Monitoring AFS-USA: Conclusions and Recommendations

Updated Observations

Since my initial observations of AFS-USA, I have done a bit of follow-up.

The following Twitter conversation caught my eye because it reflects some confusion about the AFS-USA brand and who it serves:

AFSUSA did a good job of responding on the same day to @Batinamilk, which means AFS is both listening to and talking with the groundswell – at least on a basic level. AFS-USA’s ability to respond swiftly to Twitter questions is further exemplified in the following conversation, which gives some indication of where AFS-USA plans to go with its blog aggregator:

Another interesting development in AFS-USA’s social media strategy is its “AFS Host Family Appreciation Award.”

The award is a badge that AFS-USA encourages its returnees to post on their host families’ Facebook walls in order to show their appreciation. This altruistic message also serves to spread the word about AFS-USA – a great example of the organization’s efforts to energize its followers.

Socialmention.com revealed that, for the last month, AFSUSA has had the following statistics:

Compared to the last snapshot from Socialmention in mid-March, strength went down by 1%, sentiment went from 49:1 to 42:0, passion decreased by 3%, and reach decreased by 16%. Overall, AFSUSA’s social media presence decreased in the past couple weeks. Though none of the decreases are detrimental, the slow decline indicates that AFS-USA is not growing in the social media world.

Conclusions and Recommendations

AFS-USA listens to, talks with, and engages the groundswell on a maintenance level. It occasionally acknowledges its Twitter followers and asks them questions, it responds promptly to concerns, and it provides various forums for prospective and current AFS students to interact and learn from each other. Its “Host Family Appreciation Award” and the Ask an AFSer Facebook group are examples of how AFS-USA is beginning to branch out to energize and embrace the groundswell further. By asking AFS students and families to take initiative in spreading the word about AFS-USA through social media, they are taking advantage of their passionate supporters. Still, in the world of social media, there is always room for improvement.

One simple improvement would be to make the AFS blog readily accessible on AFS-USA’s main homepage.

AFS-USA's Current Homepage - The social media links are at the bottom and the blog is nowhere to be seen!

Also, AFS-USA’s brand awareness has some inconsistencies. So far, AFS-USA has not defined exactly what its name is in social media. Should social media users search for “AFS-USA,” “AFS USA, or “AFSUSA?” I based my searches on what yielded the most relevant results, which was AFSUSA, but the others also led to some AFS-USA-related data.

Additionally, the Facebook pages and group related to AFS-USA (Study Abroad with AFS-USA, Hosting with AFS-USA, and Ask and AFSer) are not entirely consistently branded either.

Because AFS-USA is a relatively common acronym and is part of a large umbrella organization with many different subsidiaries, some confusion is inevitable. One way to attempt to unify the brand, however, would be to brand specific social media campaigns separately and have them sponsored by AFS-USA. Study Abroad with AFS-USA, for example, could have its own corresponding Twitter account called “StudyAbroadAFSUSA”, sponsored by AFS-USA, and all blogs related to studying abroad with AFS-USA could have their own “Study Abroad with AFS-USA” blog aggregator. This could also help AFS-USA target specific sections of its broad audience. This branding strategy could extend to AFS-USA’s social media targeting of host families, parents, and especially returnees.

AFS-USA plans to reach out to returnees with its Returnee Initiative, but as of right now, it does not have much of a social media presence with AFS returnees besides its LinkedIn groups (AFS-USA Returnee Initiative and AFS Intercultural Program Returnees), which target an older demographic. Most user-generated content that references AFS-USA comes from people anticipating studying abroad or those who are currently abroad, not from returnees As AFS-USA forms its returnee social media outreach strategy, it should keep brand consistency in mind.

AFS-USA is actually in a good place to take risks with social media. AFSUSA’s low strength in social media could work to its advantage, because it can control and shape its brand without upsetting a large network. Most blogs, photos, and videos posted about AFS-USA are either posted by AFS-USA or are aggregated by them. Once AFS-USA feels confident about its social media brand strategy (or strategies), the organization can begin to aggressively tap into its passionate followers.

One way AFS-USA could use its followers to its advantage would be to establish a rating system for each AFS-USA study abroad program.

After following the link to each program, browsers could see immediate feedback from other people who went on the program with ratings and reviews

When prospective students decide on programs, they essentially “shop” for their best fit. By creating a venue for returnees to rate programs and for prospective students to see those ratings as they browse their options – not unlike the rating on Amazon.com or ebags.com – AFS-USA would take a major step toward energizing the groundswell and allowing it to help itself. Not only would a rating system give prospective students word-of-mouth feedback they could trust, it would also re-engage returnees and give AFS-USA first-hand feedback about its programs directly from the groundswell. Yes, AFS-USA would risk negative comments and the ratings would require heavy monitoring, but isn’t that what successful social media campaigns are all about?

