Hello Friends,

Discussion Questions

1. How did Orkut successfully use the marketing action plan discussed in this chapter? In what areas did Orkut fall short?
2. How does the Brazilian culture speak to the brand experience of organizations and communities on Orkut? In a culture where brands must engage their fans on various digital platforms, what advice might you lend businesses about their future social media strategy?

How do you connect with other people?

I’ve always marveled a little bit at the sheer volume of followers a social media can have. I have 118 followers on Instagram. This is in every social media term a laughably small audience. But can you imagine walking into a room to see 118 people?

That’s a lot of people’s attention to hold onto.

Like a lot of people right now, my social circle is a relatively small part of my life. I work full time. I’m in college full time. And while I wouldn’t call myself an introvert if my options are to go to a party with a hundred people or read a book? I’m choosing the book.

What’s different about my life compared to a lot of generations is social media. Social media can make a social connection. In 2004 Orkut was designed as a social networking site. Here’s the next big then on how you too can connect with other people.

How did Orkut successfully use the marketing action plan discussed in this chapter? In what areas did Orkut fall short?

The marketing action plan in Chapter 11 of Strategic Social Media by L. Meghan Mahoney & Tang Tang is about transitioning from traditional marketing into social approaches to marketing.

Social approaches to marketing expand on traditional marketing to make space for social media, it’s soaring successes and it’s inevitable pitfalls. The four dimensions to a Brand Experience are;

1. Sensory Experience – Difficult for online branding but not impossible. Have you ever been so pleased by the image of something that you just had to have it?
2. Affective Experience – This is more about emotional connection. Have you ever been moved by an ad?
3. Intellectual Experience – You’re audience is intelligent and should be able to use that intelligence to answer your call to action. If it’s too easy you may sound patronizing. If it’s too hard, your audience won’t care. They’re intelligent but they’re also busy.
4. Behavioral Experience – This is about changing your audience’s real life actions. Say you have an app you’re promoting. You want your audience to change their routines to add the use of your app into them.

So how did Orkut the 2004 Brazilian social network giant incorporate these marketing strategies into their system?

• They had a strong reputation through Google’s umbrella (Sensory Experience)

It’s hard to get any sort of sensory input or output from social media. I think there might even been an argument for whether you are getting the same kind of senses in technology as you would in real life. But I am not a scientist so I’ll leave that for someone else to study in 5 to 10 years. What I can say about your senses is they are all connected. I have strong feelings about Google. In 2004, if I saw Google’s logo attached to an kind of company I would put a lot of trust in it. That’s not exactly true today but Orkut didn’t live long enough to see that.

• Interface promoting connection between friends and valued privacy (Affective Experience)

I have seen the absolutely fall of personal privacy in real time on social media. Privacy barely exists. Orkut deciding that they were going to put a huge emphasis on privacy would do a lot to ensure their users felt safe and emotionally endear them to the brand itself.

I actually think that their connection between friends may have been part of their downfall. Can you imagine rating your friends? What if one of them got a B on trusty worthiness? They would never speak to me again.

• Prestige in the technology field (Intellectual Experience

I have a personal bias against anything that says the word prestige. Mostly because right now in 2026 if something says prestige, more often that not that translates to this person has money. Not always, but it’s happened enough that the word sets me on edge. Way back in 2004, I do believe Orkut had some claim to real prestige on the technology field. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of that prestige led to their eventually downfall. People who weren’t part of the field could have felt alienated or worse insulted by users who were part of that technology-sphere.

• Brazilian brands bought into the hype (Behavioral Experience)

Brands buying into Orkut’s social message was a great way to integrate users behavior into the social media marketing. In an environment were public ads are not available, finding new ways to sell products is a much for brands. Users who recognized their favorite brands would be excited to see them on a new platform. Users would also have opportunities to engage with new brands based on the social circle Orkut was creating.

If anyone would like more information about Orkut check out this link;

Why did Orkut fail? A post-mortem on the rise and fall of the pioneering social network – Tactyqal

So how did Orkut fall short when it incorporated all this different ways of catering to it’s audience.

Well the biggest Orkut had was that it didn’t cater to its audience. The social networks set up was great for awhile, but it never went beyond that set up. As new social media like Facebook started cropping up Orkut did not keep up with their audience. Instead, their site began malfunctioning, limiting friends and losing the ability to share photos quickly.

When the site stopped working smoothly, the audience jumped ship to other more current and less bug-gy social media networks.

• How does the Brazilian culture speak to the brand experience of organizations and communities on Orkut? In a culture where brands must engage their fans on various digital platforms, what advice might you lend businesses about their future social media strategy?

I want to be very clear that I don’t know a lot about Brazilian culture. I was really into Japanese and Asian cultures as a child. I didn’t even take Spanish in highschool (I took Latin).

But every culture has a significant influence on the social media it’s people are engaging with. Orkut was popular in the Brazilian market. Outdoor advertising is banned in Brazil, which means social media or digital marketing is the best option for the culture. In a culture where digitization is so paramount to commercial success a brand needs to stay on top of the social media stratosphere. A brand needs to know what’s popular, with who, why and how long that popularity will last.

To me that sounds exhausting. But if a brand is sticking to their niche and regularly engaging with their audience online it is just like networking IRL. I think the biggest any brand needs to remember to offer to a customer is making sure the audience knows what you can do for them.

If anyone would like a stronger understand of Brazil’s complicated advertisement rules check this out.

 Clean City Law: Secrets of São Paulo Uncovered by Outdoor Advertising Ban – 99% Invisible