All articles originally published on the blog of Semify, LLC, a digital marketing agency and SEO reseller

What #AlexFromTarget and “Welcome to Night Vale” can Teach Us About Harnessing Fandom on Social Media

Anyone who was on Twitter last week probably caught sight of a One-Direction-ready Target employee named Alex checking out an adoring fan at his register. The ensuing #AlexFromTarget hashtag soared to the number one worldwide trend in a matter of hours.

But the sudden explosion of attention surrounding 16-year-old Target employee Alex Lee wasn’t a happy accident of the Twittersphere; it was supposedly a calculated marketing experiment by Breakr, a new online marketing company that focuses on building fandom (or a dedicated fan community) in order to increase marketing potential.

“An audience changes the channel when the show is over,” reads a quote by Venture Capitalist Mary Meeker on the marketing company’s beta page. “A fan base shares, comments, creates content when the show is done, magnifying the show’s reach and engagement with existing and potential new audiences."

And a fan base is exactly what Breakr managed to create with the #AlexFromTarget campaign. The individual who posted the original photo was only associated with Breakr as a follower, but the company made the image viral through strategic use of the hashtag. They tweeted the picture to prominent YouTubers, came out with a video parody, and then just sat back and watched as the press picked up the story and tweets kept coming in.

Their unconventional experiment seems to have proven that tapping into the fandom culture of social media is a recipe for instant celebrity. Lee’s twitter account @acl163 exploded practically overnight, from about 2,000 to a current 730,000. At the same time, Breakr jumped on the hashtag to promote their new client, teen musician Corbyn Besson, who saw a large follower increase from #AlexFromTarget’s largely young, female fanbase as well. Both Lee and Target have denied collaborating with Breakr, but Target at least hasn't seemed to mind embracing the attention.

It may seem like Breakr captured lightning in a bottle with their hashtag experiment, but it’s not the first time that fans on social media have blasted something to celebrity status in a matter of days. The surrealist podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” also owes much of its success to social media. In a recent article on BoingBoing, co-writer Jeffrey Cranor discussed how a popular blogging platform turned the small podcast about a fictional desert town where weird things happen into an international sensation which has even managed to top Beyonce on the iTunes charts a few times.

Unlike the calculated choices that created #AlexFromTarget, the Night Vale phenomena was completely accidental. “The jump we saw in popularity that July [2013] was nothing like we'd seen before,” Cranor wrote. “After a few weeks, we figured out what happened: Tumblr happened.”

According to Cranor, the podcast had about 100,000 total downloads over its first 12 months and 24 episodes. When it caught the attention of socially conscious media consumers on Tumblr in July, that number exploded to 2,500,000, and tripled the month after that. Purely by coincidence, the show seemed to be exactly what many people on Tumblr were looking for: a fun, charming and spooky story that resonated with fans desperate for more diverse characters.

The purely audio format helped. Fans were inspired to create art to fill in descriptive gaps, and others wrote stories about side characters and locations the show’s first-person narrator wasn’t able to explore. Thanks to this fan-generated Tumblr publicity, Night Vale soared to national acclaim and is currently touring live performances to sold-out crowds across Europe.

So what can we learn from these two cases? In short, that attracting dedicated and engaged fans rather than pure consumers might be the key to unlocking the full potential of social media marketing.

Four Cool Things Ello Did Recently That You Didn't Notice

To be completely honest, I started this column expecting it to be an Ello postmortem. After a mass exodus from Facebook led by drag queens frustrated over Facebook’s real name policy, Ello, the little social media platform that could (or couldn’t) seemed to have faded from the public eye amidst reports that spammers were taking over and real accounts were lapsing into inactivity.

Imagine my surprise when I found the ad-free social network not just alive, but growing. Here are four cool ways that Ello evolved when you and I weren’t looking:

Ello Has Raised $5.5 Million in Venture Capital

When Ello first appeared, plenty of commentators asked (rightly) how a social media platform with no ads could hope to make enough money to sustain itself. Ello’s founders responded to that criticism by raising $5.5 million in venture capital last month. Their biggest investor is the Foundry Group from Boulder, CO.

"We're strong supporters of the Ello team's unique vision for the business,” Foundry managing director Seth Levine wrote on the company blog. “It's important that we state this clearly, since there are bound to be people who view this financing with skepticism. Foundry Group is completely supportive of the Ello mission. We'll either build a business that doesn't rely on third party advertising or the selling of user data or we won't build a business."

Ello cofounder Paul Budnitz is similarly staunch in his assertion that Ello will remain what it claims to be, and even told the Burlington Free Press that he turned down larger investments to retain the platform’s integrity.

The Financial Community is Booming

Finance reporter Joseph Weisenthal was between jobs last month when he decided to start broadcasting his thoughts about an earnings announcement from King Digital on Ello. His unusual use of the platform drew in finance reporters and bloggers from Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Financial Times, and Economist.

According to a recent Nieman lab report, these journalists are using the platform to share news, post commentary, upload graphs, and engage with each other. The birth of Ello’s financial sector marks a sharp departure from its usual demographic, which had been ruled by designers and artists until now.

