Posts Tagged 'facebook'

This visual representation of social media by Kyle Studstill sums it up pretty well

In the red corner, the latest X-factor cyborg flashes a Colgate smile as he churns through an achy Breaky Brat’s tired ballad. In the blue corner is a soap avoiding anarchist and a preachy song largely notable for its profane repeated catch phrase in a temper tantrum climax. Old Smelly from LA won.

The victory was celebrated and decried. A triumph of popular groundswell movements over the soul less corporate machine. A cynical denial of a poor Geordie teenager’s reward for rehashing last years song in a pretty wrapper. As Jimmi Carr says, you can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter. People are attracted to familiar pretty baubles and well crafted spin. Find the right dog and sheep can be herded in surprising directions.

What this event illustrates is not how popular the X-factor is, or even how many people hate Simon Cowell. What is interesting is that it demonstrates how much untapped potential there is in the music market. The vast majority of the people who downloaded Killing In The Name are not hard core fans but merely disillusioned by their exclusion from a contrived process that often rewards mediocrity and paints the airwaves in coats of beige. He who controls the airwaves controls the purse strings, or at least used to. The ability to control the channels is diminishing fast.

Analogue product has become intangibly digital. Controlled distribution became peer to peer sharing. The rich media promotion machine with its expensive barriers to entry, high production values and smug presenters; is increasingly being undermined by web cams, compressed content and word of mouth communication through social networks. The barking music industry watchdogs, chained to their infrastructure kennels by increasingly inefficient chains of production and distribution; are being overwhelmed by a flood of nimble cats. As everyone who has attempted knows, it is very difficult to herd cats. RATM manged to do it but unifying events such as this are difficult to engineer without appearing contrived.

So what does this mean for web marketing in 2010? There will be a mad rush into social media. Someone will try and engineer a similar download stunt. It will fail miserably. Smart music marketers will target offers into social media via pay per click ads targeting profile preferences, or the friends of those users (hence Facebook’s recent “Privacy” changes). Exclusive content will increasingly be delivered into social media rather than the current practice of rehashing archive material. Social media will become an active part of “live” presentations through traditional media, and there will be more paid download opportunities than you can poke a stick at.

Social media is a tsunami but just having a board is not enough if you don’t know how to surf. The X Factor has a Facebook group with nearly a million fans, a dedicated YouTube channel with over 230 million views and enough tweets to bury the London Eye in pigeon poo; but, they still got their butt kicked by a couple of amateurs. The lesson is it is one thing to have a fast car but another entirely to drive it around the track. Social media optimisation and targeting will be the big discussion point and service offering next year… and yes we can provide it. Thanks for asking.

Q: What happens when someone on Twitter with more than a million followers recommends your website?

A: Your website traffic goes through the roof

But you only know this to be true if you track your social media mentions properly…

Burger King recently launched Singing in the Shower, the digital extension to their breakfast re-launch campaign (which just so happens to have been built by Pancentric Digital).  If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re missing a treat take a peek.

The site, featuring a bikini clad shower girl “shaking her bits to the hits” was recently spotted by celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who decided to “tweet” about the site.

What happened next? Perez’s loyal followers duly flocked to the site, increasing traffic by 3000%, voucher downloads by even more and it helped create a great online buzz about the site with hundreds of re-tweets and blog posts.  All this within 24 hours of dear Perez’s post.

So the question is, are you tracking your websites & brand across social media platforms the way you could be?

Perhaps somebody is talking about your brand right now, sending waves of traffic to your website or creating a powerful online buzz about your latest initiative but you just don’t know it.

There are a number of great tracking tools for Twitter & other social media platforms, Viralheat, Twitterfall, and your trusty Tweetdeck to name but a few. Setting these up and tracking your brands mentions across social platforms is as important as your web analytics and your email tracking.

Don’t miss out on your brands social media exposure, as Perez has proved, social media can be powerful stuff.

Yes it’s true the secret to Social Media success for brands is here. Follow these easy steps and your brand will soon be the master of the social mediasphere….. How many times have you seen that before? There are countless articles from ‘Social Media’ experts (that will no doubt have picked up this post through their social media tracking) telling you how to make the most out of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo you Blog and more.

Well here are our thoughts. Not 10 steps to Social heaven, just one thing you need to do:

1. Find your influencers

Yes, that’s it, just find your influencers. Of course there’s the usual things you have to do, listen to what’s being said about your brand, your competitors brand, products or services related to your brand and find your way into the conversation from there.

But for Social Media marketing success, for your brand, influencers are the way forward. These are the Twitterers, the Facebookers, the Bloggers with real reach, real followings and real influence. If you can find the influencers in your industry, engage them, even converse with them. The result, your message will reach the broader audience more quickly, and with a lot more authority.

We are all just social voyeurs at heart, we watch, we read, we listen but we don’t contribute. With only 1% of registered social media users making nearly 90% of the noise, it’s important to find the noisy ones that everybody looks at.

You can spend hundreds of man hours trying to get a large following, readership or fan base, or you can spend that effort finding the influencers, whose reach is already 5 times yours will ever be. The choice is yours.

Is this the future of digital campaigns?

http://www.skittles.com/

Skittles have had a rather extreme social media makeover.

Product descriptions on wikipedia, promotional videos on youtube, Product advocates/testimonials on facebook all held together with a nifty little app in the top left of your screen.

I like it, it’s a brave move to allow all of your content to be generated by your consumers, but do Skittles realise what they’ve opened themselves up to?

‘Rufus_Jay’ told the twitter community that “Skittles plan to destroy the human race” this morning.

‘julianharris’ suggests Skittles contain narcotics.

One things for sure, it’s already proving a big hit. People are tweeting away about Skittles bold move, with 1000’s of comments already filling the Skittles feed, and hundreds of thousands of friends on their facebook page.

The perfect example of your consumers creating online buzz for you.

Stop marketing to. Start engaging with.