Marketing and the social web can be viewed as polar opposites.
On one end of the spectrum you have monologue based mass market messaging focused on no one in particular.
At the other end you have dialogue based small groups of people deep in conversation they find relevant and interesting.
It's a quandary.
How do we combine these two polar opposites to make both happy advertisers and happy customers when both environments are so very different?
There is a pattern which has been seen in all of the successful social web forays we have seen by brands, it's just that it hasn't been readily identified and singled out just yet.
That pattern is content.
Content as a strategy must remain central to any activity executed within the social web. But 'content' is an ambiguous word, it could mean anything, so let me give you some examples.....
Queensland Tourism 'Best Job In The World': Content was video applications for the job, a Twitter feed, a blog etc. All relevant amusing content which created interest and repeat visits. Also the promise of $150k and living on Hamilton Island for 6 months was a bonus which created the viral element and instant popularity....it was still content which drove the momentum.
Kit Kat Chunky Cookies & Cream: Their content was an online/mobile game called Chungastruck where players could play against their friends, they also had video episodes featuring a character called 'Hans Fagerlund' played by comedian Jordan Raskopoulos who was an expert Chungastruck player. The video content was funny and entertaining while the game kept people engaged and spreading the word.
Bigpond on Twitter: CRM based rather than campaign based and very successful. Their content is regular open communication. So simple but effective.
UBank: Again this is not campaign based - they created a Youtube channel with mini webisodes explaining and simplying financial situations such as the economic crisis. It's not neccessarily the most exciting or entertaining subject, but it's value adding...
What the above examples point out is that a brand's social web strategy isn't really a strategy if a content plan isn't at the center of it.
To give a further example, i don't follow people on Twitter who don't interest me or who don't add value to my Twitter experience. I won't follow glamour models, get rich quick schemes or those who follow for the sake of following....
Would you? There aren't many people who would follow or befriend someone on Twitter or Facebook if they didn't have something interesting to say or to add.
As a brand, if you want followers, friends or (nirvana) advocates then you must be creating entertaining, informative, useful and engaging content.
If your content is all of the above then a social web strategy should follow suit pretty easily....
Content is king
Vintage Wilkinson Coffee Ads - I'm drawing comparisons...
I just love these early 50's muppet adverts for Wilkinson Coffe.
Apparently these were made and directed by none other than Jim Henson!
The ads had to be 10 seconds and no more which was a bit of challenge but i think the content is hilarious (if a little violent).
The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads -- blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent, but funny, acts.
Ad number two:
Wilkins: ''Care for a cup of Wilkins Coffee?"
Wontkins: "No, i don't drink coffee"
*BANG - Wontkins is shot in the head*
Wilkins: "This has been a public service announcement"
Ad number three:
Wilkins: "We're here to persuade people to drink more Wilkins coffee?"
Wontkins: "What's the club for?"
*SMACK - Wontkins is clubbed over the head by Wilkins*
Wilkins: "To get their attention"
Ad number four:
Wilkins: "You getting on the Wilkins coffee bandwagon?"
Wontkins: "No"
*Wontkins is run over by the Bandwagon*
Wilkins: "You either go with Wilkins or you just don't go"
I can't help but draw comparisons with these hilarious ads and the attitudes of marketers.
Whether traditional or digital, it doesn't matter, we're constantly clubbing each other over the head and it's our way or the highway.
Ridiculous but true :-)
Twitter Love Story: Tweets bring two homeless bloggers together
Twitter is amazing and unusual in that it has opened our eyes to new things we would potentially never have experienced before.
Such as breaking news stories before even the media has gotten hold of the information, coverage of a Moldovian revolution, inside details about the life and loves of Stephen Fry and, more recently, a topless shot of Lindsay Lohan....?!
It's truly a special place....
Now following all of the above, a little Twitter romance doesn't seems especially out of place, there are even Twitter dating sites popping up such as MyTweetheart.com and Twitterbirds.com, but there is one recent romance on Twitter that has captured the hearts of Twitterers worldwide....the transatlantic love story of two homeless people named Bri and Matt.
Now, you might be thinking, how the hell does a homeless person have access to Twitter or the internet or even a computer?! Well, as it turns out, using internet cafes they can access just as regularly as we do.
Mark was made homeless during March of 2008 following a sequence of events which were largely beyond his control. He had worked all of his life, he was a homeowner and did not have alcohol or substance abuse issues. He was computer literate and was a writer and a blogger who used Twitter.
Mark began to write about being homeless on his blog 'Homeless Tales' and also started to monitor Twitter using Summize to alert him (via RSS)to any tweets containing 'homeless' or homelessness'. And this is how one homeless guy got to meet a homeless girl on the other side of the Atlantic and fall in love.
In March 2009, Mark was alerted via Summize to his usual tweets containing 'homeless' or 'homelessness' and became aware of a Twitterer called @tGGtH with tweets such as "“If a turtle has no shell is it naked or homeless?” and, “Just saw a homeless guy with a cell phone. WTF?”
The connecting URL to @tGGtH was http://girlsguidetohomelessness.com/ - tips for surviving homelessness. You may be homeless, but you do not need to be a bum!
Mark started to read the blog and discovered what he described as "a young, intelligent woman, newly homeless and whose writing I found highly engaging and witty. She was following exactly nine people on Twitter and had just received her very first follow - me".
@tGGtH was also known as 'Bri'.
Bri was alone and homeless in a trailer with no heating, running water or cooking facilities living in California. Mark was living 5,000 miles away in Scotland but, as Mark had often done with other homeless people, he felt the urge to reach out to her.
Within a few hours of their first tweets they were exchanging direct messages which would soon progress to email and then instant messenger. Before they knew it, they were conducting an online affair, though niether had ever met in person, and found themselves falling in love.
After a few months of online conversing, Mark made the leap and travelled to California where he remains currently, but only for another 2 weeks before he must make his way home to Scotland.
They both work but financially it has been difficult for them and they have spent most of their time staying in a small, cheap motel.
Soon Mark will be back in Scotland and Bri will return to her trailer situated in a wal-mart parking lot.
However, they have such a positive outlook that they say "Those few niggles aside though, we are both blissfully happy and madly in love. Most importantly, thanks to Twitter, we are together".
Such a lovely heartwarming story.
You can find both of their blogs here which is where you can read about the rest of their story:
http://homelesstales.com/
http://girlsguidetohomelessness.com/
UPDATE:
@tGGtH found me on Twitter! How nice...
FACT: You can't truly understand the social web unless you're in it
A study released today called 'An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World' stated that of people who identify themselves as social media marketers, 65.5% have never posted an update on Twitter....
Like some others, I find this is slightly odd.
An excerpt from B&T's top 50 marketing bloggers shows that some key figures in digital marketing believe that it's essential to be part of the landscape that you are promoting to your clients...
Iain McDonald, managing partner at Amnesia (whose blog ranks 17th), had taken the unusual step of asking all staff to get on to Twitter in September 2008.
"We've immersed ourselves in social media," McDonald says.
"We believe that the only way to really learn is to get your own hands dirty. We follow the debate and having the debate is healthy as far as I can see."
I am a firm advocate of immersing yourself in your craft - do you agree?
Please stop asking me to convert my digital plan into TARPs!
Time and time again i am asked by those 'upstairs' to translate my digital planning into TARPs.....
Today is different......it's time someone stood up and said that the concept of benchmarking digital & traditional with a common planning metric is a total load of shite....whether TARPs, impressions or reach, it's still pointless.
contrasting...
Digital media planners don't truly appreciate the job traditional media does and can go off on a tangent planning and evangelising digital-only campaigns but going digital all at once is unrealistic for most clients.
Hence we get trapped on a merry-go-round of painful, ego bashing conversations, resulting in neither party moving forwards (how many of you have experienced that? I know i have....)
But all it takes is a little bit of education and mutual respect.
Digital is unlike any other medium that's come before it, and benchmarking it against traditional media will never suffice.
As an example, a key bone of contention between 'trads' & 'digis' - my own denomination, feel free to use it ;-) - in agencies can revolve around the revenue models.
Some clients are still billed on a percentage of media spend rather than a retainer or project basis, therefore it's in the agencies interest to spend, spend, spend the client's money when they get the chance....and rightly so!
However, digital as a medium doesn't always require big bucks.
In fact, digital can often be cheaper than traditional media due to the measurement capabilities which subsequently help to increase targeting, optimisation and effectiveness.
Pin-pointing effectiveness leads to refining activity and spending less money to achieve your objectives.
Great!
Not great.....with declining ad spend comes declining revenue if you're still basing your income on percentage media spend.
The other bone of contention is labour...
Digital is incredibly labour intensive with various assets, technologies, maintenance, measurement, reporting and engagement.
It is by far the most labour intensive medium in advertising history.
We, as digital planners, now have multiple roles moving from media planner to creative to production to analytics and even customer relationship management.
Traditional media planners do a tough job but it is far less hands-on than digital.
So from a traditional planners point of view, digital could negatively impact on revenue generation, it's a fad - not everyone in the world has a facebook account and it and it's only a piece of the pie...
True....
From a digital planners point of view, traditional is unneccessary and boring, we work our butts off for minimal reward in comparison to ' trads' and digital will one day rule the world so what is everyone waiting for?
True.....
We are all correct in our own way.
