Social Media

Does the Creative Dept of Your Agency Need to be Shaken Up?

French painterSocial media presents an interesting challenge to agency creative departments.  In many ways, the rise of a largely consumer generated media entity is a potential pitfall for ad creatives.  By definition, it seems that they are almost completely unnecessary in a consumer generated world yet they’re still part of it.

Fortunately for the creative class, brands have been elbowing their way into this space for a few years now and most of them aren’t willing to give up control of their brand to the masses.  Instead, they’re always looking for new ways to “get their message out” at any cost through these channels and that falls squarely into the strength of the modern agency structure.  “Help me push in an environment I’m not comfortable in!”

This has created an interesting distinction between paid media and earned media.  In areas of the world like China, where BBS dominates, brands have been more reluctant to jump in because the channels provided few, if any, safeguards. Brands haven’t made as strong of a shift away from paid media in these markets because the opportunities in social media haven’t really matched up to many of their strengths as marketers.  Why waste resources in earned media when you get a better return through traditional channels?

In the US and UK, things are different.  The social media market for advertisers has largely adopted a version of the traditional advertising model.  If you look at the glorified brochureware sites that support most packaged good brands, you’ll often find a social media element squeezed in amongst a heavily manicured Flash animation or a wrapper for video.  Design a can, submit your picture with our product, make our next commercial, tell us what this means to you…rarely a compelling interaction and usually a behavior that needs to be significantly incentivized to be successful.

Why is this?

The reason is largely due to the pedigree of the creative class.  With few exceptions, most creative professionals come from a background in visual design or film.  It’s no wonder that agencies have embraced the concept of the “viral video” when it is primarily a version of the 60-second spot with less constraints.

There is a problem though.  Social media isn’t about video or visual design.

Yes, video and visual design play an important role in some aspects of social media but it is, by no means, a requirement.  When you look at actual creativity within the social space, it’s not something that’s clearly driven by titles like designer, copywriter or producer.  It’s a new kind of creativity that involves almost a mix of UX and sociology.  How do people want to engage with this brand in a social context and what is the most compelling way to facilitate that engagement?  Hint: it rarely requires a Flash microsite or shooting a video.

What is required is shaking up the creative structure of most agencies.  You’re starting to see plenty of social media strategists at big interactive firms but how many social media creatives do you see?  How many creative directors are really experts on social media and don’t come from design backgrounds?  How many even understand basic principles and ethics of word-of-mouth marketing, which is the closest discipline to social media?

As always, I love to be corrected so if you know of any social media specialists that sit within the creative department of a major agency please let me know and I will post an update.  If you’re in a creative director role and think you’re doing just fine, I’d be equally interested to hear from you.

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Bud Light: The Difference is Friendability

facebook-bud-lightBrands have struggled with how to integrate with emerging media channels for a long long time now.  Social networks are no longer “new” to most people under 40-years-old.  Brands have been creating MySpace pages and online communities for almost a decade.  Unfortunately for many companies, not all brands are the kinds of brands that people want to interact with on those platforms.

Some brands, like perhaps an online shoe store, fall into this category.  Do I really want to be “friends” with the company that ships me shoes?  This is the challenge that Zappos must’ve felt.  However, Zappos is a company that has a pretty clear idea of who their customers are and how they might want to interact with their brand.  If you look at how they use a channel like Twitter, you can see a somewhat organic conversation taking place between Zappos employees (including the CEO) and a select group of stakeholders.  If you’re really interested in how the company operates, they even offer a variety of behind-the-scenes content on their Facebook page.  It’s not for everyone but it’s a way to build a deeper connection with a select group of stakeholders who have a pretty high probability of becoming advocates for your brand.

That’s fine for a company that ships shoes but what if you’re a beer brand?  Your brand is synonymous with fun and socializing.  There are few brands that would seem so uniquely suited for seamless social media integration than an alcohol brand that is so closely associated with the very behavior that these platforms are trying to extend.

Then why do brands like Bud Light fail so clumsily in this regard?

As I was traveling and concerned that my favorite hockey team might be falling out of playoff contention, I checked ESPN, only to find a prominent and expensive banner ad from Bud Light asking me to become their friend on Facebook.  Being somewhat nuetral to Bud Light as a brand but fascinated by what a company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising would do with a platform like Facebook, I clicked through and prepared to become a “fan” of the brand.

