Tag >> advertising
I will be a panelist at the 'How to Profit from Social Media Marketing' workshop
JP Holecka Apr 1, 2009 - filed under: Marketing Comment (0)
I will be joined by top Vancouver social media experts Shane Gibson and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega for practical advice on expanding your network and increasing sales through social media marketing. The night will consist of networking, presentations and the three panelists answering questions from both the moderator and the audience.
 
Won't you join us the evening of Monday April 13th at the Harrison Gallery. Where we will answer the question. "How can you get social media working for your business?"
 
More information and tickets here>>

tags:// twitter, recession, marketing, business, Branding, advertising
The Brand race for followers. It's not just numbers.
JP Holecka Mar 20, 2009 - filed under: Social Media Comment (5)
There is an arms race, of sorts, going on. Yes, another one and it's really no surprise. The reality is that Twitter has dropped and ad agencies are guiding their clients down the same path as they did with Myspace, Facebook and pretty much any other popular social networking site that has emerged over the last five years.

This is what I am hearing and seeing in agency recommendations. Get as many followers as you can quickly then blather out a bunch crap and useless messaging at your followers! Yes another old school one way communication platform has hijacked Twitter. When will they learn? We are back to the eyeballs measurement again because that seems to be the only measurable metric that  makes it into the quarterly campaign review decks. It's not just traffic and eyeballs anymore. Comscore needs a new set of measurement tools. The measurement is brand interaction in the Twitterspace. The numbers matter if you are interacting well with many, then it counts.

Celebrity has really pushed Twitter to the tipping point in recent weeks and sure some of them are doing it well and others are really doing it bad! Agencies should  not build out their Twitter plan and campaigns following the lead of people like P-Diddy and Ellen. Maybe Snoop Dogg because he gets it big time, but for the love of God not P-Diddy. *Disclosure* I am a west coast guy and prefer the LA rap anyway.

Twitter is 140 characters of content. That content has to be engaging, insightful, helpful and maybe even carry a narrative. The problem is that agencies are already having trouble boiling down narrative from a 30 second TV spot to a 9 second web banner. Now they have to get down to 140 characters and it freaks them out further to even contemplate that. Hell it freaks me out but that is the new canvas. Figure it out soon before the next and even more confusing communication channel emerges.

If you gather up a ton of Twitter followers and have nothing relevant to say. Your brand will become dull and tiresome quickly and the giant swath numbers your brand has worked hard to get will have zero value.

tags:// Twittersphere, twitter, Brands, Branding, advertising
Battle of the Brands in the Twittersphere
JP Holecka Feb 2, 2009 - filed under: Social Media Comment (5)

What happens when someone asks a question about your brand the social media space? Well, that's a riddle that many brand, marketing and pr folks have been trying to answer for a few years now. If the question raised about your brand is by someone with a substantial amount of online clout, or has a large influence of social media sites like digg and buzzup.  The conversation about your brand can lead to bigger things than you probably wouldn't expect. Measuring the impact of a social networking conversation has on your brand is not easy and there are only a few high powered, and expensive, search tools that can do with any sort of accuracy.

Blog conversations happen over hours and days and spider off via comments and trackbacks etc. You track some them by using Google alerts and then dispatch either legal, PR or the customer service department depending on the level or kind of attention that the situation requires. For the most part brand managers are able to keep a lid on most bad conversations or attempt to leverage the good ones going out there in the socialsphere, but it is a pretty unsophisticated affair.

Now let's add Twitter to the mix. Twitter takes the conversations that are happening in the social networking world and accelerates them to a breakneck pace. Those very same conversations are now happening at real time by a powerful network of influential bloggers and social media connectors. They can propel the brand conversation into the stratosphere within minutes. I bet this scares the pants off of most traditional brand, marketing and PR folks. In the old days [oh say last year] you could find the social networking conversation that was happening about your brand, set up a meeting with internal and external personnel needed to either quell the negative impact on your brand or fan the flames of the positive ones. Then walk out of the meeting and execute the plan over the period of a week or two.

Well those days are going quickly! Today a conversation about your brand can go from zero to .5 million in less than two minutes and last a total of 6 hours then disappear as quickly as it arrived. That is pretty hard to get a handle on for most.

Here are a couple of examples:

Let's take the story of Chris Brogan's question the other week. Chris posed this question: "What's the difference, to you, between BMW and Audi? Which do you feel more strongly about and why?" For those of you who don't know who Chris Brogan is let me give you a little background. Chris is one of the top social media experts and has a huge following of loyal readers, fans and clients like Panasonic. His current RSS feed shows 17,315 subscribers, 5000 Facebook fans [5000 is the most tht FB will let you have on any one account] and 39,144 followers on twitter. Now I am sure that there is some overlap in the numbers but you get the idea. Not only is are the number of folowers that Chris great in numbers but they are also powerful in their own connections and followers. The ripple effect is huge here. So back to the case at hand. One question from someone like Chris and you can hear the collective inhale of people that are going to weigh in on the subject.

So for around 4 or five hours on twitter there were no less than 24 thousand conversations in 140 characters or less that where all discussing the pros and cons of BMW and Audi. I am sure that both of the respective car companies are aware that this event happened by now. I have a feeling that stats in this post made it into a few Powerpoint decks. So what does that mean to the brand and what can be done with this kind of data. Well there are a few things that if I was BMW or Audi that I would have looked in the data.

  • Problems with your product.
  • Problems with your competitors product.
  • Likes and dislikes about your the product.
  • Likes and dislikes about your competitors product.
  • Possible flaws or manufacturing defects that may not be big enough to report but enough to tell someone about.
  • Links that people post about your product.

These are just a few of the research strategies that I would have recommended if I had be consulting to either one of these brands during this battle of the brands. Now what to do with this kind of conversational blitzkrieg? If you are ready for such an event then like any attack good or bad you roll out your own pr/marketing plan and take advantage of the situation. The first line of defence would be the corporate website. The conversation is happening online and the Google searches are probably linking to your corporate home page right? Well if the comments are positive and are specific to a curtain make of model of your cars then make sure that the web team has a prominent link or CTA to that make or model that users can easily find. It could mean more sales if you act quickly enough. If there is a negative conversation happening then hold back for a bit and see where it is going. Can your loyalty and retention team "jump" into the conversation to address concerns? The could if they were ready and actively participating on sites like Twitter. There are actually a multitude of other methods that BMW or Audi could have done to take advantage if the situation had they been ready for it. Soon this type of brand blitz will not be a once in a lifetime event. I predict these brand spikes will happen on a weekly basis and that those who learn how to harness them will come out ahead.

Here is another recent example. When Steve Jobs announces the other week that he was stepping down temporarily from Apple due to health issues, the social networks erupted with the news. In fact I had found out about the news many times over on Twitter before I heard about it from traditional news outlets. It was 24 minutes before the NY Times finally broke the story. I know that there needs to be fact checking and such but I am sure that fact could have been checked and pushed live to the NY Times home page sooner than 24 minutes. The news of Steve Jobs went to almost have a million posts in a just a few seconds. Now what if the PR and Corp Com team had not been responsible for the news and it was actually was untrue. Not responding fast enough would mean your stocks are going to take an unnecessary hit.

So the question is are your brands duking it out in the hyper-paced world of microblogging? If so what are you doing about it. From my experience with working with large brands, I suspect not much. There's probably not enough resources on the marketing team to handle it and the agency with the account is just not equipped the know what to do. This maybe a small concern for a lot of people today today but not for long. It is my strong recommendation that marcom teams around the globe start to focus on issue like this. Companies like JetBlue and Whole Foods understand the importance and have huge beach heads in this space already. What are you doing?

****UPDATE**** Here is an update on the metrics of the converation. Mike Troiano at the Scalable Intimacy blog has further anylized the impact of such conversations with a simple yet clear estimation of the impressions made:

24,000 conversations, folks. If on average the participants in those conversations had 100 followers (Chris alone has 40 thousand followers), that's 2.4 million impressions. There's no doubt in my mind these impressions are higher impact than passive, anonymous media equivalents... but you know what? Screw impressions. They're the artifice of dying media. What's the impact of a couple million affluent, college-educated, major metro-concentrated thought leaders being exposed to each other's positive and negative views of a brand in a 24 hour period? I’d say pretty high. Maybe I’m just new fashioned.