We Crave the Cute

Sometimes, nothing hits the spot better than a cute animal. Most people reading this probably already know that, or else you wouldn't have clicked on this post when you saw the thumbnail picture of the kitten and "mouse" (see below, if you haven't already scrolled down just to look at all the pictures and swoon).

The groundswell is crawling with animals (pun intended).

In 2008, a simple live video stream (Puppycam) of Shiba Inu puppies exploded on the internet. People went wild over watching the furry fluff-balls interact and be, well, puppies. Their cuteness was enough to draw in millions of views. If only marketers could be that cute, right?

Passion for animals is enough to drive huge traffic in social media. Pet owners and enthusiasts post on message boards and chat rooms like pethobbyist.com and terrificpets.com to brag about their perfect pets, ask for advice, and look for support. Some of these enthusiastic pet owners have also taken their pet-obsessions to social networks, where they have created profiles just for their animals. For the most dedicated animal-lovers, Facebook provides apps that include Dogbook, Catbook, Horsebook, and even Ferretbook, according to LJworld.com's article. A little excessive? Maybe. But a great opportunity for digital marketers to target a specific population of animal lovers? I think so.

An Animal Friend of Mine on Facebook

Animal profiles on Facebook are not only for private pet owners, however. When the Leipzig Zoo released photos of Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum, photos and videos of her immediately went viral online. Her fans quickly created a Facebook page for Heidi, which now has 324,382 fans. That's quite a few people who like her just for being cute - a number any business page would kill for.

Heidi, the Most Famous Opossum in the World

Heidi certainly is not the first animal to go viral on the internet. The following videos are other examples of some of the most-played animal-related YouTube videos in recent years. 

I must admit that the number of videos I posted was mostly self-serving.

But don't underestimate the power of a fluffy, doe-eyed critter. Their funny viral videos, heart-melting photos, and often ridiculous social networking profiles may seem light-hearted (because they often are), but they carry huge potential for online marketers. Some companies have already tapped into the animal craze by creating animal web mascots, such as the Firefox logo to the right.

Clearly, the public has an insatiable appetite for cute, funny, and intriguing animals. Besides posting advertisements next to the videos, forums, and profiles, however, I haven't seen many attempts by marketers to take advantage of this huge desire. So what do you think? Can marketers harness the animal appeal, or is the basic appeal of animals in the groundswell that they aren't there to sell or to convince?

They're there because they're cute. That's all.

What? Tampons in the Groundswell?

Chapters 9 and 10 of Groundswell focus on embracing the groundswell for innovation and how the groundswell can transform companies, respectively.

Both chapters reminded me of Kimberly-Clark's (makers of Kotex pads and tampons) most recent product line, advertising campaign, and interactive website - U by Kotex. Like Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, which was profiled in chapter 10, U by Kotex takes a risk by challenging traditional norms for feminine care advertising and releases some control over its brand by creating content for the groundswell to interact with. The campaign also fits within the topics of chapter 9, because it uses groundswell forces to solicit direct and indirect feedback about its products directly from its customers.

According to the New York Times article, "Rebelling Against the Commonly Evasive Feminine Care Ad," U by Kotex was introduced in March 2010 and comprises an entire line of feminine care products, including pads, tampons, and pantiliners. It is targeted to teenagers and young women between 14 and 21 years old - a prime demographic for groundswell engagement. The products are small, sleek and come in a black box, individually-wrapped in a variety of neon colors.

U by Kotex Products  - Try a Free Sample HERE

In addition to the line’s inventive packaging, the U by Kotex’s advertising campaign has caused a stir for its innovative, frank, and satirical nature. The U by Kotex campaign, which includes television, print, and digital advertisements, directly references and mocks previous Kotex advertising campaigns. Watch the campaign's most famous advertisement, "Reality Check," below.

Other advertisements in the series include a candid camera-style video of a woman trying to convince men to buy her tampons, a man administering a fake Rorschach test with every ink blot resembling a penis or vagina, and a print advertisement with large text that says, “I tied a tampon to my key ring to make sure my brother wouldn’t take my car. It worked.”

All the campaign's advertisements, as well as its other forms of rich media, can be found on the U by Kotex YouTube channel, which has 890 subscribers as of today.


Though the advertisements are humorous, the campaign focuses also on the serious aspects of education and awareness in relation to menstruation. The website has multiple interactive venues for girls and women to post their personal stories, read articles, view videos, take quizzes, and ask questions about menstrual health, and sign a declaration to “break the cycle."

