Tweet. Blog. Poke. Tag. These non-sense terms are now becoming the latest burden of labor born upon the shoulders of stumped marketing professionals across the globe. There has been exponential scope creep in the growth of socially accepted communication trends. Marketing in a Web 2.0 environment isn’t about creating trends. It’s about optimizing on social opportunity to find creative approaches to support branding efforts. And it’s about the conversion of these branding efforts into goals realization.
There are thousands of social media sites – general and niche- that play host to millions of users every day across the globe. That is a huge opportunity to reach horizontally across primary, secondary, tertiary, and et cetera demographics to develop relationships with your consumers. But every day, there are countless brands vying for your target demo’s attention.
Take your time and PLAN! It is integral to your Brand’s health
You need to be prepared to invest time into the development of both a fool-proof content development plan and a creative strategy. You cannot expect to open a Twitter account on Day One and attract 1,500 followers on Day Two. You also need to manage expectations that your content will not manage itself. Think of your social media marketing campaign like a new puppy – it’s cute and fun when you first get it, but you need to remind yourself that in three years you’re still liable for grooming the dog and cleaning up after its messes.
Failure to take a Tweet or Wall Posting seriously could be fatal to your brand reputation. A weak social media campaign will be destroyed by chatter static posted by online Negative Nancies faster than you can bat your eye. A poorly executed social media campaign will become just another marketing case study about the toxicity of brand manager bandwagon-hopping to branding efforts – another company that bit the dust because it leapt to soon before it looked.
Go online and read about the Skittles social media train-wreck. They attempted clever little website widget to reach a younger target demo through social media, but the execution was haphazard. As a number of blog entries vocalize, it was done better by Modernista years ago – cleaner, simpler, and their execution yielded an interactive widget you could drag and drop across the screen. Who doesn’t want to knock a brand’s website navigation around their desktop?
Our agency lives by the mantra “If you don’t choose your brand, it will be chosen for you”. We take care in meticulously crafting brands for our clients by exploring every nook and cranny of brand positioning, messaging and creative standards. We take our time and define any and all “loose ends” as we make our way through a corporate brand matrix. If you leave even one stone unturned, if you don’t jiggle just one door handle, it will come back and haunt you.
Companies spend millions in product development. Their employees spend countless hours researching, developing, manufacturing, distributing and selling that product. Despite the collective efforts, at the end of the day it is the brand that will sell the product. A company’s greatest asset is their brand.
The marketplace is a giant popularity contest, and consumers want to hang out with the popular kids. Consumers also want to hang out with the rebels, the rich kids, the techies and the Dungeons & Dragons crowd. Social media allows a brand to kick back on the couch with their consumer and talk about common interests and swap stories. Social media breathes depth and personality into a company’s brand.
Attract Brand Residents
Social media marketing is an evolving account planning tool that can help you, my fellow Marketeers, cultivate personable relationships with your consumer. The measurement of success for a social media campaign will not just be “unique visitors” – your well-trained analytic eye needs to also watch page views and total website visitors like a hawk. If you are attracting a high percentage of visitors back to your site, month over month, that’s fantastic. You’ve got yourself a sticky campaign. If your repeat visitors aren’t just maintaining, but they’re also increasing month over month, then congratulations – you have achieved brand residency.
Brand residency is a term we toss around the agency that describes what happens beyond brand advocacy, when consumers actually take up residency in your brand. Brand residency can be gauged by the extent of brand advocacy, website stickiness and the growth of brand community.
Think of a little franchise called Star Trek, and the fanatics we love dearly – the trekkies. Trekkies have gone far beyond franchise advocacy and they actually get a rush every time they salute their Star Fleet Commander or tell off a foul-mouthed Klingon. You want to attract your own brand trekkies. But for the sake of not confusing Vulcans and Mac-philes, we call them brand residents. Your brand residents are the foundation for your sales growth. Take care of them!
Where do you put your campaign?
According to the April 2009 comScore 50 Top Web Properties Ranking (released May 14, 2009), Facebook was ranked #8. This is over other huge web properties like Wal-Mart, craigslist, Expedia, Target and Disney. Twitter achieved 83% growth between March and April and just missed the ranking report at spot #56. MySpace wasn’t even mentioned, despite the fact that this press release specifically discussed social media trends. Based on what we’ve seen in our research and understanding of social media, MySpace is trending down. Certainly, there is a lot of activity on the website, but it’s not knocking at the top 50’s door.
Our recommendations to start a simple social media campaign – grab yourself a Picasa account, create a Facebook company profile and start Tweeting.
STOP! Don’t start yet! Continue to read on my media-trodden compadre.
Picasa
When you upload pictures to your Picasa account, be 100% sure that you are comfortable with the fact that your image could very well end up in a Google cache and show up indefinitely in an obscure image search result for years to come. Are you comfortable with that image you’re uploading will be a pictorial window into your brand that you can’t take back?
