Digital Media and Marketing Strategies

Professor Mike Yao

Module 3: Social and Email Marketing

Table of Contents
Module 3: Social and Email Marketing.................................................................................... 1
Lesson 3-1.1: Module 3 Overview ..................................................................................................... 2
Module 3 Overview Lecture ................................................................................................................................. 2

Lesson 3-1.2 Social Media Marketing Strategies Overview ............................................................... 4

Lesson 3-1.2.1 Social Media Marketing Strategies Overview .............................................................................. 4

Lesson 3-1.3 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Strategies ..................................................................... 17

Lesson 3-1.3.1 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Strategies .................................................................................... 17

Lesson 3-1.4 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Other Considerations ................................................... 28

Lesson 3-1.4.1 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Other Considerations ................................................................. 28

Lesson 3-1.5 Buzz & Influencer Marketing Planning ........................................................................ 40

Lesson 3-1.5.1. Buzz & Influencer Marketing Planning ...................................................................................... 40

Lesson 3-1.6 Online PR ................................................................................................................... 54

Lesson 3-1.6.1. Online PR ................................................................................................................................... 54

Lesson 3-1.7 Email Marketing ......................................................................................................... 61

Lesson 3-1.7.1. Email Marketing ........................................................................................................................ 61

Lesson 3-2 Expert Session ............................................................................................................... 68

Interview: Lynne McChristian, Senior Instructor of Finance .............................................................................. 68

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Lesson 3-1.1: Module 3 Overview

Module 3 Overview Lecture

In the last learning module, we learned about online advertising, content creation and
management, search optimization, and CRM.

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In this module, we focus on how to engage and grow your consumer base through social
marketing strategies, online PR, and emails. Let's get started.

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Lesson 3-1.2 Social Media Marketing Strategies Overview

Lesson 3-1.2.1 Social Media Marketing Strategies Overview

In February of 2004, a small company in Menlo Park, California named Facebook,

launched a web-based service to help people find new friends through their university
classmates. By the end of 2004, about 1 million users became members of the service.
In 2005, when I moved from California to Asia, I had about 30 Facebook friends, and
there were fewer than 1000 active users in this ultra modern city of Hong Kong which
had a population of over eight million people. By the time I moved back to the United
States to join the University of Illinois in 2015, I had over 500 Facebook friends and
more than 3 million people in Hong Kong had joined the online social network.

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Fast forward to February 2018, the once intimate network of friends and classmates
now has over 2 billion active users around the world and that the company is now worth
approximately $483 billion. Besides being one of the largest companies on Earth and
connecting nearly one-third of the world's population, Facebook as a media platform,
has the power to sway the results of elections, shape social and political opinions, and
create new cultural phenomenon. It has also disrupted the entire advertising industry
and reshaped the marketing media landscape.

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What made social media platforms, such as Facebook, so powerful in helping

organizations discover, reach, engage, and ultimately influence their communication
targets? What are some of the most effective social media marketing strategies?

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How can a company makes sense and take advantage of the various social media
channels to achieve its marketing goals?

In this lesson, I will discuss social media marketing strategies. Since I have covered the
theoretical and conceptual aspects of social media, another Coursera course, I will
mainly focus on the strategic and practical issues related to social media marketing in
this class.

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Before we look at specific social media marketing tactics, I want to stress three key
principles about social media that I observed from studying this technology for nearly 15
years.

First, social media is not just one media channel. It is a virtual society in which all sorts
of human activities take place. As a marketer, you should never treat social media as
the same as other media channels like television or newspaper. The best way to

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unleash the power of social media is to think of it as a parallel universe to our physical
world with its own set of rules, norms, and cultures.

From this view, social media marketing is not about using social media for marketing,
but about managing a variety of marketing activities on social media.

Second, communication on social media is both social and personal.

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Traditional mass media is rich in content and broad in reach, but lacks personal context.
Face-to-face communication and the telecommunications or intimate and impactful, but
difficult to scale. Social media has the power of both communication systems, and
social media marketing does not follow the conventional distinction between one-to-
many mass advertising and one-to-one direct marketing.

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Instead, you should see social media marketing as personalized marketing on a

massive scale in a many-to-many communication system.

