Mediaboss Marketing

Taco Bell Social Media Marketing

Taco Bell serves more than 2 billion customers each year at 7,000 restaurants across the globe. However, the fast food chain has become known for more than their appetizing selection of tacos, burritos, and quesadillas, theyre continuing to prove themselves as leaders in the world of social media marketing.

The Tex-Mex fast food chain has become prominent on every social media platform, creating a unique social media presence thats unparalleled to its competition. While fast food kingpin, McDonalds, may boast more collective followers, Taco Bell has managed to be levels ahead when it comes to engagement and the brand attention that their social media activity receives.

Making use of every available social media platform is one thing, but Taco Bell has lifted the veil that separates most major companies from their customers by engaging with them in a more personal and fun fashion. So how did Taco Bell manage to sear their name in as the heavyweights of social media marketing? The following three aspects of Taco Bells social media marketing strategy show how theyve managed to outshine their competition and how your companys strategy can learn from it.

A quick scroll through Taco Bells Instagram page or Twitter feed and its clear who they are targeting. The fast food company have defined their youth-based demographic and have found a way to appeal to them through a witty and unapologetically sardonic sense of humor. The company understands that to create a relationship with their audience, they have to channel more human-centered marketing approaches.

Many companies attempt to attract a youthful demographic, but fail because they arent able to connect with the audience. The younger generation will naturally always be more savvy when it comes to social media and can easily sniff out inauthenticity. However, Taco Bell managed to find a way to get their demographic to respond, and to do so, they had millennial minds doing the prompting.

Our method is hiring Millennial-minded individuals because they live and breathe social media, Nick Tran, the former social media lead at Taco Bell, told CMO. The digital natives entering the workforce today are passionate about social; by having them dispersed throughout our teams, we are staying on the forefront of trends.

Theres no denying that this marketing approach is working for the fast food company. Many of Taco Bells social media exchanges have managed to go viral, which has resulted in multiple media outlets doing stories on the companys social media moves and in turn, end up doing a portion of the marketing for them.

Anyone who has engaged with a big company through a social media platform knows that a majority of the responses may might as well have come from robots. The lack of personality on social media and flood of product promotions isnt going to inspire a plethora of customers to hit the follow button. Taco Bell found a way to connect with their audience by engaging with them in real time. Its a simple yet time consuming strategy, but one that has proven to grow Taco Bells social media following.

Getting the message out to there to your demographic is crucial, but so is listening to them, which is something that Taco Bell understands and thrives at. Nick Tran explains this strategy shift by saying, The Main difference in strategy now vs. before is that what we are doing today in social media is real-time, and we listen and engage all the time.

By listening and engaging, Taco Bell isnt just tapping a like button or copying and pasting a blurb, they are responding in a humanistic way thats laced with enough playfulness that it instantly warrants a share from the recipient. Theyve also embraced a content strategy that goes beyond what Taco Bell creates internally.

Taco Bell Old Spice Social Media Marketing

Part of Taco Bells content strategy involves influencer marketing where they connect with influencers or other brands that arent necessarily associated with the brand but have amassed sizable fan bases on their own merit. The fast food company found a way to benefit fans of their brand while promoting their products. One way the company has accomplished this is by sending influencers their products prior to the official release.

Webcast, July 26th: Best Practices for Engaging Your Channel Partners

Another way Taco Bell has managed to get their brand out there is by infiltrating trends in an organic way. The company has managed to have multiple tweets go viral by jumping on existing hashtags and trends that are prominent in the moment. To give an example, when #10ThingsIGetAlot was trending, Taco Bell tweeted Do you sell bells? alongside the hashtag. The tweet garnered a significant amount of attention and worked because it was both funny and a tad self depreciative, which further instills a personality behind the brand.

With that in mind, Taco Bell had the brilliant idea of sending hand-written notes and wearable brand-related items to models, actresses, musicians, and other celebrities popular with young people.

Have a look at the ring and letter sent to actress and model Chrissy Teigen after she shared a tweet about getting married.

Taco Bell Chrissy Teigen Social Media Marketing

Every company wants to reach a sense of virality with their social media strategy, but very few are willing to step outside the safe zone quite like Taco Bell is. Not only does the team behind the Tex Mex fast food chain take risks with their posts, they also post where most marketers are known to fail. For example, the Reddit community is quick to shut down anyone trying to market to them, but Taco Bell has managed to infiltrate unscathed.

