Those two empty rows? The shelf space for Old Spice body wash.
If you don’t understand the significance of that image, just read The Old Spice Social Media Campaign By the Numbers.
Granted, that Old Spice Tw was the complete opposite of all that relationship building, direct human engagement stuff social media “gurus” have been talking about.
When you walk into a Starbucks, what’s the first thing you think about? Is it checking in? For me, that comes in about 8th place after things like “I hope the barista is cute,” “Should I get coffee cake?” “Hmm, iced or hot coffee?” and “Is the bathroom vacant?” The list goes on and on.
I’m 23 years old and I’ve worked primarily on digital and social media marketing campaigns. Because of this, when I’m roped in on projects I’m usually asked what platforms could be tapped to make a campaign go viral. One of the tools mentioned most often these days is FourSquare, but I swear, I almost never want to suggest it.
To me, FourSquare falls squarely in the category of oversharing. I don’t use FourSquare because I simply forget that I have an account. The other day I was at a really cool event at the Zeppellin Hall Biergarten in Jersey City and after about 4 hours of being there I thought, “This is the kind of thing FourSquare is made for, right?” But then I thought, “But, I still don’t want to check-in.”
I reluctantly did and browsed the people who were also checked-in. It was cool to see that there were other people there, but I didn’t know any of them and could care less. So I checked-in, earned points, and essentially explored every feature on FourSquare…and promptly forgot about it.
Most people like to check-in for the social game within FourSquare. Hell, it can be cool since a lot of places are giving away free gifts to frequent visitors and mayors. For some reason though, that has never interested me and it’s only now that I realize why. I simply feel like I’m whoring myself to these establishments because by checking in I’m almost selling my presence to these companies.
Maybe I’m missing out on the FourSquare boat by tossing it to the side. But honestly, if I wanted to share where I was, I’d make it a tweet or a Facebook status.
If you know me, you know that I tend to overthink. Naturally then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I also tend to overwrite.
I was sitting in Starbucks today writing a screenplay (cliche, I know) and saw this guy next to me showing a presentation to a colleague. He flipped past 6 slides chock full of information while saying, “So she wrote all of this stuff…”
“Stuff.”
This poor girl he speaks of probably spent 20 hours researching all the “stuff” on those pages. In one fell swoop, all of that diligent work was given the same amount of attention we spend reading spam.
It all reminds me of my own time spent working on PowerPoint presentations. I usually dig up so much interesting research that I want to show it all off in my presentations. I want to show the level of analysis my topics are given.
Every time I’ve done that in my career, those slides fall flat. But whenever I’ve thrown up 3 boxes with pictures and 3 powerful one-liners, those slides are gazed at for minutes at a time. My audience is in wonderment. It’s like the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
So keep it simple. If you can communicate one point clearly, those slides will be so awesome you’ll want to share them with your friends.
What? You don’t believe me? 100 Beautiful Slides from Cannes Lions 2010 has been viewed 14,000 times. (credit: @jessedee)
Speaking of how Overthinking Can Kill Advertising, I just saw this Kit Kat ad celebrating the epic 11-hour Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. It’s a brilliant and simple execution that will hit magazines quickly enough that people will completely understand the message, that is if they know about that Wimbledon match.
That’s probably the one flaw with the quick-twitch advertising trend that’s hitting right now. There’s no way of knowing how many people know about a current event like the Wimbledon match. Still, I like the ballsy move. It’s completely aligned with the brand message of “Take a Break” and as long as you place the media in relevant mags like Sports Illustrated and ESPN, the ad should be a hit.
I love work like this, and all signs point to us seeing more of it. My own agency McCann Erickson responded quickly to their Mad Men reference when they posted a “Welcome, Sterling Cooper” message on their site. And big marketers like Unilever have caught as as well, like when Unilver shot multiple versions of their Dove Men+Care ads for the Super Bowl with Colts and Saints players. Luckily, one of those featured Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees that they were able to get on air right after the Saints won the Lombardi trophy.
Do you think this twitch advertising trend is good for brands?