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Third, social media marketing involves both content and relationship management.

Traditionally, the functions of marketing strategy, advertising, sales, customer relations,

and public relations are managed separately.

Effective social media marketing requires a holistic and integrated viewpoint from which
these different marketing tools should be strategically coordinated and flexibly combined
to achieve a common goal. With these three principles in mind, let's now take a closer
look at social media marketing.

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Although there are many social media platforms, each with different functions and
features, there are two defining characteristics across all of them. The first is an
inherent capacity to build and grow social connections,

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and the second, a communicative environment that enables, fosters and rewards user-
generated content. Broadly speaking, social media marketing involves one or a
combination of the following marketing strategies.

First, there's social media advertising. Social media advertising is very much like a web
page advertising and search engine advertising, except that you are buying the
advertising inventory on specific social media platforms instead of from an open market
or a search engine. This strategy is best used when conversions and short-term
revenue growth are the key objectives.

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Next, there's social media based content marketing. This strategy involves an
organization creating and maintaining its own informational and entertainment media,
such as videos, blogs, or educational material, and then using social media to share
and promote this content.

This strategy combines the advantage of social media as both a platform for content
creation and a social networking platform. Content marketing on social media is

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increasingly being used as an integral part of public relations, consumer education, and
brand awareness campaigns.

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Lesson 3-1.3 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Strategies

Lesson 3-1.3.1 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Strategies

The planning and management of social media based advertising and content
marketing strategies are similar to their counterparts, such as online advertising and
online video marketing in a broader digital ecosystem. Since I have covered these
topics in other lessons of this course, I would like to focus on the third and perhaps the
most distinctive social media marketing strategy, leveraging the reach of social media
influencers to promote marketing messages.

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The power of social media to connect, engage, and influence people is unprecedented
in human history. Today, a couple of 100 characters, an abstract symbol or a random
picture posted on social media can reach and influence tens of millions of people within
a few minutes. Marketers often use social media to generate a sudden surge of public
attention or buzz to promote products and services. More and more businesses today
are limiting or even eliminating conventional promotion strategies, such as mass
advertising in favor of social media buzz campaigns.

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For example, in 2013, artist Beyonce surprised her fans and the music industry by
unexpectedly releasing her fifth studio album for purchase on Apple's iTunes music
store with a post and video on her Facebook and Instagram pages. Unlike the typical
release of a pop album, there was no traditional marketing or promotional ramp up, no
fanfare, no lead pre-release versions, no demo copies to radio stations and industry
insiders, and no early releases of singles to build fan excitement prior to the release.

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Relying solely on Beyonce's own social media channels to announce the new album,
she and her record companies saved millions on the advertising costs while generating
record breaking sales.

Despite the lack of a traditional marketing ramp up, the album purportedly sold 430,000
copies, with 80,000 copies downloaded in the first three hours after the announcement
on Instagram and Facebook.

Based on iTunes sales figures released by Apple, this album was the fastest selling

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album in iTunes history with 828,000 copies downloaded globally in the first three days.
Social media is also an effective platform for word of mouth marketing.

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Endorsements and recommendations from trusted sources have always been a critical
part of any persuasive strategy in marketing and consumer behavior research. Ellen
Andreessen proposed four types of information sources; impersonal advocates, such as
mass media institutions, impersonal independent, such as consumer reports and

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independent research, personal advocate, such as salespeople, and personal
independent, such as friends.

In E word of mouth marketing, companies rely on social media sharing and liking to
reach and influence potential customers. Each social media users can play the role of a
salesperson or an independent advocate. Theoretically, every single user on a social
media platform can play a part in a word of mouth marketing campaign. Now imagine
you can have two billion salespeople and advocates around the globe, this is the true
power of social media.

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In addition to buzz marketing and word of mouth marketing, another frequently adopted
social media marketing strategy is influencer marketing. An influencer is someone who
carries influence over others.

Think about influencers in your life, they could be your parents, siblings, professors, or
friends. These influencers can affect your decisions in all domains of your life, including
consumer related behavior, such as purchase decisions and product or brand attitude.
Influencer marketing focuses on using influencers to promote a brand message,

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product, or service to the larger market and influencer marketing is not new, it has been
around for a long time.

