The optimistic generation

Buying a product or using a service can include more than what you think. Living a certain lifestyle and buying or using products and services that support that lifestyle and the values that go around it can influence the users to have brand loyalty. Companies can use and generate further brand loyalty by creating platforms for brand communities, revolving around the lifestyle and ethos of the brand and its target audience. Even using Tumblr is a brand community because the audience has common interests, depending on which pages they follow and reblog. 

Some examples of brand communities that you may be familiar with include:

- sephora

- HOG ( Harley Owners Group)

- Playstation 

- reddit

- LouLou magazine

.... and more companies that realize having a brand community strengthens the loyalty of consumers. But you don’t need a company to build a brand community, you could have a blog that revolves around a certain lifestyle and start using the same rules that apply;

The 11 rules for building online communities

1. You must have a community manager- to organize and be as much excited to be involved as the community members

2. Your community must have a purpose- the target audience will not care if the topics talked about are random and all over the place, it will not catch their interest 

3. You must use whichever tool/ platform your members are most familiar with- even if the audience is interested in the community, it will have to be simple and familiar enough for them to use and be involved

4. You must create content about your community- the main reason for creating the brand community is for two-way communication, so keep it that way and make sure to talk positively about the members

5. You must build personal relationships with you members- if you want the audience to read and listen and be interested, you must attract their respect and show you care

6. You must let heated debates happen- too much positivity can lead to people thinking the comments could be fake, allow debates to happen in order for discussion to flow easier

7. You must begin building the community before you launch the website- connecting with the audience before creating the platform will attract more attention to the launch of the website

8. You must recognize the individual contributors from members- recognition encourages engagement, simple as that

9. You must encourage members to recruit friends- creating a referral strategy is the best way for the audience to invite their friends with the same interests into the brand community 

10. You must share control and power with members- having a branded community involves people who feel committed, therefore give them some room to take ownership of the activities

11. You must not use your admin powers unless absolutely necessary- removing a post can do more harm than good because you are ignoring the real issue, if it is a nasty comment you need to confront the user and explain the values of the branded community

Getting things done can be difficult, energy-draining and time-consuming, depending on the tasks. There may be small tasks that are more important than the bigger ones or vice versa, overall there are reasons to why you want to or need to get these tasks done sometime soon. I have so many places that I can write my to-do list on, like my agenda, wall calendar, dry-erase board, thumb-tack board, sticky-notes, my cell-phone notes/calendar/reminder app and three folders I have that say “ To-do, to file and to ponder”. So why is it that my room is a mess week 6 into my college semester and I don’t even know where to start my to-do list? 

Because I am not thinking about how important it is to keep my room as clean and simple as my life - when I can help it. Instead I am letting it give me anxiety- along with my schoolwork. You- who is possibly reading this for motivation- and I need to think of our chores and tasks as business objectives, with a mission, vision, strategy, and tactics.

Let’s use a specific example of something from my (long over-due) to-do list;

Vision= to have a tumblr/pinterest- looking room that has my items and clothing in all the right places

Mission= to have and keep a clean and simple room that is easy to find everything I need to within a few minutes 

Objectives= * to clean, sort and season my clothing * to fix and re-purpose my damaged clothing * to sell and/or donate my small clothing * to sort through my papers and books * to place my art supplies in a box and put them in the basement instead of taking up closet space * freshen up my room with green decor (plants, wall art, inspiration quotes)

Strategy= *keep myself motivated *staying on task * getting inspired 

Tactics= * keeping myself motivated; by continuing to write down my to-do list in the same places, like my agenda, my reminder app and my dry-erase board *staying on task; by having a specific day or time of day that I clean the clothes from my bed, water my plants and sort my papers * getting inspired; by researching, reading blogs and watching You-Tube videos about innovative and creative ways to create nice decor and be organized

Well now that I wrote down my plan and the specific ways that I will get it done, I know that my room will end up looking something like this by the end of today...

Think about your staple food, something you always rely on because of quality and taste. Now think about beans. Are beans something you usually include with your meal? If you are in your early twenties, then probably not, unless you are a very healthy eater or have been a fan of Heinz for awhile.

In appreciation of Heinz beanz long-time fans, who refer to themselves as Beaniez, and their growing tastes, Heinz created “Heinz Five Beanz”, which have a mix of five different beans for the different tastes of Heinz Beanz fans. The We Are Social agency were asked by Heinz to create awareness of the new product that is targeted for “grown upz”. The question they asked fans was, “ which bean have you grown up to become?”, and based off of that created a personality quiz for each of the FIVE beanz, along with a Facebook app about the beanz. My favourite part about this two week campaign is that every hour five beaniez were chosen to receive a personalized bean! I don't know about you, but anything personalized seems multiple times cooler.

The “My Grown Up Beanz” campaign reached 10.8 million people on Facebook, 3 million people through Twitter, blogs and news sites, resulting in 30,000 extra ‘Beaniez’ in the Heinz Facebook community. Obviously this was a successful campaign back in 2014, lets talk about what Heinz Beanz and We are Social did right.

