I was asked by Talkwalker - a social media monitoring and analytics tool (along with fellow B-M colleague Elaine Cameron) to give just one social media trend marketing trend for 2014. Now I 'cheated just little' and gave a trend that wasn't really a specific marketing trend.
However, I do strongly believe that politicians, institutions, governments, political parties ... could pick up some tricks and best practices form the marketing world.
You can read my thoughts on the topic below and you can see the full article here.
Governments will embrace social media
It has already started but in 2014 we will be seeing more European governments and politicians fully embracing social media – especially with the European Elections in May 2014. They will become more comfortable and open to this medium and will hopefully make the most of it, and use it in innovative ways.
Social media has undoubtedly allowed a shift in the power balance to happen – from sellers to buyers, from brands to customers and also from governments and politicians to the electorate and voters. Governments and politicians will need to understand how to make the most of social media to create the necessary awareness around politics in general. And then understand how to turn this awareness into actions – and I am talking about real tangible actions more than a retweet, a ‘like’ or a share.
There are two key elements necessary for the above to happen: hashtags and videos.
Firstly, hashtags will become increasingly important and central as more and more social media channels are incorporating them in order to aggregate content. Harnessing the power of hashtags will allow for increasing awareness to be created around specific campaigns.
Secondly, short and captivating videos will captivate and drive action. Youtube is still as strong as ever and 2013 saw the creation of numerous video and image based applications such as Instagram and Vine making the creation and dissemination of videos easier and more affordable than ever. Videos and images have already been identified as a strong social media marketing tool but I cannot wait for the political world to embrace this effective way to share and tell their ‘stories’.