Sounds a lot like Tampax's beinggirl.com, doesn't it?

In Mass Marketing Retailers' article, "Kimberly-Clark gives Kotex brand new slant," Andrew Meurer, the vice president of Kimberly-Clark's North American group brands was quoted saying, "For the past 50 years, advertisers – Kotex included – have been perpetuating a cultural stigma by emphasizing that the best menstrual period is one that is ignored...We are changing our brand equity to stand for truth, transparency and progressive vagina care," he says. "Moving forward, the tone of the Kotex brand's marketing will adhere to its new tagline--'Break the Cycle.'" The tagline, he explains, comes from a 2009 study of the same name, which showed that while 70% of girls and women ages 14 to 35 feel it is time for society to change how it talks about vaginal health, only 45% of them feel they have the power to make a difference.

The entire U by Kotex campaign is a perfect example of a company embracing the groundswell and using it to energize its brand. Notice how Meurer noted a focus on transparency? There may be an altruistic side to Kimberly-Clark's transparent approach to menstrual product marketing, but my guess is they've recognized that transparency is key to success in the groundswell.

The U by Kotex campaign begs its target market to give it feedback and engage with its products. The website immediately greets all visitors with a prompt for feedback, and throughout the site, there are countless additional opportunities to chime in about the products, the campaign, and the movement.

A Snapshot of a Forum about U by Kotex Tampons

U by Kotex Prompts the Groundswell for Feedback

In addition to its YouTube account, U by Kotex manages Facebook and Twitter accounts, and according to the running tally at the bottom of the U by Kotex website, the brand has engaged 2,333,827girls in its cause. 


Cause or no cause, all that engagement with the groundswell is sure to improve U by Kotex's brand presence and encourage innovation in its products and its market approach, don't you think?

Are We All Becoming Our Avatars?

What is the difference between your physical and digital self? 

This may seem like a silly question. Obviously, your physical self eats, breathes, sleeps, talks, and interacts with others. Your digital self - whether it is an avatar in a virtual community like Second Life, a profile on Facebook or Linked In, or just a username in a forum - is just a projection. But think about the amount of time you spend using or acting through that projection. If it is just a projection, why do you care about it so much?

Any user of social media, whether consciously or subconsciously, creates one or many calculated identities. These online identities – the motives for creating them and their existence in general– have important psychological and cultural significance.

Maybe Avatar was a hit because we could relate to it?

For society to adjust to social networking and digital technologies, users have adopted new definitions of interpersonal communication and interaction. We have created new languages and interpretive codes oriented around the encoding and decoding of digitally transmitted messages, and we have grown to accept digital projections as replacements for physical reality. Cyberspace has become a valid site for human interaction – on par with coffee shops, classrooms, work offices, and any other form of face-to-face interaction.

Could it be?

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message." His ideas followed that the media and technologies a society uses, not the content the mediums carry, have societal significance. Though different mediums engage users in different ways, each serves as an extension of the body. The technologies people use, and thus extend themselves with, provide insight into the psychological underpinnings of the society they belong to.

Social media technologies have allowed users to extend their bodies into virtual communities. The increased use of digital communication technologies and social media simultaneously encourages hyperconnectedness and discourages face-to-face interaction. By transferring emphasis from material existence to the digital sphere, social media users have more power to strategically calculate their virtual selves and the ways they present those bodily projections to others. These digital projections affect the creator's perception of self, of others, and the ways others perceive the creator’s physical person. Over time, these altered perceptions cause changes in societal norms and expectations.

Cartoon by Hugh Mcleod

Social networking users have no control over the ways others will interpret their constructed identities once they are created. Users can adjust aspects of their profiles, but when they sign off, their virtual selves remain in cyberspace for other users to interact with and judge. Misuse and misinterpretation of personal information can be uncomfortable and sometimes harmful to the profile creator. Why, then, would social media users take such a risk?

One reason is community. Social networking profiles are a bridge to a cyber-community with its own set of behavioral norms and expectations for self-presentation. Users may be aware of the vulnerability, superficiality, and calculated nature of the profile, but to opt out of social media is to opt out of an entire social realm that gains more and more cultural clout every day. By opting in, users submit to the social networking communities' expectations and written and unwritten codes of conduct.

A "map" of online communities based on actual online traffic from bandwidthblog.com

Every social media user consciously chose to use social networking as their medium for self-preservation and social connectedness. If the medium is the message, the individual profiles are only a product of a larger cultural phenomenon. Social media has changed society’s definitions of a social community. Social media users consciously and actively participate in changing their perception of themselves, of others, and of society in general – within the social media community and outside of it as well. The more social media users participate, the more they give life to the medium, until the need to differentiate between users’ corporeal selves and their digital representations becomes obsolete.