I’m in the business of overthinking.
I recently started working in Strategic Planning at McCann Erickson NY after 7 great months of doing much the same work at StrawberryFrog. We analyze consumer behavior, figure out a brand’s stance in the marketplace, consumer perception, and try to figure out where the opportunity is for our clients.
We’re inundated with data; some qualitative and some quantitative, some useful and some useless. Our job is to distill it, to simplify. We have to find that core idea. And it’s hard as hell.
As planners, we are in the know about just about everything happening culturally and our scope of understanding not only has to pass state lines but also international time zones. We have to understand everyone everywhere. I read a book or two a week. I read 3-4 magazines a week. I click tons of distracting links on Twitter and e-mail newsletters every week hour.
All of the best ideas in the history of advertising have been dead simple. Got Milk. The Best Job in the World. Hell, I’m not even going to bother naming all of the ones I know.
Dead simple advertising is inspiring, and I think it’s time to celebrate all of those campaigns that we admire for their utter simplicity and impact. Share your favorites in the comments below.
Or not.
I was recently catching up with some old issues of Ad Age that I hadn’t gotten around to when I stumbled upon this article about Facebook’s hopes of taking geo-location to the mainstream. I have tons of reservations about geo-location services anyway, but this quote from Seth Goldstein blew my mind (and not trying to knock you Seth, you’re more than welcome to explain your point further in the comments section):
“People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising,” said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. “If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her.”
There seems to be this grand idea amongst some in social media circles that in order to prove the efficacy of the medium they must show how it completely abolishes everything about marketing and advertising that’s every been taught, practiced, and written about.
I personally think it’s counter-productive in getting people to take the field of “social media marketing” seriously. It’s just flat out pompous.
What integrated marketing across various channels provides is a ubiquity of message that in turn creates frequency and exposure at different points in the purchase decision process. The reason frequency is important in marketing is because consumers generally need multiple exposures to a product before trial. Basically, it has to be burned into your memory bank.
To be fair, Seth Goldstein is talking about a form of frequency here too, in that hopefully you’ll see all of your friends “checking in” at Mickey D’s for a Big Mac and be compelled to go get a Big Mac. But, what if Consumer X keeps seeing his friends talking about the new “Bacon Cheddar Chicken McBurger” sandwich but forgets to stop in because there was no billboard on the highway near the McDonalds advertising the sandwich.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested or previously exposed to it, there was just no message at that potential purchase time to remind him. So, yeah, multi-channel communication is still important.
And with geo-location in general, here’s where the math gets messy. Facebook is a social networking tool meant to connect friends and family that the general public understands. But as you get into more niche social services, the understanding and adoption wanes.
Twitter is still used by only about 7% of the population (not that it isn’t powerful in its own way) and Facebook could potentially give the boost to the “check-in” concept that has only been adopted by a couple of million people on services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
And one has to wonder, is the reason for fairly slow adoption for Foursquare because of a lack of awareness or because people just don’t know why they’d want to use it? Foursquare has been installed in everything from giant signs in Vegas to window decals, but use is still relatively low compared to the general population.
This all circles back to one of my core theories about social media. Just because something can be shared doesn’t mean it will be shared. For every 200-million-view YouTube video, there are 27 million videos with only 12 hits. People will share what they find interesting, and if “@SoAndSo checked in at McDonalds” isn’t interesting then it won’t be shared.
So really, even if Facebook rolls out geo-location, will 300 million people really start using it just because it’s on Facebook or will the general idea still not catch on with them? After all, when I wanted to tell my friends where I was and what I was doing back in the day, I simply typed a status update. But that’s soooo 2008, right?
If I told Sony Pictures marketing president Marc Weinstock that social media didn’t provide any ROI, he’d laugh in my face.
That’s because Sony Pictures just took the #1 spot on Ad Age’s Entertainment A-List, an annual ranking of the top entertainment brands, after netting the studio’s first $2 billion year.
