Someone asked me for a definition of social media marketing this morning. I had to pause for a second, but eventually came up with this:
“Social media marketing is engaging people in online dialogue and using those conversations to exchange value.”
I’m going to run with that for now. I haven’t seen a consensus on the definition anywhere else.
Next up: elevator pitch.
We’re putting together a marketing plan and digital strategies outline for a children’s television series which is in development for an Australian network. It has been sold around the world and the producers are pretty excited about the social networking opportunities. Forums, blogs, ‘Second Life’ Islands and behind-the-scenes access areas are nothing new, but this series comes at a time when 90% of nine-year-olds have used the Internet and 34% of twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Never before have young teenagers engaged so enthusiastically with online content or been more inclined to join online communities.
I can’t reveal too much about the series, given that it’s in production and all a bit hush-hush, but it’s along the same lines as something like The Saddle Club or Bluewater High — a bunch of kids who are elite proponents of a particularly popular activity who are growing up together and attending the same school. The websites for those shows are pretty good, I particularly like Bluewater High’s, but the strategy we’re putting together is going to be on a whole new level.
The online strategy for the show is divided into four basic parts:
Here’s some of the cool things we’re doing on the social networking side:
Using Flash™ technology a detailed virtual world will be created where fans can walk through the sets and see where the characters have been. Bandwidth issues in Australia prevent video-intensive features like real-time character interaction (like you might find in a video game), but it’s certainly possible to create a static virtual world. Powderfinger’s Hotel Existence website is along the lines of what we’re talking about.
Fans will be able to sneak into character’s bedrooms and read their diaries, see what they’re listening to on their iPODs, see what they ate for lunch and gather clues from the virtual set to use in online games and competitions.
The coolest feature of this virtual world though, is how the character’s profiles will integrate with actual Facebook and MySpace profiles. The producers were keen to create a new stand-alone social networking platform especially for the show, using something like Ning, but we explained to them that if we used existing platforms, fans will already be familiar with the user-interface, they won’t have to sign-up for anything new and most importantly, every single aspect of their interaction with the show’s characters will be automatically broadcast to all their other friends who share the same social networking platform. The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, so by allowing fans to interact with characters on Facebook you are increasing the show’s marketing reach by a factor of 150 for every single fan.
The social networking profiles will be updated weekly by production staff, in sync with the onscreen events. So, for example, when two characters start dating, their Facebook profiles will change to show that they are ‘In a Relationship’. When they break up, their profile will be updated accordingly. These changes will obvioiusly also appear in their real-life ‘friends’ news feeds as if the events were happening to real people. When characters post on other characters’ walls, fans will be able to track the conversations between them.
The characters will also post event invitations. For example, in the lead-up to an episode where one character throws herself a sixteenth birthday party, all her real Facebook friends will be invited to attend. Candid photographs of the party will later appear and fans will be able to comment on the photographs.
Several instructional videos will be created by real-life, professional proponents of the activity the show centres around (imagine if Kelly Slater had put together a series of instructional surfing videos for Bluewater High and then they were posted all over YouTube). A section of the website will be devoted to showcasing these videos and via step-by-step tutorials, fans will be able to learn what the characters are doing. Fans will then be able to film themselves and their friends and upload them to the site and to YouTube. This will ensure the website gains significant exposure in YouTube (and Google) when people from around the world are searching for videos of this activity – increasing the reach of the online campaign far beyond the core Australian audience.
Montages of popular television shows created by fans who put their favourite scenes together in a YouTube re-mix are another recent video Phenomenon (one fan film clip from Australian children’s series H20: Just Add Water has had more than 650,000 YouTube views). It’s a labour of love that can take countless hours, but tools like Flektor are making it easier to do and by providing fans with a library of useful clips, helpfully sorted under appropriate categories, we’ll make the process super-easy and encourage fans to plaster as many clips as they like on YouTube.
Fans will also be able to download songs from the website soundtrack and edit them into the clips, resulting in huge exposure for the artists (a bargaining chip when licensing the songs). The website will then run competitions and the fans can vote on their favourite montages, bringing new filmmakers to the fore and increasing exposure on YouTube to a worldwide audience.