In fact, celebrity and athletic endorsements were the first forms of influencer marketing
dating back centuries, what is new today is that any individual can become an influencer
in the world of social media. A social media influencer does not have to be a bona fide
celebrity, regular people like you and I now have the ability to become online celebrities
with strongly engaged social media following. Social media has leveled the playing field,
giving anyone from around the world the opportunity to have a voice, the brands are
taking notice.

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Big and small brands are starting to allocate budgets towards influencer marketing,
which is now a billion-dollar industry, and influencers are taking full advantage,
changing the way that companies market their products completely. Marketing
practitioners often treat buzz marketing, word of mouth marketing, and influencer
marketing as separate tactics, and indeed, there are differences in the planning and
execution of these marketing solutions.

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However, I think it is more beneficial to consider these tactics holistically by focusing on
their shared common core strategic element, the influencers. A marketing strategy will
never create buzz without it being shared widely by influential connectors in a social
network. Similarly, E word of mouth marketing is not that different from using an offline
direct sales network in terms of scale and effectiveness without the boost from social
media influencers. In comparison, the outcome and impact of buzz marketing and E
word-of-mouth marketing are more difficult to control and predict than a well planned
and well executed influencer marketing.

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Lesson 3-1.4 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Other Considerations

Lesson 3-1.4.1 Buzz & Influencer Marketing: Other Considerations

Let's dive a bit deeper into influencer marketing. According to recent studies, influencer
marketing content delivers an 11 times higher ROI than traditional forms of digital
marketing.

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Brands can make 6.50 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. eMarketer
reported that 54% of female consumers for example, purchase the product after seeing
it recommended by an influencer, and 45% have followed a brand directly from an
influencer's posts.

There are many types of online influencers. They include bloggers, Youtubers, vloggers,
domain experts, special talents, entrepreneurs, public figures, cultural icons, and

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celebrities, models, and famous athletes. Their social media accounts are followed by
hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of followers. And they hold a tremendous
amount of power in shaping public perception and changing people's attitudes.

Though there is not a common standard, any social media account that attracts
between 1000 and 10,000 followers is usually considered a microinfluencer.

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Macroinfluencers, on the other hand, are those famous people that can routinely
command the attention of millions of followers.

A company can engage and enlist the help of influencers in a variety of ways. In
addition to earning voluntary and organic recommendations from the influencers,
organizations can offer incentives or monetary rewards for an endorsement from key

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influencers. While such a practice will be considered a serious violation of journalistic
integrity in the traditional media era, it is a common practice among social media
influencers.

There are also many apps and platforms to connect and matchmake brands and
influencers. For example, Collabor8 is an online platform that allows brand owners and
social media influencers to connect and instantly begin collaborating. It removes the
middleman and gives users control over the collaborations, enabling the marketers and
the influencers to focus on what matters most.

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On collabor8, influencers can easily create a profile, request to work with new people,
chat, send and receive payments securely, leave reviews, and more. Ethical and
professional considerations aside, sponsored influencer marketing is being watched
closely by governments around the world. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission
has imposed stricter guidelines for disclosing sponsorships and conflict of interests
associated with online influencer marketing. Please be sure to complete the readings
assigned for this lesson to learn more about these guidelines and regulations. There are
several key factors to consider when developing an influencer marketing campaign.

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First, there is the reach. Reach is the quantity of people to whom an influencer is able to
deliver a message. A common misconception about social media influencers is that they
need to have millions of followers. This is not true. Reach alone is not a requirement of
being an influencer. In fact, there are many microinfluencers who have fewer followers,
but who also have tapped into highly credible niche audience.

Next, there's credibility. Credibility is the level of trust given by followers based on the
perceived knowledge or expertise of an influencer. Credibility is considered more

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important than reach. Influencers must have the ability to explain things in a clear and
convincing way to an audience, so that the influencer is perceived as trustworthy.

Next, there's authenticity. Good influencers genuinely believe in the brand that they are
promoting and what it stands for. If influencers are not sincere, they risk alienating their
audiences.

Then there's activity. Influencers must be active on social media, publishing content

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daily or weekly to their platforms. The best social media influencers are publishing
content often, so they stay fresh in their followers' minds.