As you can see from the above analyisis and comments below there are more than a few of us looking at this in 2009.

tags:// twitter, steve jobs, chris brogan, Brands, bmw, audi, advertising
Is viral the way to recession success?
JP Holecka Jan 30, 2009 - filed under: Advertising Comment (1)

I have been reading a lot lately on what companies are trying to do break through and get some marketing attention. Does banner blindness increase in times of economic strife? I have no research data to prove my theory, but my hunch is yes. Why yes you ask? Well most people in economic turmoil do not want to be reminded of what they can no longer afford. Sure they may have been able to afford purchases before in the good times when credit was flowing but now it's not so simple. So my guess is that banners are not as effective because folks are now just focusing on all the free content  and searching for a bit of good news in these gloomy days. It is the same reason the malls are now half empty and Macy's is closing 11 stores this year alone. Why depress yourself with the inability to apply consumer therapy by going to the mall or similarly clicking on a banner to a microsite that gives you generally the same feeling.

So we have established the fact that the regular way of advertising is ok and no one is saying abandoned ship just yet but there are a lot of brands struggling for that break out campaign right now. Those successful campaigns also usually take a fair bit of cash to produce and promote and last I checked there wasn't much of that good old marketing cash lying around.

In today's post I will discuss the viral approach. Not the whole gamut of viral, but two specific styles. The first one I call "deep cycle" that involves a slow yet powerful positioning of your brand. One that leaves a long lasting positive message that will ,if executed correctly, have long lasting residual effects once the recession is over. The second one I call "short cycle" that involves a shorter but much louder approach that is more in the present. One that is intended to drive awareness for sales in this quarter but not necessarily long term brand lift.

Exhibit A is Honda's new "Documentary" style campaign called "Dream the Impossible". It is hosted on a Honda branded Youtube page and in episode 1 "Failure: The Secret to Success" [Watch clip before proceeding - 8:19min] chronicles Honda's disastrous entry into supplying motors for indycar racing back in mid 90's. The documentary is very solemn in tone and opens up with a series of nicely shot vignettes  of Honda employees re-living the nightmarish tale of woe in question over a ominous piano track. It's not a new style of film making but well done and you are pulled in quite quickly with the personal stories of failure. This is a great hook because everyone regardless of ego has fears of failure either in the future or the scars of failures past. It is something that emotionally pulls us into the film. It's an interesting approach because from what I can tell Honda is not trying to shed a failure image but rather discuss why there are successful at building motors today. If Chrysler or GM had made this it would be a film about apology and apathy, not success. Even if either one of those two companies wanted to make this film, Honda has now taken that opportunity and turned it on it's head in the process. This film is clearly about success and presented in a way that suits the somber mood of the current climate.

So why take this approach? Honda has some spend money here by the looks of things and campaign branded Youtube site indicates there are more films in the works. The views are only at 20,347 for just over two weeks and that really is nothing to get excited about. Are they mad, is this campaign a failure? No it is just a beginning and I think and the plan is to take the slow and deep cycle approach over more that one quarter. The Japanese are great at the long, slow and very successful marketing approaches [see the 80’s decade if you need a reminder]. They are building a slow deep wave of positive brand experiences that will overtime build up trust in the brand and a take away message that Honda “does things differently”. Honda smells blood with the US auto makers and are planning laying out the ground work for when the recession is over. They know, like Kellogg's did in the great depression, that if you advertise and market yourself correctly in economic hard times that your brand can win out in the end. Kellogg's advertised hard in the great depression when there were really no standout leaders in cereal business. In fact there were over 60 competitors going into the depression and only a handful one coming out. I believe that this viral documentary series is part of a global initiative to put the US auto makers out of their misery once and for all. Hell Toyota for the first time surpassed GM in global sales and with Honda being the second largest Japanese auto maker it's no wonder they are going for it.

Will it work? That I don't know, but it does come across as authentic and that is important. Only time will see and seeing that is is a deep cycle viral campaign time is what will be required for the final word.

Exhibit B The "T-Mobile Dance" is another viral piece that is a full on attention getting video that was last weeks viral darling. It made the worldwide news and social media headlines and has already had 2,204,122 [Watch clip before proceeding - 2:41min] Youtube views alone. Wow that's great and I would say that the short term campaign KPI's have probably been met. It's a charming video that is supposed to make you feel good in times of doom and gloom. The performance looks to be performed or 'inspired' by the Improv Everywhere Group that did the Grand Central Station Freeze last year. It's very polished and well done. The scene is set to make you almost say out loud "Man I wish I could have been there"  As far as virals go it fits into the "I can't believe what I am seeing” category and that does work well as a contagious aspect for any viral video.