Creative, dedicated fans love writing fictional stories about their characters. Sites like Fan Fiction.net have millions of stories uploaded about virtually every popular television series ever created. Buffy the Vampire Slayer alone has more than 30,000 stories uploaded by fans.
A section of the website will actively encourage fan fiction competitions where people write stories about the characters and upload them for others to read. Producers will actively use this as a research tool to figure out what fans want to happen in the next series.
Those are just some of the strategies I can talk about publicly. We’re pretty excited about it all and I’d love to hear any feedback you had on what we’re doing. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of their own I’m all ears…
We’ve just launched a new website for a Brisbane company called Big Cat Reality. They operate a huge catamaran that takes scuba divers on weekend trips in the Moreton Bay Marine Park and up to the Great Barrier Reef. The crew are experienced and hilarious, the scenery is amazing and it’s one of the best-value scuba diving trips in the country. I’m really proud of the site because it’s a great example of how you can use social media marketing to great effect in a small business. Social media marketing really doesn’t work well for a lot of companies because most people don’t give a shit about them. You don’t need to know what your local baker is doing when you’re not buying a pie and you don’t want to share photos with your plumber. Big Cat Reality on the other hand was just screaming out for a social media marketing campaign and it’s really working well for them.
Here’s what we’re doing and why it’s working…
Scuba Divers all own cameras and they all take photos. Hundreds of them. Under the water, above the water, on the boat, when they get off the boat, when they’re eating, when the crew do something funny, when the captain wears a silly hat, when someone has a few too many post-dive-brewskies. They go away for a weekend with a couple of dozen like-minded individuals, become best friends, and every moment is documented. Naturally they like to share their memories and they want to keep in touch with their new friends because divers always need dive buddies. Big Cat Reality clients are a pre-packaged social network just screaming out for a place to converge. We could have started a customised Big Cat community using an application like Ning, but in reality, Facebook does everything they need and their demographic (25-35s) is savvy enough to know what Facebook is, but probably not keen enough to try something new. Facebook fits their business better than a new 2mm wetsuit; the customers love it, it’s easy for crew to update: win-win.
Scuba Divers get to live in a completely different world to the rest of us. They’re keen to show others what it’s like and there are heaps of talented underwater cinematographers out there who are more than happy to splice their footage together and give it away. In fact, Big Cat Reality had already been tagged in half a dozen brilliant YouTube vidoes without them even knowing about it (proof that the best marketing strategy in the world is producing a great product that influential people want to share with their friends). It didn’t take much to create an official Big Cat Reality YouTube channel and start collating the videos together. It’s early days yet, but we’ll work with them to make sure they come up in YouTube and Google when people search for all the dive locations they visit (and for keywords like ’scuba diving’ in general).
It took them a few years to figure out why it was a good idea, but the crew have started gathering email addresses of clients who are keen to know more about upcoming trips. They have such a great product and what they offer is such a good deal (and an amazing experience) that people are more than happy to give their details over: in fact, they’d be disappointed if they weren’t kept informed about what was happening. A good viral marketing campaign isn’t about having the funniest photo, it’s about finding people who want to forward your message on because they believe in it. We’re working with Big Cat Reality to make sure they have the kind of email alerts and newsletters that people want to forward to their friends. It’s an easy job too, because if you go away on an amazing dive trip and someone makes it easy for you to share the photos, videos and stories of that experience with people who are interested in what you got up to on your weekend, it pretty much takes care of itself.
Social media marketing doesn’t work for everyone. People won’t build social networks around cola or freeze-dried noodles, but if your product appeals to an existing community of like-minded individuals who have stories and images to share, social media marketing is your most powerful tool. It doesn’t take much effort, the market does the work for you, and it’s dirt-cheap. If you have a great product people will tell their friends about you anyway, all you have to do is make it easy for them.
A recent HitWise report reveals that overall market share of social networking sites has decreased by 20% over the last 12 months. An article at BizReport.com has cited the report by Hitwise (a visitor metrics company) and used the headline ‘Is Social Networking Dead or Dying?’. I can’t find the original point of reference on the Hitwise site, but the BizReport.com article states that the number of visits to social networking sites has fallen. It then goes on to point out that this might actually be because people are spending more time on their favourite site rather than jumping to and from a bunch of them (which would rack up the number of visits from unique users, but isn’t a true indication of popularity).
