° see the final slide for end notes and references
In our opinion the long-term use case for
social media has been made: adoption is
growing at an exponential rate; social
media is more trusted, particularly
among key demographics; it‟s at the
heart of the mobile experience and it‟s
about to converge with TV.
Flickr: some rights reserved by joguldi
And while it still doesn‟t have the reach of
traditional media channels, and individual
platforms may come and go it‟s growing so
rapidly that it has now become an essential
and powerful part of the marketing and
communications mix.
The question now is not if or when. It‟s
how?
How do you develop successful, creative
social media campaigns? What works and
what doesn‟t? Is there a guarantee for
success? What might it cost and deliver?Flickr: some rights reserved by L. Marie
Which is why we‟ve developed
this five-point framework based
on our experience of developing
award-winning creative social
campaigns over the last few
years as well as what we see as
industry best-practice.
Flickr: some rights reserved by Todd Ehlers
The framework is not a guarantee of
success, and like all conceptual models
there are some ambiguities, however, we
find that it‟s useful tool to help develop and
evaluate social media campaigns.
Flickr: some rights reserved by minicooper93402
In the long term we believe that social media will be about building communities and platforms not campaigns. However, we‟re pragmatists, campaigns are an excellent first step into social media, and a good way of determining what works best for your brand.
Flickr: some rights reserved Mike_Fleming
concept
participation
content
partnership
propagation
concept
That every great campaign needs a great
concept is a banal observation. However, while
there is some overlap, the types of concept that
work in social media tend to be different to those
that worked in traditional advertising. The primary
challenge of social media campaigns is to
develop shareable concepts. Most marketing
and advertising collateral is not shareable.
You need to create messages that your fans,
or brand advocates, can pass on to their
broader social networks. Because, as you are
probably aware, social media is digital word of
mouth.
So how do you make sharable
social objects? What is it that
makes things shareable beyond
the obvious viral tricks of cute
babies and funny animals. Well
there are lots of different
approaches, however, we‟ve
identified four broad types of
shareable ideas (or social
objects as we often refer to
them).
Offers – coupons, discounts, samples
Utility – apps, customer service
Content – entertainment, news, education
Causes – particularly peer-to peer giving
Align which social object you pick with the aims of the campaign – sales, brand, etc.
However, whichever one you chose, you must then ensure that they are remarkable – in both senses of the word.
remarkable [rɪˈmɑːkəbəl] adj
1. worthy of note or mention
2. unusual, striking, or
extraordinary
so how do you makesomething remarkable, something shareable?
InnovativePeople love to share news on
innovation. Think how car
manufacturers and the tech
industry use innovation to
promote themselves. What
are you doing that‟s
innovative?
ExclusiveScarcity, as economist have long
understood, drives demand. Is
there a limited edition, or a truly
unique experience that you can
offer? For example, fashion
brands now offer access to
catwalk shows with live streaming.
UnexpectedPepsi Refresh was an
unexpected move. And while
it‟s received a lot of attention,
there are many who think that
it‟s not part of a coherent
brand message. Be careful
when using this tactic.
SimpleDon‟t over complicate the social
object. Attention span on the web
is incredibly short. We released
this simple puzzle picture as a
JPG image, there is no
interactivity, it was just a picture,
but we got 1M views in 2 weeks.
participation
“It's because of this
fundamental shift
towards user-generated
information that people
will listen more to other
people than to
traditional sources.”
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO Google
1% heavy contributors
9% intermittent contributors
90% non-contributors
The 90-9-1 rule was
developed as part of a study
by Bell Labs on web
participation, however, the
work was based on already
existing communities of
shared interest. In our
experience it does not apply
to brand campaigns. Levels of
participation depend on
existing brand engagement
and the type of participation
required, but tend to be much
lower than this rule would
suggest.
TWO BROAD TYPES OF PARTICIPATION
Creative and „critical‟.
Voting, commenting, sharing and „liking‟ are all
participatory acts (critical). You need to provide this
alongside the deeper creative participation. All
participation is valuable. Don‟t judge the success
of a campaign on the level of creative participation.
This is because different levels of participation reach different
audiences. Creative participation reaches advocates and
provides depth. ‘Critical’ participation includes the mass and
delivers reach.
