Posts Tagged 'online'

Let’s set the scene, tastefully designed meeting room, inspiring brands and phrases on the wall, spectacular views from the 15th Floor, it’s the monthly marketing meeting.

“I’ve got a great campaign idea”, says the marketing manager. “It’s brilliant, unique and sure to hit home with our customers and prospects.”

“Brilliant”, exclaims the marketing director, “but what social media channels does it embrace? Is there a Twitter api element? How does it tie in to our Facebook page? How many more followers are we going to get?”

“Well we don’t really need social media integration with this idea, I was thinking we’d leave it up to the customer to decide whether they’d engage via social channels”, the marketing manager sheepishly replies.

Queue dumbstruck colleagues and looks of bewilderment around the table.

New campaigns from companies big and small today are awash with references to social media, “come find us on Facebook”, “for latest news, see our Twitter page”, “To find out whether we decide to change the colour of our logo from red to burgundy watch our Youtube video”but is this relentless pursuit of today’s marketers to embrace social media actually having a detrimental effect on the quality of the marketing campaigns as a whole?

Too often social media is used as part of a campaign framework without thought to what it will bring and who might engage. It requires careful thought, and methodical execution to get it right, yet we continue to see countless examples of the social media after thought from brands who should know better.

For some brands there is no doubt, that campaigns with a social media focus have delivered impressive performance.  Look at Whopper Sacrifice or The Streets new mix tape release as a great example of how to embrace social media as part of your marketing campaign. But for every success story there are countless let downs, fan pages abandoned after a month, twitter feeds that never get past the first 5 messages, and Youtube channels with nothing but an old advert on auto play. Be it content, delivery, or execution, creativity is important for all elemnts of campaign activity, a brilliant advertisign campaign will only extend to social media if the thought has been given to how it’s executed in these platforms, who it’s targeted at, and why they would want to engage with it.

But if the creative juices for social media just aren’t flowing, there is another solution.

Why not leave it up to the fan to decide. Coca-Cola’s ‘fan made’ Facebook page is testament to what can happen if you leave the fans in control. So if the campaign idea is brilliant, you think your target audience are sure to want to engage with it, perhaps the social media element should simply be to sit back, relax and allow others to share your content with their peers?

Like this post? Why not follow our musings on Twitter @pancentric ? (Sorry couldn’t resist)

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.

So here I am watching ER and there is an advert for something (doesn’t say what) which features a directive to search “who is she”

Now, I am thinking, wow what a great idea, make sure you are top of the listings for that phrase, after all we know how to do this, don’t we? So I do the search and its just a PPC campaign, no cleverness, no style, no substance. For goodness sake the top organic listing is about CRB checks and there is no mention of the product on the 1st 2 pages.

If all you were doing was getting people to use a PPC link, what was the point? You could have driven them directly to the site without using search at all. It just added an extra click for the visitor and no added value. A really dumb move.

Another of those campaigns where they just don’t get digital. Oh, someone had an idea all right, but if only they’d spent a few % of the ad budget on some proper digital expertise they could have had a much better result.

And I will not dignify the product with a mention.