It’s a beat-up, but if you step back from the hyperbole and gaze at the bigger picture, it could well be that the excitement has died down and social networking has hit its high-water mark. Could it be that everyone in the western world who wants to have a MySpace or Facebook account now does and that those that do are using them less? Are the steep growth curves of the social media giants about to even out?
My gut instict is yes.
What does this mean?
A: The fad is over.
People who signed up to Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and LinedIn have played around furiously for a while, but like hoola-hoops, roller skates, slinkys, Pokemon, yo-yos, slap bands, Alf and The Olsen Twins, they’re now starting to lose interest. I don’t think they’ll relegate social networking to the bottom of the toy-box just yet, but I think you’ll definitely see less ferventness, which is exactly what that HitWise report is showing.
If I owned Facebook, I’d be selling out now. Watch for an announcement in the next few months, before the capitalists realise there ain’t as much money in it as everyone thought. And don’t even get me started on fucking Twitter.
Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.
A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.
Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.
NineMSN are giving away prizes if you use their search instead of Google’s. The concept is simple: for a few weeks you can go to their secret search page, (which is different from their normal search page) enter some words into the search field, hit the search button and as your results are displayed, some little poker machine-style spinny things show you if you’ve won a prize. This happens every time you search. You get more chances at winning if you make it your homepage and more still if change your default browser search to theirs. It’s a great campaign and very nicely done, I like what they’re trying to achieve (ie. after using their search for a few weeks you’ll realise it’s pretty good, so you won’t bother going back to Google). It’s well-executed, clever and ticks lots of boxes. It won’t work for me because I realise my chances of winning a prize I actually want are dismal, I love the search results I get from Google and I hate the advertising on NineMSN, but that’s not the point.
The point is how I heard about this campaign.
It was here.
Not from NineMSN, not from a media release, not from a banner ad, not from a promo in Internet Explorer, not from a news article, not from a popup window. It was from a cool blog by an 18-year-old university marketing student. That’s the real power of social media. This is the core. This is the buzz. If your brand is interesting, people like Zac Martin will start talking about it, and people like me will start listening. Not because the message is forced upon me, not because anyone got paid to do anything, just because it was interesting.
Be interesting.
I don’t want to be one of those ‘I saw an article today’ bloggers, but, I saw an article today. It was at news.com.au and it was talking about how employers have “backflipped” on Facebook and want employees to use it. It was in the business section under ‘innovation’ — I had to chuckle.
“EMPLOYERS have backflipped in the way they view social networking sites at work. More than one in four managers now embrace the use of MySpace and Facebook as “untapped” business opportunities, research revealed today,” the article read.
What a crock of shit.
Here’s what happened: Journalist, Rebecca Beisler (I’m sure she’s lovely, but today wasn’t her day), received a press release from a corporation who did a ’survey’. It sounded interesting. Rebecca cut and pasted three paragraphs from the press release and then figured she’d better call some other people to get their opinion.
Internet Industry Association CEO Peter Coroneos said this:
“The internet is set to have an even more profound impact on business. The digital revolution is only beginning to be felt.”
Well fuck me.
RMIT ‘digital expert’ Mark Gregory said this:
“People like to use these sites and tell people what they’re doing. It gets them some happiness and more morale for employees.”
As a university representative you’d think Mark could get some more happiness into his grammar.
What this article really says is that 75% of managers surveyed don’t think social networking has a place at work and 25% of them think there’s probably some sort of untapped opportunity there but they don’t understand enough about it to know what it is, so maybe if they let Gen Y kids play on Facebook on their lunchbreak they’ll figure something out, or at the very least, not quit and go work somewhere else where they can play on Facebook on their lunch break.
If you want to make social media like Facebook and MySpace work for you (as opposed to business networking tools like LinkedIn), you need to figure out how to make it impossible for Cam Hill not to say good things about your brand to his friends (even, gasp, his ones from real life) and you need to understand that employees playing on Facebook at lunch are just like teenagers at the mall.
Don’t believe the hype.
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