Before loading your images onto “the Net” (we hate this term – 1998 called, they want their jargon back), create a contact sheet of all images you’re considering. Let the contact sheet sit overnight. Review them again the next morning, and as you splatter the first morning drops of spilt coffee on them ask yourself “Will this be an embarrassment to our company in five years? Are we trying too hard…is this even who we are?”. If you’ve passed the introspective gauntlet, click ‘Upload’, please.
Update your Picasa albums regularly, update once every three weeks or so. Unless you are a brand in an industry like photography or graphics, your consumers will not look at you as a purveyor of interesting photographic content. They will, however, be interested in seeing what you’ve published online.
We’ve all casually taken a gander at photo albums of friends we haven’t seen in a decade, but who we ‘found’ on Facebook. You’re essentially a brand equivalent to that photo-sharing relationship with your brand residents. They might not know your last name, but they still care enough to flip through.
Facebook
Facebook is certainly not the poster child for freely expressing graphic creative. However, the website does lend itself well to a multitude of content options. You can create a profile, build a company brand page, offer company history and information, play host to brand “fans” (brand trekkies…er, residents!), share pictures and even go so far as spark discussions, the content of which YOU can mediate.
You actually give your brand life with Facebook. People become the brand’s friends. They view the brand’s profile and write on the wall. A brand is free to comment back and forth with their new friends. A brand can have an opinion and can participate in discussions. Hell – a brand can have hobbies, enjoy certain activities and can express itself with musical interests!
Facebook is like the bolt of lightning to Frankenstein’s branding monster. Be wary and careful of the life you give to your brand. Be sure to take care of it – if you give your brand too much power with this new life, it could turn on you.
You need to be prepared that Facebook should be updated at least once a week. Also, be ready to spend a considerable amount of time at the front end of your Facebook page development – remember, if you do not choose your brand, it will be chosen for you! Everything you say will start to define the brand’s identity, even down to your brand’s favorite music artist and favorite quote. This could be a labor-intensive endeavor, but it can really become a great way to develop a “Friendship” with your consumer targets. Check out Coca Cola’s Facebook page.
Twitter
Twitter is full of the Tweets of people chirping from all over the globe. You will always have tweens and boppers eagerly joining the ranks of the newest social media gravy train. But, a common theme that we read while researching Twitter is that this social media channel is overpopulated with social media professionals and/or enthusiasts.
Browse through the content and chew on it – it’s like you are cybersurfing through water cooler chatter. Or, if you want to take the Twitter tweeting analogy (and branding) a tad too far, they’re tweeting like professional pigeons flocked around a bird bath.
Twitter is all about who you know and what you know. Who are you Following? Who are your Followers? And most of all – what are you talking about? Grapple with the idea as to what your social position will be on Twitter. Will you be the smart ass brand? Are you going to be as interactive with your Followers as Pepsi? Are you on the straight and narrow, only reporting facts and figures – no hard knocks from your Tweets? Or are you a shepherd of compassionate content, becoming the Dr. Phil of Tweet-dom?
Know who you are before you start chirping away. Not only will it help attract like-minded consumers, it will make the job of creating content easier. The first 25 Tweets will be a challenge, but after that you’ll steamroll right through. You will have defined your brand voice in 140 characters or less.
Twitter will require hella maintenance. You need to be on your Twitter page two to three times a day, providing content to the content-hungry micro-bloggers. Also, do yourself a favor and sign up for a URL shortening service, like http://bit.ly. Not only will this cut down the number of characters you use in your Tweets, but these services also report click through. Great way to keep track of traffic outside of your brand’s domain!
Social Media – the new double truck
In conclusion, social media has stuck. If it’s not MySpace, it’s Facebook. If it’s not Facebook, it’s Twitter. If it’s not Twitter, well…by then something even more ridiculous sounding will be launched. We cannot control how people prefer to receive their content. But we can control how we disseminate branded content through popular media channels.
Social media offers marketers an opportunity to reach every consumer under the sun in a highly-targeted, calculated fashion. Social media lets you order an audience for your brand message that’s as custom as the espresso drink you order at Starbucks. Tall! Skinny! Extra hot! I need to sell some fitted jeans!
Websites like Facebook and Hulu not only offer profile branding, they also offer behavioral targeted advertising campaigns. Social media is now removing the guess work of “How do I reach a niche market?”. After you develop content, all you really have to do is monitor click-through and make sure your content is updated and consistent with your brand message.
Embrace social media marketing. It’s not going anywhere. You may hate budgeting for social media marketing as much as you begrudge your double-truck 12x frequency commitment, but there is pay-off. Coca Cola has over 1.9 MILLION fans on Facebook. Pepsi holds conversations with their Followers on Twitter. Victoria’s Secret can hand-deliver store promotions to a targeted group of Facebook fans without ever having to access their catalog mailing list. So what can it do for you, other than expand your cyber-vernacular to include some bizarre-sounding verbiage?
Anything you want.
L7 Creative Communications is proud to announce the hiring of our newest blockhead. San Diego based advertising agency L7 Creative Communications announces the hiring of Scott Blair as Interactive Art Director.