IKEA has a reputation of creating functional, modern, quality and affordable products. Products offered are available for any part of a home from bathroom, living room, bed room to kitchen and more. They not only offer furniture but they also offer accessories to compliment any room in any home. IKEA is a Swedish-founded Dutch-based company that has 355 in 29 countries. The popular furniture store has a vision “to create a better everyday like for the many people”. Some of the key factors that contribute to IKEA’s successful supply management is their affordability, quality and availability.

Founded in 2016, CharterClick is a young startup based in United Arab Emirates, envisioned by its creators as a universal platform for yacht cruise rental. CharterClick is an online booking service that lets you book yachts, speedboats, and fishing trips all under one site. The main feature of the system is that it works in real time – something that no vessel aggregator has done before. CharterClick first approached Eminence in December 2016 wanting advice on their social media strategy, finding that their main challenge was targeting the right people. Their main objective was to grow their social presence online and generate sales through social media. CharterClick knew they wanted to target a wide range of both locals, tourists and expats from around the world, starting with Dubai expats. The challenges: Attracting more people to click through to the website to book a Charter Generate Awareness of CharterClick online Prove digital marketing is effective Directly targeting the right people Eminence began looking at a strategy for their social media channels by analyzing the behaviour of the target market and the direct competitors. With yacht rental being a highly competitive business in the UAE, however none of these companies had an easy to use website, that allows yachts to be instantly booked without calling the company itself. Eminence found out that the target would be interested in a variety of charters, and a content plan would need to be put in place in order to generate results from the right target audience. CharterClick was provided with a comprehensive social media strategy for their marketing team to follow. Eminence sourced a range of local influencers who were managed, and selected through their followers based on the needs of CharterClick. These influencers posted and wrote about their experience, producing remarkable results. The efforts were focused on the timings, days, and different types of campaigns that generated engagement from new and existing followers to both CharterClicks Facebook, and Instagram.

After being listed as number five on Fast Company’s Most innovated social media company of 2017, Taco Bell is making a way for itself by focusing on the customers for product development and research. To reach customers in a more personal sense, Taco Bell has been using social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram to review customers complaints, ideas, and creativity. “Instead of sitting behind glass and listening to a focus group, we now have access to 20 million consumers and can be inspired by them and connect with them and have real relationships with them (Lacy, L. (2016, November)”.

From goofy grins to stand-out chins, the extraordinary expressions of more than 3,000 candy-faced hopefuls came in fast and furious in the Make Your Face a Maynards search – the first contest of its kind to transform one lucky Canadian into a delicious candy treat. Oshawa, Ontario’s own Jessica Winacott was randomly selected from the top 10 finalists to become a bite-sized confectionary celebrity as the face of Maynards, Canada’s #1 candy brand. (Legaspie, 2011) Maynards was a confectionery manufacturer in the United Kingdom and Canada. It was best known for manufacturing wine gums, Sour Patch Kids and Sour Cherry Blasters. Following acquisition by Cadbury in the 1990s, it is now a brand of Mondelez International. In 2016, the brand was joined with Bassett’s to create Maynard Bassetts. (Wikipedia, 2017)

It is safe to say that social media is one of the most talked about topics currently in the world and it doesn’t look to be fizzling out anytime soon. Social media platforms have gone from a place to connect with friends and family, to a regular social tool for organizations to utilize and maximize the many properties and capabilities it holds. Technology is advancing at an astonishing rate, and there is no telling what a social media platform will look like or what the functionality of it will be in the future. For an organization like Metroland Media, they are already behind in terms of implementing any kind of social media, so if they do choose to move forward with it, it’s possible for them to enter the social media world at a very different and confusing time. The real question is, will they?

To a child of the ’80s it still seems unbelievable that vacations today are researched and booked almost exclusively online. I remember visiting travel agencies with my parents. I can recall flipping through the glossy pages of snazzy magazines, always trying to sneak that Disney booklet into a place of prominence on the agent’s desk. I can picture how every “Sunshiny Holidays” guide was divided into country-specific sections, and hotels had a single picture depicting what they were all about. One picture. That was all. To help with the limited visuals were 5-7 sentence descriptions written by the proprietors themselves. So you’d thumb through the guide, gaze at the photos and dutifully try to convince your parents to choose the spot with the best-looking pool. All the while the agent typed away on her keyboard, telling you what was available and at what price. It felt like a simpler time, even if it was a comparatively powerless one for consumers.  Alas, I won’t be offering the same memories to my kids (hey!…remember when Mom spent 4 hours staring at her cellphone reading reviews for our one-day getaway to Great Wolf Lodge?). The limited technological sophistication available “back then” unfortunately meant very limited access to accurate, reliable information when booking a holiday. Transforming the Industry The transformation of the Tourism & Hospitality industry caused by the influence and upsurge of social media is nothing short of astounding. Approximately one-fifth of leisure travelers worldwide turn to social media platforms for inspiration within different categories of their travel planning including: Hotels (23%)  Vacation activities (22%)   Attractions (21%)  Restaurants (17%). Along with these sweeping changes, the Travel Marketing Industry has had to adapt to the ever-shifting landscape, finding innovative ways for determining how to create desirable experiences, and secure a high number of bookings. As early as 2011, Ryan McElroy, a recognized leader in the travel and hospitality industry, discovered that many travel agencies were still operating from old blueprints. They were missing opportunities to generate bookings because they weren’t harnessing the social media and digital platforms available. As a solution, McElroy created Travel Agency Tribes. Travel Agency Tribes is a SaaS (software as a service) company that creates all the technology required to make a travel agency’s online presence dynamic, easy to update, and adept at crossing all the new channels that today’s savvy travel consumer expects. This Canadian company has its ear firmly glued to the ground. It’s leveraging the very best that social media… Read more »

