, generating tremendous publicity online. The show selected most interesting ones and edited them into a five minutes video, which became viral online instantly. I personally watched the video more than six times. The campaign was highly related to the festival tradition with sound and feasible ideas.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are around corner. Two festivals that gather family members together are best moments for people to celebrate love and friendship. Consumers’ emotion may get boosted and be easily influenced by any marketing attempt that emotional appeals.

PR pros and marketing specialists should always put context and social environment into their considerations when creating marketing campaigns, elaborately selecting appropriate target audience and persuade them with effective appeals.

Jimmy Kimmel, I Told My kid I Ate All Their Halloween Candy

Seven Ways Brands can leverage Social Media Marketing this Festive Season By Richa Mahindru

 

 

VanderMolen and His Five Reasons

Last Wednesday, I met Alan VanderMolen, who is the Vice Chairman of Daniel J. Edelman Holdings and the CEO  of global practices. He was an expert in global public relations business and his first advice for our PR students was taking business classes to strengthen our understanding of business world. His speech reflects his decent sense of humor, provoking laughter in the hall and truly inspiring us. His charisma and accumulated knowledge about the business boost my interests in PR business. He visualized that how a successful professional will be like in PR area.

His five reasons explaining why he loves public relations comprehensively introduced the current trends of communication technology, the organizational philosophy of the Edelman, how public relations evolved in past years, etc.

1.PR is becoming an advisory function

2.The emergence of purpose as a corporate strategy

3.The revolution in media

4. PR is moving to the center of the plate in the marketing mix

5.The poor guy across the hall is a University of Michigan alum

In his perspectives, public relations have been rapidly evolving and become increasingly crucial in marketing mix. Some clients value public relations over advertising, which has been dominant in general marketing mix. My understanding of public relations was broadened beyond basic media kits we learned in class. Public relations is more about looking in general and longtime communication strategy of the company and advice clients how to effectively maintain the relationships with consumers and stakeholders.

In public relations classes at the Ohio State University, we are trained to persuade others with solid rationales and decent presenting skills. We learned how to cooperate with others, coming up with effective and creative solutions to the assigned problems. PR classed at the Ohio State University truly supply us with hand-on experiences and opportunities to practice. VanderMolen’s five reason briefly introduced the current trend and future of Public Relation and the education we received here is undoubtedly compatible to the PR business in the real world.

Attending PRSSA meeting last week was a big boost of my interest in PR and communication area. It’s an era of message and we are trained to be creators of it.

More information about the event is on PRSSA website:

http://ohiostateprssa.com/2012/11/08/vandermolen-osupr-and-passion-for-work/

Meet with Jay and Macchionee in the Creative Engines Event

Two week ago, i attended the Creative Engines Event at Wexner Center at the Ohio State University. The coming guests were Sergio Macchionne, the CEO of FIAT and Chrysler, and John c Jay, who is the global creative director of Wieden+Kennedy.

Sergio Macchionne is a fairly gentle person with decent sense of humor. He briefly talked about the struggles his team went through in 2009 and how innovative turnaround helped them overcome the toughest time. “Mindset is key in succeeding in the face if impossible odds.” He highly values the importance of being creative and dealing with changes. He believes that contemporary leaders only care about what’s possible rather than impossible. The Chrysler commercial super bowl did creatively appeal to the audience. He claims that “Creative commercials can only produced by people who works out of the box” As an expert in motor industry, Macchionne knows how to catalyze the market by exploring creative solutions and cooperating with top-rated advertising firms.

I was so inspired by John Jay’s story and his American dream. He was born in Columbus, learning English by remembering car brands. As the global creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, John has traveled around the world, working with people who dare to make changes and thinks out of the box. “It’s time for us to create new dreams instead of recalling old ones.” Nowadays, there is no time for us to look back or refresh something classic but cliche. It’s time to look forward and create new culture.

