Signed Finds – how social can drive retail and charity engagement
Signed Finds is a new social media marketing initiative for Vinnies, a.k.a St Vincent de Paul. The premise is simple: get Australian and international musicians and bands to sign and donate their t-shirts, with a photo of said musician holding up the signed tee. Then the t-shirts get hidden in a Vinnies retail store, the [...]
11 social media marketing trends for 2011
Yes its February, but part of the reason this is so late is because of the launches that have been pumping out in the last few weeks. So with 11 months left of the year, I figured its a good time to look at the trends shaping the rest of 2011.
Measuring social media influence
Greenpeace Australia came and did a presentation for Social Media Club Sydney, about the social media component for their global campaign to get Nestlé to stop buying unsustainable palm oil from Sinar Mas, a global supplier that was destroying the south east Asian rainforests where orangutan’s were being threatened. I ran a social media analysis using Alterian SM2 to see how the Kit Kat brand in Australia was affected by Greenpeace campaign. The results show a clear negative impact on Kit Kat’s brand sentiment, that’s clearly attributable to Greenpeace’s localising the campaign.
Social Personas: implications for social marketers
Social Media Club Sydney’s sponsored event Social Personas: How different is the social media you from the real you? probably achieved the aims that the research set out to do, which was to cause people to question the “acceptable” behaviours related to authenticity versus superficiality in social media in Generation Y. The other speakers, demographer and historian Bernard Salt, and researcher Dr Rebecca Huntley focused on Facebook and the reported, self described superficiality in Generation Y behaviour’s particularly on Facebook.
My presentation was intended as a bit of a tongue in cheek thought starter, rather than fighting the superficiality and behavioural traits, maybe marketers should just play up to it?
Australian Election 2010 – social media match fitness
The 2010 Australian Election is going to be an interesting one for social media analysis, because for the first time we will see to be able to see whether social sentiment is going to have an impact on how people vote. I started looking at this on Friday 16 July, the day before the election was called, and left Alterian SM2 monitoring tool looking at the same keywords over the weekend which included the day of the election announcement.
This analysis is from 1 to 18 July and includes mainstream media as well as strictly “social” media channels. Twitter has by far the largest volume of mentions for both parties.
Who owns social content?
A year later, most clients are now active in social media – they are asking for Facebook apps, one of them has even replaced their corporate website with a Facebook Page and many of them are even using Twitter, personally if not for their brands. The legal/creative issues for user generated content have not gone away – the clients lawyers are still saying “no” to many creative, social content campaign ideas.
It goes like this:
1. Creative team pitch in a cool, engaging user generated/social content, game/application/tactical campaign
2. Client loves it
3. Digital producers spec it out, and it all looks like its all systems go.
4. Then it gets run past the lawyers
5. Lawyers say no
6. Campaign gets killed or its “Back to the drawing board”
Introducing the authors of Age of Conversation 3
I am very excited to be part of a new book, Age of Conversation 3: It’s time to get busy!. It’s going to be a physical book, available directly from Amazon and other online book stores. The new cover, was designed by Chris Wilson. And the website, was designed and built by my friend, Craig Wilson and the hard working team at Sticky Advertising. The editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan have done an amazing job pulling it together
Australians increasing social media use is led by Facebook
Nielsen reports today via Nielsen’s 2010 Social Media Report, that there are now 9 million Australians interacting on regularly on social networking sites with Facebook dominating – more than 83% of social networkers naming Facebook as their main social networking platform, up from 72% in 2008 and 34% in 2007.
Overall, Facebook is Australia’s most popular social network with 75% of online Australians having ever visited, and via time spent per month (more than 8 hours per month which is seven and a half more hours than its closest rival site YouTube)
Social mashup goes mainstream: Pepsi Hit Refresh
Earlier this week, Pepsi Australia’s Hit Refresh social media and heavyweight outdoor campaign started it’s promotions activation phase, via a Twitter treasure hunt and the engagement so far has been extremely high. This is a campaign I’ve been working on since late 2009, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing social brand advocacy in action at a grass roots level in the Gen Y and Gen Z demographic. Particularly on Facebook, Fans of the page are spontaneously sharing their love of Pepsi, requesting the treasure hunt come to their city, and enjoying the MTV TV spots.
