All Posts Tagged 'Twitterpage2'
Where in the World Are You?
Have you heard of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Britekite, Google latitude, twitter location, Facebook location (which is due out soon); the new buzz of the web is who will be the leader on keeping tabs on your location. I have joined foursquare and google latitude and started checking in for a few locations around the office and my house, which begs the question how “social” do i want social networking?
For example Foursquare wants you to unlock your world, using your cell phone or text message (US only) by checking in to locations. Using your cell phone’s GPS functionality to tell you what is close to you, suggestions from other Foursquare users, and the ability to add locations. Once you check in you can let your friends know and also share this information on twitter and Facebook. If you have checked into a location the most you become the Mayor of that location. There are also discounts on some Foursquare locations where you could get drink specials if you check in to a location. Check out the video on Foursquare here.
Facebook will be launching their Geolocation based software soon which will integrate with the most popular site on the web. So what will happen when Geolocation hits the mainstream? How will brands use this information? Could be the rise of geotargeted pay per click or location based services; what a great way to target your customers.
This is going to be great for marketers but what about privacy? Do I really want the world and markets to know where i am all the time. If i am at the mall I don’t want text messages from say the Gap saying i could get a discount if i could stop in the store. Imagine all the junk text, emails, tweets, fB messages you would get by just walking around in the King of Prussia Mall. It would be nuts.
There will be a thin line on how people will want their information used. So there are a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to be crossed before everyone is loving geolocation. I think it will be here to stay…What are your thoughts? Concerns? Excited?
Check out Foursquare, Google Latitude, Gowalla, Loopt, and Britekite below
Originally published on
When paid advertising opportunities first opened up years ago on social networks, many brands and agencies tried it. Usually, by the performance standards we typically applied, it failed.
In those early efforts, we found users were engaged with their friends and friend content and were not in the least bit interested in ads. Post-impression activity was equally dismal. Over time, new offerings have emerged but, more importantly, we have all come to better understand the mindset and use patterns in social media and have adjusted the goals of paid placements within social environments to better match those of the audience. Still, our main focus became engagement strategies more in line with the environment and user expectations while social advertising lingered on the fringes with an occasional, small budget component.
While we were waiting for new and better ways to reach social media users with paid media, the social networks both evolved significantly and grew significantly. People now spend more time on Facebook than on Google, look to Twitter for real-time news and recommendations, and generally make their social networks the hub of their online existence. Considering the huge and growing volume of page views and, therefore, possible ad impressions available in social environments, the paid media opportunities simply had to reassert themselves. We’ve seen ad networks like Lotame and others successfully serve and optimize targeted ads within social media. Facebook offered self-serve ads and has partnered with a number of ad sellers, and even Twitter has finally gotten into the ad game.
Changes in the Social Environment Create New Opportunities
Some of the changes recently announced at Facebook’s f8 conference will have a dramatic effect on Facebook’s impact for both marketers and users. Facebook’s new open API will surely encourage and reward developers to further enhance Facebook offerings and make it even more important to users. Openness begets value which begets growth; especially in social media. The availability of easy new social plug-ins will motivate site owners large and small to incorporate Facebook functionality into their sites and drive interactions to their Facebook Pages.
Marketers now share critical digital territory with and across social environments and regularly debate whether their assets and interactions should be housed on their brand sites, microsites, or on Facebook. Often, Facebook wins, not only because that is where the audience resides, but because of the built-in functionality that supports the very kinds of interactions that marketers hope to motivate. As Facebook expands and new offerings emerge from the collective, innovative minds of thousands of developers, this can only get stronger. Plus, new data sharing policies will allow third-party sites to capture, keep, and use Facebook information – opening up new opportunities, likely launching new companies and new offerings if they can successfully navigate the inherent privacy issues. Overall, the future of Facebook and, to a lesser extent, other social environments, appears to favor continued growth in both size and influence.