And finally, there is engagement. Social media is not a one-way street, influencers must
engage with their followers. When followers mention the influencer or ask questions, it is
important to acknowledge followers by liking or commenting back. Besides reach,
credibility, authenticity, activity, and engagement, you should also consider the following
factors.

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First, you must make sure that your product or brand image matches that of the
influencers and the message being sent. An irrelevant, or worse, a mismatched
influencer can cause long term damage to your brand. A good case illustrating the risk
of having a mismatched brand influencer is the controversy that resulted from Snickers,
You're Not You When You're Hungry, campaign.

The Snickers brand had used this slogan, you are not you when you're hungry, in their
advertising campaigns. The creative concept had a successful run until the brand tried

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to adopt it in a social media campaign. In 2012, Snickers collaborated with popular
celebrities in the UK, such as Sir Ian Botham, Cher Lloyd, and Katie Price to promote
the brand. Snickers took the slogan of their TV advertising campaign literally in their
social media promotion.

Popular British model, Katie Price, for example, suddenly started tweeting on politics
and macroeconomics. This was really unusual as Katie's previous posts were typically
fashion related. The campaign attracted a lot of attention, but also caused confusion
and backlash among Katie Price's followers. Even the BBC's economic correspondent
joined in on the conversation with Katie on social media. Katie Price eventually revealed
what was actually going on by posting an image of herself with a Snicker bar captioned,
you're not you when you're hungry.

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Now creatively, this is a very cool concept and it indeed attracted much attention from
the followers of these celebrities. However, the campaign ultimately caused problems
for the brand and triggered an investigation by the advertising standards agency of the
UK. When the public became concerned about celebrities leveraging their followers for
advertising sponsorship, the damage was not only done to the influencer's image, but
also to the brand's image. This case clearly illustrates the importance of aligning
marketing needs to the influencer's niche and target audience. [MUSIC]

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Lesson 3-1.5 Buzz & Influencer Marketing Planning

Lesson 3-1.5.1. Buzz & Influencer Marketing Planning

[MUSIC] There are many benefits to partnering with influencers and in using influencer
marketing as part of an overall marketing strategy. Such benefits include more brand
exposure and awareness. Improved search engine ranking through high quality organic
links. Increased credibility, better consumer targeting through social media analytics,
new leads and ultimately great conversion. But how can we plan and execute a
successful influencer marketing campaign? Let's look at a few key steps, first setting
goals before engaging with influencers.

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It is essential to establish goals for your influencer marketing strategy. These goals
should be tied to the objectives set for your social media marketing strategy and should
always tied to the goals of the business. Examples of goals can include brand
awareness, reach, brand reputation, perception in the market, increased post
engagement, increase website traffic, lead generation, lead conversion, increased sales
and more. It is also important to establish specific key performance indicators for each
goal so that you are able to measure the success of the influence of marketing strategy.
I'll discuss the KPI's of digital marketing in another lecture.

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Once the goals and specific KPI's are established, the next step is to determine who
you are trying to influence. And in the social media channels they interact with the target
market. Could include a company's customers or prospects who work in a specific job
function or industry. You must conduct careful research to determine social media used
by the target market.

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For example, instagram and Youtube are among the most popular channels for
influencer marketing.

And linked in is a good platform for B2B influencers,

while twitter is an effective channel to influence the news media.

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While facebook is still dominating the social media space. Fewer people from the
younger generation are actively using the platform after determining the right target
market and the social media channels to use.

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The next step is to try to identify and find influencers that this target market will trust.
The target audience must trust and respect opinion of the influencer in order for the
strategy to be successful. It is important to keep in mind that users from different
demographics, cultures and regions are influenced by very different kinds of influencers
on different platforms.

For example, research has shown that Youtube stars have more influence over
teenagers when compared to mainstream household celebrities like taylor swift. Data
from twitter showed that people aged 45 up prefer celebrities and influencers. Bigger is
not always better in influencer marketing. You must carefully balance the cost and the
benefit of choosing different types of influencers for different goals.

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Macro influencers have huge followings but they often work with so many different
brands that it is extremely costly to secure their exclusivity. They may post-20 posts
about 20 different things a day and each may be read by a million followers. But the
followers can be very diverse and scattered, which reduces the impact of your
influencer campaign. Micro influencers may lack reach and activity, but they can make
up for that by having high levels of credibility and engagement.

