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Glad you guys could finally meet in person! I have definitely had that thought about “height” and meeting in person after being on ZOOM for so long!

I think the Cypress group has shared so much with each other and we are all honestly sick of each other after working together for so long! After working together, we have all expressed our own perspectives and ways of doing things. “#Over-communicating” has become a hashtag in our team culture and GroupChats as we all work outside of our day-jobs to pursue our Masters! I’m super excited to meet my team in person and other amazing people from our program! #DIM

This was an incredible experience to have the opportunity to work with so many thought-leaders and creative minds within the industry and out. After working for over 10 years in one organization, finding fresh new perspectives within this program is what precisely the doctor ordered . I could not have asked for a more rewarding experience to be taught by successful leaders in their respected professions, and more so, to team up and work with some of the most talented student-bodies .

Congratulations all.!

You guys are too cute!!!! I’m so happy you got to meet in person! Thank you for everything this semester.

I think as a cohort, establishing the Group Me chat and the Google Drive early were keys to our successful bonding. Both were incredible resources for all of throughout the whole program and helped us really form a little marketing community.

I laughed the entire time while reading! I believe it went viral because of how hilariously detailed her descriptions are. Also, Candy corn has consistently been a debate on social media for the last few years and I believe that Brach knew this specific product would be a conversation starter at the very least. I hate candy corn but I almost want to try it to add my two cents to the conversation. If other food brands have a goal of standing out and drawing attention to their brand (whether it’s favorable or not), tapping into a social media hot topic will most likely get the job done.

First of all, for anyone that listens to “My Favorite Murder” podcast, Georgia and Karen talked about this on a few episodes and then did a live taste test of the flavors, which was hilarious and gross. Like Aisha said, I do think that candy corn is one of those funny subjects that people like to debate about on social media, especially this time of year. I think Brach’s created this gross bag of festive flavors to spark a conversation with their brand name, and also interest people to buy the bag just to get involved with the risky taste test. Either, it worked for them. If you check out #brachsturkeydinnercandycorn on Twitter, you can see her post started a whole viral trend – a win for Brach’s, even if the flavors are gross!

This for some reason reminds me of the ‘Bean Boozled’ Jelly Beans that you can find as a gag gift, but obviously not on such a disgusting level. There is no reason that a sweet candy should be mimic a very savory meat product.

I think this post went viral purely because of its humor. It’s always entertaining to read the funny opinions of others, especially when it comes to having to ‘take one for the team’ and try an unnatural taste of candy!

Here is a video of a guy doing a live tasting of these disgusting morsels:

I read the entire post and I don’t regret it at all. Heather Martin is a modern day Shakespeare.
I think everyone here explained it well; it all relates to surprise and uniqueness. I found this post about Oreo and it talks about how they started to diversify from its standard flavor. It all started when they released a birthday cake flavor in honor of their 100 year anniversary, and the flavor was a huge success. After that, Oreo thought it was best if they started to release interesting flavors based on trends in the industry or what’s happening in pop culture.
I think Brach understood this as well and decided to make these horrifying Thanksgiving flavored candy corn based on the upcoming holiday. And based on how well Heather’s post has been received, Brach might have had more sales just because a user saw Heather’s post and decided to try out these candy corn for themselves.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oreo-flavors_l_5c76ca5de4b062b30eba5eaf

I am not big into reading, but I could not stop. Her writing was an art form. It was executed so perfectly. It sounds just like a person talking. What I think is even funnier is that although she said in many different ways it was not good, so many people will now go out and purchase it, even though they have a heads up not to get it. I guess the big take away is even when someone’s talking bad, at least they’re talking, all publicity is good publicity. Many brands try to be so perfect all the time, but sometimes even flops can work in their favor and sometimes it takes a little humor. If a brand is able to evoke an emotion whether that’s making them laugh until their belly hurts, cry a river, motivate them to strive for excellence, they have caught a new customer.

Wow this post is something. I understand it is a joke but I also think at some points in the post it is kind of hard to tell. Personally, Brach should stick to normal candy corn because everyone loves the original! I also think that she thought a lot about posting this and did a great job taking her time to post this.

First, I think we can all agree that Candy Corn is everything correct with America. Second, How has no one talked about the greatest evolution of Candy Corn since its invention? The pumpkin corn takes all the best parts of Candy Corn and makes it bigger.

First, how am I not surprised that it was horrible- isn’t all candy corn? I think this post went viral because 1- how long someone was willing to sit there and write about something as unimportant as a new candy on the market on a casual platform such as a personal Facebook page. Secondly how detailed and raw she was with her descriptions that you can almost taste it while reading the post (trying not to gag). And lastly how she prompted readers to share it turning a hilarious FB post into almost an ad in a weird way.

The comments on this post brought me SUCH delight. Thank you for your equally thoughtful and humorous insights… from everything that’s right with America to modern day Shakespeare to murder + candy podcasts. Spot-on observations, and just goes to show that well-written copy can be priceless.

First off, candy corn is not it. Second, thanksgiving flavored candy corn just seems like they are trying too hard to be jelly beans, We’re all aware jelly beans have the craziest flavors, and jelly beans can be good, but the wax flavored green beans or turkey gravy candy corn just don’t seem like the best route to go. I could see it as b being a joke like Brach mentioned, sitting them out and wait to see those who take a handful to eat say.

The post definitely went viral because of the intense descriptions of each one! BUT I still would not try it lol.

I think other food brands can learn from this to create posts by describing what’s inside descriptively in a fun way to intrigue people.

