A Millennial That Doesn't Like Social Media

I am a part of the small percentage of millennials that is no the biggest fan of social media. I have an Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat that I barely use. Even though this is so I have been in charge of the social media account for UGA Recreational Sports for 2 years. This was one of the biggest struggles of my college career! The average student would be happy to get paid to do what they already do all day long, but don't get me wrong  I like my job, but I didn't sign up for the social media part. The reason that I don't use social media is because I am a very private person and can't understand why you need to know what I'm doing at all hours of the day. Over the past few months I have learned a few ways to begin to love social media:

#1. Accept the fact that social media is here to stay

I will probably be expected to do some kind of social media in my future jobs. I have to learn the best way to do this despite my anti-social media habits.

#2.  Took a Social Media Strategy course

I challenged myself to take a course about something I really didn't care about. After the first day I was obsessed with the class and my professor and I can honestly say that I learned so much information that I know that I will be using again.

#3. Take what I learned and apply it to my current job to create an actual social media plan and strategy

As I graduate leave my job this year I want to make sure that I leave something for the students after me to follow. I also want to feel like I left my mark with the department and that I made a difference by working there.

#4. Understand that social media is what you make of it

Whether it is personal or business your accounts are what you make of it. It can succeed or fail based on how you choose to use it.

#5. Use Social media more during the summer

I am challenging myself to use all of the platforms more often "all summer sixteen" to get more connected with the rest of the world and to get with the times! Now that I have a better understanding of the platforms I want to be able to apply what I learned when I can which will make it a bit easier when I use social for a business.

This blog was fun and it pushed me to stay up to date with all things social. It wasn't easy as I had to go search to find something to talk about and I tried to connect each post to what I love... Essentially Sports, but Probably Not as I veered off topic a few times. I don't think an actual blog will be my weapon of choice again, but it was a valuable experience!

'Dammnn Daniel!' Back At It Again With Forever 21??

This is the "Probably Not" part of my blog that has nothing to do with sports. Unless you have been living under a rock I'm sure that you saw the video on Twitter, "Daaammnn Daniel, back at it again with the white vans!" that went viral. Something two kids in high school created took them from being popular kids in school to being nationwide cool kids in 30 seconds. Daniel and his friend Josh have been everywhere from guests on Ellen to a feature with Forever 21.

I recently received an email from Forever 21 with the subject line "Daammnn Aaliyah!" My first thought was...nuh uhn seriously? Did they really just Damn Daniel me? I then opened the email to see Daniel and how to dress like him with clothes form Forever 21. I also clicked on the video clip in the email that took me to the a promo video with my name in it and more of Daniel walking around. 

Because I am a Marketing student and in a Social Media Strategy course I thought this was a cool idea advertising wise, but Forever 21 is about a moth or so late on this. This was a good idea to stay current and incorporate social media into their email marketing. Young girls that are obsessed with these two boys probably thought that it was the coolest thing to see in their email. The guys that want to be like them now have a "Damn Daniel" starter pack to follow and become cool like them too. I'm curious to see how (if it all) the response to this impacted Forever 21, whether it be social media following or to a spike in sales of Men's curved hem tees or distressed skinny jeans? I would assume it didn't nearly as much as it did for the freshman and sophomore duo, but it was a cool concept.

Marketing March Madness: # 1 Reese's vs. #68 Buick

I went to the March Madness 2013 College All-Star game in Atlanta and thought that it was the coolest thing! I want to go into sports marketing after I graduate so I had fun, but noticed a lot of things that my friends did not at the game. I mainly paid attention to the sponsors and how companies were incorporating March Madness into there products or services. I remember two brands for 2 different reasons. Buick and Reese's. I remember seeing a brand new Buick vehicle on the concourse and signing up to receive promotional emails from them in the future. That's it. Reese's, on the other hand, was everywhere. I recall a sweepstakes, receiving a t shirt, giveaways, commercials, and even promotional signs in the grocery store.

Reese's is an official sponsor and Buick is a presenting sponsor. I know that there is a major difference for the companies, but as a consumer I couldn't tell the difference at the time. They were both competing to get my attention and they both go it, but I recalled more from Reese's based on my experience. That's all to say that things have changed over the past few years for marketing these events. Companies have stepped up their game when it comes to advertising for March Madness. It is important to use social media as the main campaign or to tie it it to other television or print ads. I decided to see how both brands are doing three years later...