Marketers Respond
Marketers have learned how to participate effectively in social media by helping to facilitate connections online and offer entertainment, information, or other benefits relevant and valued by their target audiences. They have finally (for the most part) stopped shouting ad messaging through social media but still crave the ability to directly communicate with a targeted group within social media environments. The recent Nielsen study validated in strong terms the usefulness of the social graph in promoting significant improvements in ad recall, awareness, and purchase intent. The key appears to be using social engagement ads to unveil users’ friends who have interacted with the brand by friending, liking, or some other mechanism in an implied endorsement. If it’s not a big surprise that marketers have to think differently about social media advertising and approach it differently, then it shouldn’t be surprising that the ad seller market is responding with new social media ad offerings.
Ad Sellers Respond
I recently had a conversation with Dave Williams, CEO and co-founder of BLiNQ Media. Earlier in his career, Dave co-founded 360i, a leading search marketing firm, and so approached this new display venture with the goal to combine the strengths of search marketing with the audience and tremendous profile data available in social media. BLiNQ Media has forged a strong partnership with Facebook as one of its preferred partners and works with other social networks as well. It delivers deep data-driven, profile-targeted ads using an auction-based inventory system. This allows marketers to buy on a CPSA (cost per social action) basis that limits the risk. BLiNQ ads often include the social engagement element that includes friends’ endorsements and drives results measured in fanning events, application completions, downloads, or other highly measurable conversions usually within the Facebook environment but off as well.
This effort, along with numerous others, combines an intriguing blend of various trends in online media buying, now including performance-based buying and profile-driven optimization with the efficiency of ad exchanges. We’ll be watching as these evolve.
The current opportunities in social media advertising look different from the early efforts and thankfully perform better, but perhaps the biggest change, the real evolution is the way we understand messaging in this environment and the expectations we have for this channel. So, is my first thought in social media paid ads? No, and it never will be. But it is nice to know that there are targeted, reliable, effective options in paid media to reach consumers in their media of choice.
Originally published on
I just came back from SXSWi and had a great time, met some fabulous people, and had a chance to ponder the future of our digital industry – all from the vantage point, communication point, and with heavy reliance on my mobile phone. All around me digital natives, technologists, and interactive practitioners of all sorts were attached by the thumbs to their devices; myself included. How did this #succeed or #fail to enhance the experience?
#succeed
#fail
Was this a good test case for future, population-wide heavy use of mobile devices? Most U.S. mobile phone users do not profile like those who attended SXSW, but I’d be willing to bet that smartphone users in the United States are trending in that direction. We know that many international populations are way ahead of us already. Eventually, I expect the world will look a lot like SXSW did this past week, with a good percentage of the population relying almost minute by minute on the productivity that their mobile devices promise. If we can solve the infrastructure issues that hamper access in many places and improve battery function to reasonably support all the good ideas that proliferate, we can look forward to a time when there are far fewer #fails in our mobile experience.
I would love to hear about your mobile experiences at SXSW.
Originally published on
Back in the early digital days we often fielded panicked calls from in-house marketing personnel whose head of marketing or another C-level executive would demand that they secure the top organic search listings in the major search engines. Thank God most business people now understand both the value and difficulty of that feat.
Today’s equivalent is the overworked, understaffed, and stressed out in-house marketing departments being presented with the demand to start tweeting or get a Facebook page up – yesterday. When your boss comes blowing into the room demanding that you make an immediate splash in social media, deflect any attempt at forcing an ill-conceived tactical launch by asking for a short period of time to gather and present your research, plan, and budget.
The Homework:
The Conversation:
No boss can fail to be impressed by your preparation and the smart approach you will have outlined. This will balance an urgent request with an action plan that puts business goals and audience needs first.
Originally published on
It is easy to be seduced by the power, vitality, and increasingly pervasive influence of social media — so much so that you begin to believe that it can perform magic. In our heated fervor to capture all the potential and opportunities we can, we must be mindful not only of what social media can do, but perhaps more importantly what it can’t.
The reality is that social media can’t fix existing business issues, nor is it a sure-fire solution for achieving business or marketing objectives. Social media can be an enabler and an accelerator of existing core capabilities, values, attributes, and plans. It can even be a catalyst for change. But it can’t magically create what doesn’t exist.