While other studios tried to ride sequels and remakes, Sony rode new and untested properties like District 9 ($210 million), Paul Blart: Mall Cop ($183 million), Zombieland ($102 million), Julie & Julia ($129 millon), and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs ($235 million) to box office dominance.
What’s most startling about the numbers is that most of the big money makers for Sony barely featured any “A-list” stars. Rather than rely on big names, Sony actively used social media to help spread the word about their releases.
District 9’s extensive viral campaign led back to an online experience that was shared by consumers through social media and created early buzz for a “weird” sci-fi movie with a no-name cast and no-name director.
Zombieland had a “Zombify Yourself” website, Twitter account, and a “Rules for Surviving Zombieland” video series that earned nearly 2 million views on YouTube.
And Sony is convinced that social media had a huge hand in creating its success.
Having a buzzworthy film has also proven to work more in Sony’s favor than most, due to an early presence on Twitter (Sony has more followers than any other movie studio) and an adaptive marketing strategy that keeps conversation around its films active even after the opening weekend.
‘The judgment day comes a lot sooner now. You used to get to opening day or the second day to see whether the audience really liked the movir or not. But when you hype one thing and deliver another, [negative social media chatter] is the immediate penalty these days.’ [Sony Pictures Chairman of Worldwide Marketing] Jeff Blake said.
Universal Studio knows too well about that after they saw box office sales plummet for Bruno following its opening weekend because of how quickly word spread through Twitter from consumers telling friends “not to bother.”
Meanwhile, other studios like Paramount have used social media to push obscure homemade movies like Paranormal Activity to $193 million worldwide. NOTE: There’s an extensive case study about that film that I worked on in the upcoming book microMARKETING by Greg Verdino.
Social media’s impact on sales is getting harder and harder to deny these days, and those of us who continue to study how the medium works are going to be instrumental in creating the marketing campaigns that are necessary in this networked world.
This post was inspired by Mark Schaefer’s post, A simple strategy to increase your influence on Twitter
There’s too much boasting among social media marketers. We like to believe we’ve redefined marketing and social media will disrupt every marketing and advertising tactic ever developed…EVER! This attitude reminds me of the creative arts. My heart will always be with writing. As a writer, great stories seem to come from a magical place in our heads and don’t fit any “model.” But every great story that’s been analyzed has been found to follow principles and triggers which ignite a particular reaction in the reader’s mind, and those principles are followed intentionally by some and accidentally by others. Either way, they’re evident in every great story.
Writers, however, have a tendency to believe that their stories reinvent the wheel. But if they pick up one of the volumes that exist on dramaturgy, they would realize that their brilliant solutions to storytelling problems were discovered long before they were born.
Social media marketers also believe they’ve reinvented the wheel. They disregard proven principals, and, frankly, disrespect the old school (and this is coming from a “totally digital” 23-year-old).
I think there’s a lot to learn from the old school way of marketing and advertising. No greater example sticks out to me than when the agency I was working for folded last year and, while searching for employment, I stooped to the level of selling office supplies to small businesses door-to-door.
In door-to-door, you do everything that’s considered ineffective by social media evangelists. It’s cold, impersonal (in that you don’t know the prospect), and heavily sales focused. The tactics seem counter-productive.
So at first, I didn’t follow the system. I didn’t listen to the principles. And I loosely followed the tactics. After a while, I found that even though prospects loved me, they didn’t buy from me. I was really friendly, and I could chat about just about anything with customers.
But I couldn’t close.
When I finally married the sales techniques with the relationship building skills I had mastered, I started selling like a monster. Then I quit. I still hated the “walking door-to-door” aspect of it and dreaded what that would be like during NY winters.
But I learned valuable lessons that are lit ablaze by my social media peeps. I like the industry. I like the theories. I like the people. I dislike the rose-colored glasses. I dislike the echo chamber.
And lately I’ve been feeling that some of my thoughts may brand me as an outcast, like in this Ogilvy quote:
“I run the risk of being denounced by the idiots who hold that any advertising technique which has been in use for more than two years is ipso facto obsolete.”