One of Taco Bells most successful social media campaigns was for their new mobile ordering app. Instead of taking the regular approach of the occasional promotional post to pique the interest of their followers, Taco Bell gave them no choice. The company basically blacked out all of their social media accounts and left only one phrase to promote the app. In just 24 hours after launching this campaign, Taco Bells app secured itself in one of the most downloaded in Apples food and drink category. Not only did the company not risk their promotion getting lost in the rest of their social media activity, it made sure that their followers were the first to know.

Another way Taco Bell made their engagement skyrocket was through the use of emojis. The company realized that there was no taco emoji and started a petition to get one, which worked after they managed to receive over 33,000 signatures. They followed this engagement booster by inventing a Taco Emoji Engine, which not only celebrated the taco emoji entering the texting game, it prompted followers to tweet at them for a unique response. In the first five days of introducing the Taco Emoji Engine, the companys official Twitter page received more than half a million direct tweets.

Taco Bells social media strategy may benefit from their teams creative genius, but theres a lot to learn from the path to success that theyve paved. Creating a brand personality that strives from being blandly corporate, engaging with customers in real time, and taking creative risks are all steps that can be incorporated into any social media strategy to ensure it excels.

Steven Tulman Marketing, Sales and Leadership Enthusiast | Speaker | Author | Investor Helping build stronger brands and loyal customersthrough influencer and social media marketing. Steven is the CEO of Social Pulse Marketing Inc., a leading influencer marketing and social media marketing agency helping Fortune 500 companies increase brand Viewfullprofile

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How Taco Bell is Winning at Social Media Marketing - Business 2 Community

If a brand wants to know how many people it reached with itsorganic post on Instagram or how many impressions its Story received, it has had to open Instagrams app to access those stats instead of accessing them through a social marketing dashboard. No longer, though; now that brand will be able to use Facebook to log in to that dashboard,and more options are on the way.

On Monday, Instagram started sharing analytics for brands organic posts and Stories through the Instagram Platform API, so that brands can pull up these stats within the marketing dashboards they use to manage and monitor their various social accounts.

Instagram has been testing the features with marketing technology companies like Falcon.io and is now opening it up to all members of Facebooks and Instagrams Marketing Partners program. And sometime in the coming months, individual developers will also be able to access these features.

To be clear, Instagram isnt giving brands any information that they didnt already have access to. Any brand or individual that has converted their account to a business profile Instagrams version of Facebooks Pages has been able to pull up stats like organic posts reach, Stories impression counts and followers demographic breakdowns through the apps Insights tab. But now those stats can be automatically plugged into social marketing dashboards.

There are a couple of requirements that must be met before these stats can be accessed through the API, though. First, brands must have converted their accounts to a business profile. Second, brands must use Facebook Login to sign in to the dashboards provided by Falcon.io or any other marketing technology firm that plugs into Instagrams API.

The new API is built on the same stack as the Facebook Graph API. Because of this, businesses will need to use Facebook Login to access the new features. Businesses still have the option to use the current Instagram API, though insights will not be surfaced through it, according to an Instagram spokesperson.

In addition to making brands organic post insights available through the API, Instagram will also now let brands use the API to moderate comments on their posts, such as by hiding individual comments or turning comments on or off for individual posts.

For example, a brand could configure their social marketing management software to keep an eye out for comments with certain keywords or have every comment sent through a tool like IBM Watsons text analyzers and automatically hide comments considered offensive or toggle off comments on posts whose comment threads are overwhelmed with spam.

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Instagram starts sharing analytics for brands' organic posts through ... - MarTech Today

SEOUL

Despite North Koreas increased efforts to prevent outside information from entering the country, international activists say technology and market forces will eventually overcome state censorship.

North Korea is one of the most isolated nations in the world, where foreign media is prohibited and most people don't have access to the Internet. The repressive state has even executed citizens for distributing media from South Korea, according to the Transitional Justice Working Group that documents human rights abuses in North Korea.

