Week 13, Part A Blog Post

For the purpose of this assignment, I decided to focus on analyzing the social media impact of Rosetta Stone, McGraw Hill Education, Pearson, Cengage, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which are educational companies that rely on e-learning to some extent. Since Codex Alexandria, my fictional company, is an educational software company, these well-known educational companies were probably the most effective, similar actual companies that I could compare to Codex Alexandria… Rosetta Stone seems effective because they link to blogs made by famous Rosetta users, who advertise Rosetta Stone products well by writing blog entries about their travels abroad and how their language learning with Rosetta Stone has helped them navigate the world. Rosetta Stone also successfully advertises to people on social media by asking users to respond to questions that company poses, and then asks users to tag the company in their responses. These tagging requests indicate that Rosetta Stone is interested in advertising their products through active social engagement. Meanwhile, McGraw-Hill Education seems to use advertising effectively to recruit potential employees by creating posts to encourage them to apply to job offerings on their website. In addition, McGraw-Hill Education indirectly advertises itself as reputable, interesting educational company by posting links to interesting educational articles and responding directly to users who comment on their posts.

Pearson advertises its products well on social media because its social media accounts do not directly advertise to users. Instead, the company posts interesting articles on social media accounts and shows photographs of happy employees and others enjoying the fruits of the learning products that they produce. These tactics give the impression that the company truly has faith in the quality of its products. Cengage, although it is a popular educational company, does not successfully advertise well to people on social media because it appears to post advertisements that are all written similarly and contain videos that possess the same statistics and calls to action. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt seems to effectively advertise their company by relying on links to random educational articles and advertisements for their live videoconferences. The company does not directly advertise its products or rely on advertised sales; it instead advertises its worthiness as company by gently encouraging people to respond to its posts on social media.

One of the major components of social media advertisements that have I noticed is the fact that they frequently rely on brightly colored photos to attract viewers’ attention. In addition, many of these photographs or images are accompanied by product descriptions and prices in the titles of the ads, which alerts viewers immediately that these companies definitely want to persuade potential customers to visit their websites. I suppose that their calls to action are probably that people should considered buying their products because they are sale and probably meet their needs and desires. They effectively using imagery because it does manage to catch my attention, but it does not hold my attention when I actually visit the advertisement links their websites and discover how much money they want to pay for products that they will never even offer free shipping for. In general, the most annoying ads on social media are the ads that appear after I have just recently finished looking at certain retail websites, but did not make the decision to purchase anything from them. I feel this way because it is blatantly obvious at this point that companies are being overly pushy and persistent. After all, if I did not ultimately want to buy any of their products a few minutes ago, what makes them think that I would now change my mind? Besides, these type of ads remind me that Google is spying on me and collecting data about my online habits, which annoys because I value my privacy and I did not think that any government or corporate entities have a right to potentially use Internet browsing history to potentially harm me or extract money from me.

Compared to traditional advertisements such as television advertisements or Internet ads, I respond to the advertisement done on social media a lot more effectively and positively. Traditional advertisements seemed to be aimed at the older generations, who were more likely to have grown up with regular television watching than millennials, who are generally less interested in television and prefer to use the Internet and video-streaming services to watch film productions.  For one thing, I find traditional advertisements to be such a turn off because those advertisements often appear too aggressive and solely promote an agenda to sell me stuff, whether or not I actually need it or want it. I resent feeling pressured to buy something any time I see a traditional advertisement, and in response I am actually less likely to buy whatever they are trying to market to me because I can obviously tell the these companies have no real interest in me or my well-being beyond finding some way to convince me to spend my money. Whenever I look up a traditional advertisement, I do not think that I am valued as a potential customer or even just a human being because the company that is pushing this traditional advertisement is not engaging a social dialogue with me, nor does it particularly care about taking my opinions into account by creating products that fit my needs and interests.

Companies that use social media advertising, from what I have observed, seem to be the companies that best understand how to court customers (and keep them) in this changing, modern, Internet-driven economy. Although I doubt that companies that use social media advertisements care any more about customers than companies that use traditional advertisements, I (and probably many other people) can at least respect the fact that they at least pretend to whenever they try socially interact with social media users in fun, light-hearted ways. Generally speaking, I have more respect for companies that realize that their survival depends on what their customers want (more social interaction on social media, less direct pressure to buy products) rather than company CEOs and other officials who stubbornly want to stick to outdated ideas about how to attract customers, and then complain when potential customers do not respond the way that they want them to their advertisements. In addition, social media advertisements are more likely to influence millennials and teenagers because those groups are known for using social media regularly. Companies that cleverly use social media advertisements know that as people become more and more tech-savvy, most of the successfully advertising campaigns will have to occur on the Internet, especially on social media, not outdated platforms like television or on billboards.