Don‟t expect or demand too much. In our experience,
high-engagement brands can expect much higher levels
of participation than low-engagement brands.
So if you‟re Nike then you probably
could get people to the top of a Everest
WHY DO PEOPLE PARTICIPATE?
An MIT Sloan study identified 3 main drivers for participation. Love, glory and money. In our experience, love and then glory are the most effective and authentic drivers, however, we‟ve found that it‟s often a clever mix of all three that works best – a small financial reward often helps with initial participation rates.
And it doesn‟t matter that creative
participation reaches a small number of
people, because you need it to activate your
fans. The small number of genuine believers
who will spread the word to others.
content
“We now generate as much
information every two days as
was generated from the
beginning of human history until
2003.”
Eric Schmidt – ex
Google CEO
This means that scarcity of attention is
the real problem. As Herbert Simon
noted, we now live in an attention
economy.
Flickr: some rights reserved by robinvanmourik
And most adverts, with some notable
exceptions, are not shareable content.
So what do brands have to do?
How do you reach audiences that you
can‟t interrupt?
Brands have to take more responsibility for
creating their own high quality content. As, for
example, Shell did over 50 years ago, creating
the Shell guides, edited and illustrated by great
artists and writers people like Sir John
Betjeman, Paul Nash and Eric Ravillious.
CREATE GREAT CONTENT
Christopher Bailey, the
creative director of
Burberry, has observed
that Burberry is now as
much a media
company as it is a
fashion company.
But it goes beyond just creating great content. Again you have
to plan for two separate audiences. You have to create two
different messages. One for your advocates and one for the
people that they reach. People who would not necessarily
respond to the first message.
Perhaps the best example of this is VW‟s Fun Theory
campaign. The website offered the chance for
participation in a UGC competition (not much more than a
few hundred entries) alongside in depth content.
But the message
advocates passed on
to the mass audience
were the simple short
videos that gave the
campaign enormous
reach. (Over 20
million YouTube
views).
partnership
Partnership
Partnership is, in our experience, a
very effective way of reaching a
wider audience. With Thinking
Spaces for the Economist we
developed the campaign with
influential partners that helped
propagate the campaign through
their own social networks.
And it‟s much more effective if
it goes beyond propagation.
With the Art of the Trench
Burberry co-created the
campaign with The Sartorialist
(and as we did with our
partners on Thinking Spaces).
The Sartorialist helped with the concept,
the art direction and took many of the
initial photographs. He lent credibility to
the campaign (something we find works
best with „new media‟ figures) and both
partners benefited from the association.
propagation
SOCIAL FIRST AND INTEGRATED
The most effective campaigns are „social
first‟, integrated campaigns. We worked
with Grey developing a Twitter and Google
Maps mashup that worked with their
space chair concept for a TVC.
digital platform
DIGITAL INTEGRATION
We advocate a „hub and spoke‟
approach – with, generally speaking,
the social media spokes used for
awareness and recruitment, with the
hub being used for conversion.
46
COST AND RETURNS
There is a perception that social media is
somehow „free‟ or „earned‟ media. It‟s not.
Quality content and partners cost money. To
„earn‟ attention you have to shift media spend
to content, creative activity, channel
management and build. The „free bit‟ is the
exponential return that a successful campaign
delivers.
WHAT’S THE ROI MODEL?
There is no established, general ROI model for
social media. However, that shouldn‟t be a surprise.
We‟re only about three years in. And approaches,
campaigns and channels differ widely.
ROI models will be established as the channels
mature. In the meantime it‟s worth noting that even
before the advent of social media brand advocacy
was proven to drive sales growth, by in some cases
as much as 20%. The results with social media can
be exponentially greater. Flickr: some rights
reserved by sahlgoode
Measure everything. Benchmark against your own activity. Benchmark against
your competitors. Develop your own attribution models, and ROI models. Test
them against others being developed in the market.
CONCLUSION
° Be remarkable
° Align your social object with your
business objectives
° Offer levels of participation
° Think like a media company
° Offer levels of content
° Think about partners early on in the
conceptual phase
° Integrate with other media
° Measure and benchmark
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