Familiar pattern

Still it is following a pattern similar to other authoritarian regimes that view knowledge as power and have tried to limit and control access to outside information. This according to leaders from Cuban and Myanmar (or Burmese) independent organizations working to evade authoritarian censorship and outside information restrictions in their own countries, who were recently in Seoul to share their experiences and strategies with Korean counterparts.

I believe that the increasing Internet penetration is going to be inevitable. Eventually the government will need this and needs this for its own development, said Rafeal Duval with the independent news organization Cubanet.

In Cuba, as in North Korea, growing demand for foreign movies and television dramas, not political news, has made smuggling in outside information an increasingly profitable venture.

Using a variety of USB drives, Micro SD cards and DVD discs, Cubanet distributes through the black market a weekly compilation of video content, audio podcasts and entire webpages known as El Paquete for its growing list of customers in Cuba.

Duval said Cuban authorities charged with preventing the influx of foreign media are eventually co-opted by being bought off and often becoming users themselves.

Theyre going to realize the impossibility of a ban because of corruption, he said.

Another Cuban project called Apretaste targeted the countrys elites, the estimated 25 percent of Cubans who have access to email. Apretaste works as a proxy search engine in which volunteers in places like Florida email results to over 100,000 Cuban inquiries each month.

Right now we are giving to the people in Cuba something that they really need. We are giving them a window to see you outside the island, said Salvi Pascual who founded Apretaste.

Prior to democratic reforms that began in Myanmar in 2011, the military government highly censored the Internet. But the porous border with Thailand and the proliferation of satellite TV receivers in the country made it easier for exile opposition groups to penetrate the countrys information blockade.

Emerging black market

The North Korean economy has been steadily growing in recent years despite increased international sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for its continued nuclear and ballistic missiles tests. In the last year, the countrys gross domestic product rose 3.9 percent, driven in part by the exports of coal and other minerals, according to Bank of Korea in Seoul.

However an emerging private market that is tolerated but not sanctioned by the communist state is also driving economic growth. A survey by the Beyond Parallel project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC says most North Koreans now earn 75 percent of their household income from the black market. The Illicit export of North Korean seafood, shoes, cigarettes and cooking oil has given people new purchasing power to bring in outside information and technology.

The number of households with TVs and DVD players in North Korea has grown to the point of being ubiquitous said Nat Kretchun, Deputy Director of the Open Technology Fund, a group that promotes internet freedom and is funded by the U.S. government through the Voice of Americas sister organization Radio Free Asia.

And the number of legal North Korean cell phones users has also been growing in recent years. Initially many of these domestic phones were used to transfer unsanctioned media and information files but recent updates to the phones operating system installed inhibiting censorship and surveillance software.

It effectively blocks all unsanctioned files from being used on domestic phones, said Kretchun.

However for every measure taken by authoritarian governments to block outside information, activists are developing technological counter measures.

That said North Korean defector Kim Seung-chul, who founded North Korea Reform Radio, which broadcasts into the North, expressed frustration that the South Korean government seems to provide less funding to groups working to penetrate the Norths closed information environment than do these Cuban and Myanmar exiles groups.

The South Korean government, conservatives, veterans, and famous people have a lot of money but they do not use the money for this. They get angry about North Koreas situation, but they do not act, said Kim.

Youmi Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.

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Cuban Activists Say North Korea Fighting Losing Censorship Battle - Voice of America

July 25, 2017, 10:04 pm

Gretchen R. Hammond, a transgender reporter, was personally threatened, subject to sexist and anti-Semitic abuse and Neo-Nazi slurs as retribution against an article she wrote, losing her job as a result and the National Review is the only major American publication reporting on it. How did this happen? Hammond was the first reporter to write about the Chicago Dyke March removing three Jewish women from the march for having Jewish symbolism on their flags. While the Dyke March holds that there is nothing anti-Semitic about forbidding Jewish symbols while allowing other religious imagery, they were evidently unhappy with anyone reporting on their totally not anti-Semitic actions and letting the public draw its own conclusions. Shortly after the article was published, Hammond and her employer, the LGBT newspaper Windy City Times, began receiving insults and threats, which included anti-Jewish and sexist slurs. Shortly after, Hammond was forced off of reporting and placed into sales, which she blames on harassment from the Dyke March.

