About Sarah Voges
Sarah grew up in a small town in the Texas hill country that gave her plenty of opportunities to get involved in community activities. She learned, through these activities, the importance of social connections and how much fun it is to be a part of a team. She took this idea of community with her to The University of Texas at Austin and majored in psychology to indulge her curiosity about people’s behavior and motivations. After a few years of working, she decided to study the inner working of the business world and earned her MBA at The University of Texas at Dallas. Now, at Click Here, she uses her knowledge about building community, understanding people, and managing businesses to develop strategy for clients in the digital world and help foster meaningful relationships between clients and customers. Her focus is often on the community aspects of the web and how social networking affects a brand.
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Digital Fun for the Holidays
Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah!
Wait, don’t groan. I know it’s still a little early, but if any of you are like me and pull out your Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving, then it’s time to get in the holiday spirit! I love the holidays, so I’ve put together a quick collection of digital coolness to help add to your merriment this season.
Fun Stuff for You
Are you planning some special meals? Allrecipes is a standard favorite, but they’ve added some fun features to their website, like a personal recipe box, menu planners and shopping lists. They have an app, too, so you can figure out what to do with the leftover turkey without leaving the couch (we know, it’s the tryptophan). And for those of us in warmer climates who can still break out the grill, Weber’s On the Grill app is also full of yumminess.
Speaking of the couch, don’t forget to download ESPN’s ScoreCenter so you can keep up with all the great rivalry games and championships this time of year. Tell them who your favorite teams are, and they’ll make sure you always know the latest play. (It’s also good for keeping husbands happy when you take them to the work Christmas party on a Saturday during football season.)
For those of you planning on entertaining lots of guests, you can find great ideas on everything from holiday decoration ideas to inventive recipes to tips for great parties on Pinterest. Since I’ve talked about this bit of coolness before, let’s move on to finding the perfect gifts.
I
f you’ve been put in charge of the office or family Secret Santa tradition, check out Elfster. You can create gift exchanges, invite participants, manage drawings and send wish lists. It includes social integrations, so if my Facebook friends are using it, I can see what they want for Christmas or check out gifts that other people have liked to get ideas.
If you still want help finding just the right thing, check out Mashable’s list of gift recommendation tools that use social to personalize the suggestions.
Fun Stuff from Brands
This wouldn’t be an agency blog if I didn’t touch on a few of my favorite things that brands are up to this season.
This time of year, ads change, and we begin to see all kinds of representations of holiday magic. Sometimes those ads give us great ideas for ways we might start or add to our own traditions. In the new ads from The Home Depot, they feature some cool new ways to deck the halls with ornaments, and the best part is they tell you how to do it. If you go to the site at the end of the ad, you find a video about the project that will link you to printable instructions and all the products you need.
I’m sure we all remember Target’s Christmas Champ, the lovably certifiable lady who is WAY into holiday sales. This year, she’s back with her own Twitter handle spouting tips for your shopping adventures and a YouTube page where she walks you through the finer parts of her sales-hunting strategy.
If holidays for you mean peppermint mochas and red cups, then Starbucks has a fun way for you to pass the time between shots of espresso. Their new augmented reality app lets you scan their signature holiday cups and watch the characters animate. There are also special offers and e-gifting tools available, so you can send a cup to a few of the people left on your list.
This year, when you a buy gift from JCPenney, you can get a Santa Tag with a customizable QR code. You scan the code, record a greeting or message to the recipient and put it on your gift. Then when the recipient scans the code, they hear whatever warm wishes you recorded.
Coca-Cola has a new QR code campaign that takes you to an iPhone or iPad game where you can throw snowballs at your friends. While this might be a good way to pass time at the airport during the holiday travels, it’s part of a much larger “Arctic Home” campaign from Coca-Cola to support the work of the World Wildlife Fund to protect polar bears.
Happy Holidays!
Have you met my new favorite online obsession? Its name is Pinterest. No? Well, let me introduce you.
Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool, an easy way to save things you want to remember on the Internet. It uses pictures to mark your place, and you can organize your collected items into any categories you please. Once you create a profile (which is easy to do with your Facebook account), you can look at other people’s pins and begin creating your own boards. You can filter the pins you see by topics in which you’re interested, such as architecture, DIY and crafts, photography or food. Or you can discover new things by following certain people. When you sign up via Facebook, it helps you find friends from Facebook who are using Pinterest that you may want to follow. You can also find people with similar interests or just follow certain boards to guide what shows up on your home page.
