The Dragonfly Effect

Nowadays, social media has greater and greater impacts on people’s life. As a result, many companies do marketing through social media. In the article “The Dragonfly Effect”, there are four skills to make this marketing approach successful, which are focus your goal, grab attention, engage and take action. With these four skills, a Leukemia patient finds blood match. It can be seen that the influence of social media is no longer restricted to one’s circle of friend and is expanded to the whole society. During my previous internship in ACNielsen, I got some insights into the effects of online campaign. Nielsen mainly focus on for-profit companies and the goal of most of the campaigns is to promote the products of the companies. There are several ways to grab audience’s attentions. First, it is the kind of campaign that will give prize to some audience who retweet the original tweet. Secondly, it is the online activity that encourages audience to share their experiences of using products. Thirdly, it is official introduction to the products.

Based on the data retrieved, the tweets that receive the most responses are the first type of campaigns and is followed by the second type of campaigns. The first type not only involves the engagement of audience but also has the stimuli for audience to engage. This kind of campaigns may increase the impact of the brand but the effect on sales is questionable. For the second type, the impacts depend on the Key Opinion Leaders (KOL). There will be a certain amount of people who participate in the activity. Not all the comments will be seen by other users and also, not all the comments can be trusted. Thus, this type of campaign needs key opinion leaders who can win trust easily and can describe the product clearly and in detail. The KOL can be celebrities or the active users. This type of campaigns help sales most. For the last type of social campaign, the impacts are limited and they depend on the influence of the social media account. Audience will read the introduction of the products if they like the brands but they will hardly retweet it. In addition, the limitation of the social media is that in most cases, only those who follow the account will read the contents of accounts. Therefore, the impacts of this kind of campaign is not that large. As to the maintenance of social media accounts, it mainly depends on the contents and frequency of update. Successful accounts have a good knowledge of the audience’s preferences. The accounts are made up of several topics and are updated on daily basis.

For the companies or the individuals who want to win attention, it is critical to KOL to help advocate. In the article, one of the key factors that the patient can find the blood match is his circle of friend. However, for the start-ups and social entrepreneurs who lack resources may encounter difficulties in using social media to do marketing. For social enterprises, they may have limited budget for prize so that the first type of campaigns may not be applicable. If they adopt the third approach, hardly anyone will pay attention to the content and help them to disseminate. Therefore, my question is how to let small social enterprises get attention from the users and how to let the tweets from these organizations stand out from the millions of billions of tweets?