Hey guys! Abi here. Natan and I just got back from Societal Social, an evening celebrating the launch of the Social Media Society (@soosocial). This is the first society of its kind, focusing primarily on social media. We all know about blogging, tweeting, facebooking, and myspacing (yes, these are all terms accepted by urbandictionary.com) but have you ever thought about how big of a communications industry these sites are?
For this reason Comm club wants to get involved. By meeting professionals in this field we can plan for guest speakers and learn about internship opportunities. Natan and I were the only students at the event and people were very excited to talk to us. We met the founder of Social Media Society and are looking forward to collaborating with them by becoming a student chapter.
Social media is a huge up and coming industry and we’re really excited to get involved! For those of you interested in digital marketing, PR, media, ad sales, or anything that has to do with social media stay tuned for updates on the situation!
Update: Comm Club covered in MediaPost's Just An Online Minute blog!
Update: Here's a very poorly edited clip we put together from the night. Hope you enjoy it.
Thanks!
-Abi Bock Director of Social Media Society Outreach
Natan here again. The other panel at Advertising Week today that is worth noting and sharing with everyone was Google’s “Experiments in Digital Creativity”. I could go on forever “geeking out” to the cool things their creative people showed us, but instead I would like to just share with you the presentation itself which can be found at http://bit.ly/87coolthings.
Here were some of my favorite Google inventions from the presentation:
1. Example of clickable videos - booneoakley – BooneOakley.com redirects you to their YouTube page, which is a clickable video. My words wouldn't give it justice, so I recommend you just check it out and see the possibilities of centralizing a brand or a company through YouTube. The possibilities are limitless. A university could present the brands of their school in a whole new light through a medium that our demographic loves going to.
I had the pleasure of attending BusinessWeek’s Best Global Brands panel today as a “Delegate" of New York University (according to my badge). As I had expected and hoped, the conversation that Burt Helm, BusinessWeek’s Marketing Editor, moderated ended up focusing on Social Media. Each executive (from Microsoft, Audi America, KFC and Cisco) had his or her own perspective on how it can and should be used as a marketing tool.
Here are the live notes (condensed and edited to the best of my ability) from this panel. Please pay attention to the bolded inserts which are my attempt to comment on the statements they made from the perspective of an NYU student and Comm Club Vice President. Also stay tuned for embedded video from youtube.com/fastforward, once they put up the content.
Apologies for the poor image quality.
Monday, September 21, 2009 2pm-2:45pm
Panelists:
Javier Benito – (JB) Chief Marketing Officer, KFC
Scott Keogh – (SK) Chief Marketing Officer, Audi of America
Marilyn Mersereau (MM) – Senior Vice President, Cisco
David Webster (DW) – GM. Brand and Marketing Strategy, Microsoft
Moderator:
Burt Helm, Marketing Editor, BusinessWeek
Jez Frampton, CEO of Interbrand, gave the introduction.
Interbrand is the firm that provides the statistics each year for BusinessWeek’s Best Global Brands.
OPENING COMMENTS:
JB (KFC): Our biggest challenges….are all related to disposable income, how do we make sure consumers are spending money on our brand and making it their brand of choice.
SK (Audi): In my role it’s incumbent to keep optimism in the system because if it turns the other way there are a whole bunch of problems.
MM (Cisco): – We watch the Cisco ranking by Interbrand very closely… My job is to teach people at Cisco what branding means, to teach our inside executives what the brand means….Our second biggest challenge – we grow through acquisitions…130 companies…We acquired Pure Digital who thinks there Flip is a great brand too. “ARE WE A HOUSE OF BRANDS OR A BRANDED HOUSE? THIS IS ONE OF THE CHALLENGES WE DEAL WITH.”
I capitalize this quote not because she was yelling, but because it really stood out to me as something important to consider when dealing with such a big brand. This is of course something NYU probably deals with on a daily basis. There is Steinhardt, Stern, Gallatin, Tisch, but there is also this one larger NYU brand that appeals to many of the thousands of students who apply.
2:14PM
QUESTIONS:
BH: David Webster: Asked about the launch of "Bing", a new online search engine
DW: Is it Bing, or Bing by Microsoft? These are key questions. People needed to know that it was from somebody they had heard of. In order to even have the credibility….by in large around the world consumers have an enormous trust in Microsoft.
BH: How do you silence bloggers and press versus perception of actual customers, how do you go about thinking about that.
MM: When I do something outbound, when we talk about a new product, our server business, we launched on blogs, where technologists were talking about it first. Then, later on, more traditional media. Most marketers tend to focus on outbound stuff…” She finished off her statement basically saying how often marketers tend to try to find new customers instead of trying to find already existent fans of their product. As the best social media practitioners in advertising have already been teaching, the uniqueness and importance in social media is the ability to let the fans of your brand come and find you. It is very important to be out there in different social spaces so they can find you when they start looking.
SK: We have all sorts of mechanisms to track things. We get back to people. Enthusiasts make sense, we’re an enthusiast brand.
BM:How does Microsoft play in social media?
DW: If you looked at “echo chamber.” Critical thing is when people are actually influential and how to engage them. We have been very active. We have 10,000 bloggers at the company, Twitter accounts for every sub-brand.We crowd-sourced the creative we ran on TV –took user-created videos and put them back on TV. We used it because it allows you to have a conversation. But, don’t get distracted by 5 people, if you overreact to negative statements it will feed into their empowerment.
BM: Last Social Media question for Scott: Is Social media the best marketing medium for building trust, is it useful period?