But ultimately we need to go back to education and mutual respect rather than fighting a war of words over whose job is more important, which channel is more valuable and whether or not digital will kill traditional media outlets.
We're so very different but also completely the same.
Our combined goal is to produce better consumer experiences with our clients brands and products....that goal should be channel agnostic.
Digital should not neccessarily replace traditional media but it should form part of a well balanced strategic plan, but a strategic plan need not have one form of measurement.
So please....lets all get along, understand each others differences and respect each others work...
But for gods sake, don't ask me to convert my digital plan into TARPs ever again.
The state of the Twittersphere....
I came across a great study by Hubspot today entitled 'The state of the Twittersphere'
The report centers around the activity of people of Twitter such as; dormant accounts, average tweets per day, average number of followers etc and gives a great overview of the usage of Twitter today...
Below are some of the main highlights i have picked out:
Twitter user base stats
In an effort to quantify exactly how many dormant accounts exist, they labeled users as inactive if they satisfy all of the following conditions:
• Fewer than 10 followers
• Fewer than 10 friends
• Fewer than 10 updates
By this definition, 9.06% of all Twitter users are inactive.
• 24.14% of users have a bio in their profile
• 31.32% of users have a location in their profile
• 20.21% of users have a homepage URL in their profile
• 45.12% of users have tweeted at least once
• 47.29% of users have at least one follower
• 44.50% of users are following at least one account
Though they have noticed that those users who are actively using Twitter do so on a regular basis.
• The average user tweets .97 times per day
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738
Stats on Tweets
When we look at the content of tweets that are posted by users they see that users are frequently using Twitter to interact and communicate with other users rather than just answer the "What are you doing?" question.
• 1.44% of all tweets are retweets
• 37.95% of all tweets contain an "@" symbol (mentions)
• 33.44% of all tweets start with an "@" symbol (replies)
They also see that many users are reaching the 140-character limit in an attempt to get as much content as possible into every update.
Top 20 Geographical locations
Because the location field on Twitter profiles does not contain any structured data (Twitter does not require people to separate city from state or province, etc.) it is hard to do any detailed analysis on this data.
However, the list of the top thirty most common phrases people type into their location section on their bio shows that Twitter seems to be popular in major English-speaking cities.
The top 20 locations are as below:
London
Los Angeles
Chicago
New York
San Francisco
Toronto
Atlanta
Seattle
Boston
Austin
Sydney
San Diego
Washington, DC
Melbourne
Portland
Houston
Vancouver
Dallas
Brooklyn
Philadelphia
Sydney is no. 11 !!!
You can read the study in full here: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf
How to turn around an awkward conversation
I'm in a bar on a Thursday night waiting to get served by a red-headed goth waitress with a nose ring and star tattoos adorning her exposed gut when i meet 'Dave'....
Zoe: Yep.
Zoe: How very perceptive of you....
We've all been there.
It's horrible to be stuck in a conversation that is going in the wrong direction.
An incorrect flirtation, awkward silence or simply nothing to say can signal danger ahead and in most scenarios you'll make an excuse and walk away never to speak to them again and only remember them as the passing freak in the night....
But it doesn't have to be that way.
...Meet 'Matt'
Zoe: Hi.
Matt: I'm Matt.
Zoe: Nice to meet you Matt, I'm Zoe.
Matt: So what do you do?
Matt: I work in the ad industry too, how bizarre! So what brings you here tonight?
Matt: Cool. Can i buy you a drink?
Zoe: Yeah that would be great, thanks.
Matt: So what kind of advertising do you do?
Zoe: Digital basically...
Zoe: Yes i am....you?
Matt: Me too! I'll have to follow you...So what do you think about Twitter?
And so the conversation moves to a mutually happy place where they both feel involved and comfortable....(i.e. not awkward)
Now flip this situation from a Thursday night in a bar between two people to an online environment between a brand and a consumer.
Big ask i know :-) but try to imagine it becauase it really is that simple.
Social media, social networks and socialising online is the buzz of the moment and clients are desperate to jump on board and be part of trend...
So desperate in fact, that they go running up to these consumers and try to start conversations which invariably turn out to be painfully awkward because of an incorrect flirtation, awkward silence or simply nothing to say.
The consumer then runs away, never to speak to you again and they will forever remember you as the 'passing freak in the night'...
But if you're interesting, entertaining and have something to say (like Matt) then you could start a beautiful, mutually beneficial friendship.
All you need to do is think of your consumers as people, not consumers....have human conversations, entertain them, compliment them, involve them, be interesting, have a topic of conversation, laugh together and have fun with it...!
As a wise man once said "you're only as a good as your last piece of content"....or your last conversation topic/content.
Be a 'Matt' not a 'Dave'.
(* Conversations with Dave and Matt were based on real life scenarios but names were changed!)