Unfortunately, once you click through, you’re greeted with BL Central.  At BL Central you either send a beer (or a basketball[?]) to a friend, which is quite possibly one of the most innane and low level social interactions enabled by Facebook, or you can watch a series of commercials, which you may have already seen a few dozen times depending on whether or not you own a TV.  What else does one of the largest media buyers in American advertising invest in?  How about some desktop backgrounds and a PDF of the March Madness basketball tournament that hasn’t been updated since the tournament started?

So why does Budweiser have such weak profile of their customers compared to a company like Zappos, who has a much smaller and difficult customer base to reach?  Why can’t a relatively bottomless media budget and the help of some of the most skilled agencies in the country do anything to convert someone like myself into a brand advocate?

The difference is the brand culture.  Bud has bought their way into our culture through paid media in an era when brands had limited options to reach consumers in a meangingful way.  Yes, “friending” Bub Light will result in a certain amount of advocacy when your social network sees your association with the brand but it’s unlikely anyone will see your desktop background and, if they do, the reflection isn’t wholly positive on the brand.

It’s worth noting that this hasn’t hurt Bud Light.  The company sells a lot of beer and shows no signs of fading.  Similarly, their activity in social media is hardly a huge part of their marketing expenditures.

The failure is in the missed opportunity.  How could Bud Light fund a social utility that would promote their brand image for the same amount they spend on disposable media?  How could Bud Light’s numerous sponsorships – real brand experiences for many people – leverage social media to enhance the events and places that now only act as logo holders for the brand?  How could Bud Light come to life online like it does in a bar or any of the settings it exists organically?  If Zappos can invite you to their water cooler what’s stopping Bud Light from clinking glasses with you?

The answer is that they can and probably will but, for now, companies that were born into this environment will excell at building their brands in this tiny corner of the media universe while the brands that are positioned to benefit the most will continue to stumble around looking for ways to replicate the simplicity of how they originally carved out their niche in our culture.

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SXSW: Facebook Connect + iPhone = Love

sxsw-2009 Just saw what might turn out to be the biggest announcement of SXSW. Facebook just announced the latest development in their Facebook Connect platform, which enables iPhone applications to be social. Put simply, you can now play games like iBowl against friends based on who is online (in realtime!). You can also use it with applications like Urban Spoon to see what restaurants your friends are reviewing and whatnot. The possibilities are essentially endless.

Of course, this all begs the question “what is Facebook gaining from being a portable social network profile company?” Sure, in the short term, it may drive more traffic to their site but what happens when people only log into Facebook to change their profiles because they get all the social utility they need from the micro networked FB Connect sites?

Still, very interesting announcement. It definitely gets you thinking about the possibilities.

Further Evidence That Nothing is Viral

trafficThe research refuting the grand myth of viral marketing continues to pile up.

The latest is an analysis from TubeMogul that shows the real sources of traffic to so-called “viral videos.”  As anyone who has actually looked a referring traffic on a socially distributed video can tell you, it is blogs that drive the most traffic by an overwhelming majority.  To quote the data, it’s about 80% of the traffic for a mere 35,528,837 videos surveyed.

This isn’t the result of a chain letter, these are highly influential blogs driving traffic to content.  Not forwarded emails or IMs.  Not even social networks.  In fact, the data on how important social networks are to this kind of content is equally revealing:

In total, search engines provided 11.18% of all video referrals; social networks provided 3.66%. Following close behind were social bookmarking aggregation sites, with 3.19; then video search engines (0.63%) and email/IM sites (0.05%).

These all powerful social networking sites barely beat out social bookmarking aggregation, which the vast majority of Internet users are still completely unaware of.  Equally interesting is the small sliver of people that are driven to “viral videos” in the way most people think of “viral” distribution, email and IM.  0.05%.  That is so low that it’s statistically irrelevant.

I know we will continue to hear about viral marketing for years to come but I hope that, over time, professional marketers and public relations practitioners will begin to change the way they talk about this kind of marketing to focus more on the influencer networks that actually drive brand building results in this space.

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It’s 2009 and Social Media Releases Are Still Terrible

under-constructionI hate to be the bearer of bad news for PR people (ok, I actually like it a little) but those social media releases you’ve been pushing aren’t any use to anyone.

You could make a larger case that press releases themselves are of little value any more but what I’m more concerned with is how some wire services are repositioning press releases, marking them up and selling them as “enhanced” releases for “social media.”  Yes, just go ahead and ask any blogger what they want more than anything else in the world and they will most certainly tell you “press releases, more press releases please.”

It’s easy to poke fun at the worst releases but for this example I will use something that is being positioned as best-in-class by some.  One of my favorite PR bloggers, Todd Defren, recently posted a case study where Shift Communications, the poster child for the social media release and IMHO one of the best tech PR firms out there, was hailed for a campaign in which this social media press release played a supporting role.

