Tag: social media

How to Lose Loyalty in 10 Days: Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco

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This month marks my first Facebook-less month. Like more than 35,000 other users who have signed up to do so, I closed my Facebook account on May 31. For someone like me who rarely participates in movements of any kind, Facebook has elicited in me an usually intense negative feeling. This has not always been the case, however. I had started as an early adopter of Facebook, partially due to the privilege of having a .edu email address as a university professor. In those early days, I was an avid advocator of Facebook and marveled at the revolution it would bring to the social landscape. What happened then? In a few years, I had turned from a Facebook lover to a Facebook hater. Reflecting on my own journey, I realized that there are important loyalty lessons here for businesses to learn.

Quit Facebook Day

Don’t Forget Your Roots

Like many media companies, one unique aspect of the Facebook business model is that the end users of Facebook are not the same people who pay the bills for Facebook. Facebook started as a social network intended to connect people and eventually grew into a business model deriving revenues from advertisers. Nobody blames Facebook for wanting to make money. After all, it is a business and it has to make money to survive. What Facebook did wrong, however, was to make every business decision based on money AND at the cost of its roots, the millions of end users. Continue reading “How to Lose Loyalty in 10 Days: Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco”

Interview on Social Media by With Good Reason Radio

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Recently I was interviewed by Sarah McConnell, host of the With Good Reason radio program. In the short segment, I discussed the growing popularity of social media in business use and offered my advice on small businesses entering this area. For those of you who missed the program or live outside of the Virginia and DC area where the program was broadcasted, here is an online recording of the program. In the second half of the program, Professor Alan Abrahams from Virginia Tech also offered his advice on the steps small businesses should take to establish an online order business.

Listen to the program:

How Do College Students Approach Social?

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College students, like other young consumers, are notoriously fickle and may not exactly seem like an ideal candidate for loyalty marketing. But there are at least two things that make college students hard to ignore for many businesses. First, college kids are usually at the cutting edge of technology and fashion trends. After all, two of the major online players today, Google and Facebook, had sprung from university campuses. This makes college students important trendsetters to watch. Second, although college kids may not be rich today and some may even have concerns paying for their education, they do tend to spend more (a good 40%) on discretionary items such as fashion and entertainment. They are also well on their way to joining the educated professional workforce in a few years. So for some businesses, college students represent valuable customers right now, and for many others, these students are potentially valuable customers in the near future.

Because of this, it is important for loyalty marketers to get into the mind of college students. Recently, I conducted a brief survey of 184 college students. Similar to an earlier study I did on adult consumers, the purpose of this survey was to understand college students’ online social activities and their consumption and sharing of online content. Some findings from this survey were expected, while a few surprising facts also emerged. Here are some highlights.

Continue reading “How Do College Students Approach Social?”