Does that mean there are no worthwhile thoughts and tactics being used by social media marketers now? No, but it does mean that a lot of the tactics used to create relationships, build trust, and ultimately drive sales through social media have already been discovered, mastered, and improved upon by door-to-door sales dudes long before we started commenting on the practice of marketing.
If you’re a social media marketer feeling a bit “icky” about hearing these thoughts from another social media marketer, please remember that I’m not telling you to be a huckster. That’s a misconception about door-to-door salespeople. The most successful door-to-door salespeople build relationships and do pretty much everything we advocate. The difference is that they also use persuasion techniques to help drive the prospect toward a desired action, and those techniques hold valuable lessons worth considering in order to get the most out of the relationships we’ve built.
In the end, I do believe that for the most part we do what salespeople do. The biggest difference is we do it all over a computer rather than while standing in a prospect’s living room or office.
I’m a big fan of using some kind of research in order to back up my statements, but I’m going with my gut on this one. It was inspired by this article in AdWeek, Are Brands Hostage To Endorser Scandal. The survey shows that consumers say they don’t feel that celebrity scandals have any effect on their perception of brands they endorse.
I don’t believe them. It’s the problem with self-reporting sometimes. People think that when a star like Tiger Woods is involved in a scandal that they don’t think it reflects badly on Nike because it wasn’t Nike who was sleeping around, after all. But, they don’t understand the psychological effects of association and how that’s what branding is all about. If Nike kept airing Tiger ads during the onslaught of “mistress” interviews, it would most definitely reflect negatively on Nike. No matter what consumers say, it’s not worth the risk.
But, I do think that it’s senseless when brands end endorsement deals following scandals. Hell, I actually think it’s counter-productive. They do so to tell the world, “Look, we don’t endorse this kind of behavior so we are no longer associated with this celebrity.” But in reality, I think it can have the opposite effect.
Consumers know that athletes like Tiger endorse Nike products so that Nike can sell more products, but when brands cut those connections when athletes are in the middle of scandals they’re showing just how artificial and shallow that relationship is. It says “We at Nike don’t really care about Tiger, we were just using him so you would think we were a great brand so that you would buy more of our products. Now that we can’t influence you to give us more of your money from this relationship, we have officially announced that we are ending this promotional relationship.”
In my opinion, they shouldn’t cut the endorsement deals and announce it. Just say something along the lines of “Tiger’s actions greatly trouble us,” and cut the ads from running until his image is restored.
Welcome to my new post series: Best of Social Media. I plan to share the best ideas, examples, and stats I see every week. Definitely let me know what you think in the comments.
Obviously humor is at the heart of what drives the viral spread of content on the web, but Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh explains that those things that go viral most often and for much longer are remixes and mashups of existing content. Take a look at the Kanya/Obama video, which takes two independent clips, marries them, and creates something wholly more viral than the source material.
Even viral content can spawn more viral content. Take a look at Charlie Bit Me and the remixes such as the “Charlie Bit Me (Auto Tune)” which spread the video through the web again.
The key, Huh believes, is to take something familiar and put it into a new context or give it a new meaning. The question is, how can brands do that?
Domino’s, just a little over a year ago, was hurt more often than helped by social media. A video of two employees flinging snot and messing with orders in other disgusting ways drew millions of views and mainstream press coverage. Domino’s was forced to close the location where the incident took place and a company spokesman said it definitely attributed to a fall in sales:
The company had been on track to see a profit in the second quarter of this year, McIntyre said, but saw a 0.7 percent decrease. “Because we were trending positive, all things being equal, that was the one thing we could point to and say that impacted us.“
Since then, Domino’s has done tons of great stuff to build its brand through social media. Ramon De Leon, a Chicago franchisee, revolutionized relationship marketing for the company through Twitter, built the most profitable Chicago store, and has been sharing his insights with other Domino’s franchisees. And now they’ve taken their “Pizza Holdouts” TV campaign to social media through an interesting new concept.
With Domino’s “Taste Bud Bounty” consumers hunt down friends and place a “bounty” on them via the Taste Bud Bounty Hunter game.