Really?

Let’s take a look at some of the “social media” features that are so valuable in this release:

  1. YouTube videos.  Great, everyone loves YouTube videos and you can grab the code and insert them into your blog posts.  Well, normally that’s true but Marketwire shrinks the YouTube videos to a size where the button for links and the embed code are eliminated, forcing you to click the video itself to go to the page on YouTube where it is available (you have to figure this out for yourself, Mr. Bloggy McSmartypants).
  2. Head shots of the founders.  Nothing wrong here, except for the fact that the image is 800×530.  It’s too big for any blogger to use and too small for anyone in print to use.  If you want to use this picture in your blog, you’re going to have to resize it.  Add another step.
  3. The obligatory social bookmarking links.  If Steve Jobs issued a press release about how he was the offspring of two government baboons, I still don’t think enough people would Digg the release enough to drive any traffic.  I still don’t understand why these social bookmarking sites are being pushed on people when the content doesn’t justify it.  Case and point: the total amount of people who click “Digg” for this release is a whopping zero.  Want to know how many “Technorati‘s on this release”?  Spoiler alert…zero.
  4. Search stats.  Yes, the search stats…finally, it all makes sense.  That is until you actually look at the results and see that it’s all just a bunch of sites that regurgitate news releases.  Hardly the big influencers of social media.
  5. SEO?  You’d think SEO would play a major role in a social media release platform but I’m giving this release a C- in that category too.  It’s nice that they have a descriptive page title and everything but what about the URL?  Is Google going to fall in love with “http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Mobilesphere-880759.html”?  Where’s the product name (“Slydial”)?
  6. Content.  I’m not sure what happened to Shift’s original model for the SMR but this release looks a whole lot like a regular old press release.  Apart from the quotes being broken out, I’m not really seeing the bulleted information that is going to eliminate barriers to publication.

Of course, the results of the campaign were still impressive.  The company was covered in 381 blog posts and they attracted 200,000 beta testers.  I think that Shift is a great agency and they probably played a direct role in driving those results.  I just don’t think a social media press release had anything to do it.

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The Antidote for the Social Network Bell Curve

plastic-man

There is a lot of talk today about the growth of Facebook and how it is outpacing many of its peers, such as LinkedIn.  Yes, Facebook is a phenomenon and its growth is impressive but is Facebook really any different from Friendster and MySpace or will it experience the same bell curve that they did?

For starters, let’s look at how MySpace overtook Friendster.  Friendster was the first social network to really get traction in the US and Generation X embraced it.  Like many sites of it’s day, Friendster had trouble scaling to meet demand.  The site would often freeze and the overall speed was making it increasingly unusable.  On top of that, Friendster was slow to add new features so the market was ripe for MySpace, a social network where anything goes.

MySpace allowed people to hack their layouts and do just about anything you could do with HTML within its pages.  On top of that, it was a responsive site with fewer barriers than Friendster.  The shift was swift.  Within six months you could see Friendster’s growth tapering off and MySpace shooting towards the sky.  A star was born and MySpace was the new king of social networks.

Of course, the very flexibility that made MySpace attractive was also a contributing factor in limiting it’s user base.  The site was bought by Fox and everything from the ads to the custom layouts to the interface itself became too loud and low brow for many of the more desirable demographics.  Some users’ home page customizations would actually hurt your eyes to look at and no likes to have a co-worker sneak up on you with some risque online dating ad on the screen.  The ground was fertile for Facebook.

Facebook began as an extension of a school yearbook and you could only get an account if you had a valid college email address.  This barrier was quickly dropped but that didn’t mean that Facebook would become the free-for-all that MySpace was.  Facebook would allow customization but only to a degree and they would keep their interface fairly lean to not only speed up the site but also it wouldn’t alienate your parents.  It was a nice enough cocktail that Facebook would gain popularity as quickly as MySpace and overtake their biggest competitor just as MySpace’s traffic was beginning to flatten.

1So what happens next?  If the cycle repeats itself, Facebook will begin to flatten out and a new kind of social network (maybe Friendfeed) will take over.  Right?

While Facebook will certainly begin to flatten out soon – probably in the next 12 months – they’re learning from history and taking steps to avoid extinction.  For one, the company is hyper-aware of user experience.  When the site started to feel like it was getting taken over by third party applications, they changed the interface and gave application developers less of an incentive to take over your personal feed.  They also launched Facebook Connect, a fascinating new technology that enables a degree of data portability and gives Facebook users the right to take their profile out into the Internet and use it in new ways.  It’s pretty clear that Facebook is more concerned with adapting to its environment than it is with extracting value out of every page view.

