The Digital Campaign : overkill?

The digital media has transformed the way politician persuade the citizen. The presidential campaign is great example of modern marketing. While emphasis is on digital marketing, Obama and Romney's marketing teams are using various mixture of marketing techniques in order to reach and persuade the citizens to attain their votes.  According to the article, digital marketing predicted to reach $160 million and candidates are funding heavily on the micro-targeting. Related to last week's CRM lecture, in political campaign tremendous amount of data is collected to target specific audiences. Using sophisticated algorithms, the marketers process the collected data to examine the voter's behaviour and predict specific traits that correlate to voting decision. They will then use the data to target the specific market in order to increase chance attaining the votes. It's spectacular how specific campaign teams can get. However, the precision of the target marketing are getting creepy in a way. 

The history of presidential campaign portray how the marketing evolves overtimes. How there sophisticated marketing tactics are amazing that companies could learn many from it by investigating their marketing approach. As explained in the past lecture, just like any other digital marketing marketers, presidential campaign are also facing dilemma of creepy/sweet spot. 

Facebook's "Want" and "Collet" buttons: Competing social commerce site?

The social commerce market is growing rapidly this recent years and now it is $1billion market(US). Related to last week's post, it appears to be Facebook is also entering the social commerce market. Facebook introduced a new retail feature "want" and "collect" buttons that enables Facebook users to elect the want button and add selected products to their wishlist. The selected product will be visible on friend's newsfeed. While the feature is similar to existing web service like fab.com and Fancy, I think these existing service could be in stake when the feature launched by Facebook. Because of the huge amount of users Facebook carries they are in great advantage. The existing social commerce websites users might switch to Facebook, since user can have same experience while just Facebooking as usual. Facebook entering in the social commerce market might stimulate the market even more. I wonder how Facebook would position them in the social commerce market and how they will leverage the feature for company's further growth.

The Fancy: A new way of marketing

The Fancy is new social commerce site that has feature to share any products that users are interested. Unlike the Pinterest that only has interest sharing feature, the fancy allows to sale the products via the site. When the product shared by the user is bought by someone, the user who posted the product receives 2% credit from the price of the product. With this new business model the Fancy launched in 2011, has 500,000 post per day making $10,000 sales per day.

The Fancy have done a decent work blending the core essence of e-commerce and social media networking sites and implemented successfully (the idea itself is like a combination of Facebook and Amazon). Browsing the Fancy's website, their user interface does actually looks "Fancy" and make me want to buy the products with authentic and eye catching design. They offers wide-range of products from apparel to travel (relatively in high price range). Because of this characteristic of website, it might be adequate for luxury brands.

The fancy appears to adapt to the current trend of social media networking very well, attracting millions of users and manufactures. While there are competitors like fab.com, I wonder how this social commerce site will grow in next few years.