Knowing what social media can’t do will help manage your expectations and those of your stakeholders, thereby enabling you to dig beyond the surface hype and get to the hearty matter of what is truly possible.
Let’s take a look at the key can’ts.
Social media can’t substitute for marketing strategy.
Sad, but true. There are still many companies that think that having a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel is social media marketing. We all know examples of languishing Twitter accounts, inactive Facebook pages, unengaging YouTube Channels, and so forth. Or what about those who think that a marketing objective is to have a certain number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers? Marketing strategies are overarching across media and channels, whether it is social or not. The means, what can be achieved, and the metrics to measure the results might differ across channel. Understanding the opportunities in the social realm and how your marketing strategy can be activated and executed in social media is what makes it marketing — not the vehicle itself.
Without a marketing strategy and objectives, we risk falling prey to the “click-through syndrome.” It’s starting already. Folks are counting up and touting how many fans, friends, and followers they have, with no context relative to their business and, in many cases, no relevance to real marketing results and impact.
Social media monitoring firm Sysomos released a report based on an analysis of 600,000 fan pages on Facebook. What were these pages measuring and what meaning does it have? The analysis showed that the major majority of fan pages had between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than .05 percent have more than 1 million fans.
While all this is interesting — and even potentially relevant — the number of fans, followers, app downloads, or views you have is not a marketing strategy or objective. These data points are reflective of a number of variables, including inherent celebrity or popularity of your brand, active participation, effective implementation of your marketing strategy, promotion of your social assets, as well as the size and reach of your brand.
So, for a Fortune 100 company to have less than 500 fans or followers, you can make a level of assumptions that the marketing strategy or social media program is not engaging its current or potential market in any meaningful way. On the flip side, if you are a small local business or a niche product/service, then these sorts of numbers can be meaningful, particularly given the exponential nature of social media. Building your fan base, just like building your email database, is potentially a viable goal and a metric point — but it is not a marketing strategy.
The number of followers or fans is a measurable number, just as a click or view indicates some level of interest or engagement. Understanding what the numbers indicate and the relevance to your objectives is what is important.
Just as you need to look beyond the click for true marketing impact and success metrics, you have to look beyond the surface metrics in social media as well. Using your monitoring, tracking, and analysis tools, you need to consider the metrics — retweets, incoming links, engagement, sentiment, impressions on your other sites, increased searches, engagement, and so forth — and see how they correlate to your marketing and other business objectives. You can’t rely solely on the numbers. It’s what the numbers lead to that matters. Is your social media program leading to an increase in website visitors that correlate with more sales and impact your marketing objectives? Is it helping to identify new products and services? Decreasing incoming customer service calls?
Without a marketing strategy and objectives, there can be no real measurement for results that support and advance your business goals.
Social media can’t succeed without a genuine focus on your customers.
Social media is about listening, engaging, and responding to your customers. If you are not truly focused on your customer, you will not succeed — period.
Social media can’t be a one-off project.
A successful social media initiative is not a one-and-done deal. From a marketing perspective, you can certainly integrate a promotion to ignite participation, engage more customers, and so forth, but it doesn’t end there. The Friday’s Woody promotion outlined in a previous iMedia article serves as an example of how a one-off promotion without ongoing participation ultimately will cause your efforts to fail. And while they might have close to a million fans, this is certainly not a reflection of any long-term impactful success.
Social media can’t work without organization alignment.
Even if your social media efforts are focused on marketing objectives, you are opening up your brand to the world. Anyone, anywhere can say anything. The purpose and objective strategy and guidelines must be shared across disciplines to respond appropriately to the “what if?” scenario. In addition, regardless of the message platform, it is rare for some customer service issues or questions not to arise, so you need to know and have a process in place to get the information you need in a timely matter to respond appropriately. The same applies if your brand is using social media as a customer service platform or any other purpose; there needs to be an understood process for communication when “stuff” happens, as well as consistency in messaging. HR, legal, PR, marketing, and other areas in the organization must be aligned.