From a marketing standpoint, the blurred line between the physical and digital worlds is significant. If online identities and virtual communities are becoming more and more legitimate, a brand's presence in social media puts it on par with other profiles, and subsequently, other people. As Groundswell suggests, people trust other people more than they trust companies. If a brand exists on the same plane as a person, it is easier to relate to and carries more influence.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding media: the extensions of man. New York: Mentor

The Path from Social -> Personal -> Emotional

The start-up sector of the social media industry is the most telling of social media's future directions. One recent innovation in social media that is telling a lot is Path - an app launched in November, 2010 for smart phones (specifically for the iPhone) that calls itself "the personal network."

The Path app allows users to share photos and 10-second video clips with up to 50 friends. For each post, the user can write only three contextual tags: person, place, and thing - nothing else. If friends wish to respond, they can do so with one of five emoticons. 

Path - Nervous at Home from Path on Vimeo.

The friend maximum is a response to Dunbar's Number, which is a theory that human beings cannot support more than 150 personal relationships at a time. By allowing only 50 friends to access posts, Path hopes to create an intimate network where users can share personal moments with people they actually know and care about. Additionally, according to Wired, Path's emphasis on sharing intimate photo and video memories was inspired by a recent Ted Talk by Daniel Kahneman about the connection between memories and happiness.

In addition to its social research background, according to Mashable, Path has a star-studded founding team, which includes former Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin, Macster co-creator Dustin Mierau, and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. It also has a solid backing by angel investors - proving its clout in the social media sphere.

So why is Path so telling of social media's future?

Path responds to several emerging trends and issues in social media by creating a new way of sharing, gathering, and processing information. 

Too Many Photos!

Networks like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube allow users to share a (practically) unlimited number of photos and videos with others. While tags and captions help viewers sift through them, we are still inundated by photos and videos we either don't care about or want to care about but can't because they are surrounded by so many others we don't care about (Phew). Path stops that by saying, "Here are photos and videos you will want to see because they come from people you actually know."

Network Overload & Privacy Concerns

The larger networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin grow, the more impersonal they become. Also, the more friends, followers, or connections one has, the greater the chance his or her personal information could be compromised or exposed to unwanted viewers. With too many superficial online "friends" and too little control over what those people see, many social network users have cut down on what they share. How, then, can social media be social when users hold back from each other and heavily monitor their content? 

Path, with its limited close-friend network, is a refuge for the disillusioned social network users who seek safer, more genuine relationships online. 

Postmodern Individualism

More than other social networks, which expand and often overextend relationships, Path attempts to strengthen the relationships one already has using the technology people are already accustomed to. Path is only for smart phones. Each individual posts individual photos with individualized tags to other individuals on their smart phones. It's the closest thing to socializing without talking and without actually interacting with anyone else. And that's perfect for those of us who are so wrapped up in busy schedules that intimate social interaction is hard to come by. 

Don't have one of these phones? Can't sign up for Path.

Collective Memory Loss

The modern young generation has a deteriorating need to remember anything. Information is at our fingertips, so why remember it? Lack of memory can be inconvenient, however, when reflecting on our own lives.

Photographing and/or recording important or interesting moments allows Path users to essentially bookmark their lives for instant recall. Not only for others, but for themselves. 

We are Social and Emotional Creatures!

Humans are fundamentally social and emotional, and Path makes sure to satisfy those impulses. The app displays who views a post and allows other users to react using one of five emoticons – happy, sad, mischievous/wink, shocked/surprised, or love. 

A photo post on Path with all the possible emoticon response options

In this way, Path separates itself yet again from traditional social networks without entirely rejecting users’ expectations. Though users still cannot comment on photos, emoticons serve as a compromise. Because users can react with a range of emoticons, user responses to posted media are more complex than Facebook’s “like” feature for photos and posts. Also, the emoticons fit nicely with Path’s visual aesthetic. Additionally, unlike open-ended comments or “likes”, emoticons allow for a simple measurement of users’ emotions in response to photos and video. If Path gains enough popularity, the app could track its users emotional responses - a potentially valuable insight in the world of social media marketing!

The idea of displaying and/or measuring emotion – an essential part of human interaction – in a social network is new and catching on. Just yesterday, Mashable posted an article on Affectiva, a new commercial technology for monitoring viewers’ emotional responses to video. 

Click here to have your face monitored by Affectiva!

Path may seem simple, but its insight into the human social condition and the trajectory of modern technology is highly sophisticated. Before long, we may actually stop measuring our social network's value by size and instead by the personal connection we have to it. Could Path be the app we need for social network reformation?