Want some cheap eats? Hurry!

Hi All,

A bit late for this blog. It's nearly mid semester and things are heating up (assignments and life).

Anyhow, first thing after I got home, got into my facebook, and received a message in my FB inbox from MMSS which is my uni's marketing student society. 

The message was about this McDonald's which was just opened its new store near our university (East Malvern). One of my friend actually updated her blog about its grand opening 

Well, that's not the point, the point is that I followed the link in the message and came across this facebook Fanpage "The Pickle Club" that McDonald's just launched. And what the Pickle Club does is, they posted awesome deals on their page regularly or so and students who saw the deal can visit certain stores (this one is only for East Malvern, for now) and say the keywords and then you'll get the deal!!! but the deal is it's "One per customer per day."

Here are some of the examples of deals that were offered.

Source: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pickle-Club/147689095242742?v=wall&ref=ts

There was also a link from the info tab on their facebook page, so I checked it out.

It was http://www.kellycogroup.com.au/ and this page actually showed me what this Pickle Club idea is about. They were the company who own several McDonald's stores in Melbourne's suburban area. And they created the company so they can give back the community, for example hiring staffs in the area, give what they get to charity in the form of donations or sponsorships and so on.

What do you think?

The first time I saw it, I was like,,,hmmmm??

Do you think this will make more people go to East Malvern McDonald's and even though they didn't get the deal first, would they still buy something from there. 

Or

Do you think people won't bother trying to get the deal first at all.

Well, from my point of view, I'd want to try to be the first to get the deal sometime, you know....just for fun!

But in terms of marketing, I like it, I like the idea that they are making the use of social media, and also they are giving what they get back to the community or donate to charity. They not only use facebook though, they also have Twitter account that people can follow and get updates on great deals everyday.

Some of other businesses actually do this too, but mostly what I received are more formal deals which come in the form of e-mail. f=For example, Myer send me e-mail everytime there's a sale, Borders sometimes send me discount vouchers as well as Dominos Pizza.

Do you look at the deals you received from several businesses and have you ever used them? I tried Borders once, it was 5% discount on a book, and yea, simple as!

Anyhow, thanks MMSS for the message, I'd have to try it sometime.

P.S. have a great rest of the week, next blog coming soon!

It's a FAD so I'm doing it!?!

Actually, I wanted to blog about Klout. Which if you remember from my last blog, fanpagelist.com had this system called Klout to measure top brands on twitter. 


However, from the comments I received on my last blog, I want to take this opportunity to blog about the topic which was quite popular over the last few years; "Is Twitter a FAD?" which I think is a bit more interesting than Klout.


OK, so If you actually google "Twitter & Fad" together, there will be million of articles on it. I've read some of them, some I agree and some I don't but to blog about it I should be asking myself and I also want to ask you who read my blog. 


"What do you think, Is Twitter a fad?"


You are probably wondering what on earth I mean by a "fad"? If you don't know what a "fad" is. This is what Wikipedia said. 

A fad, is sometimes called a trend or even a craze about something

A fad becomes a fad, when a number of people start "doing it" and it then starts to increase rapidly. 

A fad is "the behaviour that will fade quickly once the perception of novelty is gone"

I remembered the first time I used twitter was because of my friend who told me what it can do. She said I can follow medias, celebrities, and other stuffs. So I gave it a try, but what makes me like Twitter was how I can keep up with the world not because I can follow celebrities. 

So I would say, if you think it's a fad, then it's a fad! I mean I agree and disagree. I can agree that it's a fad because, twitter have all those elements. By saying all those elements I mean the celebrity endorsements, following people here and there and lots of media are using it. So yeah, I believe that these elements are the influences why many people are using Twitter. 

However, I think that businesses that can find ways to appropriately utilise twitter within their companies are clever, regardless of whether they are using it because it's a fad or not. Many companies are now including twitter in their processes as a tool for communication, assign tasks throughout departments etc etc. I've seen it myself, the company I've interned for last summer used Twitter to communicate about the meeting, share ideas and experiences and lots of other activities.

By doing so, they can cut down some of the costs and companies can track activities of employees. Thus, this not only can benefit the companies on how they can interact with employees but what Twitter can give is more than that. Twitter allows company to know what customers are saying about them, whether they like or dislike their brand? It provides "direct" interaction between companies and customers. And if companies can find the right tool to measure and track customers, then it's easier for them to develop new products, new brands or even find potential target markets etc.

I came across this statistics which give some interesting insights.

• 23% of online customers read what's on twitter once a month and 11% do not own twitter account but are still reading the tweets.
• 20% of customers said they followed a brand of company so they could interact with them.
• One of the motivations why customers follow a brand of company on twitter is because they want to seek for more information from the brand and the company.

Source:Webpronews

However, many statistics have suggested that Twitter's popularity is fading (FAD?) and also have a very low retention rate. 

Source: Nielsenwire

Nielsenwire did a study on US Twitter's users and found that around 60% of the users do not return to use twitter the following month. 

I follow approximately 650 people on twitter which more than half are not tweeting anymore. I reckon that if companies do not create a regular habit to tweet, they risk loosing customers. If businesses are using twitter to interact with customers, therefore, your twitter account is somewhat similar to your customer services department.

Therefore, what do you think Twitter should improve? Do you think it will stay?

p.s. I didn't think it would be this long, therefore twitter list of interesting people to follow will be my top three only

1. @Mashable  - Tech new, lots of insightful statistics

2. @SocialNetDaily - all about social medias, lots of interesting articles

3. @Flipbooks - not only lots of RTs about social media news, but lots of good quotes and interesting stuffs like "7 reasons why you are addicted to twitter"

Enjoy! : )

When the blue bird "Tweets"!

Just last night Twitter has just reached its 20 Billion Tweets! which I've got the news from of course while browsing twitter.

Source: Mashable

Twitter has been around for quite some time, which some of you would've probably know what it is. Basically it provides social networking and microblogging services, which users can update "status" called "Tweets" online using what's similar to texting, which the Tweets can be written up to 140 characters (Wikipedia, accessed on Aug 1, 2010). Well, nowadays, Twitter is, I think, one of the essential social media tools that businesses should use.

From a little browsing, I came across this link Top Brand on Twitter, which measures brands that are using Twitter as one of their social media tools. The site measures the brands based on number of followers and also "influence" statistics (more about "influence statistics" next blog).

The Fanpagelist.com allow us to browse through all the brands that are using Facebook and Twitter (I will only mention twitter today), which the site also divided the brands into corporate and product brands. 

As you can see from the two pictures which I captured from the site, most brands that we are familiar with are now using Twitter as one of their tools to interact with their customers. One real life story I want to share which my housemate was the one who's experienced it. It showed how a brand/product can interact and create value with customer using Twitter.

My housemate was ordering Domino Pizza online, when the pizza arrived the toppings that she ordered were all wrong, so she tweeted @domino (yes, Domino Pizza is on Twitter!), which Domino responded very quickly and actually e-mailed her to apologise and they also told her that they will make sure the store that she ordered from is monitored so that they keep the service consistent. I mean, even though my housemate did not get the right topping, at least Domino took certain level of responsibility and apologise for the mistake.

As what I said before, other popular brands are now on Twitter, interacting with their customers such as Starbucks, Apple, Google. But from what we can see on the list, that as Twitter provides microblogging services, so many brands that made the top 10 are mostly "media-typed" brand such as CNN, Time Magazine etc, which these brands use Twitter to tweet the latest news to the world.

During this moment I'm typing, many new twitter accounts are being created, therefore, no doubt that Twitter should become one of the many tools that businesses should consider using!

P.S Hope you enjoy some small facts about Twitter in my blog and feel free to comment, suggest and follow me on twitter. Next blog, promise to have a list of people that are very interesting to follow on Twitter.

: )

Guess there's a first time for everything?!?

I actually wanted to greet using something better than 'Hi', but I guess it would come out pretty lame.


Anyhow, welcome to "It's The Ripple Effects", and my name is Ratchsi Wongphimonkit!
If you can look to your right hand, which that's my profile. "Ju" is what my friends call me and you can call me by this name as well, which I know, is a lot easier than my actual very long name.


This is not the first time I blog, I used to keep what I call an online diary, but then I stopped. So I guess, I found another reason to start blogging again. This subject I'm taking this semester MKF3881 - so called Electronic Marketing gave me a choice to choose between blogging and creating a video (about social media & e-marketing) and a marketing report. I've experienced the pain of doing so many reports in one semester, so this time, I decide to do something different. 


By the way, if you are curious about the name of the blog. Basically, the idea of the name of this blog came from my screen saver, which helps me link it together with how social media is. Think about it...social media create enormous ripple effects : )


Enough about me, this blog needs to be about e-marketing, therefore, first of all


This video I've attached is about social media revolution, it's pretty fun to watch! Some of you might have seen it already, but just like I said, it's fun to watch : )

Edited:

In case, if there's any tech difficulty. Here's a link for it instead:

Social Media Revolution 2010 Video










Hope you enjoy the video and feel free to comment, share the video, follow me on twitter etc.


 : )