“We’ve been waiting for something like this to happen,” Ello Cofounder Todd Berger told Betabeat. “It’s a little humorous that it’s the financial community that embraced it first, but it makes sense for guys to be highly focused on efficiency would jump on a platform that’s highly easy to use.”

Ello is Actually Brand-friendly

When Ello first staked out its territory as the Land of the Ad-Free, many marketers were left wondering if it was a social taboo to set foot in Ello’s hallowed webspace. Sonos made headlines by being one of the first companies to adopt, then seems to have gotten cold feet and posted nothing.

But after a period of uncertainty, Budnitz said that brands are “totally welcome,” but there won’t be any way for them to pay for ads or promote their own posts. According to creative director and designer Greg Foley, this limitation could actually push brands to be more creative and engaging. “It's so personal that I've got to wonder, if I were a brand and I wanted to engage on this, it'd have to be in a really unique and personal and ultimately fun way, and not selling at all." he told Fashionista.com.

Budnitz agreed. "You're paying for people to see things they wouldn't organically want to see, so their interest level is fairly low,” he said. “If you put up stuff that people are really interested in, you can gain a relatively large following fairly fast."

A Fake Art Show Turned Out Kind of Awesome

When I was still using Ello actively in October, I saw an update that sent my social-media loving heart aflutter. Klaus Biesenbach, the director and Chief Curator of MoMA PS1 in New York City was accepting submissions for an art show cultivated and shared exclusively on social media.

Ello is a platform built on anonymity, but the story seemed to check out. The profile picture was even the same one used on Biesenbach’s Twitter page. Incredibly creative works of art flooded in from all corners of Ello, all tagged with the @klausbiesenbach handle. The art explosion lasted for about a week before Biesenbach’s page vanished, and Ello developer Justin Gitlin announced that the page had been a hoax.

But erasing @klausbiesenbach didn’t erase the tsunami of art generated. Participating artists gained levels of exposure and engagement that should have been nearly impossible to cultivate on a beta site that doesn’t have a search function yet. The artists who posted may have lost their chance at MoMA-recognition, but they gained membership to a gifted community of content creators.

If you’ve already joined Ello, it might be time to dust off that old account and poke around. It’s still too soon to say if Budnitz’s unusual strategies will sink or swim, but there’s still plenty to explore in the meantime.

Amazon Challenges Google for Online Advertising Business

Amazon has already begun expanding into everything from mobile payment to book publishing. It was only a matter of time before it went after Google's longtime hold over the online advertising business.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com is getting ready to move into the world of online marketing with a product that's likely to resemble Google AdWords. Google pulls in $50 billion a year from marketing like AdWords, which places ads tailored to the user's interests alongside search results. 

Amazon's new product is expected to perform a similar, keyword-based service, along with a bulk-buying tool for advertisers looking to boost their visibility. Reportedly, the system will increase Amazon's ability to place advertisements on third party sites and may become available later this year.

Amazon does have at least one advantage over Google. Since Amazon is an online retailer, it has more access to purchasing data than Google. Amazon had 250 million active users as of the second fiscal quarter in 2014, and access to their buying and selling trends may give Amazon the edge it needs to make their ads as effective, or more effective, than Google.

That doesn't mean Google won't be a major competitor. Google has a head start of 14 years on Amazon, and the large share of the market Google controls gives the company considerable power over pricing trends. AdSense has drawn in over a million advertisers since it was launched in 2,000, selling limited ad space to marketers.

If Amazon can compete with Google, the new service could be a good opportunity for the company to increase its profitability, especially since its gross margins have been low in recent years compared to other internet giants like Google and Facebook.

Amazon's service will likely be good news to marketers stumped by SEO obstacles like Google Penguin and Google Panda. SEO is often used either as an alternative or supplement to pay per click campaigns and measures like AdWords to get a client's site to show up in the top results organically. It's unknown how Amazon's service may tie into SEO.

Amazon's gone toe-to-toe with Google before, entering the smartphone market with its Fire Phone that competes with Google's cloud computing, and Google Shopping Express threatened Amazon's longtime hold on the e-commerce market. Only time will tell if Amazon can compete with Google for online advertising. Amazon has already begun expanding into everything from mobile payment to book publishing. It was only a matter of time before it went after Google's longtime hold over the online advertising business.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com is getting ready to move into the world of online marketing with a product that's likely to resemble Google AdWords. Google pulls in $50 billion a year from marketing like AdWords, which places ads tailored to the user's interests alongside search results. 

Amazon's new product is expected to perform a similar, keyword-based service, along with a bulk-buying tool for advertisers looking to boost their visibility. Reportedly, the system will increase Amazon's ability to place advertisements on third party sites and may become available later this year.

Amazon does have at least one advantage over Google. Since Amazon is an online retailer, it has more access to purchasing data than Google. Amazon had 250 million active users as of the second fiscal quarter in 2014, and access to their buying and selling trends may give Amazon the edge it needs to make their ads as effective, or more effective, than Google.

That doesn't mean Google won't be a major competitor. Google has a head start of 14 years on Amazon, and the large share of the market Google controls gives the company considerable power over pricing trends. AdSense has drawn in over a million advertisers since it was launched in 2,000, selling limited ad space to marketers.