For each bounty placed, the friend in question is gifted with a coupon for a free pizza (with purchase of a second pizza. The bounty issuer also gets a coupon in turn (first time only). Should the friend order with your coupon (before any others), you “capture” their taste buds. After ten captures, you’ll earn a coupon for a free large one-topping pizza.
The “Taste Bud Bounty” game will run through June 27, and the player with the most captures will win free pizza for a year. The game has already been quite successful. If you look at the bounty hunter wall, 5,860 people have already participated in the first week.
As an extension of a sampling campaign to get customers to try the brand’s new recipe, it seems like it could do exactly what Domino’s wants in spreading awareness and trial.
Vitrue, a social media management company, has released a free tool that determines the value of a brand’s Fan Page by measuring number of fans, posts per day, number of interactions, and other miscellaneous data.
It’s an interesting, if questionably accurate, way to help determine the value of a fan page. The formula is proprietary and how it calculates value is unknown, but it works off the premise that every fan and interaction it worth a certain dollar value. For example, since the average CPM rate online if $5, one of the factors it seems to use is calculating the impressions a fan page is earning through posts and interactions. So if you generate 1 million “earned” impressions, it’s technically equivalent to spending $5,000 on ads.
Try it out. It’s obviously all theoretical, but still interesting
A new study by mobile audience media company JiWire surveyed 1,000 smartphone users to find out their responsiveness to mobile ads. Here are the key findings
2,700 readers of the business management e-mail newsletter “SmartBrief on Leadership” gave these responses to Social Media Issues
NYTimes has this very interesting report about social media and mobile networking apps.
A phone is a simple replacement for a wallet stuffed with loyalty cards, but the real appeal for stores is in the location information provided by Foursquare and other location-based applications. Retailers can track when customers actually enter their stores. Such data can be used to learn things about store traffic, such as when men visit versus women. And it’s easier to note when the most loyal customers visit.
“If you check into work, then you leave work, you check into a bank and then you check into a store, that’s a behavior that, in aggregate, we might use to transform the way we market to you in the offline world,” Mr. Bough said. “We might see dayparts that are more likely for you to check out of some place and go to the store, and we might do advertising during that specific daypart in that specific place.”
Pepsi, in addition to beginning a Foursquare program, is also introducing a location-based iPhone application called Pepsi Loot through which customers can collect points toward free music downloads.
“We believe it’s a real, new opportunity to transform loyalty programs in a way that we haven’t done before,” Mr. Bough said.
Tasti-D-Lite wove Foursquare into its loyalty-card program this year. When someone registers the card online or visits the loyalty Web site, she can click to connect the card with her Foursquare account (along with Twitter or Facebook). Whenever the card is swiped after that, the customer accumulates Foursquare check-in points and Tasti-D-Lite loyalty points at once.
“Imagine the amount of data we now have in order to make better marketing decisions, in order to make loyalty decisions, about our customers, as opposed to the paper punch cards we had before that didn’t do anything for us,” said B. J. Emerson, social technology officer for Tasti-D-Lite.
This next quote is particularly interesting given my observation in 7 Keys To Measuring Social Media ROI, that the brands that have seen the most direct and measurable benefits from social media usage have been those that control their retail environment, like Dunkin Donuts, Tasti D Lite, Naked Pizza, and Dominos.
Pepsi’s Foursquare program will begin running in June. While the company is still working out details, Mr. Bough said that he expects that when a Foursquare user is near a Pepsi retailer, an offer to enroll the person in a Pepsi rewards system will appear. Once people are enrolled, whenever they check in at a grocery store or drugstore selling Pepsi, they will accumulate rewards points or badges that they can redeem for products or offers or donate toward charities. Restaurants can layer in offers, too — Shakey’s is giving $3 off a large pizza for people who show the Pepsi Loot app, for instance.
Very, very interesting article from FastCompany that I can’t even summarize. You should just read it. It’s formatted like an infographic, so it’s easily digestible.
Some of the topics?
What are some of the social media or general marketing articles that stood out to you this week?
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