Social media can’t change the inherent popularity, appeal, or success of your brand.
Really cool, fun, and even memorable marketing can’t save a bad product, service, or something that no one really needs or wants. Anyone remember the Pets.com sock puppet? While this was before social media really emerged, the popularity of this mascot was rampant. More than likely, the sock puppet would be a social media celebrity today. “Old world” realities still apply; Pets.com might have been a bit before its time, so it is hard to speculate whether the business would be a success or not today. But the point is that the sock puppet got great awareness and loads of “fans,” but the Pets.com business ultimately failed.
Even if you happen to run a successful campaign or effort that attracts significant numbers of fans, followers, and so forth, this is only going to translate into long term, meaningful success if your brand has value to your customers and you have the substantive goods and means to deliver on the message.
If your product is broken, even the greatest social media strategy or program can’t fix it. In fact, it will bring these sorts of issues to the forefront. Twitter has the power to change the face of customer service, but without the back-end infrastructure, proper process, and effective communication processes — real substance — it will fail.
Social media can’t replace experienced digital marketing expertise.
Being an active user of social media does not a marketer make. A successful social media effort integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers bring real experience to the table. Social media at its best is not planned solely by technologists or inexperienced marketers who just may be savvy with the tools; it requires collaboration across disciplines and proven experience in marketing, particularly digital.
Social media can’t be successful without a realistic level of investment.
Social media in some circles has been coined “earned media,” which like PR usually carries with it a connotation of being free or “cheap.” It is probably fair to say that it can be cost effective –particularly compared to some other forms of marketing — but a well-developed, integrated, ongoing social media program demands strategic planning. It incorporates a host of tools, technology applications, design, and so forth. Strategy development, socially interactive websites, mobile apps, Facebook pages, monitoring tools, analysis, not to mention the time and effort to maintain these elements on an ongoing basis — these investments are not “cheap.” But more often than not, the return justifies the investment.
Social media marketing can’t magically produce positive changes or marketing results for your business. But real magic is not about tricks or smoke and mirrors. The best magic takes a lot of hard work, creativity, experience, and substance so that when you look behind the curtain, there really is something there.
Originally published on
It’s that time of year. We all started off the new year with lots of good intentions to climb new mountains and improve ourselves personally and professionally. It’s a safe bet that many business people included a New Year’s resolution to join the digital conversation either for their personal growth or on behalf of their brand or company.
But a goal isn’t a plan and it isn’t necessarily a commitment either. My fear is that many of these new social media converts will leap into social media without a plan and, like most other resolutions, will have fallen off by Valentine’s Day with the resulting Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter accounts as deserted as the local gym.
The impact of that desertion can be dramatic if customers, prospects, colleagues, or friends are left hanging and the social sphere becomes cluttered with burned out hulls that remind those who stumble on them that you didn’t sufficiently value their relationship to maintain it. Think about it — if you start a conversation and then walk away in the middle of it, you can reasonably expect some quizzical or even hostile responses to that behavior. This abandonment can damage a brand, a corporate reputation, or many important relationships. It can be devastating to the organization’s commitment to this critical effort if the first pass is insufficiently supported or thought through.
While there are some circumstances where a transitory presence makes sense and meets audience expectations — an effort in support of a trade show or conference, for instance — it’s generally best to approach social media as a long term, consistent effort. Like all outreach channels, sometimes it may be more active and sometimes it will be less, but if you open the channel you have to be ready to keep it open. That takes resources, commitment, organizational alignment, and most of all a plan.
Know What You Can Support
It’s hard to be disciplined about anything, and social media activity is no exception. We learned early in the static Web site days that producing good, fresh content on a regular basis is a nearly insurmountable challenge for many organizations. Multiply the content hungry online locations by the number of new online venues and the task becomes daunting.
