Adventures in Digital Marketing: Nike+ FuelBand Infographic

My friends Julia, Rachel and I are all taking a course on Digital Marketing this quarter, and I thought it would be interesting to do a group post on a project we just completed. 

The technical part: the assignment was to manually “listen in” on the online chatter about a product or brand through a variety of channels. We chose to follow the Nike+ FuelBand using IceRocket, Twinitor and Google Alert emails. We then coded the qualitative data based on themes we observed in order to perform a quantitative assessment.

The fun part: the final part of the project was to create an infographic to visually convey our findings. The goal was to keep it simple and tell just a few stories rather than describe everything we found in all of the data. 

Below are some thoughts/ideas/reflections we came up with as a group a few days after the project was turned in. Let us know what you think!

Graphic Design is a Powerful Tool for Communication

Christine: I come from a graphic design background, so this project was really fun for me! It was the first time since arriving at UC Davis that I was able to flex my creative muscles on a school project. We wanted to convey several simple points with our graphic: that women were posting much more often about the FuelBand than men, that the majority of the content was technical talk, BUT that men were posting much more content about the technical aspects of the product, whereas women discussed personal use situations. I think our infographic was one of the best in the class, especially in terms of Tufte’s data-to-ink ratio.

Julia: While I consider myself a fan of graphic design, I have never had the opportunity to work on a project like this. Thank goodness we had Christine on our team! We definitely relied on her skill in this area. Our professor stressed the importance of keeping our infographic simple for maximum impact. Infographics are ubiquitous in media today and I appreciated the challenge of creating our own. They can be such a powerful tool. I am already thinking of ways I can use infographics in my summer internship project! That’s b-school education paying off.

Rachel: This was definitely a fun assignment, but also challenging for me because I am not very creative.  I look at infographics all the time but I’ve never really thought about the work that goes into making one, or the qualities that make up a good infographic or a bad one.

“Scientific” View of Social Media

Julia: Given that we are all ardent social media consumers, I found it particularly interesting to take a more scientific approach to gauging sentiments about particular brands or products. While we may have some vague idea about how certain topics are trending online, seeing how stories emerge, data point by data point, was enlightening. While most large-scale sentiment analysis and data coding is done by computer algorithms, we manually coded our data. While this would not be feasible for most real life situations, I feel as though we were able to capture the nuance in the various mentions across our channels.

Bros Before Hos: The Controversy

Julia: I expected a reaction to our tagline. We certainly were going for a provocative and cheeky phrase. However, I didn’t expect quite the intensity of reaction that our piece received based on these few words alone. I suppose this proves the importance of considering audience in your word choice. (I know….duh, right?) Looking back I think people either loved it or hated it. If generating discussion was the goal of this assignment, I think we definitely accomplished that aim. What do you think?

Christine: This was definitely a very interesting aspect, and I think one of the benefits of learning about social media and digital marketing in a business school setting. By doing things by hand for a class project (much like manual calculations in stats class!) we are learning the deeper meanings of limits and tradeoffs of technologies like Google Analytics or even Excel, which is very useful.

Rachel: As an analytical person,  I really enjoyed being able to look a all of the chatter about the product and extract useful insights from it. Data is used so often in business these days and I think it’s really important to learn how to present the data in a way that is easy for people to understand.

Rachel: We suspected that the Bros before hos line in our infographic might not sit well with everyone in the room but we didn’t realize that people would be so offended by it. I was really surprised. I felt like people were ignoring the overall quality of the infographic because of one tiny part of it.  

Christine: I was a bit surprised too -- I think it’s easy to forget that not everyone will view something you find funny or trivial in the same way. I have to admit that looking back on it, I feel like we probably should have thought this through more, presented ourselves as more professional. Just because it’s a classroom setting doesn’t mean we should assume everyone is in on the joke. It did get a laugh at first, but then the backlash kicked in -- I think this would happen similarly in a “real world” situation. For me it was a lesson learned.

We're curious to know what you think! Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!

xoChristine + Rachel + Julia

PS Click below to see the full infographic in all its glory.