Buick posted to Twitter a couple of times over the past week, but they barely received a response from their followers. I don't think Buick or car companies should try to force their way into this type of event because the audience is different. They should stick to the professional sports like Kia with the NBA, where they can actually make a campaign out of it. Taking a car and slapping #MarchMadness on a post does not put you in the conversation. 

Buick could take a few notes from Acura for taking a shot at March Madness this year. They have an #AcuraTourney where eight videos of online basketball performers and influencers are in competition with each other to win it all as voted by fans. It is a take on the March Madness bracket and they received better responses than Buick for a car company. Overall I love the idea, but it seems like they just stuck the new vehicle at the bottom of the screen so I still don't think it completely relates.

Reese's after three years is still "owning it!" When you're an official sponsor there is obvious reason and pressure for you to have to have a major presence, but Reese's does this year round with every major holiday and event. They have quite a few fun and creative posts on Twitter that are relevant to whats going on with the tournament from recipes to up to date reaction of the #BracketBusted upsets. Their posts are more interactive for fans and Reese's interacts back with them. It doesn't take much for them to get attention and to draw people in. Most people know the brand and love their product. It's less about buy more Reese's and more about having fun with this event. 

So it looks like in my matchup between the underdog, Buick, and the #1 seed, Reese's, ended in their delicious favor. If only I hadn't developed a peanut allergy!

March Madness Bracket Tips

March Madness is one of the best (or worst) times of the year for sport fans. If you decide to make a bracket and play against your friends, family, or coworkers it could be fun or disappointing.

In recent years, countless upsets have ruined the brackets for John, who kept up with every college basketball game since the pre-season and earned Susie, who only picked teams based on their uniform colors, a couple hundred dollars from the company pool. Social media platforms will be filled with status updates on brackets before the games and tears of joy or pain after the games. 

Before you start tweeting away your sorrows here are a few tips that might help you pick your bracket before Thursday:

1. Don't bet on it.

Upsets happen every single year. Don't bet your life savings or next paycheck. If you have to put something on the table offer to buy lunch for everyone and spend $5 at Little Caesars.

2. Don't do research.

Research shows if you do research to fill in your bracket it doesn't work.

3. Unorthodox is the new orthodox.

Picking by jersey colors, vacation destinations, coin flipping, asking your mom, and guessing which mascot would win in a mascot fight are all great ways of picking the winning teams for you bracket. It's so crazy it just might work.

4. Go round by round.

If you want to test the waters before making a complete bracket for the first time or because you have a history of unsuccessful picks, try picking the winners of each game. CBS Sports does Round By Round Brackets  I tried this last year and did pretty well. 

5. Have fun!

Unless you're competing against your classmates to get a 100 on your final exam don't sweat winning your bracket. It's all fun and games.

Whether you are John or Susie, good luck this year. I haven't watched a game all season, but just maybe that's the right and winning thing to do.

Why I Became A Fan of the Clemson Tigers...

So I recently became a fan of the Clemson Tigers...on social media! I will always be a Georgia Bulldog, but I came across an article recently about how Clemson New and Creative Media team is #winning and decided to check it out for myself.

I help manage social media accounts for my job so I find myself paying attention to college athletics social media pages from time to time. With their recent chance at winning the CFB National Championship title, there has been a reason for non-Clemson fans to pay attention to their social media accounts. From videos of  Coach Swinny Dabbing going viral to a Match.com dating profile with hopes of meeting up with ESPN's College Game Day, their social media team shows us how to do social media the right way. Aside from the content created around the CFB National Championship I think that their overall presence on social media is better than most college athletic accounts.

I checked out their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Vine accounts. What stood out to me the most was their videos. They share the videos across all platforms and most, if not all of them are made from Vine. Their Vine account has over 11 million loops which is incredible for a college athletics page. Vine is not a platform that most schools use And use effectively, but Clemson has mastered it. They create these short videos for every sport from preseason workouts to game day which not only hypes up fans during the season, but keeps them interested in the off season. It's a creative, quick and easy way to engage fans other than using graphics and photos if executed the right way. Fans retweet, like, and share a lot of their content which is instant feedback telling them they're doing the right things. It's obvious they are current and know how to appeal to their audience with images like this:

Georgia's social media accounts and New Media department, Hunker Down Productions, have been exceptional as well. The videos that they create are amazing and if they ever decided to make a full length movie I would watch it in theaters. I think our video production is similar, but we await the football hype videos over everything else. I think Clemson takes followers behind the scenes of their college athletes and delivers it in a six second package that leaves you wanting more. It is even a great way for recruits and prospective students to spark interest in the university. The same could be said for Georgia too, but Clemson gave us a run for our money with this one:

Clemson's new media team and their creative work is something that I will be keeping an eye on as far as social media goes. Football is another story, so nice job in social media land, but there still ain't nothin' finer in the land...

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Sued

We have all seen the Michael Jordan Crying Face memes on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I recently saw an article from ESPN.com about the possibility of getting sued over using MJ in one of his most emotional times. Getting straight to the point, you won't get sued for retweeting this meme,but Michael Jordan or the original photographer (Associated Press) could try to sue if they wanted to, but  have real problems to deal with.

There was a recent case with Dancing with Stars' Val Chmerkovskiy. He shared a meme of a little girl in hopes to get a conversation started about childhood obesity. Well he got a conversation started alright. While the sister of the little girl was on Facebook she saw the image and was obviously upset that someone had posted this image of her little sister and made it into a meme. The photo was taken without the knowledge of the little girls' family in 2008 and the family decided to sue Val for $6 million dollars for defamation, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy for making the meme go viral. The original photographer on the other hand is only being sued for $600,000. This doesn't seem fair considering the meme has been around since 2014.

Though he did not create the meme, he shared it and is still receiving a lot of heat about it from social media followers. It turns out the little girl has Down Syndrome which makes it all worse, but there was no way for him or anyone else to know that. It does not make it right, but I don't think he should be sued for millions of dollars for posting an image that he did not create and did not have malice intentions on the little girl. From a PR perspective I would have told  him not to  do it from the beginning, but sometimes people do things that they should have thought twice about. He apologized and the case is ongoing.

Memes are a big trend in social media and they don't seem to be going away for a while. They can be made from anything from an athlete to a popular event to a regular person. Most users have shared  these images and don't think about how it can affect the person that the image is about. Most are harmless, but some can be harmful. Continue to share the funny ones about celebrities, but stay away from the ones with people like you and me. It's all in fun until someone gets sued!

#NBAAll-StarWeekend2016

Emojis are essential to any text, tweet, snap, and caption. These fun faces are more than just an embellishment on how happy your are to talk to your BFF. Emojis have come a long way from the generic smiley face.  Over the past few years we have seen a few developments with skin color, relationships, and the long awaited middle finger emoji. Apple, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have all improved or added emojis for their users. Twitter began to create a special emoji when you use specific hashtags. This started with the 2014 World cup when they introduced "hashflags":

Majors brands and events have been receiving this extra special something for recently like Coca Cola, Toyota, Star Wars, and the American Music Awards. These hashtags have been used for major sporting events as well including the College Football Playoff Championship and Super Bowl 50. The 2016 NBA All-Star Weekend is the newest sporting event to get in on the action. There are 32 new hashtag emojis for this event for players and basketball fans (including myself) are loving it. Check out all 32 below:

Whether or not you are a huge basketball fan if you know who these players are these emojis sum them up in an emoji perfectly! I have to admit when I saw these I laughed out loud because these are so spot on. The official 2016 NBA All-Star twitter account used them all throughout the weekend. 

I'm sure that this will have a positive impact on the impressions and mentions the NBA and All-star weekend would normally receive. Even if the impact is not that large of a difference it is so much more fun to tweet about these games now. I don't know if this is temporary or forever, but I sure hope these are here to stay!

Social Media Showdown Part 2

Did you see Beyonce featuring the Super Bowl? She was amazing and the game kept me occupied until it was showtime, but then I realized it was really just a cover up to announce her new tour... All jokes aside congrats to the Broncos and Peyton Manning, they played a great game and I can't wait for the Cam Newton memes to go viral on everything. Lets recap Super Bowl 50 from a Social media standpoint...

Here is my review of the Sports Stadium feature. My first con is that the app is not an actual app as I was led to believe from reading an article. It is actually a feature on Facebook that you access by typing in "Sports Stadium" or by typing in the team names into the search bar. I only had 8 out of 561 Facebook friends interacting on this feature. I'm not sure how they got the word out about it, but that is pretty surprising and I didn't get much out of it at all. The news feed was strictly about the game, but it wasn't a lot of activity. The live stats and expert comments were a nice touch, but it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be. As much as we are on our phones we sometimes miss plays, so it was nice to have that as a part of the news feed. This is also only available for American Football and no other sport. With the NBA Finals coming up in June, hopefully Facebook will have it ready for that. I know that this is a brand new feature for Facebook and they will work out the kinks so we will see how they develop this feature over the next few months.

As far as the other social media platforms go I think that they were nothing out of the ordinary. Snapchat was my favorite platform over Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook because of the story feature. Snapchat normally has the story feature, but they had two for the Super Bowl: Super Bowl and Super Bowl worldwide. I don't think most people consider that there are American Football fans around the world. I guess it is not any different than us celebrating a Futbol game in Europe, but it was very cool to see  celebrate Super Bowl 50 with us. I thought it was a great example of how social media makes the world a smaller place and how it can also bring us together.

Social Media Showdown Part 1

Next week is Super Bowl 50, but the Panthers and Broncos are not the only ones preparing for the championship game. Social media platforms have been preparing to out perform each other this year. Facebook is launching an app called Sports Stadium where fans can talk about all things sport and it includes features like play by play, game statistics, and commentary from sportcasters. 

Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are typically busy during major sporting events. From criticism about the officials to Game Day pictures, if something is happening in the Sports world it is being mentioned on social media. For Facebook to step up and make an app solely for sports is a major step and could possibly put it ahead of the pack for fans. Twitter is normally the platform of choice for live events because it's short and sweet and in real time. (Let's be honest no one wants to see you update your Facebook status ten times in a row during the game, but I will gladly favorite your tweet as i'm scrolling down my feed.) 

Snapchat has also brought some fun to the game with having geofilters and stories specifically for sporting events. You can easily see what your other couple thousand Falcons fans are doing while watching the game live or at home. Instagram has recently introduced a feature that allows you to see posts related to the same live event all in one place similar to Snapchat's story feature.

Twitter has been called "The World's Biggest Sports Bar". Who can forget Oreo making light of the lights going out at the Superbowl XLVII by tweeting that you can still dunk in the dark. That was a great way for advertisers to take advantage of an unexpected situation during a live event. For the Sports Stadium app it is set to be adfree, but will it eventually include advertising?

Twitter is a big competitor for Facebook with it's other apps, Vine, Q&A, Camera and Challenger and Periscope. Twitter has reported $132 million loss while Facebook has reported $1.56 billion in profit with advertisers so having an ad free app may not hurt them, but it may not last long either. There is just as much anticipation and excitement if not more for the Super Bowl commercials as the game every year, but could this eventually be a future Super Bowl commercial replacement as advertisers and marketers look to social media to further promote their brand? Or an additional part to the multi-million dollar 30 second tv spots? Probably not this app alone if it ever does begin showing ads, but as social media continues to become a major part of our world it could be the beginning of some major changes for advertisers and marketers.

The app will be released in time for next Sunday's big game which will be a great test to see how well the app will do with sport fans.

I'm In the Wrong Business.

How many times have you been scrolling through your feed on Instagram to run across one of your favorite celebs showing of their brand new teeth whitening kit or skinny tea? And so you think I am one step closer to being just like you! I don't hink I can go a day without seeing BOOTEA, MateFit, waist trainers, teeth whitening kits, detox teas and other products being promoted on my feed.

I get paid $10 an hour to Tweet, Snap, Instagram, and post to Facebook five times a week about recreational sports. Don't get me wrong I like my job, but when I found out that athletes, celebrities, and popular social media users were being paid anywhere from $1,000-$300,000 per post to basically do the same thing...I realized I was in the wrong business!

The fact that some people are simply mentioning and showing a company's product and make up to 30,000 times what I make is amazing. It's obvious that the requirements to promote these products are to be a celebrity or have a high number of followers and to be attractive. They send you the product for free and you gain them a couple of thousand new customers. The promoter probably doesn't even really have to use the product. I mean there is no requirement to other than to tell your millions of followers that you do anyways. So who really wins here?

Let's face it; as annoying as it may be to see these staged promotions it's smart marketing. Using someone with a lot of influence on social media to say "Hey I use this, you want to be like me and look like me so you should use it to. Oh by the way use my discount code for 15% off as an extra incentive and so the company knows it's working." Though the company pays per post, the cost varies and it is so much cheaper than making an advertising campaign. I also think it reaches more people because it's not just one actor, model, singer or athlete. They use the "inbetweeners" of  Hollywood celebrities and everyday people. Fashion bloggers, makeup gurus, fitspos, dancers, etc. In a way you want to trust them just a little bit more because it's not a huge celebrity who always gets paid to do this. It's someone who you feel like you relate to and they wouldn't do this if it didn't work. You learned how to conture because of this person, there is no way they would steer you wrong now. As a marketing student, even though I know exactly what these companies are doing I have been slightly interested in a detox tea or two. Great job guys, it's working.