Making all digital content portable and distributing it in multiple ways helps to cut down on the overall volume of content required, but requires advance planning. In a best case scenario, your consumers will supply the most valuable content as they engage with you and others in your space through comments, reviews, ratings, video postings, polling, and a host of other opportunities; but you need to know how to elicit and encourage that participation.
It’s usually not a good idea to try to launch multiple new platforms at once. To start, pick what is doable (and can be done well), what is the best match for your objectives and audience, and what best leverages your resources. It’s far easier to extend into other social media channels on the back of one already successful effort than to launch a bunch of things at once and hope the synergy emerges. You can plan for a multi-prong initial effort but it requires some finesse.
Know What You’re Looking For
Remember when you only had to measure and monitor your Web site activity, when all you cared about was e-mail registrations or sales or leads or whatever high value concrete tasks you were measuring? Now you need a reliable and understandable way to put your social media efforts and expenditures into perspective with all your other hard work and investments, and you have to quantify the intangible. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with it all.
Create a dashboard that describes in detail your current and desired state and the path to get from one to the other. Set realistic and aspirational short- and long-term expectations so that you can track and celebrate your progress or correct the course as needed. This is the most fluid environment you will encounter. If that attention lags, opportunities will be lost.
Conversation threads can be fleeting — this makes them potentially powerful or ephemeral depending on if you’re listening carefully enough to catch them in a timely manner.
Make Planning a Priority
There are a multitude of reasons that planning for social media is overlooked more often than in other digital efforts. It’s not clear who owns it, you don’t usually need an IO or contract with a third party, the field is new, the opportunities are varied, it’s perceived as more casual, or construed as a somewhat reactive environment. That makes planning harder maybe, but not less important.
Yes, there is a lot of latitude in this area. There are many different kinds of legitimate and productive online conversations you can facilitate in support of many different business or personal goals. Not all of them have to last a lifetime or involve thousands of people but all of them require thought and preparation to make it a good experience for both you and the intended audience. It’s worth the effort.
Good ideas drive good business, bad ideas don’t. Then why do we not place more value on creativity in digital media? Why do we so often dismiss it in social media? If your brand is planning to do anything beyond listening to what others have to say — if it’s preparing to engage in any way — you risk disaster by not thinking creatively about every single aspect of the program: the platform, the strategy, the tactics, the messaging, and the objectives.
As more brands embrace social media, it has become apparent that there is a tendency to focus first and foremost on the technology, the platform, and the apps –the “shiny trinkets”– rather than starting out with a strong, strategically based, unique campaign that embraces (or even invents) the correct technology as a part of the overall creative idea.
I speak of “creative,” the noun, in a broader sense than its usual advertising world definition because social media is forcing a rethinking of the term and everything that goes into it. Great creative is single focused and speaks in a tone or voice that befits the brand. It pushes the envelope, challenges our senses, and forces us to engage with it. Great creative makes us talk about it, impels us to share it, and makes us anticipate when and where we’ll see more. Great creative accomplishes goals.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most compelling (and least compelling) applications of creative thinking within the social media marketing realm.
Before moving on to some of the winners and losers of social media creative, let’s consider the bigger picture.
As creative has made the pilgrimage from broadcast, print, and out of home to digital and social media, progressive creative teams have forced themselves to think less in terms of filling the media buys they’ve been handed by buyers and planners, and instead to think much more strategically earlier on in the lifecycle of a campaign or program. The creative germ still comes after brand objectives are established, but it often follows these questions: What’s the most cost-effective media mix to accomplish the brand goals? How can we build creative concepts around them? To what extent can we successfully execute this unique creative message?
Bill Bernbach said, “Properly practiced, creativity must result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced, creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.” In this recession-riddled economy, there isn’t a client out there that isn’t demanding “greater sales more economically achieved.” Social media is no exception, and that’s where the creativity comes in.