SK: I’m asked by many people at Audi, why don’t we make this a social media cause, or uploadable. The odds to make it become a viral success is small. Often we just need to focus on selling cars and investing in the future. Social Media from our point of view would be more for customer service, customer relations environment. Not just a pure marketing tool.
The rest of the panel was extremely interesting and due to Advertising Week’s policy on recording I was not able to capture it. I did however ask the first question when the panel was opened up to questions:
My Question: “This is a question for David from Microsoft. I am a student from New York University and every year I notice that most students are purchasing Macs. What is Microsoft doing to compete in this market and to make their computers as sexy as Apple’s products seem to students?”
DW: We have an entire team dedicated to this. For operating with bookstores, the fact that our products are much cheaper compared to Apple’s products, especially during the economic downturn. We are heavily invested in .edu engagement. Also, we have other brands with a “high degree of relevance and engagement.” If you have a Xbox, with a PC you can connect them and get high-def movies, etc.”
The second question from the audience was: What social media spaces do you engage in?
DW – I tweet, I Facebook, personal blog, post videos occasionally on YouTube, I dabble in pretty much everything. I blog through Facebook to over 150 of my team.
SK: Twitter, Facebook
MM: Social Media as a broadcast, “I see a lot of guys from high school that remember me”
-Natan Edelsburg, Vice President, Communications Club
First off, thank you to everyone who came to tonight’s meeting. We had a truly awesome turnout, and we really appreciate your interest! Stay tuned for an amazing video from the meeting! Update: Here is the video! We hope you enjoy it!
This is going to be a great year for Comm Club. We already have some wonderful events in the works, and we loved hearing your input. Studio tours and internship panels both had a great reception. Helping out with Steinhardt’s Undergraduate Conference and a potential partnership with the Women in Communications Club were also discussed.
We were really happy to have people approaching us after the meeting with more event ideas of their own. Remember that we are here for you guys, and we want to help you do what it is that YOU want to do. Please email us at nyucommclub@gmail.com with any ideas that you have for events
Also remember that we would love for you to write for our blog. Anything at all related to media, culture, and communication applies. It can be something as serious as a description of an advertising seminar you attended or as silly as a weekly report on Gossip Girl product placement. Remember, having something that you’ve written appear in an NYU blog can really help when you need writing samples to supplement your resume!
Since today’s time seemed to work for everyone, we are going to keep our monthly meetings on Wednesday nights in the middle of the month. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, October 14th at the same place and time (7:30pm on the third floor of Pless Hall). We look forward to seeing you all there!
We also really want to thank James and Kaplan for supporting our first meeting. Without their help it would not have been possible!
On Sunday October 4th @ 12 at NYU (Room TBA),NYU Comm Club, in conjunction with Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions, will be sponsoring a campus-wide opportunity for students to take a practice GRE, LSAT & MCAT administered under simulated testing conditions. This Practice Test is a terrific opportunity for you to assess your test-taking skills while learning valuable strategies to help you ace the real test. Since the admissions process has grown increasingly competitive in recent years, a high score on your entrance exam can give you a significant edge!
If you are interested in attending this free event, simply email us (nyucommclub@gmail.com) with your name, email, phone # and the exam that you would like to take. Every person who registers for the Practice Test will earn the NYU Comm Club $1. So, if 50 people register for any of the tests, the club will earn $50. Not only does it benefit you but the club also!
Please share this information with anyone you know and have them email us if they are interested in attending!
Lastly, Look out for emails from us about upcoming events. Thanks again.
Saturday, the Communications Club executed our first large event. Felicia Shulman, Caitlin Pirraglia, Lynn Burke and myself (Natan Edelsburg) went out to Washington Square Park to invite students from all of NYU to board free buses to Target in Jersey City so they could get anything they needed for their dorms!
We had a HUGE turnout and heard only good things from our participants. The rain throughout the day did not deter people from coming to the park, enjoying our flavored PUR filtered water and dancing to the music of the amazing DJ that was spinning at our event. For our many, many Twitter followers :), here is a link to the live Tweet from @NYUCommClub from the event: Live Tweet. Here are a few pictures from the event:
Thanks for everyone who came out and we encourage everyone to come join us at our first meeting, this Wednesday at 7:30pm in the 3rd floor lounge of Pless Hall.
Hello Everyone! Welcome back to another exciting year at Comm Club. We have some really great things planned for our blog:
An editorial calendar, a new editor-in-chief of the blog, and frequent posts featuring interviews, Comm Club information and events, and the general goings-on of the MCC Department. As always, we are excited to welcome new contributors to our blog. Please email nyucommclub@gmail.com if you are interested in writing for us.
For now, here are some of our upcoming events:
September 10thfrom 2pm-7pm we will have a table at the Club Fair at Coles Gym. Please stop by, say hello, and pick up a flier and some candy!
This Saturday, September 12th from 1pm-5pm we will be hosting a ReadyU Target event. Buses will be leaving from Washington Square N & Waverly Place to take you to the nearest Target for FREE! Get ready to receive lots of discounts and free Procter & Gamble products. Please check out details for the event in the Washington Square News. http://ow.ly/osTi Also, please join the Facebook event and pass it along to anyone at NYU! http://bit.ly/bWkFA
On Wednesday, September 16th at 7:30pm Comm Club will have its first meeting of the year. Please come to the3rd Floor Lounge of Pless Hall (82 Washington Square East - across from the Silver Building) to meet our E-Board and learn more about our club! There will be FREE pizza and drinks!
Also, don't forget to follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/nyucommclub) to receive updates with news and events.
We hope your classes are going well and welcome back!
