Yves Klein Blue are a band. They’re from Brisbane, they’re friends with the band I’m in and I happen to think they’re awesome. Their album came out on Friday and, as I suspected it would be, it’s bloody marvellous. You may know the song ‘Polka’ from that Mitsubishi Lancer commercial, and if you don’t know it, that’s OK, they’re probably not overly concerned because 75,000 other people have listened to it on YouTube, which is rather a lot of ‘reach’. I talk about music every so often on this blog because it’s one of my top four favourite things (the others being marketing, cooking and vintage motorcycles), but the reason I’m talking about Yves Klein Blue today is because they are a marvellous case study of how you can use social media to market things. At least, they could have been…

You see, Yves Klein Blue aren’t a particularly huge band. They’re signed to a major independent record label called Dew Process, they’ve been doing the rockstar dream thing and have just recorded their album in America with a big-name producer, they’re playing all the right festivals, but they’re certainly a long way behind some of their other label contemporaries (The Living End and Ben Lee, for example) in terms of popularity and chart success. As a marketing case study, they’re starting from a reasonably clean slate, which is a good place to start from if you want to do some quantitative analysis.

The trouble is, despite bringing The Population on board to kick-start their album launch with a wonderful, if not entirely original, idea for a Twitter application and a competition to win tickets to the Splendour in the Grass festival by mentioning the bands name and what you’d do to win the tickets, they don’t seem to have created much of a splash. I’m certainly not knocking The Population’s work mind you, I think the ideas were great. I’m just surprised that for a band with over 75,000 views on YouTube they haven’t created a bigger buzz so far. Check out this graph which shows the number of Twitter mentions (positive AND negative) each day since the campaign launched and you’ll see what I mean:

Before the Twitter campaign launched Yves Klein Blue were being mentioned a small handful of times a day. In the week since the campaign launched, they have been  mentioned 234 times (Twitter Search’s figures aren’t historically accurate as they don’t count people who tweeted and then deleted). That’s a lot more than a handful, but it’s not exactly overwhelming. Cabbage is more popular than that.

Perhaps it’s too early to judge, perhaps this is the calm before the storm, but right now, the graph of people Tweeting about Yves Klein Blue seems to be going nowhere. Seth Godin (if it’s still cool to quote him) would call that a ‘dip‘. I’m wondering just exactly what sort of success they were aiming for? I’ve giving a talk at this month’s Sydney Social Media club about measurement in social media marketing. One of the great things about having a social media monitoring tool so close at hand is that it becomes a lot easier to calculate the reach of social media marketing campaigns, which makes it much easier to justify ROI to marketing managers.

Whichever tool you use, you can calculate the reach of the first week of Yves Klein Blue’s album launch Twitter campaign in a number of ways:

1. Calculate the number of people who downloaded a song (presumably that was the primary goal)
2. Calculate the number of individual people who tweeted about Yves Klein Blue (that’s the number of people who actually engaged with the campaign, they’d be more likely to go on and make a purchase)
3. Calculate the number of tweets which mentioned Yves Klein Blue (a handy figure for charts)
4. Calculate the number of people who saw tweets about Yves Klein Blue (this will look way impressive when you do your powerpoint presentation at the end of the month, but in reality, if any of these people were interested enough they would have then tweeted about it themselves and we’d know who they were)

I don’t know how many people actually physically downloaded a song but the record company will; although I can’t imagine they’re suffering bandwidth problems at this stage (it’ll be around 100). Anyone can count the number of individual people who tweeted, and the total number of tweets that mentioned Yves Klein Blue was 234.  The overall exposure to those tweets (what traditional media planners would traditionally call ‘reach’) you’d calculate by multiplying the number of mentions by the number of followers each tweeter had at the time of tweeting. If you were being honest, you’d also subtract the negative mentions multiplied by the number of people who saw those. Danica Davis from Brisbane was actually the only naysayer of the bunch and remarked to her 94 followers “omg how bad are yves klein blue“. While Danica doesn’t bring the overall total down too much (hint: it’s at the low end of the five figure scale), at the end of the day, this is the digital world and traditional reach doesn’t count for much - not when you can get precise figures for the exact number of people who actually engaged with the campaign and took an action of some sort.

The campaign is hardly a ‘fail’ (hell, as much as I like them, they’re not Radiohead), but it does go to show that you just can’t trust ‘reach’ as an indicator of campaign success, no matter what the medium.

What do you think?

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