Creativity has been a top-discussed topic for people working in all kinds of businesses. People follow the old rules and conservative ideas to make things work just fine, but rarely we explore unprecedented ways to make things work better. In PR business, we learned how to write press release, fact sheet and media alert in a professional format. Maybe, there exist some other unexplored methods that can better achieve our goals, which are maintaining positive images of our clients and maximizing the marketing benefits for them by waging campaigns. We are a generation of creating, exploring and transcendence.  We should take more time to think out of the box, trying to solve one problem with multiple solutions. We are young and we may define the future.

Biographies of Jay and Macchionee:

John c Jay:http://www.aiga.org/design-journeys-john-jay/

Sergio Macchionee:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Marchionne

My Experiences in Twitter Chats As a Newcomer

Social media becomes increasingly indispensable in PR business. PR professionals and students use twitter as a tool to expand their business network, increase interview opportunities and better understand PR business.

I have participated in three #prstudchat, which is a twitter chat for PR students and professionals. It starts at 8:30 p.m. every Wednesday. I only contributed one twitter feed for each time, sharing opinions about the existed topics that other people covered with #prstudchat in their tweets. However, the tweet feeds are not as timely as other professional twitter chats like #pr20chat. Very few tweets were contributed during scheduled time. I usually track relevant tweets back to several hours ago, but the responses and interactions with other people were not undermined or postponed.

My strategy of participating in the twitter chat is to make comments and respond to others, connecting their perspectives to my personal experience. Once a tweet talking about the resuscitation of MySpace, indicating that clients revalue the importance of uses of MySpace. I tweeted to him, showing him my gratitude to his suggestions, since my MySpace has been out of use for years.

Twitter chat is a opportunity to have conversations with other PR peers, garnering suggestions and information of marketing trends. It is a forum of sharing creative thoughts and very “spark the ideas” moment.

Here is five steps to a successful twitter chat by Justin Dennis, who is a marketing expert in social media.

http://socialmediatoday.com/node/851296

Ways to Stay Creative

In the process of marketing, a creative thought in advertisement can effectively attract consumers’ attention and press their purchase button. A creative press release may get reporters interested in the stories that you covered. With no doubt, creativity is a indispensable force in marketing work. However, professional marketers’ ability of creativity has been diluted after years of occupational experiences. How to stay creative becomes a widely discussed topic in every field of business.

Every innovative deed starts from a little idea. Open your mind to generally explore new ideas and solutions to a problem. Breaking down the rules and restriction is also beneficial for cultivating creative thinking. Think Big, Think Crazy!

This is a link of 80 best guerrilla marketing, which visualizes creative thoughts in companies’  promotion process.

Target at Consumers’ Emotional Reaction: A Perspective from Pantene Commercials

Human beings are emotional creatures, fond of touching stories that may reflect their own experiences. Intense emotional reaction and fluctuation may easily press consumers’ purchase button.Pantene engages emotional appeal in their commercials aired in Thailand and Russia. The commercials were elaborated and touch millions of audience who also shared the videos through internet. By airing commercials with substantial emotional appeals involved, Pantene generated lots of buzz online.

By exposing to emotional appeals in commercials, consumers may be easily affected and psychologically connect their own experiences to the brand. Positive image of brand will be effectively built up and induces more sales.

An article talking about the difference between rational and emotional marketing perfectly explain why Pantene distributed substantial budget to commercials involving emotional appeals.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/difference-rational-emotional-marketing-23661.html

PRactice: Best PR Learning Chance Supplied in School

PRactice is a public relation firm, run entirely by students, at the Ohio State University. I am glad to be a part of this organization with lots of inspiring people and numerous opportunities to wield our creativity in practical PR works.

• Real-world PR experiences

In PRactice, we have our own clients, which can be small business or nonprofit organization located in Columbus. Our clients are Groovy Spoon, a frozen yogurt store, and Ride for World Health, which is a cycling team that will ride across the nation to increase people’s awareness of public health care. Our job includes creating media kit, writing media card for riders, planning campaigns for the frozen yogurt store during winter, etc. We can gain hand-on experience and apply our in-class knowledge to the practical work.