So what is the antidote to social network extinction?  Maybe it’s as simple as putting the emphasis back on user experience and being flexible enough to adapt to the changes happening on your network and in the industry as a whole.

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A Whopper of a Facebook Campaign

app_3_33988778285_984Today a colleague posed an interesting question to me.  She asked “are there any brands you can think of that have done a good job with Facebook?”  I genuinely want to be helpful in these situations but absolutely nothing came to mind that I would be willing to defend in a presentation.  Yes, Facebook is a valuable media property with some pretty intriguing demographics for a lot of different brands but have I ever seen a brand interaction on Facebook that I actually thought was valuable?  Nope.

That’s when I remembered a little buzz I heard about a Burger King promotion called Whopper Sacrifice.  The concept is simple, if you delete ten of your friends you can get a coupon for a free Whopper.

Here is how Burger King describes it:

What would you do for a free WHOPPER®? Would you insult an elected official? Would you do a naked handstand? Would you go so far as to turn your back on friendship? Install WHOPPER® Sacrifice on your Facebook profile and we’ll reward you with a free flame-broiled WHOPPER® Sandwich when you sacrifice 10 of your friends.

It’s meant to make people think about what the value of a Whopper is to them.

There is a lot I like about this campaign:

  • The tone of it is right in line with the rest of the creative that BK is pushing out right now
  • The fact that a lot of people are participating reinforces that a Whopper has value to this demographic
  • BK takes advantage of the discrepancy between the real value and perceived value of the word “friends”…you wouldn’t stop talking to real friends for a hamburger but Facebook allows BK to make this claim with a degree of validity
  • The company is relinquishing some control and letting their stakeholders police “the Wall,” which is resulting in as many people defending the brand than there are people criticizing it

I haven’t eaten at Burger King more than two or three times in the past ten years but, aside from the health concerns, I know I do like Whoppers.  I’m a tough conversion for this campaign but it has made me think about the call to action.  Are there ten fringe friends of mine on Facebook that I wouldn’t mind deleting for a coupon for what is essentially a free lunch?   Maybe some people from third grade that I’m not really friends with.  I’m not going to do it by Burger King is making me think about it, which is a win by itself.

This raises another question about the value of “friends” on social networks but that is a topic for another blog post.  I’m going to lunch.

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GM Launches Propaganda 2.0

GM employs a lot of people.  GM buys a lot of materials from people that employ even more people.

GM is also a failing business, which has more to do with the fact that they don’t sell a lot of cars than it does with the current economic climate.  The company really liked selling big SUVs to people long after the market no longer demanded them.

Either way, the message is clear.  Give GM $25 billion now or their failures will cost the US $156 billion, not to mention the social consequences of millions of lost jobs.

The channel?  YouTube.  Is this because GM, the #1 media spender in the world, can’t afford TV time?  Probably not.

In reality, this is an example of a company trying to use social media to create a blind groundswell around an emotional issue.  There are some obvious issues here to the even slightly critical eye.  For example, if GM is a failing business that has been in decline well before the current economic crisis then won’t $25 billion just postpone the inevitable and add to the cost for taxpayers?  This issue isn’t addressed because social media is all too often not the right channel for rational debate.  It’s the channel for snowballing emotionally charged issues.

It appears to have backfired on GM.  The video is the lowest rated video of any video on this week’s top 100 on YouTube.  It has also generated more than 1,400 comments, ranging from anti-socialist tirades to far reaching criticisms of GM’s business model.  Any sign of a groundswell of support is buried in negative sentiment.

What’s to be learned here?  For starters, it’s important for all brands to understand that transparency is not something to be taken lightly.  Large brands can’t get away with seeding ideas like this without a full representation of the issue or backlash becomes almost inevitable.  Just because T. Boone Pickens can get away with hiding self-interest behind common interest doesn’t mean the same is true for large brands that have a history of layoffs to undermine their newfound interest in protecting American jobs.

The Real Opportunity for the Evolved PR Agency

Jeremiah Owyang has stirred up the debate on what PR agencies need to do in order to survive in the future following the Horn Group’s recent event titled “Is Social Media Killing PR?”  He offers a variety of different options ranging from becoming a social media filter for clients to moving into a wider range of marketing disciplines to help fixing the agencies’ own reputations, which are often much worse than that of the clients.

Charles Cooper over at CNET also chimed in, saying that “PR is killing PR?”  He states that social media isn’t really playing as big a role as empty messaging and weak products/services that are being pushed by PR.  He doesn’t outline an opportunity out of all this except to suggest that if PR goes back to doing the fundamentals of their business better than maybe there will be more success.