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A recent study from markedly found that as an influencers, number of followers rises,
the rate of engagement decreases. Users with less than 1000 followers generally
received likes on their posts 8% of the time. While users with 10 million followers only
received likes 1.6% of the time. The study found that influencers in the 10K-100 K
followers range offer the best combination of engagement and broad reach exceeding
influencers with higher followers.

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Business budgets and goals will also play a big role in determining the type of influencer
to work with. If the business goal is for brand message to reach the largest audience
possible. A big name celebrity influencer, maybe the right fit, but these influencers can
be very costly. On the other hand, brands that would like a more targeted approach
may choose to work with micro influencers who can be more cost effective and achieve
similar results.

Once you identify the right influencers for the campaign. But before you reach out to
them, it is extremely important to set up monitoring and listening streams. So that you
can track these influencers positioning and decide how to best engage with them.

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You want to start engaging in interacting with target influencer on social media to
develop a relationship before reaching out to them directly. Share, like or reply to an
article or blog he or she has written after listening and engaging with the potential
influencer.

It is now time to reach out to discuss potential partnerships, influencers derive value
from partnering with brands. Companies will need to define specific benefits for working

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with influencers.

Benefits could include financial compensation or free products or services to give away
to his or her audience. Once a partnership has been established, it's time to harness the
power of the influencer by incorporating influencer marketing into your overall social
media strategy.

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Some of the tactics of influencer communication and engagement include using
influencers to promote a brand's content by posting on their own social media accounts.
Using influencers to share content from a company's social media channel, inviting
influencers to be guest bloggers. Inviting them to speak at events and then stream
these events on social media and giving influencers free products to try in exchange for
a review or a mention on social media.

Finally, once the influential campaign is launched, you must analyze and track the
performance with social media analytics. Most social media influencers will provide their
partner companies with detailed results for engagements, impressions, followers and
more from their social media accounts. It's important to take a close look at the statistics
against your goals and specific KPI's.

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You should ask questions like was the target audience reached? How many of them
were reached? Was there an increase in post engagement? Was there an increase in
website traffic increase or sales? How did the brands online presence improve
compared to competitors? How many positive references and mentions were there on
social media? And how was your brand perception changed? Influencer marketing has
gone from the fringe of digital marketing to front and center as more and more
companies recognize its power and potential. At the same time, governments and
industries are working in parallel to standardize the practices and address critical
ethical, legal and professional concerns. Marketers now also have access to many tools
that help identify influencers with engaged networks within a defined target market.

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Tools like Onalytica, followerwonk, buzzsumo, klout, and hootsuite can help companies
discover and mapped influencers that are most influential. Listen to what influencers are
saying, interact with and developed relationship with them and provide detailed
reporting and ROI. [MUSIC]

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Lesson 3-1.6 Online PR

Lesson 3-1.6.1. Online PR

A consequence of the digital revolution and the rise of social media is a blending of
communication contexts.

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Contexts collapse is the flattening of multiple audiences into a single communication
context. In the same social media space, for example, a company's marketing team can
engage customers, but so can it's executive and employees on their own. Real
consumers can post reviews of your product organically, but so can fake reviewers and
your competitors. Journalists can step out of their professional roles to share their
personal opinions on a controversial issue. CEOs can post their personal views on
stock market trends and hot investment trends.

Such mixing of social, spatial, and temporal dimensions of professional and personal
communication activities can bring opportunities and threats to a company's reputation.
Online reputation and relationship management become an essential activity in digital
marketing.

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Online PR leverages the network effect of the Internet to shape opinions, drive visitors
to your website, build and maintain customer relationships, and mitigate the negative
impacts of crisis. At its core, public relations is about reputation, which results from what
you do, what you say, and what others say about you, and social media is where all of
those activities occur.