Instead of condemning this harassment, the Chicago Dyke March bragged about it, tweeting Zio tears replenish my electrolytes. Zio is an anti-Jewish slur popularized by the KKK, and the Dyke March initially defended the comment before deleting and replacing the original tweet.

If other organizations used derogatory slurs towards or celebrated the abuse of an individual by people angry at her reporting, the outrage would be deafening. After all, when CNNs Andrew Kaczynski faced harassment from redditors after publishing an article perceived as threatening to dox the private individual responsible for a gif that president Trump tweeted, Vox and the New York Times were quick to document the harassment that he faced. When a bunch of angry videogame fans harassed feminist journalist Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Zoe Quinn for criticizing sexism in videogames, it kicked off a 3+ year cycle of story after story on what became known as Gamergate. Surely, harassment that cost someone their job and that has the support not just of fringe internet users, but a large mainstream institution is the sort of bullying and intimidation that people would be up in arms against. And yet, the same organizations that have long campaigned against what they see as harassment and intimidation of progressive writers are suddenly silent, or even supportive of this bullying when its done by supporters of the Chicago Dyke March. Are journalists falling for the disingenuous invocation of LGBT rights by the March to distract from the racism, sexism, harassment, and courting of fascism that their movement is engaging in? Or have journalists seen what happened to the last left-wing writer who tried to expose intolerance and hypocrisy in the Chicago Dyke March and decided that is safer to turn a blind eye? Whatever the answer, the Chicago Dyke Marchs successful war on the media should be deeply disturbing for those interested in a free and honest press.

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Pinkwashing Censorship: How the Chicago Dyke March Won its War on the Media - American Spectator

Canada's highest court recently upheld a controversial order requiring Google to remove certain results from its worldwide search listings. Now, Google is asking a federal judge to rule that that the Canadian order is unenforceable in the U.S.

"Without a declaration from a United States court that enforcement of the Canadian order in the U.S. is unlawful, Google believes that Equustek will continue to pursue enforcement of the Canadian order," the company writes in a complaint filed Monday in San Jose, California. "Google now seeks a declaration from this court that will protect its rights."

The battle over the search results dates to 2012, when technology company Equustek asked a judge in British Columbia to order Google to remove search results for Datalink Technologies -- which allegedly stole trade secrets from Equustek and engaged in counterfeiting.

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The Canadian issued a worldwide injunction prohibiting Google from displaying search results for Datalink. That order was upheld last month by Canada's Supreme Court.

The digital rights groups Electronic Frontier Foundation, which weighed in on Google's side, criticized the Canadian court's ruling.

"The courts decision will likely embolden other countries to try to enforce their own speech-restricting laws on the Internet, to the detriment of all users," the EFF wrote. "Its not difficult to see repressive regimes such as China or Iran use the ruling to order Google to de-index sites they object to, creating a worldwide hecklers veto."

Google argues in its new court papers that enforcing the Canadian court's order in the U.S. would violate free speech principles. Among other arguments, Google says that the First Amendment prohibits injunctions that are not "narrowly tailored" to achieve a substantial interest.

"The existence of the Datalink websites is, and remains, a matter of public record," Google writes. "Equustek cannot show that it has no alternatives available other than enjoining Googles search results outside of Canada."

Google adds that Equustek has not sought injunctions against other search engines and social media sites and has not stopped Amazon from selling Datalink products.

Google also argues that the order shouldn't be enforced because it's "repugnant" to public policy in the U.S. "The ... standard applied by the Supreme Court of Canada did not come close to satisfying well-settled United States law for imposing injunctions," Google writes.

"The Canadian court placed the burden on Google, a non-party, to disprove Equusteks rights in every country outside of Canada, rather on Equustek, the plaintiff in the action, to prove its entitlement to removal of search results in each country in which it sought removal," Google writes. "Moreover, the Canadian standard took no account of the 'public interest' at all."

While Google says it's trying to protect the company's rights, it's uncertain how this lawsuit will do so, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman. That's because even if Google prevails, it's not clear that a victory in the U.S. would prevent a Canadian court from holding the company in contempt, Goldman says.

"There could still be Canadian enforcement actions that would not be governed by U.S. law," he says.

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Google Wants Federal Judge To Nix Canadian Censorship Order - MediaPost Communications