When considering social media, consider your specific goals. Branding, brand awareness, customer service, increased trial or sales — these are not specific enough. Dig deeper. If you were spending $5 million on a TV buy and half a million on production, your brief would have very specific goals, your messaging would (should!) be very single focused. The same applies here. Why wouldn’t it? For example, imagine that brand awareness in the Midwest is 30 points behind that in the South, where the product originates. We need to up awareness and recall in target demographics by 10. And we’re going to do it for a fraction of that aforementioned $5 million. We’re just not going to get it done temporarily during a six week heavy-up.
Here are some basic tips to consider before getting started:
To really understand the value of creative, look at these four examples of how compelling creative (or lack thereof) makes the difference between success and failure.
When in doubt, introduce a critter — and increase site traffic 100,000 percent in three months.
Consider Aleksandr Orlov, a snarky but loveable CGI meerkat with 630,000 Facebook friends. He represents CompareTheMarket.com in the U.K., a website that will search 400 insurance companies to get you the best price on car insurance. Aleksandr is a bit upset that “his” site, CompareTheMeerkat.com is getting hit with traffic that has misspelled “meerkat” for “market.” And that is the relatively simple idea that propels this entire campaign — but there’s so much more to it than that, and it all flows from the creative.
Examining all the creative and strategic elements behind this campaign reveals how intricate it is. Dual websites work in concert with each other; you’re constantly being nudged to the insurance site from Aleksandr’s site, but in a natural — not forced — way. The site pulls you into this completely fictional world with a fully developed character who has a detailed back story. Everything from his accent to his cravat and smoking jacket, to his head of IT and chief tea-maker, Sergei, helps create this wacky, fully realized world. It tells a story, it’s ongoing, it’s got legs, and there’s no hard sell.
The consumer engagement level is perfect: You can download ringtones, voicemail messages, and TV outtakes, and yes, you can actually compare meerkats, just like the site title proclaims. And if you don’t move fast enough, you’ll get scolded by Aleksandr with a threat to send you to that cheap car insurance site.
Why do literally thousands feel the need to comment whenever Aleksandr posts something on his Facebook wall? Because VCCP, the U.K. agency that created him, created a fully realized character and world that his “fans” feel a part of. Why does he have 31,000 followers on Twitter? People feel the need to play a role in his community. They ask him questions, and he responds. They worry about Sergei because they haven’t heard from him in a while. All this from a company that compares car insurance rates.
Of course it’s silly — ridiculous even — but it works. In the first three days of the campaign, CompareTheMarket.com had reached 75 percent of its first monthly goal for quotes. That quote number was up 90 percent over the same period a year earlier, and half the traffic from the meerkat site went directly to compare the market.com.
As is obvious from the level of involvement, this was more than a “dipping the company’s toes into social media” kind of effort. It was a full-blown campaign that launched with TV, but I’m wagering that the extra ongoing social media effort allowed for a smaller upfront TV buy and extended the tail end of the campaign for an incredible ROI. You get out of social media what you put into it. And putting in a serious creative effort up front pays dividends in the long run.
Many brands and all categories have evangelists — people who are passionate or knowledgeable enough to help promote your product with word of mouth. Tapping into that audience takes skill and creativity.
Sony and Ford had somewhat similar creative intentions when they launched the recent Sony DigiDad Project and the Ford Fiesta Movement: Giv
e product to interesting forward thinkers who were very active in social media, then let these influential people create content and (hopefully) become brand evangelists through well-publicized forums.
Ford held a much-publicized entrance contest to determine who would drive away in an as-yet-unreleased Fiesta for six months. It included questions about social media connectivity (i.e., video views on YouTube, Twitter followers, etc.).
Sony reached out to influential dad bloggers — a good match, as the dad gadgets (or “dadgets,” as the company coined them) were strongly targeted to dads. Both companies gave out certain assignments that had to be completed on a monthly basis, but a lot of the user-generated content was free form in the guise of tweets, videos, blog posts, etc.
Think about the investment for a minute: a commitment to lending out 100 cars, or a bunch of cameras, laptops, and projectors, for a limited period of time. In exchange, the marketers receive hundreds of people continually touting new product to millions of followers. More importantly is the exponential buzz factor — from broadcast and print media to tens of thousands of bloggers weighing in with their take on the event, comments on the blogs, Diggs, retweets, YouTube views, etc.