There are a few points about this campaign that makes it distinctive in both the social media and advertising landscape in Australia:
Why filmmakers should care about social media
I gave this presentation at the 17th Annual World Congress for Science and Factual Producers in Melbourne on 4th December. The audience was mainly documentary and science filmmakers from around the world who came to find out about social media and what it could do for them.
Radical Authenticity: MC Hammer at Social Media Club Sydney
Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) was transformed last night, 10th November 2009, spellbound by one unique individual, the one and only MC Hammer. Hammer, listed as one of the top social media users on WeFollow is passionate about social media and entrepreneurship. What makes him so engaging is his deeply personal point of view: everything was related to his own experience with Twitter his blog, and the people he interacts with online. Hammer’s insights are related to what he’s gained transforming his personal brand into a social personal brand
what are the rules of social media?
A friend who runs a very successful business was contacted via email recently as he’d been held up as a “How not to use twitter” case study at a marketing event. While the person who emails this may or may not have had good intentions, there are a bunch of reasons why they are just completely wrong and inappropriate in judging at all. I’ll start with their Twitter profile:
the cornerstones of social strategy
I’ve been working on a number of social media campaigns lately, some really long term and some short term. What do they have in common?
* Defining social objectives
* Social media monitoring
* Channel strategy
* Content strategy
The combination varies from client to client but its really important to have these cornerstones to help build a social media conversation.
HabitatUK return to Twitter
It was in June that HabitatUK learnt the power of social media when they jumped on Twitter and used trending topic hashtags (the most tasteless was the Iran Election) to push signups to their marketing database and furniture discounts . As the blogger who broke the news, and then watched it break all records on Social Media Today, I am very relieved to see them back on Twitter. The case has been used as a benchmark of the cynical use of hashtag spam, been written up on countless posts, news stories and talked about on Twitter. Even though HabitatUK apologised through me via another blog post, and then promptly blamed their intern as the cause of the hashtag spam, they didn’t respond back on Twitter. Until now.
Are you marketing to your ego?
David Meerman Scott will be at the next Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event to talk about how marketers can “understand social personas and stop wasting money and resources”
David has many case studies on his blog and his book World Wide Rave, but the post that leapt out at me takes it one step earlier in the process referring to the marketplace being the outside world and not your office.
His question to all of us marketing in the new era:
1. Do you market to your ego? Or to the external marketplace?
2. Focus on your buyers, not your bosses.
3. The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office
A social media elevator speech
As today was designated Recycle a Blog Post Day, I decided to go back to my very first post, which was written to explain web 2.0 as a digital trend to a traditional advertising agency I was working for at the time. The only thing I’ve changed is the title and added and substituted “social media for web 2.0 in the post
One of the first questions people ask me about digital trends is “What’s so great about social media?” The easiest way to describe it is to use the 30 second elevator speech.
How social media influences trust in advertising
Last week Nielsen released the 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. The survey covers degrees of trust consumers have for advertisers/brands. The top 3 are worth highlighting:
* 90% of consumers surveyed trusted recommendations from people they knew personally
* 70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online
* 70% trusted brand websites
The key takeaway for me is that “strangers” opinions posted online offer as much trust to the consumer as the company website. That can be a glass half full or half empty depending which side of the social fence you sit on.
the customer experience lifecycle of a social brand
With the definition of customer experience lifecycles, marketers can calculate the most strategic influence points on the path to purchase. What interests me is the multiple touchpoints in a customer’s lifecycle where brands who use social media marketing can make a difference to a customer’s experience. I found inspiration in this post on How to define social media strategies by using the customer experience lifecycle
A standard customer experience lifecycle includes the following stages:
Qantas Travel Insider on building a social community
At the Social Media Club Sydney June event panel discussion Do you need an agency to run effective social media campaigns? Karla Courtney – Online Editor Qantas Travel Insider, and @qftravelinsider – represented the client perspective. Karla works client-side and has built a community around the @qftravelinsider Twitter account by engaging in conversations around travel. Watch the video excerpt from the evening.
How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study
Habitat is a trendy furniture store, set up by Terence Conran in the 1970s, for those who’ve never been to the UK its like a slightly more upmarket version of Ikea. @HabitatUK turned up on Twitter a couple of days ago, and decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, decorating, or shopping, but obviously the top hashtags for Thursday evening AEST such as #iPhone #mms #Apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contestant who got voted off #Poh. I found these on Twitter Search:
