Silver Bullet Syndrome is the wishful thinking desire for a single fix-all, solution to digital marketers’ problems. It’s a vain hope that one platform, campaign, or comms piece can solve all the digital KPIs (usually the desire for more website traffic or more conversions like online sales). Unfortunately, in today’s social and digital marketing world, a single solution is very unlikely to deliver all the wishful outcomes projected onto it.
social media advertising
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”
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.
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: