Lanhgam on: messaging strategies and reputation management

Langham on messaging strategies and reputation managementLangham Hotels recent foray into social media has ended after Hong Kong bloggers and Twitterers initiated heated discussions on the innapropriateness of the series of viral video’s that were “aimed at driving business to its hotels“.

Much has been written, and some background as well as the public’s thoughts on the campaign can be seen here, here, here, here, and here. Whilst it has obviously achieved the goals of a social media campaign in generating buzz, Langham’s response to pull the plug is an obvious sign that it did not go too well.

As marketers, irrelevant to whether on traditional, digital, or social mediums, a key component to a campaigns success is by really knowing our audience. This is really a basic marketing 101 concept that should not be forgotten in the hype of all the new platforms we can execute our tactics on.

To a certain extent, even on mass forms of traditional media, we have a general profile of our audience. For example TVB viewers vs AXN viewers, or Apple Daily readers vs SCMP readers. With the inherent boundless nature of social media, our content reaches further, and our audience becomes much broader. Messaging strategies must account for this.

In the end, whats done is done, and there will always be controversy where satirical humor is involved. When negative PR occurs, whether self inflicted or the result of certain events, smart and strategic reputation management is important. Pulling the plug to prevent further damage is one thing, but could Langham not have done a little better than just stating that they were dissapointed in the tone of the video’s being misunderstood?

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Four pillars of social media content creation

At iSprouts, we have made ongoing efforts to develop a generic social media content creation process that could be adapted for a variety of corporations and objectives. A number of revisions have been floating around internally at iSprouts, however we have often refered back to an open source draft of such a process by Geoff Livingston, author of “Now is Gone”.

Today I thought I would share our current four pillars of social media content creation used as a base for developing a sustainable dialog between our clients and their audience. It is an evolving work in progress, and as it is based on open source material is released as such as well. I would just ask that if there are any comments or suggestions, please do post a comment, if you do release a modified version, please share with us what you’ve done, and if you do use it please credit and link back to us. We will be releasing a more detailed and extended version of this sometime in the near future, so if you’re interested, do keep a look out for that.

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Huge growth in social media marketing predicted by Forrester

Forrester Research recently predicted a huge growth for online advertising. Social media and mobile are on the top of their lists, but everything online is showing an upward trend.

Forrester online media predictions

Forrester online media predictions

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iSprouts social media marketing

Evolution to social media

Evolution to social media

This inaugural post marks a new chapter for iSprouts. We were conceived in 1999 as a small shop focusing on providing digital marketing, and workflow automation services for corporations in Hong Kong and Greater China.

The evolution of the web is now seeing users generating and consuming each others content. The Internet based on user generated content has been coined Web 2.0, and a new breed of applications facilitating social interaction is sweeping the Internet.

With this evolution, iSprouts is now focusing our services on helping your business navigate the world of social media. Our dedicated team of consultants is ready to create and implement a social media strategy for your brand, focusing on a predefined set of objectives and providing long-term and measurable results.

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