The New Look to Technology

In today’s job market, it has become a must that you maintain basic technology skills.  Microsoft Word, PowerPoint  and excel are the top essentials, but we are getting to the point where if you don’t know how to use Prezi and Photoshop, you’re behind on the times.

Though Prezi is more advanced in concept and takes much more skill than a PowerPoint would, the look is far more modern and interesting.  The Prezi online tool focuses on visuals and more specifically visuals that you can tie into the theme of what you’re presenting about.  They use the phrase “Ideas Matter” and this video clip really demonstrates their values.  They want the Prezi to be the vehicle for your information, but they want the vehicle to enhance your information.  The modernity and visual elements are the two things that puts a Prezi above the rest.  A Prezi is just much more clean and relevant to our time period than a PowerPoint.

The reason I’ve chosen to connect Prezi with Photoshop is for the visual aspects of it.  With so many online photo sharing tools available to the average consumer, pictures are rarely left untouched these days.  Many people are familiar with the red eye corrector and maybe the black and white tool, but now there is so much more.  Even with the way you format a picture with your subject and the background is important.  This website gives great tips on how to improve on your photo editing skills.  Also, I find that Instagram is a great tool if you’re just getting started.  It’s an app on your phone that allows you to add different filters onto a photo.  This also rely’s slightly on the fact that the user has a good eye.

All three of the programs use visuals as the main attraction.  It takes a little bit of skill, but with the right additions, a photo can be worth 1,000 words.

Pinterest is the New Google Images

Pinterest: a new photo-sharing tool linking content to Web pages and users to their identities.  When the site first launched in 2010, it promoted exclusivity.  To join the site, you had to be invited.  Potential participants began to flock to the site, requesting invitations from their friends, and expanding the growth of the site.

Three years later, the site is a popular medium for learning and advertising, but ultimately entertainment.  The space is host to both company and brand pages as well as just everyday users.  Interaction is facilitated through “pins”, which are basically images with a short customizable description and a link to the page from which the image came from, issuing credit where due.

With such great variability in the range of topics covered on Pinterest, some brands find the medium to be a great tool for accessing their customers on multiple different platforms.

Whole Foods utilizes Pinterest to the fullest extent, keeping the advertising to a minimum and really gauging the interests of their audience.  Whole Foods maintains several accounts, ranging from the official Whole Foods Market page to Whole Foods 4 Healthy Living, Whole Foods Market Cooking, as well as various others.

While the spinoff pages are equally diverse and interesting in their content, the official Whole Foods Market page features 46 boards, almost 2,000 pins, and over 115,000 followers.  Most of their boards somehow relate back to food yet there are many others that simply relay the same values and messages their company aims to portray.  Pinterest is about building up an image through the pins you choose to represent yourself.  A business is no different.  They want their consumers to see their pins, identify and then transfer that identity to the brand.

Chobani greek yogurt also maintains a great social media presence, including an official Pinterest page.  Unlike Whole Foods, they only have one Pinterest account but maintain 26 boards, almost 5,000 pins, and over 55,000 followers.   For such a niche product, the Chobani Pinterest page offers a wide range of uses for the yogurt, ultimately exposing the customer to the extended abilities of the product.  Pinterest is really the optimal space for this venture because there’s excessive opportunity to showcase techniques, flavor combinations,  and recipes with prime images.  The audience is immediately captured by the ingeniousness of the ideas and people feel an urge to try these new recipes.

For example, the Chilly Chobani board, features various ice creams, yogurt bites, mousses and more.  The endless pins are exciting and capture the audience with their uniqueness.Overall, Chobani’s pins are creative, helpful, and capturing.  Their use of Pinterest really works to their advantage .

Lay’s Lets the Fans Decide

In July 2012, Lay’s launched a campaign called “Do Us A Flavor” that puts the control of the flavor in the hands of the customer.  Fans submitted a total of 3.8 million flavor combinations through the Lay’s Facebook page.  The incentive was $1 million in prize money or one percent of the new flavor’s 2013 net sales.   It could also be the fact that your own choice of flavors would be featured in stores next to all of lay’s other famous flavors that interested people to submit their most creative innovations.  The best part of the campaign is its high level of interactivity and how it links itself to other social media avenues.  The submission process operated itself through Facebook.  You would have to accept and install the app before designing your flavor.  The app automatically posted the creation to your Facebook page, creating some self promotion and added buzz.

The campaign is now in it’s second stage of the process. Three flavors, cheesy garlic bread, chicken and waffles, and sriracha, have been chosen as America’s finest.  The concept of engaging the consumers of voting through social media is ingenious for two reasons.  Firstly, the whole campaign is new and exciting, and lay’s fans are going to be extremely interested in trying the new product of their favorite brand.  Also, if the consumer is going to be posting on their Twitter or Facebook, they want to be promoting a flavor they can be proud to share.  Either way, these two groups of people, brand loyal consumers and social media savvy folk, are going to be purchasing three bags of chips, if not more.   Encouraging the customer to try their new product, uphold the flavor that represents them , and ultimately putting the control in the hands of the consumer creates added revenue that would not have necessarily been there otherwise.

The second reason this campaign was such a success plays off of the whole consumer control aspect and allowing social media to be a driving force of advertisement.  While they did put out a considerable number of television ads, featuring celebrity guests Michael Simon and Eva Longoria, great choices by the way, they relied heavily on their consumers to carry on the movement through social media.  Lay’s use of Facebook and Twitter engages the customer to log on or tweet their vote.

One thing I would like to point out is that the campaign has received a lot of attention from other news sources, however not all of it has been positive.  PRNewser does a great job of highlighting the concept and social media behind the campaign, however the Huffington Post “found that while each of these flavors had some serious potential, they all fell short one way or the other.” I’ve personally seen some negative feedback on the products just on a local level that i would like to share.

In conclusion, though the media campaign may have been spot on, the product doesn’t live up to the hype.  This could ultimately prove to be their downfall.