We took a look at the conversations surrounding a brand in class today - but I did not get to choose the case study.
ASOS sounds to me like a Taiwanese laptop manufacturer - but it's a brand that means a lot to my students.
We started with the website, and took a look at news reports, then moved onto blogs.
With Twitter it became really interesting. An appeal for photos of customers wearing leather garments was responded to within minutes. These photos became potential content for the ASOS Life Community site.
Customers were raving about the brand and its offers - and so were doing the marketing for the company. I could barely find a critical voice on the social web.
People are clearly happy to share their love of fashion and I can envisage this being true of music or sports fans - but it's not so easy to see how other organisations can so easily recruit customers to become fans.
Richard, what fun. Asos is such a good case study. They are a real retail ground breaker.
I have created a reputation wall about the company here http://reputationwall.appspot.com/?sid=134420
To have some idea of what these small white words are all about, user the search syntax 'the white word asos clothes OR fashion OR accessories' in Google and all will be revealed.
The words in the Reputation wall are the top latent semantic analysis words in the texts in the corpus found by our search engine.
Basically they reflect the words that people most associate with the search term used.
Posted by: David Phillips | Friday, November 13, 2009 at 06:43 PM
The beauty of using social media as a tool for marketing and public relations stems from the fact that any positive gains in perception are quickly negated by a poor product. On the other hand, the reverse holds true if a product is good.
For example, two recent movies come to mind - Snake on a Plane and Cloverfield. Both received huge hype prior to their respective release dates, yet the former's tickets sales dropped drastically after a week in the market while the latter's remained strong. Both were primarily marketed through viral means, which seems to be the online equivalent of word of mouth.
The turning point was that one movie was so bad that it was funny while the other while (motion) sickening at times, was a quality film.
As such, if the product is good, it will almost sell itself. If the product is good, the fans will follow.
Posted by: Philip Fukuto | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 09:27 AM