The most helpful tool though, in my opinion, is the ability to link back to original sources. You install the “Pin It” button to your bookmark toolbar, and then you can hit the button when you find something to save on any website. It’ll let you choose a picture from the page to keep as the bookmark, select a board to pin it to and then add a caption. So if I find a recipe I want to try, I can pin a picture of the final product and go back to the original blog or website at any time to use the full recipe.
Pinterest is still new, with its quickest adoption happening over this past spring and summer according to compete.com. So far, the audience is predominantly women.
Because of this, there are few official stats on how people are using it. But that’s half the fun. People have found all kinds of creative ways to use the site, like making visual travel guides. More commonly, I see people create boards to plan their weddings or gather inspiration for their holiday decorations. There are a lot of recipes collected for future trial, and ideas for everything from your next haircut to your next vacation. Other users can like or comment on a pin that you post, so you can use it to get feedback on said new haircut. If you notice a friend is planning a party, then you can mention it to them when you find an idea you think they’d like. The people who run Pinterest have recently updated the interface to allow for the uploading of video, help you find pins that are generating conversation and let you add prices to pins.
Pinterest is not meant as a promotional tool, and as such has not made any indications of how it will work with brands, if at all. I can see some potential, though. Users are already posting products and tips from brands, especially clothes and recipes. Simply making content accessible to this channel, through the inclusion of good pictures, may bring your brand into this trendy site. But for now, it serves as a great tool for your creativity – a place, full of beautiful things, to inspire your next project or find a little encouragement.
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Usually when we talk about brands in social media, we deal with how their owned presences look and act. But there are opportunities on these networks other than just creating and managing a brand page. Today, we’ll take a quick look at what’s possible on Twitter in terms of advertising.
Promoted Tweets to Followers
This is the newest option from Twitter, and it allows brands to place their tweets at the top of their followers’ news feed (regardless of the time of day or how many other people or brands they’re following). This helps to keep a special tweet from getting lost in the user’s stream of tweets for the day, ideally making sure the user sees the tweets they want when they follow a brand – special deals and offers. You only pay when a user engages with the ad, but if the user is checking their feed somewhere other than twitter.com (such as on their phone), they will not see the promoted tweets.
This program was rolled out with a select group of partners that Twitter felt uses its platform well, like Starbucks, Virgin America and Gatorade along with select nonprofits such as The American Red Cross.
Promoted Accounts
Promoted accounts are meant to help you gain followers. The ad is placed in the recommendations of who to follow for users that may be interested in your brand. Twitter uses your current set of followers to create a profile of people that see your promoted account to increase relevancy. The advertiser pays for the people who follow them. Amtrak recently used promoted accounts to double its followers.
Promoted Trends
Promoted trends allow a brand to capitalize on trends relevant to their business. The promoted trend appears at the top of the trend list and when clicked takes the user to conversation about that trend, including any promoted tweets the brand is also using.
RadioShack recently used a promoted trend to support their cycling team during the Amgen Tour of California by purchasing the #BackTheShack hashtag. They tweeted about the race and their team throughout the day and encouraged fans to participate on their Facebook tab, which served as a hub for all of their tour-related content and contests. The hashtag was mentioned 16,700 times during the event, and RadioShack gained 1,200 new followers during the overall campaign.
Other Uses
Opportunities on Twitter are not limited to just the advertising products that Twitter offers. The real-time nature of Twitter conversation can lead to creative tie-ins with traditional advertising, too.
For example, Jell-O Pudding has decided to make America a little happier by giving away free pudding when they’re down. If the aggregate mood on Twitter indicates frowns, Jell-O gives away pudding until the mood returns to a happier place. The company monitors emoticons to figure out how we’re feeling. They have a billboard and website that change in real time to track this effort that ties nicely with their current advertising campaign.
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We’ve talked about what it takes to bring a brand into social media and the benefits for doing so, but let’s not forget that one of the best things about social media is that it’s fun. And participating in the fun is a wonderful way to give your brand a personality or revive it for a new audience. We’ve already seen a few great examples, such as the Toyota Swagger Wagon and Ford, but developing your cool factor requires understanding cool.