I like both videos for very different reasons but feel that the Honda one will prevail in it’s long term goals. The T-mobile video feels more like a gimmick that will not have as much of long lasting impact on the brand.

What are your plans for viral campaigns this year? I know that they are very much on the radar this year because that is really what most new clients are inquiring about. Oh that and Twitter of course.

tags:// viral, video, recession, marketing, kelloggs, advertising
Will Twitter fragment your marketing efforts even further?
JP Holecka Jan 13, 2009 - filed under: Social Media Comment (1)

I read an article calling Twitter the next Second Life! The article went on to discuss the wasted branding and marketing efforts that still lay waste on virtual islands of Second Life. Now that Second Life was no longer making the headlines of the various marketing rag as the "Next Big Thing". SL is a space that I do know first had having been involved with an effort to build an in world TELUS Mobility brand store in in back in 2006. Tami  Gillespie, the project lead, at TELUS informs me the store is still active in the community and that the residents still are after here for all the latest virtual hand sets that the real world TELUS sells.

Now, that got me thinking about how every new social networking site that comes online continues to erode and fragment the digital entertainment space like cable did in the late 80's and 90's. With every new social networking superstar there are the forgotten heros from days gone by. Remember Classmates.com [1995], Friendster [2002], MySpace.com [2003], and Orkut.com [2004 Now owned by Google] just to name a few. Ya I thought you might. You probably even have an old login or two for those sites that still works don’t you? So that said, are they actually forgotten or just left behind by the marketers and advertisers for all things shiny and new? The real fact is that Myspace is still the biggest in the US with 76 million unique visitors a month. It's odd with that type of high traffic why I have not had a client request a unique myspace campaign in at least three years isn't it? What impact and sway do those sites still have on brands and business? What are the collective numbers I wondered. Well the number of active users are actually still quite large and when you throw a new social network onto that pile like Facebook or Twitter, they really do start to add up. Marketers are in such a hurry to find the next thing that reaches critical mass that they quite often forget that there are many users that feel forgotten in the social networks of yore! 

So let's throw Twitter into the mix now and see where we are going with this in 2009. I don't think that Twitter will ever become a Myspace or a Facebook in relation to adopted users or complexity of interactions. In fact at the current growth rate it would take Twitter approximately 30 years to catchup to Facebook alone and that’s only if you were to lock in the current user base and not allow for further growth. Twitter however continues to grow and become more and more integrated with other online sites and services and may impact brand and business in ways we can only imagine. Social networking is what “search” was in the 90’s Yahoo, Excite and Lycos knew they could get the eyeballs but it took Google and Overture to figure out the business model that worked. It’ll come and currently it looks like the two likely ones to do so are Facebook and Twitter.

There are pundants that say blogs, myspace and podcasts and many other social networking site and services are dead. They are not and although they may have flat lined out in growth. The various services retain a large number of users and continue to fragment the attention and eyeballs of millions. As each new service comes online and gains in popularity the fragmentation continues. In fact Friendster, long thought dead, has 61 million unique visitors a month globally. Second life had 1,445,444 users logged in in the last 30 days and Twitter has about 4-5 million active users. You start to add that up and you are talking about a lot of people not watching tv, listening to the radio or reading newspapers. Even if the Twitter numbers drop there is going to be a large base left behind that will have a great influence on products, services and brands. Brands should not continually jump to the next big thing abandoning the last one but actually maintain campaigns and a presence in each of the services to maintain a global presence. Sure you can throw a media buy of display advertising on those sites as they are probably covered in your network buy and it seems easy enough to do so, but really is that the love that your once shiny social network deserves? Why not rotate unique and innovative campaigns though a couple of those spaces a year. Absolutely make sure that the numbers are there and that the audience falls within your target, that only makes sense. 

Just because the creative team at your agency thinks that the current social network ing or media darling has become dull and tiresome does not mean that it has. Take a good look at the number of active users there and leave no brand loving money spending social networking fellow behind! 


tags:// Twittersphere, twitter, Second Life, Myspace, marketing, facebook, Branding, advertising