I wrote last week that real time social marketing was having a moment. It’s having another moment right now in the Oscars aftermath. Unlike the Super Bowl, there was no “:Oreo moment.” Many brand tweets fell flat, as Ad Age pointed out — and they also ran a piece on why not every cultural moment deserves a brand response. I don’t disagree with either article, but I thought Seth’s post was a timely reminder of what the stakes are. Thinking and being able to react in real time is risky — but it’s also energizing and invigorating. Not every moment is right for every brand, but when it is, the opportunity is huge. (And it almost goes without saying that day-to-day engagement adds up to huge opportunity over time, too.) On the flip side, sometimes there is a desperate need for restraint: you don’t want your pre-scheduled content or ads blasting out into the world, oblivious, while an unthinkable tragedy unfolds and the social web becomes a forum for shock and grief.
The point is, in today’s world, you have to be there — already living an “entirely different way of being in the world.” That is the essential piece. Make the moves you need to now so you’re ready later (which, of course, will soon be the now).
Business Insider (via khuyi)
Brilliant — and exactly the questions brands need to ask themselves about their digital marketing.
TechCrunch summarizing Chamath Palihapitiya at the Growth Hackers Conference
Although he’s addressing entrepreneurs here, Chamath’s words are equally true for digital marketers. We need to dial back our obsession with creating “virality” and focus on delivering value. That’s how you build connections with consumers in a crowded digital space — how you become memorable, trusted, and preferred. Value for users can take lots of forms, but it should always be the starting point for marketers.
Nothing Says Sexy Like A Brand New Tire
Newsweek, 1970
Tires are indeed the most sensual of all auto parts. Also, marketing is fun.
American Ballet Theatre goes bold and sexy in their marketing for the spring 2013 season. I like it.
Water is Life, a charity that provides a portable water purification device to people in need, just launched a campaign that takes on the #FirstWorldProblems meme. The video spot above made the marketing rounds this week.
I think they missed the mark here — and it’s a shame that they did, because there was a lot of potential: great conceptual alignment, popular meme, popular cause.
Here are my (first world) problems with this campaign:
1. It feels exploitative. Putting random Haitians in front of shacks and asking them to read lines like this is lazy and degrading. These are real people, not props to help you make a point.
2. Shame is a bad strategy. This campaign seeks to spur people into helping a charity. Great! But its strategy for doing so is to accuse and shame the audience. This campaign implies — even if you’ve never tweeted a #FirstWorldProblem, but have found yourself thinking of one — that you are self-absorbed and kind of a jerk. How motivating is it to be insulted? Especially in social, positivity is the name of the game.
3. It completely misses the point. People know their first world problems aren’t real. They don’t need to be told, and trotting out dozens of people struggling with poverty doesn’t make this point profound. Yes, millions of people around the world face serious problems every day. But scolding Twitter users isn’t going to help. Trying to “kill” this hashtag, as they put it, may be noble, but it’s not an effective way to engage and empower people through social — and it’s unlikely to get their cause very far.
Imagine if they had taken a gentler approach, participating in the joke rather than excoriating it. I don’t mean literally tweeting #FirstWorldProblems, but rather acknowledging the meme’s resonance with its cause, encouraging people to make that connection too, and empowering them to donate. In other words, to say yes, you may have #FirstWorldProblems, but you can be a real #ProblemSolver too. Build a campaign that is thoughtful and respectful but not humorless, and make it inclusive, positive, and shareable.
Maybe I’m wrong and this campaign will be a huge success. I hope I am, since Water is Life is a great cause. But I think they could have done better.
Social Media Marketing and the Olympics
I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Olympic games in London — primarily as a sports fan, but also as a marketer. I’ve talked before about the unique intersection between sports (some of the last truly “appointment-based” TV) and second-screen engagement, and there’s been lots of talk about these being the first truly social games. And sure enough, there’s no shortage of interesting things going on around the event — from the unique Tumblrs that the IOC will be featuring (Olympics Tumblr; Faces Of Olympians; Olympic Fashion; and Olympic Moments) to Facebook and Twitter’s partnerships with NBC around coverage to Foursquare’s efforts.
This is absolutely prime territory for social marketing. How will brands participate in these conversations? How can they tap into the excitement (and volume) around the games and turn it to their benefit? One brand that’s leading the way is Visa, with its “Go World” campaign. I can’t wait to see how engagement around campaigns builds around the games: what people share, how the brands are involved, and what the results will be — for both the athletes and the brands. I’m planning to write a post based on what we see!
Brand Advocacy and Social Marketing
On Mashable today Ted Rubin writes:
Everybody wants large numbers of raving fans singing their praises on social channels, but few are willing to get out of their own way and do the real work that true advocacy requires — relationship building. Time and time again companies build elaborate social profiles and advertise to get more fans, and then wonder why no one spreads the word about them, much less buys from them.
Spot on.
But it’s worth remembering that community management and relationship building make up just one piece of a successful social media strategy. Another (related) piece is to provide great content and real value to your followers. And a third is consistent, diligent measurement of what works and what doesn’t, so that you can adjust your efforts accordingly. Together these tools can help us get to where we all want to be — with a chorus of fans singing our praises and a better bottom line as a result.
A really fascinating post from Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley. In addition to thinking about how public information might change our “real world” interactions soon, it’s also interesting to think about how they already affect our digital actions now, especially as marketers. Think about the last Facebook campaign you ran — how did you use the available targeting data to make choices about your ad copy or imagery? What kind of assumptions (rightly or wrongly) went into that decision-making process?
Another thing I love about this post is that it exemplifies the constant conversation between online and offline. Here’s Dens, having an experience offline that prompts him to think (aloud) online about our increasingly offline/online future. In digital marketing, while we’re trying to create a great user experience online, part of the process usually occurs offline — using a product, experiencing an event — and our hope is that the user will come back to the digital space to share their experience via Tweets, Facebook posts or on Tumblr. This kind of payoff is incredibly valuable — and it’s worth thinking about how can we encourage it throughout our engagement with the user/customer.
Anyway, good stuff to think about!
Half-Baked Thought on Google Glass + Facial Recognition
I did the NYC Triathlon this weekend. The night before the face, you have to drop off your bike at the swim->bike transition area on the Upper West Side. When you do so, the organizers write your age on your left calf so they know what swim heat to put you in the next morning.
Anyway, so after you leave the bike drop-off and start walking around the Upper West Side, you see a whole bunch of people with their ages written on their calf. And with this little bit of data transparency, I couldn’t help sizing up some people (“looks older”, “looks younger”). Chelsa told me that during the race, she was specifically looking at girls’ calves to find the people in her age group, and targeted them as someone she should catch up to and pass to help boost her age-group ranking (she ended up finishing #37 in her age group btw).
It was the first time I was in an environment where normally private data (age) was worn publicly (more like a cattle-branding than a name tag), and it was interesting to see how one would / could make subtle judgements / decisions based on this data.
… which is kind of a sneak peek into what a world with Google Glass + facial recognition that is linked to Facebook profiles may be like. When you can look at person’s face thru your magic glasses and see their name / age / job / relationship status / etc hovering over their head, how will that change the act of sizing people up by their first impression?
Jonah Sachs, Empowerment Marketing: Advertising to Humans as More Than Just Selfish Machines
Great book excerpt. Go read it.