This reminds me of the guest speaker we had who came in this semester who spoke about her instagram exploring different food and how her account grew to the amount where she is focusing on mostly that. She has to describe the food in an appetizing way and take appetizing photos as well.

To point three here: this is prime listening on social media. Twitter was being proactive, knew what was going on in the world and capitalized from it.

I’m intrigued by the content piece of this prompt. We talked yesterday how social media is a vehicle for your content, but take that a step further. With the outage, would people have gone to the sites they normally read content from. For instance, let’s say I follow techcrunch on FB. Due to the outage, would I have sought out the website on its own to get my daily fix in content? I wager this outage was too short to see that shift, BUT what if FB goes down for a week? Very interesting thought experiment.

Lastly, I’ll say – though I do not use FB or Insta, I was still affected by the outage in that I had to reconfigure all my analytics APIs to pull everything again. Very time consuming.

Just like “everyone”, my first instinct was to head to Twitter to see what was up, and as usual the Twitter world found it comical that anyone looking to get their slice of social media for the day ended up there as well. As someone who uses Twitter heavily for work, and for news, I used it the same amount as normal on October 4th BUT my engagement was much higher! Twitter and other brands took advantage of the larger audience and engagement on Monday as well.

Three main point I got of FB outage was
1- How users/ will users break their norm to get their information : first thing if something goes wrong (I felt an earthquake, power went out, etc.) I go to either instagram to see whats going on. With Fb and Instagram being down, I was forced to go to my forgotten platform to understand what was happening. Brands like twitter who were able to capitalize on this new audience probably gained a full blown user.

2-How social outages effect e-commerce: as a small business owner is is fascinating to see how e-commerce is blurring with digital marketing (mainly social media). For me its simple I don’t post= i don’t get orders. The day after the outage I saw many small business owners explain how their fall launch failed since Instagram was down. Some even going to Tiktok to make joke of the situation while simultaneously drawing attention to their launch.

In relation to the first point, I found this post from Pew Research that breaks down users using social media for news. It says that 53% of U.S. adults “often” receive news from social media “often” or “sometimes.” Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the top three sites used regularly as news sources. The most interesting part about the article was that just about 60% of users expect these news outlets to be inaccurate. I guess the question now is, if a majority seem to think that these news outlets are inaccurate, then why do more than half of U.S.. adults often or sometimes receive news from social media?

I think the best answer would be instant reception. Social media essentially gives anyone a voice. This means they can “break” news whenever, whether it’s the truth or not. You don’t have to wait for the nightly TV news or go to a news website when all you can do is go on social media and filter your search and find something.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020

Continuing on with brands engagement strategies and “listening”, one use case that stood out to me following the Facebook / Instagram outage was a post by E! News. When the sites were down, I admittly had an impulse to keep checking Instagram, even knowing it was still no up and operating. In the act of doing so, I like many users found myself staring at the same image on my feed over and over again. Whatever follow posted last before the site went down, had their post ‘stuck’ on their followers timeline. When things were back up and running again, I came across E! New’s reaction post which was an image of Zach Efron with the caption reading “This wasn’t the photo that was on top of our feed when Instagram was down , but we wish it was.”

I found this reaction very responsive to the situation, and on brand for the E! social tone of voice. Did anyone else have a favorite brand reaction post ?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUn3nUUFnN-/

@Jen’s comment- I had the same line of thoughts when I first saw their tweet- it was humorous, but I wondered if it was because it was in-line with their brand voice. Which had me thinking how tones are supposed to shift during emergencies– but then again, it wasn’t Twitter’s emergency. Facebook had to come out with a “we’re sorry” acknowledgement, which had a solemn tone. It’s usually kind of hard to craft messages during an emergency with the right tone, nevertheless trying to keep the typical business tone. No doubt the Twitter team had to have multiple draft rounds for a three word tweet. But to Jen’s point, not everyone is Twitter, so throwing out a snappy response in the face of a competitor issue is usually going to look cringey.

I checked out a few of Emily’s latest TikTok videos – lol they are attracting a lot of attention, especially from Brands as well as consumers of TikTok. As other accounts that become large prior to this example, brands usually comment on these videos to ask if the user can create them “one”, whether it be a sand created logo, an animated logo or in this case, a redesigned logo.

https://www.insider.com/tiktok-logo-redesign-nascar-tinder-washington-post-2021-9

As you see above, some of these brands actually changed their profile pictures to the logo Emily created for them. The brands are receiving exposure for doing this. By social listening, they were able to find this TikTok creator who is attracting many views and commenting on her posts so now viewers will see the brand’s comments since it pushes to the top usually. It is a good tactic for free visibility and essentially brand’s also want the chance to be featured on the tiktok as well to create even more “buzz” about them. Brand awareness is boosted easily by taking part in this.

I just sent some of Emily Zugay’s videos to a friend of mine, who’s a graphic designer. Such a simple concept but turned so funny and SO effective! I got a really good kick out of the response TikToks from Washington Post and Adobe as well. This is just really clever content, and again, super effective for both Emily and the brands she’s been tagging. I wonder what will come out of this for her?!

I thought this was hilarious! It’s crazy how one random tik tok can become the next phenomenon when that wasn’t the plan the entire time. Social media and its users have a crazy way to make something go viral and become a trend just like that. It’s awesome because. that means its should be easy to spread good in the world. but in a world where there’s good there’s bad. Sadly social media has a negative impact in cancel culture as well.