If Amazon can compete with Google, the new service could be a good opportunity for the company to increase its profitability, especially since its gross margins have been low in recent years compared to other internet giants like Google and Facebook.

Amazon's service will likely be good news to marketers stumped by SEO obstacles like Google Penguin and Google Panda. SEO is often used either as an alternative or supplement to pay per click campaigns and measures like AdWords to get a client's site to show up in the top results organically. It's unknown how Amazon's service may tie into SEO.

Amazon's gone toe-to-toe with Google before, entering the smartphone market with its Fire Phone that competes with Google's cloud computing, and Google Shopping Express threatened Amazon's longtime hold on the e-commerce market. Only time will tell if Amazon can compete with Google for online advertising.

Don’t Be That Guy: Four Social Media Non-Apologies and How to Avoid Them

Social media is a great marketing tactic. It’s free, wide-reaching, and practically guarantees an audience. But with great social media power comes great responsibility, and it’s far too easy for companies to send out an offensive Facebook status, blog post or tweet that incites an internet mob.

A company’s response to a social media gaffe can have a huge impact on its public perception. But it’s not enough just to issue an apology, it has to be the right kind of apology. If your tone or timing is off, or you don’t keep your demographic in mind, your apology may not go over as well as you hope. Here are a few common apology tactics that may only land you in more trouble:

The Non-Apology

This is one of the most common apology tactics, since many people want to reap the benefits of an apology without examining their actions or admitting they may have made a mistake. Non-apologies usually include some version of the phrase “I’m sorry you were offended.” This response seems like an apology (it includes the words “I’m sorry,” at least) but it actually bounces the blame off the person in question and back at the audience. Essentially, statements like this read as “I did nothing wrong, everyone else is just too sensitive.”

In 2009, author Alice Hoffman went on a Twitter tirade against Roberta Silman, a book reviewer for the Boston Globe who wasn’t thrilled with Hoffman’s book. Hoffman went as far as to tweet Silman’s phone number to her followers before deleting her account. In her apology, Hoffman expressed regret that the situation was “completely blown out of proportion” and added “I’m sorry if I offended anyone...I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.”

“If” is the word to watch out for here. It makes her apology conditional and allows her to “apologize” without actually owning up to her actions, though it’s almost absurd in the context: of course she hurt someone by tweeting out their personal phone number. Even if you can’t understand why your audience is upset, don’t invalidate their feelings. Just take their word that you did something wrong and own up to it.

The Explainer

Beware the page-long public apology letter. If you’ve loaded it with backstory about the circumstances, motivations and reasoning behind the gaffe, it’s going to look like you’re trying to make excuses. While some people will get where you’re coming from, others will see a company or individual trying to dodge being accountable.

Kanye West’s rambling Twitter apology to Taylor Swift after his infamous interruption of her VMA acceptance speech only confused people. His heartfelt apologies were interspersed with remarks that Swift actually benefitted from the publicity and comments like “Who’s seen the play Wicked? I’ve seen it 4 times! Other than loving the music acting and costumes… it’s my story!!!”

Often it’s better just to own up to mistakes in a straightforward manner and move on.

The Double Down

All too often, public figures and brands go on the defensive when faced with negative PR. It’s an understandable response: no one wants to believe that they might be a bad person, and having hundreds of people suddenly telling you that you are can raise anyone’s hackles. Double Downers will usually keep arguing, maintaining their innocence or defending their position, which usually only escalates the situation until all sides are mashing their keyboards with capslock on and growling at their computer screens.

When comedian Michael Che received backlash for trivializing the anti-catcalling viral video produced by Hollaback!, he let loose with a series of bizarre tweets like “i think some of u are misunderstanding that post. im simply just making fun of something that is important to a lot of people.” This only served to make people angrier. A genuine apology still hasn’t been made.

To avoid doubling down, social media experts Jay Baer and Amber Naslund recommend fighting fire with water. Respond in a way that’s going to appease, not exacerbate. And give yourself time to collect yourself if you’re worried your pride is going to get the better of you.

The Scapegoat

How often have you seen a social media faux pas swept under the rug with something along the lines of “the intern did it”? Plenty of companies blame major gaffes on minor employees, followed by a timely announcement about how that employee is already fired.

KitchenAid tried this one back in 2012 after an employee tweeted a tasteless joke about the death of President Barack Obama’s grandmother. “The tasteless joke in no way represents our values at KitchenAid, and that person won't be tweeting for us anymore," the company announced.

It’s not a bad tactic; taking swift, decisive action usually plays well with the public, and you’re getting rid of a problematic employee. Still, it’s better to be more careful when deciding who has access to your Twitter account in the first place. Be aware, also, that this apology may look like you’re just deflecting guilt.

It’s possible to apologize without using any of these tactics. Using definitive statements like “I did something wrong and I’m sorry,” or “We made a mistake and we’re sorry” can be great ways to avoid the non-apology. You may not feel like you did anything wrong, but when your business is at stake, trying to empathize will always get you further than lashing out.

What are the best social media apologies you’ve seen? Let us know in the comments!