Although Owyang touches on it, neither of these points of view go back to the original definition of PR, which is the greatest opportunity that social media has opened for PR agencies.  It’s pretty simple, PR agencies need to teach companies how to RELATE to the PUBLIC using these new channels.  Your grandma probably doesn’t know how to talk to people on social networks and neither do these big brands.

It’s obviously more complicated than just being an individual with few or any stakeholders.  The way a major company handles itself online has major repercussions but that’s the main reason there is an opportunity for experts.

This isn’t just social networks and Twitter either.  PR agencies should be taking over online pressrooms and how the company tells their corporate story through their Web site.  Like I say in most of my new business pitches against bigger badder agencies, your ad agencies can push content and your interactive agency can find new ways to engage people but it’s your PR agency that you’ve always trusted to manage your most important relationships.  Sure, it’s a sales line but there’s some truth in it.

Then, of course, there is the fake New York Times, which predicted the end of PR, as well as the Iraq War.  The prank was trying to show how the world gets better by July 2009, and the demise of PR is part of that Utopia.  Maybe Jeremiah was right, PR should focus on its own reputation too.

A Brooklyn High School’s Take on Social Media

A teacher friend of mine invited me to come speak about careers in social media at Acorn High School for Social Justice in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn last week.  When he first brought it up, I politely declined.  You see, I live in Brooklyn and grew up around New York City so when someone says “Bushwick” to you, you generally politely decline due to the amount of times you’ve heard the word connected to “fatal stabbing” or “drive-by shooting” on the local news.

I eventually started thinking about it more realistically since I will be leaving the city at some point and no longer have access to the kind of diversity that I imagined I would encounter at the school.  Secondly, I’m also genuinely interested in what high school kids think about the Internet and social networks.  Either way, I was pretty sure it would make a good story some day.

Upon arriving at the school I realized that most of my prejudices were completely false.  The school was a refurbished six-story theater building on Broadway in Brooklyn, flanked by the J and Z above ground subway lines and a McDonalds.  When you walk in you have to check in with an armed security guard but I’m told this is pretty standard practice in a lot of high schools around the country these days.  Once beyond the checkpoint, it was like pretty much any high school you’ve been to except, in my opinion, significantly nicer.  It was not only cleaner than the over-priced New England boarding school that I attended, but there appeared to be a greater emphasis on global education when you looked at what was posted around the hallways.

The school has also employed the first “executive principle,” which is a program designed to get proven successful principles to take difficult assignments.  The program pays these principles a bonus of $25k a year if they commit to at least three years to turning these more challenging schools around.  This doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me when you consider the 700+ students whose lives can be changed drastically by receiving a good education.  In the case of Acorn High School, Karen Watts started as the executive principle in January and the school looked pretty good to me in my limited time there.

I presented to three classes and tried to use video as much as possible since I vaguely remember career days and how much fun it is to be talked at for three straight periods.  Since the theme was “Working in Social Media,” I used examples of some consumer generated content from past campaigns and a viral video we did recently.  Working off a version of a deck I used at a recent tech tradeshow, I went through the changes that are occurring in PR in a Web 2.0 world and new media channels, like Google, are changing the way people define media.  All in all, I think I bored them a little and I would definitely change a few things up if I could do it again.

However, it was probably more of an education for me than it was for them.  By asking some questions and surveying the room a couple times, I learned some things that came as a bit of a surprise to me.  For example, most of the kids had no idea what blogs were and didn’t read them, although many admitted to blogging on social networking sites.

Also, as expected, mobile is huge.  The only thing that surprised me was the brands that they had affinity for.  Maybe I’m too caught up in a world of people obsessed with their iPhones but these kids generally dismissed the iPhone as being too expensive and universally loved the T-Mobile/Danger’s Sidekick.  While no one knew what Twitter was, they became very interested once they found out that they could Twitter from their phones and receive updates via SMS.  It’s obviously going to be important for any new communications technology to be easily ported over to a mobile platform for the next generation of users.  This also goes for blogs…if they can’t be easily read through a phone then they may lose this age group when they all get jobs in a few years.

Overall, I loved the concept of career day and I wish it was a bigger part of my high school education.  When I was 17 and graduating from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to study and very little exposure to careers outside of my parents.  I was psychology major for a year and then an english major, which sort of led me into PR in a roundabout way.  Regardless, it’s an exercise that helps both the students and professionals get more in touch with what the other one is thinking.  Definitely take advantage of the opportunity if it comes your way.

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