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There are five major differences between online PR and traditional PR. First, the
audience is directly connected to organizations in the digital age. In the past, PR
professionals communicate with the audience through press releases distributed over
the news wires with the hope to be picked up by mainstream media outlets. Second, the
members of your audience are connected through user-generated content and social
media postings. Information can be rapidly shared from one person to another and one
group to another. Such connectivity means that brands are constantly being discussed
online beyond their control. Third, the audience has constant access to other
information. In the one-way mass communication era, a carefully crafted public
statement from a company will be difficult for an average audience member to verify
and challenge. Today, any details in such a statement will be questioned, verified,
discussed, and compared immediately following its release.

Fourth, digital audiences are active. They control what they want to see and read,
instead of being passively fed with information. Brands have lost the megaphone of
mass media. Their voices are harder to hear and can be easily drowned in the digital
age. Finally, the Internet doesn't forget. In the past, a PR crisis will pass and be
forgotten once the issue is out of the public eyes. Today, an ill-conceived social media
post or an inappropriate response from an executive will live in a digital world forever. It
can come back to haunt the company unexpectedly long after its time.

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Proactive management is vital in online PR. Online PR involves content management,

what you say to the public, backlink management, who you are associated with,
reputation management, how your stakeholders are talking about you,

and relationship management, how much influence you have on your stakeholders and
vice versa.

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Defensively, it is also necessary to track the health of a brand online through social
listening and develop a proactive approach to manage potential negative incidence. A
major task in traditional PR is media relations. Similarly, in online PR, forming healthy
relationships with online publishers can help expand the reach of a brand. Online PR
should be a critical element in influencer campaigns. Building a good relationship with
your influencers is essential. Still, you should also carefully monitor your influencer's
reputation and their communication activities because damage to their reputation can
also harm yours.

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In a nutshell, online PR is maximizing favorable mentions of your company, brands,

products, or websites on third-party websites and social media platforms.

It is about managing the reputation through monitoring and controlling online

communication of all forms at all touchpoints. Online PR should be integrated into your
search, social, end CRM strategies.

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Lesson 3-1.7 Email Marketing

Lesson 3-1.7.1. Email Marketing

[MUSIC] Email marketing is still a powerful online marketing tool today. Not only can
marketing emails trigger direct consumer response. But e-newsletters, promotions, and
other subscribed email messages can achieve branding objectives, even if they are
ignored or deleted right away. However, consumers hate marketing emails, they're
annoying and intrusive. Email spamming is heavily regulated or even banned in many
countries.

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Since most email campaigns are automated, marketing emails can appear impersonal
and cold without the warmth and personal care that the direct to consumer campaign
should have. This will add to the negative perceptions around this effective marketing
channel.

Marketers often see emails as a promotional vehicle without realizing that emailing is
one of the more intimate forms of online communication to Internet users, particularly on

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their personal email accounts. The trick is to communicate a sense of personalness, but
in scale. As in any personal relationship, agency and choice are the most critical
qualities. Asking for permission, by giving consumers the option to opt into receiving
your marketing messages will be rewarded with higher opening rates and positive
attention.

There are several main options for obtaining email marketing leads. Let's go through
some of them briefly. First, their cold email campaigns, a company can rent an email list
from a consumer email list provider and send an opt-in email request. The consumer
appearing on these email lists might have agreed to receive promotional messages
previously. However, remember your first cold marketing email to these consumers is
still uninvited. So be gentle, be considerate, and be warm. Treated like you are
contacting a potential date introduced by a mutual friend.

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The second type of marketing email is co-branded emails. A consumer would receive
an email with an offer from a company they have a reasonably strong affinity with
already to cross promote an adjacent brand. For example, a home security contractor
can send out co-branded emails promoting the smart camera system from a major retail
brand. Although this type of email is warmer and will likely yield better results than a
cold email contact. A mismatched co-brand partnership can lead to confusion and
damage to both brands.

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Next, they are the third party newsletters. In this acquisition option, a company list itself
in a third-party newsletter. This could be in an ad or in sponsored content that links
through to their company's website. It works very much like sponsored native ads on
social media, but in the form of an e-newsletter.

The most effective form of email marketing is through first-party content subscription
and as a part of your CRM effort. For example, you can generate leads from social or
search channels to a block page on your own digital properties and then convert them
through a subscription. Once an initial relationship and trust are established, your email
messages will be welcomed.

