Naturally we get a lot of calls these days from folks wanting social media programs.
When you’re building out a marketing strategy which calls for communication & outreach with/to/from brand fans and consumers on the Web:
DON’T say “What are we doing on Twitter and Facebook?”
Say “What are our goals? What are we hoping to achieve here?” and build your strategy from there.
….again…..which is obviously what Yahoo! would love to do…I wouldn’t be spending all my money on TV, outdoor, etc. trying to remind the consumer that Yahoo! is “Y!ou” and that it’s “personal”. I’d get in between my target customer and the Internet- in a GOOD way- by removing barriers to Internet access. I wouldn’t pick up baggage fees at two airports (last post) – I’m Yahoo! and I have enough baggage. I’d pick up the fee for Internet access anywhere I could get away with it, certainly ANYWHERE I could thus own the home page.
Internet access is one of those things that, like water, is perceived by users as a service that should just flow. No-one wants to think anymore about how they access the Internet. They just do. Yahoo! could take ownership of getting the user directly and easily to the Web wherever there are still barriers. What could be more “personal” than that?
This holiday season we were treated (literally) to a number of warm and fuzzy gestures by large Internet corporations, including Google footing the bill for wi-fi in fifty-plus airports around the country and on all Virgin America wi-fi flights, and Yahoo! picking up baggage fees at , um, two airports (see what Ad Age thinks of this on top of their justified disdain for the new Yahoo! campaign overall).
This whole “random acts of kindness” thing is a great idea and goes to the heart of what we still call emotional branding. I was a recipient of the Google largesse and it did give me a nice brand feeling (more because I didn’t have to fuss with logging in to GoGo than saving the $12.95, but still).
There is also a lot to be said for the tie-in of “free” Internet to the large Net providers/portals/whateveryouwanttocallthem. After all, everyone feels that Internet “should” be free. Why shouldn’t Google, Yahoo, AOL (hi guys, what’s up?), etc., provide that freedom?
The Yahoo! program is a truly bad example of this, unless it’s really not a consumer campaign at all. As a strange kind of B2B strategy, hitting San Jose and San Francisco airports might make some sense. These are hardly the geographical areas where Yahoo! really needs and should wish to build consumer awareness and goodwill. Yahoo! will never be cool again- Google is barely cool- so why not go be Santa all over the country?
From Paul Carr’s TechCrunch piece on integrated advertising, especially on Twitter (the piece is wonderfully entitled NSFW: Give Me Ad-Free Conversation or Give Me Death (Please RT):
A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.
Couldn’t define the current and/or idealized nature of Twitter any better. As marketers (Carr: “What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.” So true) we are faced with a world where any traditional notion of advertising is easily avoided by all smart people and most not-so-smart. So we leverage ourselves into content and “conversations” because people like those. At which point, like an airborne contaminant, we risk ruining that content/conversation experience by rendering it no longer genuine (the word “authentic” is currently in my “social media cuss jar” via which folks in our meetings are fined for egregious buzzword use*).
One answer to this is to leave the conversations alone in order to maintain their authentic real and genuine nature, thus retaining what is currently a quite effective marketing tool.
Over/under on that happening? Thought so.
* Social media cuss jar is combined with Internet jargon cuss jar and includes such words and phrases as “100,000 foot level”, “drill down”, and the execrable “best practices”. You get the picture.
My mother said this to me once, just after I admonished her for signing up with whatever lame ISP was bundled into her desktop on her new Mac (at least Mom is a Mac). She said, “It was already in there”. I tried to explain, and she said:
Technology is like a sausage. I really don’t want to know what’s inside; I just want to eat it.
Those of us who live and breathe tech need to remember that not everyone wants to see, or know about, the guts.
At the core of social media today is relatively new consumer behavior in terms of not just a willingness to share content, personal information, and so on- but a downright passion for doing so. The nature of the Web begets sharing, for sure- but the first widespread activity requiring sharing of information not usually publicly exposed may very well have been peer-to-peer music filesharing.
A regret of mine is that we weren’t able to use the information Napster users exposed on their hard drives to create “tribes” or “collectives”, or to connect our users in other ways. Our “Someone Like Me” feature allowed users to search for others with similar music in their collections. This enabled better trading and music discovery, of course, but we always thought it was the beginning of a social network as well. (Not to mention a GREAT dating service….) “Someone Like Me” was disabled through most of Napster’s existence for legal reasons.
We loved the sharing concept and it was at the core of the Napster tagline I created: “Thanks for sharing.”
Someone who really wants to make a difference in the branding world could work on making giant Post-It’s stick to walls better…
More later on the technographics/psychographics/general behavior of people engaging in social behaviors on the Web. “Connectors” are a key group – you’ll see them everywhere on Twitter.
Twitterers are often Connectors. Connectors get their jollies from disseminating information, putting people together, and “knowing” folks
The Forrester social media technographics are: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. I’ve added Connectors.
Some really incredible work here at Weburbanist. I am a big fan of strong messaging right at the point of conversion/action. Advertising takes on a whole new life when it inhabits consumers’ everyday environment, and this work is visceral. It’s is killer creative from design to placement (which becomes part of the design).
Just a note re my personal qualms: I think the suicide prevention and pool death posters , while the latter especially is certainly very scary, go too far. There are people out there who’ve suffered terrible losses and don’t need this kind of unavoidable reminder. Yes, tough messages need strong presentation, and the starving child is proven effective even though it’s blatant guilting. Still. We all get to draw our own lines. (I don’t get the cleaver either, but that’s from a creative standpoint.)
Edited to note: every parent I know who saw this was affected strongly by the pool poster. It’s surely effective- pool safety is top of mind for a while – but I wonder if that is worth the pain that anyone who has lost someone to drowning would feel. Would love feedback on that.