• Meet with inspiring people and enjoy the cooperation

As students, we value the importance of teamwork and bringing creative thoughts into group discussion. I always got inspired by my peers’ ideas. We brainstormed new slogans for our clients, repositioning our consumers’ brand by utilizing visually appealing patterns and attractive messages on social media platform. Each of us has different strengths that promote our clients’ brands in multiple methods.

• Best way to improve resumes and build up portfolios

During the promotion processes, we create substantial materials forming positive image of our clients. We designed Twitter backgrounds, wrote news releases and media inquiries. These materials can reflect our writing skills and aesthetic ability.

You can have professional experience in public relations area in school. PRactice is more than a class or organization. It serves as transition between school and society, helping us to prepare for the challenges in real-world situation.

take a look at the website of practice!

http://osupractice.wordpress.com/

 

Integrated Marketing: A Perspective from CCTV

Advertising and public relations are two ways of communicating in a corporation’s marketing process. Advertising uses multiple appeals to attract consumers’ attention and aims to influence their behavior and public relations distributes its message by targeting the media, which is trusted by consumers. By definition, there is an obvious difference between these two communication activities. However, in practical scenarios, professional marketers combine advertising and public relations to create a more effective marketing plan.

The China Central TV headquarters, a 44-story skyscraper in Beijing’s Central Business District.

This past summer I interned at CCTV, which is one of the most influential media outlets in China. I was one of 10 interns for one of their TV shows, which took important stories from across the country and tried to increase awareness of social issues. As interns we were responsible for promoting upcoming shows and their trailers on social media. We focused on renren.com (the Chinese version of Facebook), Weibo (Twitter), Youku (YouTube), Sina.com and Baidu.com. I was assigned to the Weibo group where I assisted with creating attractive messages to maximize the total views of our trailers.

Our group didn’t create message ideas from nothing. We sat down with people from the advertising department to better understand their strategy with traditional media. They told us they were focusing on a story about a 10-year-old boy who took care of his blind, single mother, alone. We also viewed trailers made by the advertising department. Afterwards, we brainstormed with them about ideas that could generate buzz online.

 

From this cooperative experience with advertising professionals, I learned the importance of these two departments working together and that PR and advertising are clearly related. They share the same goal of promoting the brand through the media and if there is a clear-cut separation of the two, it may disrupt the operating process of the corporation. Presumably this is one of the reasons why the term Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) has become so popular.

Public relations is not just about writing press releases, fact sheets or creating media kits. PR activities materialize the general marketing strategies and branding plans of the companies. We need to think more broadly to create campaigns that maximize our clients’ publicity. There is much more to explore in communication, and I’m ready for it! Are you?

more information about imc on mmc learning website

http://www.multimediamarketing.com/mkc/marketingcommunications/

This is a Story about a Foreign Student and PR new recruit

My name is Brant Mu (Tinglin Mu). I am a Chinese student of Ohio State University, majoring in strategic communication. Two years ago, when I held a list of numerous majors, I asked myself three questions: What am I interested in? What’s my strength? Who do I want to be? After answering all of them, I settled on strategic communication major as my learning focus and took the first step into marketing communication world.

Now, I will introduce myself by answering these three questions.

What am I interested in?

I enjoy cooperating with my trusted people and co-creating a splendid project with them.I am fond of communicating with different people, understanding diverse cultures.I love brainstorming about new ideas, solving problems with unconventional methods.

What’s my strength?

I am talented in designing visual information to attract audience’s attention, proficient in Photoshop and Photography. Web design is also my strength. I created a well designed website for my visual communication design class.My ethnical background and educational experience in the U.S. extend my worldviews, strengthening my ability of adapting to different cultures.

My internship experiences and campus activities honed my skills that are essential in communication business.

• I Interned at CCTV, a local newspaper of my home town and a Japanese seafood buffet
• I am a member of PRSSA and an account associate in The PRactice, which is a student-run PR firm

Who do I want to be?

I value the importance of marketing, anticipating myself to be an expert in advertising and PR. I want to be someone who can solve marketing problems for corporations with effective plans and creative methods.

I never regretted choosing Strategic Communication major, even for a second. I know this is what I want and where I will be extraordinary.

This is my story. What about yours?