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The content type and format of marketing emails also matter. Here are a few commonly
seen ones. Conversion emails are automated follow-up emails after someone visits a
website and expressed interest in the product or service but did not make a purchase.
For example, many e-commerce sites will send reminder emails to customers about
unfinished transactions or items left in the shopping cart. E-newsletters are an effective
way to promote a brand and build trust softly. The key in e-newsletter marketing is to
keep a sustained presence with high quality content in a predictable rhythm.
Inconsistency in timing, frequency, and quality would minimize the influence of e-
newsletters. Next, house list campaigns are periodic emails sent to existing or inactive
customers offering trials of services, new products or special promotions. Is it an
integral part of CRM marketing?

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Email is an effective push online communication method. When used appropriately,

together with other marketing activities, such as search social content and CRM. Email
marketing can be the final nudge needed to convert a hesitant prospect or re-engage a
loss to customer. However, intrusive, pushy, and unsolicited marketing emails can
permanently erode consumer trust. Keeping in mind that the emails are a form of
interpersonal communication. Be cognizant of consumers need for privacy, respect their
boundaries, and give them control. [MUSIC]

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Lesson 3-2 Expert Session

Interview: Lynne McChristian, Senior Instructor of Finance

[MUSIC] I'm Lynne McChristian, I'm a senior instructor, and I'm also the director of the
Office of Risk Management and Insurance Research. And so I teach insurance and risk
management courses to undergrads and to graduate students. But I also run the
research program, and we give faculty fellowships to study effective ways to manage
risk. [MUSIC]

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Well, everything happens so quickly now, and it's not just social media. So when we
think about digitalized marketing, sometimes people just think it's social media, but it
really is everything. It's the automation piece, it's cybersecurity, it's innovation, it's
governance. So it's all these pieces that are part of that brand strategy. And some
people may say that enterprise risk management is about the finance piece, the
operational piece. But what's happening is many corporations see reputation as
everything. If you talk to CEOs, some of them say, what is it that keeps you awake at
night? It's the threat to that reputation. That is the overarching thing. So some
companies are saying reputation is so important that that's the top of the ladder for our
risk to manage, and yet, they don't do it purposefully. It's less formal than all the things
that companies do to manage operational, finance, safety, all those other types of risks
that are part of that enterprise risk framework. [MUSIC]

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The first thing is that I think sometimes people don't have a real good understanding of
what their reputation is. There's the perception and then there's the reality, and there's a
gap between that. So what is the reality of a corporation's reputation? They probably
need to do more than just take a guess, okay? You don't just count your social media.
There's a lot of other things that they have to do to honestly take a look at what is our
reputation risk. And one of the things they can do is analyze the media coverage that
they get, there's tools to do that, but also look at their stakeholders and talk to all those
different stakeholders to see what that reputation truly is. It might not be as solid as
what they think it is. I think one of the important things for companies to know too is that
that reputation didn't have that formal structure before, and it requires it. Just like you
have a formal finance risk protocol, you have a formal procedure and protocol for
managing your regulatory issues, you need that for reputation, too.

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[MUSIC] Well, you're not looking just at brand and image. You're looking at that
corporate governance piece. That's part of that reputation risk. And we hear you say
walk the talk, but in the area now where everything is more transparent, there is a need
to think about the actions you take in that reputation risk umbrella. So for example, if
you do something outward facing, something public, but you do something inside
internally that contradicts that, that can hurt your reputation. And what's interesting
about it is I always say that bad news gets out all by itself, good news, you have to work
at. So one of the things about reputation to actively manage it is to have that formal
program, but also make sure that somebody owns it. Reputation management is not
accidental. It's gotta be purposeful. It's got to be proactive. And understanding where
your vulnerability is and to make sure that what you do is aligned with what you say is
really important to manage that risk. Because people are going to remember when you
stumble.