Defining cool is not easy to do. Webster tells us it’s slang for very good or excellent. And Urban Dictionary has lots of options, but basically it’s the same idea. For me, defining cool takes me back to high school where I was the band nerd and therefore less cool (for the record, being a band nerd totally paid off). So I won’t pretend to have some magic formula for how you, too, can be cool, but the brands that seem to get the buzz have a cool factor, so this post aims to try and figure it out.
From the analysis of both the brands and the people who have been thought of as cool, I’ve developed a few criteria:
- Be unique
- Be you – I know it sound the same as #1, but I mean it a little differently, so hang with me for a second
- Be likeable
Be Unique
Part of what makes something cool is that it’s different. It doesn’t have to be way out there, but it is admired for what makes it unique or how it did something in a new way. When the iPhone came out, it was cool in part because of the Apple brand, but more so because it created a mobile phone experience that was very different than any other mobile experience at the time.
Remember that Old Spice campaign? Of course you do, it’s everyone’s favorite example. But everyone mentions it for a reason. I imagine that, previous to their success in social media, Old Spice needed young men to stop thinking of them as just a brand for their fathers or grandfathers. So they decided they’d try talking to this group in a new way – break a few unwritten rules – and do something interesting and unique. They now have brand equity waiting to be turned into sales because they found a way to be “cool” to a new audience by using existing platforms in a new way.
Be You
Ever heard someone say, “They’re trying too hard?” That’s what happens when you try to be cool, but it doesn’t match who you are. In short, it’s the recognition that we can’t just copy a technique that worked for someone else, but must really consider what will work for our brand. Think about what your brand does well, and then think about how social media as a technology can capitalize on those strengths to find that unique path for your brand.
Conan O’Brien is a great example of someone who stuck to what he does best, making people laugh, but found success by sharing his talent in a new way. That success came in the form of 3.2 million Twitter followers, a great social media strategy, and a live comedy tour that led to a hit new show on TBS. By his own admission, his fans pushed him into new media, but now he has become one of the biggest innovators in terms of connecting his brand of funny with his audience. Interestingly, his thoughts on how the traditional and new media intersect are pretty simple: create great content, then use technology to share it.
Be Likeable
Cool is perceived. People have to like you or something you do to call you cool. That doesn’t mean you have to be universally likeable – although that will probably get you bigger pass-along rates – but you do need to be likeable among your target audience. After all, the point of your efforts is to create a better connection with your customers, so that filter should be used when planning social media initiatives.
The Bronx Zoo is a pretty typical Twitter account, posting news, event information, pictures and “behind the scenes” bits from the zoo. Then they lost a cobra, and some clever person started the Twitter account @BronxZoosCobra where she tweeted about the snake’s adventures around New York City. This very likeable new side of the zoo gained 239,757 followers in the first four days of the cobra’s exploits. This was not an officially run Twitter account to anyone’s knowledge, although the author of the tweets has not been confirmed. The fake Twitter account and news coverage did, however, help the real Bronx Zoo gain about 6,000 new followers during the week the cobra was missing.
The instant popularity of the cobra’s Twitter page spawned other accounts, like the disgruntled zookeeper, a feisty mongoose and recently a peahen for the bird that wandered away from the zoo on May 9. The Bronx Zoo didn’t try to stop the person posting as the cobra, possibly because they saw it as a way to “connect people to wild nature” as their website states or possibly because they were busy looking for the cobra. Either way, it would be interesting to see how the Bronx Zoo could incorporate the fun personality that made the cobra so likeable into their own initiatives, maybe even partnering with the anonymous tweeter to help her do more of what she’s already doing well.
That’s it for our social media series. Do you have other examples of brands developing their “cool factor” in social media? Do you have another definition of cool? Leave them in the comments.
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Being involved in social media provides you with a real-time platform for two-way conversation with consumers. So far, we’ve focused on the brand’s end of the conversation. Social media was built on the same principles of social interaction we experience offline, and good communication online or off requires us to be good listeners. So how and why does a brand listen online?
Customer Service
Listening to someone makes him or her feel special. Really listening also means we are better equipped to communicate with them in the future because we’ve really understood a need or remember something they like. These little things allow us to build a strong and personalized relationship. Listening and responding to customers on an individual basis online can also build a personal relationship that can go a long way to converting a potential detractor to a promoter or a current customer into a raving advocate. Listening in this way opens up social media to be a very powerful customer service tool for your brand.