Cost effective? Without a doubt. Easy? Not by a long shot. Results? Let’s just say that Ford recently committed 25 percent of its entire 2010 budget to social media.
A social media campaign can just as easily blow up in your face, especially when millions of people, a giveaway, and a lack of creativity are involved. Take T.G.I. Friday’s “Friend Woody” campaign, for instance.
Woody is the dumb, but somewhat likeable guy you may have seen in TV spots who will get you a (coupon for a) free burger if you become his Facebook fan. We could debate the merits of allowing Friday’s spokesperson to frolic in a hot tub with bimbos, get dumped by his girlfriend because of said bimbo frolic, begin each of his video messages in his ratty bedroom in his parent’s house, or even the generic presentation of “a burger” — but those distinctions don’t hold a candle to what happened on Woody’s actual Facebook fan page.
Thanks to Woody’s offer of a free burger, he’s closing in on 1 million fans. But what the Friday’s people don’t realize is creativity must extend into all realms of a social campaign, and a million fans who are not interacting or engaging means that they showed up for the free burger — and that’s that. Friday’s chose to post only three times since Sept. 27 –the first consisting only of a “Hi” — the other two shilling for Friday’s specials.
With absolutely no brand interaction or presence, the inmates took over the asylum. The 1000-plus comments (which sounds like a lot, but that’s only .1 percent of all the fans) are negative and vulgar. “Fans” complain about not receiving the coupon and complain about certain franchises not accepting the coupon. The wall is full of sniping back and forth between commenters, as well as ads from affiliate marketers. Compare this to comments and engagement on CompareTheMarket.com’s Facebook page, and you see an abject failure to take advantage of social media — and a real chance of damaging brand equity.
A true creative digital campaign would have allowed T.G.I. Friday’s to open up Woody’s world online, not unlike Aleksandr’s ongoing world. In fact, one could easily make the argument that Friday’s — a restaurant whose business model depends on repeat business — is a much more likely candidate for an ongoing online character than a car insurance company. People don’t switch car insurance every two weeks, but most Americans do eat out at least once every two weeks.
Overall strategy aside, creative opportunities existed for many ongoing story lines: Woody’s girlfriend wants to give him another chance. Woody is thinking he likes the bimbos better. Why not engage his 1 million fans and let them decide through a vote? Reunite with the girlfriend, or have another hot tub party?
Instead, Friday’s online social media policy is being dictated by people who are writing messages like these to Woody:
Hey, you stupid little con man… here’s the deal. I will NEVER set foot in another Fridays until I get this stupid free burger you promised me. NEVER. Got it. I’ll bet that lots of the other folks here that didn’t get theirs will do likewise. BTW, what a GREAT marketing tool you found here. I’ll bet you’ve never pissed off so many of your best customers at one time as you did with this fiasco.
If you check out Friday’s homepage, you’ll see no mention of Woody.
As you dive into your next social media campaign, here are a few takeaways from the above examples.
Creatives need to evolve
If your creatives have not evolved to be able to think as all-around marketing strategists, they’ll be hamstrung when it comes to understanding the most effective media to get their idea and messaging across. The media silos are coming down, and creatives need to feel as comfortable working a blogger outreach initiative into a campaign as they are creating a video for a rich media banner or initiating and working a Twitter persona — not to mention being able to recommend one of those outlets as a sound addition to a brand’s strategic plan.
Craft your creative to fit the brand personality and target
Was T.G.I. Friday’s really looking to pump up its somewhat insignificant 18- to 24-year-old male demo by featuring an irreverent slacker who lives with his parents? Did the company consider the overall effect on its brand, and more importantly, its older female demo, which represents its best customers?
A social media program or campaign is ongoing
It’s not like a heavy-up TV buy or an online sweeps with a hard start and stop date. If you create a million-person community, you better have a creative plan to support that community in some way, shape, or form that fits the objectives you set out to achieve. It appears that CompareTheMarket.com has that plan in place. After almost a year, the campaign is going strong. It appears that Friday’s did not have that plan in place. Three months after launch, Woody’s fan page is dormant except for complaints.