Some important questions must come into play when creating a social media plan, these questions include what are your business goals/objectives and communications strategies, who is your target audience, what tactics you will use, what are your key messages and how will all of that be integrated in to your social activities? Heinz thoroughly planned out each of the answers to these questions and what they were doing to help the business, which was to engage with the fans of Heinz Beanz so that they could become influencers to share the content.

Goals/Objectives: to engage with fans of the brand and attract new customers through the sharing of content

Communications Strategy: give the fans a reason to share their opinions about the brand and encourage engagement

Target Audience: long-time fans of Heinz Beanz, mostly a middle-aged women and men, who like to make their meals at home

Tactics: use of Facebook app, Twitter and blogs to share content, website for online personality bean quiz

Key Messages: Heinz Beanz are the same beans all the fans love, but just as the fans have grown older, the beans have developed different tastes and personalities

Integration: personality quiz; sharing results with friends, Facebook app; share information about each bean, five beaniez were chosen every hour to receive a personalized bean, every day ten fans who invited their friends to take the quiz won a beanie prize bag, and each fan got a coupon to try the new Heinz Five Beanz product

The success of this campaign is as popular as Mr.Bean himself, most bean lovers continue to support Heinz, while some people should get on the bean train to be around for the next exciting campaign !

   To some, Public Relations may seem evil because of immoral mistakes made in the past. Of course there are mistakes being made in the present as well, but I would like to blame that mostly on miscommunication. This results from the various priorities of members and a short time-line. 

   One mistake made in the past was done by a bank. A bank is one of the organizations that you would think should not make mistakes, no matter if financial, human resource, or communication. In this case, it was all three. The bank that I am talking about is the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). 

   Following the financial crisis of 2008, banks especially should know that their reputation is constantly on the line. The difference is that now the public controls much more than how much profit a company is making, the public can take to many platforms to speak out about their opinions, like mentioned in my previous post. 

   The crisis that RBC created for itself involved outsourcing temporary IT employees from India through a company called iGate, therefore taking away from the Canadians that were already working in those positions. This resulted in one of the unhappy employees complaining to the media and the story being talked about all over social media. Many RBC customers that had accounts in the bank, decided to transfer their accounts to other banks, just because of the outsourcing scandal. All the tweets mentioned that the bank should support the Canadian economy by employing Canadians and not trying to cut costs by outsourcing. 

Finally RBC’s CEO. Gord Nixon, issued an open letter to Canadians apologizing,as well as to the replaced employees,” All will be offered comparable job opportunities within the bank.” This is just one problem of many that I see. The Canadian employees should get their jobs back and the outsourced employees should be offered comparable job opportunities within the bank since it is only temporary. 

   The bank did handle the crisis by apologizing, though they did not admit they were wrong for outsourcing and replacing Canadian employees. Admitting to making a mistake is the first step to gaining back the trust of employees and consumers. Then telling the public what will be done to fix the mistake is what brings the reputation back into a positive light. 

   Imagine a product or service that you recently bought. What was the shopping experience like? Was it online, in-store, quick, too long, great customer service, or very bad customer service? How could better customer service change your experience? With better customer service, comes more trust. Personally, I would not trust a company that would not answer my questions about their products.

   One company that you may see everywhere but question their food products when you start being health-concerned started a campaign called “Our Food. Your Questions.” Yes, McDonald’s Canada decided to open an online platform to debunk myths about their food and gain more trust from consumers. The platform gave consumers the ability to openly ask McDonald’s Canada questions about the company. 

   Opening up a specific platform for consumers to talk about the company runs the risk of negative comments, however, running that platform gives the opportunity to fix those comments first-hand and fix the problem. Therefore, not letting the negativity to run its full course. If the company doesn’t develop a platform of communication of its own, the complaints and rumours will appear somewhere else and wont be as easy to turn the effects around.

    As a consumer, wouldn't you rather have your complaints resolved by the company right away? 

   The internet and privacy are two words that you would not think go well together. Or you have not thought about it before. Why is that? Is it because you think that the Government is watching, or do you believe that once you delete a past post, varying from embarrassing to a romantic picture with an ex, it is gone from the world wide web. You can Google or Bing anyone and everyone, as long as they are well known from the past or have any online presence. So basically, what do we use the internet for? 

   The internet allows us to search for not only people, but also articles and stories. Stories that may not always be true or that probably should not be made public without consent. However, it does happen, even with the possible consequences. Gawker Media, now shut down, was a blog about anything the writers’ thought would interest the public. The article was not always pleasant. 

   As one of Gawker’s own, Tom Scocca, stated,” It is true that Gawker was always a publication that took risks. It had bad manners and sometimes bad judgment” (http://gawker.com/gawker-was-murdered-by-gaslight-1785456581).  So why did Gawker post these occasional “bad judgements”? 

   Because its motto was “ Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”. About 9 years ago, Gawker posted an article about PayPal’s co-founder, Peter Thiel. It was an article that invaded Thiel’s privacy. Standing up against the inappropriate article about himself, Thiel wrote an article that was posted in the New York Times, “All people deserve respect, and nobody’s sexuality should be made a public fixation” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/opinion/peter-thiel-the-online-privacy-debate-wont-end-with-gawker.html). Thiel did not only write his own article, but also funded other lawsuits against Gawker, which eventually led to their demise, “ assessed damages of $140 million, proving that there are consequences for violating privacy” (link as above).