Do you want to smell the success of a social media campaign that will engage your audience to no end? Swan dive, into the best social media strategy of your life.
But first, let’s have a look behind the scenes with the most recent social media success story.
Old Spice and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, along with actor Isaiah Mustafa, partnered to create a campaign that took the web by storm. After introducing the Old Spice Man character (played by Mustafa) the team proceeded to seed various social networks with an invitation to ask the dashing shirtless man any questions they may have.
Using reddit and twitter, the responses were tracked carefully and those that contributed interesting questions or were submitted by high profile individuals on social networks received a video reply that was posted on Youtube.
A team of creative’s, marketers, and writers made about 87 short video replies in the first 11 hours. That works out to about 7 minutes per reply, including writing and filming. And an astonishing 180 videos in total were made during the entire campaign. The entire campaign was tweeted, retweeted, emailed, and shared on Facebook multiple times. Mashable provides a look at the Old Spice campaign by the numbers.
So what was it about the campaign that made it the success it was? One interesting point to note is once the original ad (above) was released, there was no brand mentions with the 100+ video responses. It was simply entertaining to watch and most already knew it was the Old Spice man.
The big take away to this success story is how the integration of several social media options were used together. It allowed the marketers to seed, engage, respond, and viewers to submit, view, and share.
While this was one helluva marketing and production feat, its easy to see how combining the social media options helped. But like many viral or social campaigns, the big idea and the seeding will likely determine the results.
Social media is much more than creating a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. You have to think about how to engage with your network. If you simply broadcast, you want to do so with value, such as promotional offers or news of new products or sales. But for most that don’t have legions of fans like Apple or similar, you want to share and engage. Offer info of value.
Social media contributes to online branding, reputation management, awareness, word of mouth, and more. It creates a huge opportunity, but as Seth Godin says; it’s a process, not an event.
Pepsi created the Refresh Everything and skipped advertising during superbowl (some saying it was a mistake) to give millions of dollars to fund ideas that will refresh the world to non-profits in six categories. Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education.
IKEA‘s Facebook campaign was a stroke of genius. Using the photo tagging feature, a bunch of showroom images were uploaded to the account of a store manager at their Malmo store. The first person to tag an object got to take it home.
Ford bet on social media to generate buzz to promote the new Fiesta ( story ) and head of social media Scott Monty has been hard at work and winning.
Dell stands out as one of social media’s best examples and have created success through a network of blogs, sale alerts on twitter, and listening to their customers via their community IdeaStorm.
Intuit created a community for it’s Quickbooks software users while being active on Twitter and Facebook.
Starbucks used crowdsourcing to create MyStarbucksIdea so customers share suggestions which others vote on, with the best being implemented.
Blendtec used video for its series Will It Blend and purees everything from the iphone and more for millions of views.
Zappos has an unparalleled commitment to customer service, and social media has allowed them to form more personal connections with customers.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, had the following to say…
“Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
Or you could say that your relationships are your brand.
September 9th, 2009 | Comments Off | Posted in Social Media
With recent social media events and speakers in town, more companies are starting to develop an interest in what social media can do for them. Winnipeg social media is on marketers lips and after discussing with a few businesses, they often understand the value and how it can help with online branding, but many feel its not the time to implement.
Here are a few considerations when thinking about adding social media to your marketing mix;
It’s not a question of whether you do, its a matter of when. And putting it off just means that much more catching up you’ll have to do.
There’s a very good chance your competition is doing so already
It’s strongly recommended to have someone devoted to this role as opposed to adding it to someone’s duties. The majority that try their hand at social media fail as it is time consuming.
I’ve spoken with a few local companies (and a couple south of the border) lately and have found many to be anxious to begin but unsure where to start. What I’ve done is created two options to provide direction. One being provide an analysis and report to clients as a primer, the other being available (retainer) for strategy and direction.
With advertising slowly dying, social media is really a great way to communicate with customers.
Whether its social networking or social bookmarking, social media is creating a paradigm shift in the way we consume media. This is not a mere blip on the radar, but a tsunami of sorts. But don’t mistake social media as another advertising channel. Marketer’s need to realize its more about talking to, and not talking at.
By knowing your audience you can leverage this medium. Note that its not a trend and your marketing efforts should include social media for your online marketing or branding strategy. Consider watching the following video to get a better understanding of social media’s influence.
A prime example of social media acceptance is a site you may know of called Facebook (a social media favorite) with over 250 million uers. It sees more than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on its site daily. In fact, the way we interact and socialize has undergone surprising changes, with one out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year having met via social media. Although you might be surprised to learn that the fastest growing segment of Facebook are 55- to 65-year-old females.
About 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. With about 78% of consumers trusting peer recommendations, and only 14% trusting advertisements. Furthermore, 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Another interesting fact – 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video… on their phone .
Social media, bookmarking, and citizen journalism may jeopardize the future of print media. Its estimated that 98% of the largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news – the news finds us.
If you’re serious about online branding and engaging with customers, you need to include social media in your strategy.
March 29th, 2009 | Comments Off | Posted in Social Media
Listened to Sean Moffit of Agent Wildfire give an interesting talk on social media today. Despite his introduction, it was an interesting hour. Mostly filled with facts and fodder, he breezed through his the slides of his presentation rather quickly although he had a lot to cover.
His talk on the influencers and the decline of advertising was especially interesting. But the one fact that probably woke a few up is the fact that consumers spend 25% of their media time online, yet media budgets for online are still around 5%. Which is a sign of a need to evolve as online media is more trackable. The drawback is it doesn’t reach the same audiences because online media is so fragmented. With print, radio, or television the advertising only comes in so many channels, stations, or publications. But with the web, people are now empowered to create their own content, and not only is the online entertainment more niche, it can also provide better conversion. Even if the numbers are smaller when comparing, its the conversion that counts.
The conversations you pick with your customers and the tools you use are paramount to your brand, as customers are already having those conversations so you should probably be part of them.
Social media isn’t a channel to replace something any more than the TV was to replace the radio, but rather an extension of the tools available. So when your customers blog or twitter negativity, its because they’re looking for an outlet. Communicate with them and provide that channel to address issues and work them through.