Continuous monitoring and responding in social media, again, takes some investment, but it’s an investment that can provide insurance against the expense of future problems. If Facebook becomes a viable customer service channel for your business and listening to the conversation causes improvements that create happier customers, you save with fewer calls to a call center and less negative comments online. In the event of PR crises, you have an established channel of communication that can be used to answer questions and diffuse negatives on the brand or sales. Below is an estimation from Forrester of what a medium-sized business could expect in value of risk mitigation:
Research
You can also think of social media as a giant focus group. Even if you aren’t actively participating in the conversation, people are talking about your brand. It is a great place to hear directly from consumers about what they think, but unlike the typical focus group, you can’t usually direct the conversation. You also can’t recruit for a particular demographic, so remember this type of research is mostly qualitative. That said, using social media as a research resource can help you glean business and consumer insights. There are a few types of research you may want to consider:
Campaign Evaluation – Taking a look at consumer conversation before, during and after a campaign (or a competitor’s campaign) can give you an idea of the impact that campaign had on the frequency of brand mentions and attitudes about a brand. If your goal is to generate word of mouth, this can provide some metrics to help you measure success. If a competitor’s ad stirs up buzz around the office, this can be a good check to see how mainstream that buzz becomes.
Brand Health Online – Regular monitoring of conversation can help you track trends in conversation about your brand, detect changes in how your brand is discussed in relation to your competition or help you find and address customer issues or potential PR issues.
Insights Mining – Using your business problems or interests as guidance, you can create queries that allow you to find relevant consumer conversation. There are many buzz tools out there that can help you with finding this data, but it’s more than just looking at the number of times your brand is mentioned or whether the sentiment is positive. Finding insights is about understanding how trends in conversation develop over time or how consumer opinions can inform other parts of your business. This type of research requires the most investment, but social media data, combined with traditional consumer research and business knowledge, can lead to very actionable ideas for products, services, advertising and more.
There are some times when you can direct the conversation, particularly when the community created is your own. If you have a good community of fans online that likes to give you an opinion, why not ask a question and hear directly from your consumers? My Starbucks Idea is one of the best examples of how a brand has created a community explicitly for asking consumers to tell them what they could do better. They’ve launched over a hundred ideas that impact products, customer experience and corporate responsibility. Considering they’re still launching them, it seems listening has been good for business.
You don’t have to literally build your own community though. Vitamin Water made its Facebook page its only website and used its fans to crowd-source a new product that carried the Facebook logo and the name Connect. Building a brand is about creating a connection with the customer. Creating that connection in social media requires good listening skills that can help us create stronger relationships, strengthen our brand for the future and discover new ways for our business to be successful.
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In the beginning of our series, we talked about making an investment in social media and creating great content. Any time we make an investment, though, it’s important to know if it’s paying off. Fans, followers, views and retweets are all easy to measure and give an idea of reach, but it can be hard to figure out the value of a retweet or Facebook fan (although some have tried). Usually we’re looking for a return in the form of sales, but connecting social media to the sales process can be difficult. Today we’ll take a look at some specific examples of how social media and e-commerce can interact.
Coupons and Deals
The primary reason (see graph below) that someone chooses to follow a brand on Facebook is to have access to coupons or deals. Thirty-one percent of people on Twitter cite wanting to save money as the reason why they follow a brand, just behind getting updates on future products or engaging with the brand. Providing access to deals or coupons or informing fans and followers of special events and pricing can generate sales. Offering deals exclusive to those interacting with you on the platform also gives them a reason to fan or follow the brand. For greater targeting ability, location-based applications can be used to tie in to the social media experience.
Bringing E-Commerce to Social Media
Facebook is quickly becoming an entrance for people’s Internet experience and sometimes the filter through which they choose to experience the rest of the Web. Based on the premise that some users don’t want to leave Facebook, some retailers have brought the option of buying their products directly to their brand pages.
JCPenney went all in by offering their entire product catalog on their page:
Some believe that moving everything from your company’s e-commerce site to Facebook has some disadvantages. People may not want to shop where they socialize or may trust the security of an e-commerce site more. Depending on how the site is set up, you may lose the opportunity to include purchasers in your company’s database for CRM purposes. Another way to bring exclusives to Facebook is to use your status update. This allows you to select certain relevant products, offer a special opportunity to your fans or followers and even target certain areas. Below is an example of how our client, The Home Depot, took an innovative approach to including commerce on their Facebook page.