Social media provides new creative opportunities around every bend. It’s up to the brand stewards and their agencies to strategically and responsibly tap into those opportunities to achieve predetermined, specific objectives. Anything less will do your brand more harm than good.
John Shanley is creative director of NetPlus Marketing.
…when you’re not able to attend.
All the chatter about this week’s LeWeb got me thinking about the great presenters and learning I’m missing out while sitting here in Philadelphia.
Once I got (mostly) past my initial envy, I set out to do the next best thing – keep up with it all while sitting here at my desk.
Here are some of my favorite ways to stay informed.
live video from leweb with integrated twitter stream
I’m sure you’re reading through this list and thinking “I didn’t have time to attend the show – how am I going to have time to do this?”
Many of the sources I listed above also offer RSS feeds – e.g. twitter, flickr and facebook. If you use Google Reader, I like to organize all my feeds for a single tradeshow under a folder. Then, I can click the folder to get a combined view of all the posts I’m following in date order. I find it more valuable to read posts in combination rather than individually going through each feed’s posts one at a time.
Twitter also has several services that make following trends and archiving tweets easier (e.g. Monitter and Twapper Keeper).
Trade shows are often where products and services are launched, and where new ideas are first presented and discussed. Although it’s impossible to attend every trade show that interests you, it doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from them.
The past few weeks have seen a substantial increase in twitter spam. We see these cycles occur periodically on the social web. An influx of newer users and seasoned users becoming comfortable both play a part.
As they say, the best defense is a good offense – understand what spam is, how to avoid it, and what to do if you do become the victim.
Twitter spam can take several different forms.
Most tweeps share links via a URL shortener – a web site that creates short-length URLs so you have more of your 140 characters available to you for the tweet. bit.ly and tinyurl.com are two examples of URL shorteners.
Unfortunately, with all the good they provide, they also hide the real URL so we don’t know what we’re really trying to look at until we click on the link. That’s how we get spammed.
Protect yourself and your followers. For every person who visits a spam link sent by you, they in turn spam all of their followers. That’s why twitter spam is so infectious. It doesn’t take long at all before your click has been responsible for tens of thousands of spam tweets and DMs.
Another likely candidate are those bots or so-called “services” that offer automatic services – e.g. auto-follow, auto-tweet, or auto-DM. These services need to use the integrated twitter authentication to work, but some of them will abuse the privilege and use your account to send spam.
Before signing up for one of these services do your due diligence. Ask your friends or followers for a recommendation, and google the name of the service and the word spam to see what people are saying about them.
Twitter spam tends to be pretty generic because the same tweet or DM needs to sound appropriate coming from any twitter user. It’s usually something like “Do you think you can answer this question?” or “I’ll bet my IQ is higher than yours!”
If you receive a tweet or DM and you’re curious if it’s valid, go to google and search for the URL they linked to and the word spam. If it is spam, you’ll often (but not always) get a list of people talking about how they got spammed with that link. Then, be a good citizen and DM the person who sent you the link to let them know their account has been compromised.
Some of the URL shorteners have setup ways for you to avoid clicking on bad links. bit.ly has a great previewer plugin for Firefox and TweetDeck has a preview option for bit.ly as well. I also recommend reading Joshua Long’s great article listing many of the URL shortener previewers.
Twitter takes spam seriously too. Follow Twitter’s official spam watch account @spam for current activity and issues, and read through @spam’s favorite tips to help you get started.
Yes it’s a bit of a pain, but preferable to the effort to clean up a spam attack. You’ve invested a lot of time building up your credibility online. Don’t let a simple click of a link damage it.
If you think you’ve done something to start a spam attack, do the following:
I hope this post will help most of you avoid twitter spam altogether. If you’ve been the victim, what did you do to clean it up? Share your story with us so we can all be smarter tweeps.
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