Dubai Autodrome circuit is one of the most modern in the world; it is also one of the most challenging, as it has a combination of high-speed straights and technical corners. The venue is part of the Union Properties Motor city development in the greater Dubai and area. Track experiences give the chance to sample race cars and super-cars through the Race & Drive Center – a perfect place to hone skills and develop better driving abilities.

Are you familiar with Itty Bitty Ballers? I think they’re hysterical. When I saw the tv commercial last month, I knew I had to have one! I immediately went to www.ittybittyballers.ca and – to my surprise, of the nine original figurines, six were sold out! But what is the story behind this viral internet success? GoDaddy, the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to empowering small, independent business ventures, has just closed out their Itty Bitty Ballers campaign featuring Toronto Raptors center, “big man” Jonas Valančiūnas (JV). The campaign was focused around JV’s mythical business, www.ittybittyballers.ca.  The site displays his nine lifelike figurines that capture him in action poses, such as riding a Raptor, dabbing, and giving high fives.  GoDaddy positioned our 7’0 centre as spending his spare time creating these miniature works of art. This juxtaposition was amusing and intriguing enough to drive customers to want to adopt the itty bitty JV’s as their own. Two of the nine figurines sold out the day the campaign launched, and then once the campaign went viral on social media, the remainder sold out in less than 24 hours.  From the outset, the advertising campaign (seen both on tv and online) seems comical, but through their product promotion, the team at GoDaddy managed to virally promote the ease of their solutions while supporting a small local business… all through the power of one itty bitty baller.

If you were using social media for personal or business use in Canada during the summer of 2016, you will have no doubt heard at least something about The Tragically Hip.  The favoured Canadian band was touring in what likely would be their last, due to frontman Gord Downie’s onset of brain cancer.  Concerts sold out and media of all sorts took note of what was developing into a notable time in our country’s music and lifestyle history.  As the final concert came to pass in August – complete with the attendance and interaction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – an influential social media phenomenon was occurring. Ensight Canada reported, “In addition to multiple trending topics throughout the weekend of the concert, social media posts about The Hip and (Gord) Downie’s First Nations comments generated roughly 20 million potential impressions across Canada over the past week. What’s really telling is that Canada has about 14 million daily Facebook users, so when we look at the impressions generated, we can conclude almost everyone in the country who used the internet or social media came in contact with the story in some way.”

Have you ever played hide and seek with veggies? If you’ve ever fed a toddler, chances are you have. Changing the “yuckies” to the “yummies” is no easy task. Most of us living in the Pinterest world with kids are searching topics like “picky eaters” and “hiding vegetables in kid food”. If you’re like me, you find an awesome recipe and think “I can totally do this and my kids are gonna love it!” You go to the local small town grocery store and they look at you sideways when you ask for TVP (textured vegetable protein), ground flax meal or coconut flour. So you end up making something like black bean brownies or kale chips and get a “This tastes like card board!” or “Are you kidding me? These are not chips!!!” In comes Hidden Garden Foods. This is a fairly young company, started by a Mom who I’m thinking had a similar experience to the above paragraph. They make cookies from vegetables, brilliant! They currently have 4 flavours: Chocolate Chip made with pumpkin, Ginger Snap made with butternut squash, Red Velvet made with beets and Cocoa Cherry made with spinach. All gluten free and nut free with no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. When I contacted Hidden Garden Foods to comment on how they are currently using social media to promote customer engagement in product development, their response was: “Thanks for getting in touch with us. We’re still learning the ropes of social media so I’m not sure we’re the best example of using it the most effectively…” My first reaction was to move onto a different company but a casually worded, engaging Facebook post and the kind, open and honest response to my inquiry kept me thinking this is exactly the right company to write this blog about. Hidden Garden Foods is already using their established social media network to work through the four main steps of customer involvement management:  idea generation, idea screening, concept development/testing and marketing/ distribution.

Everyday there are creative people all over the world working towards building new futuristic inventions and making advances in the world of technology.  This week I will be exploring the Future of Social Media and its relation to these new inventions.  There are many different directions to go in, when talking about a topic like this, so I will try to give you as much useful content as I can. What do you think of when I say the words the evolution of social media? And more importantly what does the future hold for us with its use? With social platforms at our disposal,  company’s are changing the way they conduct business, thus impacting the way society functions.  Social Media is being used as a tool to aid in every aspect of the business chain yet one area that still hasn’t made much headway are the CEO’s of today and how they are using Social Media to interact with their customers. I will also share with you some insight about amazing advancements in the digital world and end with a brief discussion on the importance of providing true content when putting out posts.