Bringing Social Media to E-Commerce
One of the best benefits of social media is that it provides social context to our Internet experience. We can easily connect to friends and family and see what they like or find interesting. With the release of Facebook’s Open Graph API and other sharing tools, a brand can leverage that social context to increase sales on their own e-commerce site. Zappos has done this with their website by allowing visitors to see what their friends like, share or blog about a product, or read reviews.
Indirectly Influencing Sales
What if social e-commerce is not meant for you? Connecting your efforts online to financial measures, as the traditional meaning of return on investment implies, is difficult if your pages are not tied directly to e-commerce or traceable actions, like redeeming coupons. But that doesn’t mean your social media efforts aren’t generating results. In fact, social media can play a major role in influencing offline sales. Some studies show that likelihood to purchase or recommend increases among Facebook followers.
While immediate sales may not be easily correlated to one project or initiative, it stands to reason that better engagement online should have a positive impact on sales through improvements to positive affiliations or keeping a brand top of mind.
Outside of becoming a fan or follower, social media can encourage or facilitate the sharing of opinions. While some unhappy customers may comment, providing happy customers with easy ways of sharing (think Facebook Connect or a plug-in) can lead to better product reviews on your website or service reviews on sites like Yelp. As we discussed in the first of our series, social media can also amplify the success of offline media efforts to increase the reach and impact of a campaign.
Ford has seen great returns from their efforts in social media. Below is a video describing how Ford has used social media and Facebook to build real word of mouth, particularly among Gen Y, to create awareness for the launch of the Ford Fiesta. These efforts resulted in ten times the usual number of reservations for a car’s launch. Find out about that project, their exclusive Facebook introduction for the Explorer and how else they use social media to generate results.
Scott Monty, Ford from Michael A. Stelzner via Social Media Examiner.
Sales are a very important part of what we do in social media for our brands, but social media can provide value in more intangible ways as well. In the next part of our series, we’ll discuss how social media can be used as a research tool.
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In our first post, we talked a bit about making an investment in social media and what that means in terms of time, money and integration. Once you’ve decided to invest in social media, it’s important to get the most out of your investment by utilizing what social media does best: providing a direct and ongoing line of communication with your customers. That means you need content. The benefit of social media versus other channels is that you have some ability to tailor the message – for example, you know that your Facebook posts are all going to people who “like” your brand or you can send a status update to just fans in a certain state. You also have the ability to respond in real time, so when developing the guidelines for content creation, these benefits should be kept in mind.
Create Share-Worthy Content
Social media is a communication channel characterized by its interactive nature and ease of sharing information. Creating content that people want to interact with and share, then, is an important part of success in social media. Most people share information that they find relevant to them, especially when they think it will also be relevant to the people to whom they are passing information.
The chart below shows that the top two types of content Internet users are most likely to share are related to the people they know and connect with online. This is usually content that brands aren’t really privy to. In some ways, brands can provide platforms for sharing information or creating news relevant to a person’s friends or family. For example, the “like” button essentially tells the person’s connections the news that they like a brand or piece of content. Taking it a step further, fun tools like Elf Yourself from OfficeMax allow a person to create their own content that’s both relevant to their connections and branded.
Embrace User-Generated Content
That brings up another topic, user-generated content. Comments on your page, customer service success stories from Facebook or videos submitted on YouTube in a contest can all be used as content in future social media efforts or advertising. Some brands, such as Trident, have used comments from online in their print ads or videos submitted through contests in new TV ads. The creativity of some of your fans may provide a fresh, new perspective on your mass communications that you may not receive in more traditional channels.
What your fans say can also help build an active community around your brand. For example, the Eat Mor Chikin Cowz on Facebook post pictures for their fans to caption. Lots of fans comment and like the photo, generating conversation on the page and encouraging interaction with other fans.
Integrate Mass Media Content
What about using some of your campaign assets, such as a commercial? When it comes to sharing that information online and getting people to pass it on, creativity counts. A Millward Brown study in the International Journal of Advertising showed that measures used to predict the success of a TV ad, enjoyment, involvement and branding, also predict the likelihood that a TV ad video will go viral online. But the online space is even more cluttered, so distinctiveness gains importance. Most articles on the subject point out that being funny is the most important factor, as comedy gets you passed along the fastest.
You can also use a TV campaign as a jumping-off point for your online efforts. For example, Toyota used the family from their TV commercials for the Sienna minivan to create a series of online videos that were funny and used the online medium really well. They were able to expand the story from their TV spot in a shareable form that people were willing to pass on because of its entertainment value.
Be Authentic
Let’s consider why someone is on a social network in the first place. They are primarily there to connect with friends and family, so we don’t want to get in the way of that (i.e., fill up their news feed with so many posts that it doesn’t let them see personal posts). Because social media is a two-way communication tool, people expect to get real answers when they post a question to your page and, regardless of where they connect with you, expect a consistent experience. If your brand were a person, how would he or she talk? What would he or she be interested in? Use that personality, tone and set of interests to guide what you choose to talk about in social media. This will help create a consistent experience between what your customer sees from your ads and products and what they interact with on Facebook or Twitter.
While you can prepare some of your content in advance, sometimes you need to respond quickly. Having a framework for what your brand does in social media to check real-time answers against will help maintain consistency. Remember to keep it relevant, too, by watching what your fans are sharing online or playing off events or news that your fans may find relevant.
Remember the Eat Mor Chikin Cowz? They are all about saving their hide, so they had something to say about Lady Gaga’s fashion choice when MTV asked:
If you try too hard to be “cool,” but it’s off brand, people will recognize it as a stunt. Your brand should sound like a real person (or cow) that your fans would be friends with in the offline world.
When determining what your audience will find relevant or interesting, consider listening to what they already talk about in the space before you join in. Listening to conversations can be just as important as creating conversations in social media. We’ll talk more about what listening can do for your social media efforts and business in the next part of our social media series.
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Social media has become more than just a hot topic, transforming into a fairly mainstream communication channel that presents new opportunities for brands to talk to their customers. Just like any other marketing channel, it should be entered into with a good understanding of goals and a plan for participation that aligns with your brand’s overall strategy. There are a lot of factors that go into creating successful communications in the social media space, so in this series, we will be taking a look at both the ingredients of a good plan and the benefits of participating.
Part 1: Making the Investment
Just like any new project, you have to make an investment, of both money and time. Social media is not free (just ask ClickZ). Granted, many of the tools that enable our interaction with consumers online are free: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. While the lower cost to entry is certainly a benefit, it does cost money to develop any specialized pages or content. I don’t bring up this point to scare anyone away from participating, just to emphasize that for social media to be successful, the time and, sometimes, the content required will need to be part of your budget.
A good social media presence is an active one. Once you’ve taken the time to create a Facebook page or create and post a video to YouTube, you have to stay and participate in the conversation to maximize the impact. Facebook fans expect value in return for their friendship with a brand: attention, exclusive knowledge of the company or brand’s activities, coupons and giveaways, or a closer relationship to a beloved brand. But it’s hard to feel close to a brand that’s silent. Someone needs to be there to respond to customer service issues, create and push interesting content and, in general, encourage the bond you’re hoping to create by starting a social media presence in the first place.
Part of making your money and time worth it is creating an integrated approach. The first form of important integration is within your business. The person who posts a customer service question on your Facebook page doesn’t care that the marketing team is in charge of answering, so to answer properly, your social media team will need to have planned channels of communication with the other business groups in the company to represent your brand well online. They need to be know-it-alls, essentially, or be able to find the right person to answer the questions very quickly. In addition, they should know how to communicate within the appropriate personality and tone of your brand.
Social media should not occur in a vacuum. Many clients talk about creating a viral campaign with the expectation of massive, free exposure. Sometimes that happens. Most of the time “viral success” requires a push. The Super Bowl ads that receive millions of views online do so after being presented to the largest TV audience of the year. Facebook pages see a lift in the number of likes when they include the call to action on their page or promote their page with paid ads. In fact, 75% of Facebook “likes” for brands come from ads. It doesn’t mean that the earned media can’t exponentially impact reach and effect, as it did when Procter & Gamble took their popular new character online with the Old Spice videos and Twitter, but it does mean there is room for paid and earned media to work together.