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[MUSIC] Well, a couple of things that happen. It's when something happens, how you
respond is really important. And we don't have to respond to every little thing. If you
have a strategic reputation risk plan, then you know what you want to respond to and
how. So like some negative perceptions, how do we deal with the negative perceptions?
An example might be is, company does great things with its corporate social
responsibility, so they're doing things to protect the environment, and that's something
they make a big deal about. They let everybody know about it. But internally, they may
have some wasteful practices that they think nobody knows about because they're
inside. So another example might be a company may say that they have to restructure,
financially restructure. And they will look for bankruptcy protection or look for different
mechanisms, and then they pay their executives a bonus. That's going to damage your
reputation. And those things are difficult to recover from because we remember the
negative. Another example could be if you ask people which are the most reliable
vehicles, they'll say, well, foreign-made cars are more reliable than American-made
cars. That's not true, okay? So it used to be that Japanese-made cars were more
reliable. But in the last decade or longer, the American manufacturers have upped their
game, but that perception still exists that they're not as reliable as the other cars. So
some of those things stick, and by constantly, purposefully getting that good news out,
that's a way to help manage that reputation and the expectations. And I should point
out, too is that your stakeholders' expectations change. So you may think that you had it
all great and right two years ago, and that's yesterday's news.

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[MUSIC] We build, as corporations and entities, we build reputations over the course of
decades, and they can fade away and crumble with one incident, okay? So if you have
a good reputation, you have loyal customers who will defend you if there's a small
misstep. But if we take a look at all the typical business risks and brought together a
team with diverse perspectives and diverse skills. This is what's a beautiful thing about
bringing in people who aren't all accountants, who aren't all data folks, but they have
their perspective. That's what's beautiful about a risk management process, is it's not
left to one type of skill. You bring that all together and they can see things differently. If
you looked at all the different risks and looked at them from the business angle, but then
looked at it from the reputation risk, you will have that discussion about where the gaps
might be and where the vulnerabilities might be. We're seeing more people and more
companies who are vulnerable because of that third party risk. We have all those
partnerships, they do a good job in their own business, but they're not paying attention
to what's being done with one of their partners. And if there's a misstep there, both of
them go down. So that's one thing to look at. I think it's also important to understand
that scenario planning is a good tool in the communication space to try to say what
could happen. Let's play this out and see what could happen if this incident occurred in
our company, and to use that to kind of give you a game plan about how you would
react and respond.

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[MUSIC] That's a great question. Here's something to think about. If you ask employees
who is responsible for reputation, they would say, well, we are. If you ask C suite
executives who is responsible for reputation risk, they'll say, well, the CEO is. But you
know what? That's an informal way to do it. Reputation risk should have someone who
owns it. And if someone owns it, if somebody is put in charge of it, then you'll have that
process. And what's missing is the informality. Now you will have organizations and
marketing communication will have a crisis management plan. Most organizations have
a crisis management plan. If a natural disaster happens, if a product safety, if there's an
injury, we have a protocol for that. But crisis management is the opposite of risk
management, okay? And so if you're only dealing with what could go wrong, you're
missing the piece to direct what can go right, and how to build up that equity that will
hold you through if there's something that does happen. And again, the companies who
have managed their reputation well had a quick response and maybe they did more
than what was necessary. But they could point to the fact that at the end of the day, if
you can say, did we do all that we could do? And if you can answer that, then you've
protected that reputation, the brand, and the image.

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[MUSIC] I think that that is becoming more complicated. Managing that reputational risk
is becoming more complicated because we're more aware, the bad news gets out there
within a split second. I think that it's very difficult to segregate them if they can build a
link. So if you've done business with somebody, this cancel culture, if a company has
done business with somebody or an entity that wants to be canceled, how do they react
to that? So it's no place to hide, and it's something that has to be understood and
managed so people are more careful. I think one of the things we have to think about is
if the world is continually being more transparent, then that makes us more aware of
what that reputation risk is. And we put that in front of everything we do, and the positive
is that will help build stronger ethics and integrity.

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[MUSIC] I think one tip would be to use your experts, okay? So if you're going to be
proactive, reputation risk is not a passive thing, it's gotta be proactive. So what you look
for is, who are our best spokespeople? Not necessarily the people who work in public
relations and communications, but who are our best spokespeople throughout the
organization that we can get out in front of the different stakeholders and share that
story from their learned perspective and to be visible? So that visibility, if you can build a
corporation where the visibility is shared from multiple people and you use that expert
knowledge, then that is a way to spread that reputation and to give access. That's what
people want. So it's not just talking to media, it's making sure that if there is important
forums, that you have participation from your experts, and you have that visibility that
will help build that brand and image. [MUSIC]

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