While we’re talking about paid advertising to support social media, let me say a few words about Facebook advertising. Facebook has several products, including engagement ads that appear on people’s home pages and encourage interaction through event invitations, polls, virtual gifts or video, among other options. Buying engagement ads usually requires a minimum investment of $25,000, but they also have ads that do not require interaction or can be run on other pages within Facebook, such as those you see next to a friend’s profile. You can create your own ads to fit whatever budget you have available. The Wall Street Journal puts the cost per thousand at around $2-$8 on average. Facebook ads can be targeted based on public demographic or the interests information that a user provides.
But you don’t have to buy an ad to make social media work with your offline campaign. When Barbie launched its latest ad campaign, they used their Facebook page to allow people to contribute to the idea, understand what resonated with their customers and continue what they felt was an important conversation.
The commercial:
The Facebook page:
The TV commercial is a new and interesting way to remind people of Barbie’s history and what she could stand for, but without the use of social media, it would simply be Mattel trying to reposition the doll rather than a bigger conversation and effort to impact their audience. And because they have a well-integrated social media presence, interest in their new commercial helps bring traffic to all their social media sites.
So make social media a real investment and make sure it’s part of your bigger plan. Stay tuned for more tips on social media in the coming week.
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In May 2010, at the height of season finales, Hulu ranked second only to YouTube in number of videos viewed. In August, Hulu expressed interest in a public offering, and eMarketer examined the pros and cons for advertisers, including the better content greater resources could secure versus the risk involved with turning content providers into competitors rather than owners. Also noted in the article is that advertisers view online television shows as a less risky place to participate in video ads online. This got me thinking…
How does online differ from television for advertising within a television show?
Let’s start with some basic statistics:
Although the number of people who watch television online is increasing, the in-home set is still our favorite way to watch our shows. People turn to the Internet for television shows because it allows them to watch television whenever and wherever they want. According to eMarketer, cross-platform viewers – who watch shows online and on the set – most frequently go online to watch an episode they missed or catch up on previous seasons and many missed episodes.
Younger audiences, especially 18- to 24-year-olds, participate in time shifting much more, taking advantage of the Internet’s convenience. Although it varies depending on the show, online viewers of television shows tend to be younger, more likely to be male and more comfortable with technology.
Comparing Ad Performance
The act of seeking out content online plays a big part in viewers’ engagement. The sense of empowerment makes viewers more receptive to ads, and the notion that advertising is the reason for free availability of the content is still around – unlike in television, where ads are viewed as an interruption. The environment also enables engagement because the user is required to click during the viewing process and is exposed to less clutter. In general, attitudes toward advertising are more favorable among online video viewers:
Hulu reports that 90% of its users think the ads they watch on the site are less annoying than those on television. Nielsen did a study that compared video ads run during online TV shows with their corresponding television ad. The online ads outperformed their traditional counterparts in all measurements.
Nielsen’s study only measures recall, not clickthrough rates or interaction, important metrics in the online environment. When the set of ads in an episode creates a story or a building experience, the ads perform better. Even if it’s not as interactive as a branded game, at least providing a link out to a website or more information is important, since 43% of cross-platform users stop a show to explore an advertiser’s website.
Overall, advertising in a television show online provides a unique opportunity to target a highly engaged audience that’s younger and technologically savvier than your usual show viewer. While this audience is smaller now, it is likely to grow significantly and begin mainstreaming as more people utilize Internet services. Most importantly, combining an engaged user with an engaging medium like the Internet provides a chance to create branded experiences and associations that can positively affect consumers’ attitudes about your brand.
Here are a few things to consider when getting involved in online television advertising:
1. Try repurposing a television ad. Some studies show that this type of ad performs well online and maintains a similar experience for both your traditional television and Internet viewers.
2. Consider your target. The demographics are a bit different online, so if you’re looking to hone in on your younger, hipper segment, this may be a great channel. You may want to consider how to create a more interactive experience for this tech-savvy group.
3. Measure the results. Online television provides the sensory benefits of television with the measurability of the Internet, so adding a brand study to your online television will give you a better picture of what specific metrics online television can effect for your brand.
4. Review your options. Television is available from multiple services online, with the most popular being Hulu and network or show websites. Some allow full-episode sponsorship or companion ads for your video placements. Hulu even allows viewers to choose whether they want to watch one longer commercial before their show begins or about five shorter commercials through the show.
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The rise of Foursquare and Gowalla have brought geotargeting into the forefront of emerging technology for advertising. But there are many other ways to connect to customers using their locations, from other location-based services to using social media outlets in new ways. ClickZ recently highlighted some case studies involving other services (some with more users than Foursquare) in the geosocial marketing space. We’ll take a look at the trends we see developing in this new field.
Checking in to Win
Online gaming has become a bit of an online darling with widespread adoption across multiple audiences. This social gaming trend has spilled over into mobile through location-based services.
Booyah’s MyTown is a GPS game that allows its 2.3 million users to check in to real-world places and earn rewards. Players can buy their favorite places, and other users pay rent when checking in during the day. More check-ins open new levels of the game. Olay recently used the gaming platform to target female users who check in at stores and pharmacies that sell their skin care products. The player can complete a quiz to get a personalized recommendation for Olay skin care products. An accompanying survey showed that purchase intent was higher for the suggested product when suggested through the game.
Social Networking Goes Local
Checking in is meant to connect you to new places and potentially a new community of nearby people. This means it’s the perfect tool for enhancing how we communicate with our real-life friends or make new contacts.
Available across multiple phone platforms, Brightkite lets users check in using an app, a mobile web browser or simple text message to connect with people in the area through Brightkite’s community. The “social discovery tool” tells you who and what places are around you and what happened at a place, in addition to the ability to share geotagged photos and notes with others nearby. Starbucks has found Brightkite useful in four ways: giving away a Frappuccino badge for the most check-ins, sending special offers to customers checking in with a competitor such as Dunkin’ Donuts, timed offers to morning customers for afternoon snacks and promoting its Via instant coffee line when customers check in at supermarkets.
The giants of social media have taken notice and are quickly incorporating geotagging into their current services. The microblogging site Twitter recently announced the addition of Twitter Places, which allows users to include a place with their tweet using automatic location detection or manual entry. The places are all searchable to help users find out what else is going on where they are.
Sapient Nitro is using location-enabling to support their Marco Polo game for participants of the Cannes International Advertising Festival. Players communicate their location in a tweet with the hashtag #marco and then receive nearby place suggestion with the #polo hashtag. The game also encourages players to find an elusive Marco while at the festival, tweeting hints to people who pass near him and awarding prizes to those who find him. The company specifically chose to use Twitter instead of a location-based service because it has already gained wide acceptance and is easy to use.
Facebook has also confirmed that they are developing a location-based application to be released soon, but it is not yet clear how it will be integrated into the social network’s tools. Considering the massive number of users already on the network, Facebook could become the most popular tool for advertisers looking to target consumers at a specific coordinate. Similar to why Sapient Nitro chose Twitter, Facebook has the advantage of a huge member base and user-friendly interface.
Telling an Object’s Story
At the most basic level, location-based apps and games are a means of connecting our virtual experiences with our real-life ones. They can be used to enhance our time at a location through suggestions and interesting trivia, such as Philadelphia’s tourist game with Foursquare, or share our experiences with our online network in a new way. With the use of bar codes and QR codes, some companies are connecting our online experience with the objects with which we interact rather than just the places.
We’ve mentioned Stickybits in The Buzz before as a means of connecting virtual stories to physical goods. The application allows users to turn their iPhone camera into a bar code scanner to upload comments, photos, videos or audio to an individual product. The next person to scan the bar code then sees the added information and contributes his own. In doing so, the product gains a history, and new users can see where other people use the brand and what they like about it. Pepsi has used the bar code function to extend their social media initiative by displaying messages related to their Refresh project.
Why So Popular?
The motivations for massive adoption of location-based services can be seen in some of the broader trends of 2010, particularly the idea of experiences as status (check out Trendwatching’s Status Stories). With luxury goods and status symbols losing importance in a recession and in a new generation’s set of values, the experiences people have are becoming more important. Location-based services provide an authentication of sorts for the adventures we choose to share as well as facilitate shared experiences in places we commonly frequent. Most importantly, it creates visibility for experiences on which we place value.
There is also an increasing interest among consumers to connect to and support their local communities. Whether motivated by green initiatives, a distrust for major national and global companies or simply the desire to reconnect with neighbors, the need for personalized and relevant information is strong. One of the best ways to deliver such tailored communication is to reach consumers where they are, as location-based services do. As many marketers have demonstrated already, there are several creative ways to bring your brand into this space and create a stronger connection with your customer.
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