The Quisenblog

Here’s a scene that plays out over and over on a regular basis in living rooms across America. The specifics may change, but the overall dynamics are pretty consistent.

You’re sitting there with family or friends watching football or ‘Dancing With the Stars’ (or my favorite, ‘Mad Men’) on TV. Suddenly, a commercial spot comes on that you find entertaining (let’s use the “Shankapotamus” spot for E*Trade with the lip syncing baby as an example).

You get to talking about the spot, laughing about it, and decide to see if you can find it online. So you whip out your laptop, call up your favorite video site and view the spot a couple more times with your friends gathered around. You might look at other spots in the campaign, some long-form video on the ‘Making of Shankapotamus’ and maybe some viewer-created mash-ups of the spot. Then you decide, hey, your brother in Eugene might get a kick out of the spot, so you email the link to him.

So essentially, the creation and placement of a single 30-second spot resulted in way more views, way more engagement, and way more eyeballs than you have a right to expect from a TV spot alone. Part of this is due to the tools of Social Media—the ease at which it is to find, view and forward content. Part of it as well is due to the fact that the brand or its agency had the forethought to re-purpose the content online. But the “igniter” in this case was the creative itself. Without the content being fun and engaging, the search never would have happened in the first place.

Great creative has a life well beyond its intended medium. Create content and ads that people like and find entertaining, and suddenly you have an exponentially larger audience for your efforts. With unique video searches on YouTube at 88 million per month and growing, you get a sense of how large this potential “after market” of ideas is. Branded commercial queries are now the fastest growing category on video search.

The moral of this tale is that there has never been a greater business reason to demand break-through, viral-worthy content. Marketers who stick to the old ‘tried-and-true’ solutions that communicated clearly but offered the view little in the way of entertainment value (however you wish to define it) flat-out will not have the success in Social Media that marketers who continually create ‘talked about’ spots will have.

More than 40 years ago, famed adman Howard Gossage made the observation that, “People don’t pay attention to advertising. They pay attention to what interests them, and sometimes it happens to be advertising.” These days people not only pay attention to great content, they move it forward.

Posted by Mickey

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Mickey New Media, Social Media campaign success, commercial spot, E*Trade, Howard Gossage, online audience, Shankapotamus, viral-worthy, YouTube

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The Social Media Manifesto.
Tuesday: Social Media and business.
Wednesday: Your Social Media strategy: What are you hoping to achieve?
Thursday: Social Marketing turns the Media Funnel upside down.
Friday: Action steps for getting your business started in Social Media—today.

(This is the sixth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

One of the arguments marketers have used against Social Media campaigns is that it requires too much work
for too little return. “Social Media operates on too small a scale,” they may say. “No way you can expect the number of eyeballs from an online campaign as you would get from a traditional mass media campaign,” the thinking goes.

True. But is the number of “eyeballs” the correct measurement? Shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves more
with “engagement?”

For decades, we in marketing have had little choice but to subscribe to the paradigm of “media attrition.” It goes something like this: “If we hit 1,000,000 people with the same message, we’re bound to influence the behavior
of 1%.”

That means we deliver the same message to 1,000,000 folks with the expectation that we may actually get 10,000 of them to take action.

With Social Media, however, it is possible to affect the behavior of the same 10,000 folks by starting with a far smaller number. Like, say 1,000. Or even 100.

Thanks to the Internet, social networking sites and other online tools and communities, the traditional “media funnel” as we know it gets turned on its head. It is literally flipped upside down. Instead of starting with a big number to get a small one, we start small with the expectation we can grow our community. What the Internet doesn’t deliver in numbers, it delivers in influence.

So whereas 1,000,000 used to equal 10,000, now 1,000 does.

And who, exactly, are these 1,000? They’re your best customers, the ones who already feel like you are part of their “personal brand.” The ones Malcom Gladwell would refer to as “sneezers.”

Finding them may take a little work, but once you identify them, and dialogue with them from the perspective of “what can I do for you?” rather than “here’s what I want you to know,” they’ll react positively and stick with you.

Nurturing a Social Media community takes a little more elbow grease than executing a media buy, but in the long run it’s worth it. Those initial 1,000 souls will become the “medium” of your message moving forward to friends, family and Facebook. Through the Magic Multiplier of social media, that initial 1,000 will soon balloon to 10,000 or even 100,000.

Right away you can see you don’t have to haul in huge numbers initially to be successful in Social Media. For conversation sake, take your engagement number and multiply it by 150 (the equivalent of a 0.75% conversion rate—pretty good by mass media standards). This will give you roughly an equivalent number of unique “eyeballs” you’d have to reach through mass media to achieve roughly the same results. If you engage 1,000, you’d have to reach 150,000, etc. Now ask, “what would I have had to spend to get those eyeballs?” There. You roughly have a working figure to show what that engagement is “worth” in traditional marketing dollars.

And with Social Media, your campaign doesn’t end when your ad budget does. Each member of your community has the opportunity to engage deeper and bring others in.

Looked at it in this respect, Social Media can be as competitive in scale as mass media.

Influencing behavior via Social Media may not work the same way as through conventional media, but the results can be just as effective (the Evian “Rollerskating Babies” video on YouTube for example, has attracted over 11.5 million views, in addition to the other free publicity it has generated. This could translate to a mass media value of more than $1 billion!)

With Social Media, you end up with customers who have chosen to engage with you on a deeper level. They have opted in. They came to you because someone in their personal circle recommended you. And if they have a good experience, you are “made” in Tony Soprano-speak, and won’t have to compete for them on a transaction-by-transaction basis, you’d likely have to do with a mass media campaign.

Just do the math.

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Posted by Mickey

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Mickey Social Media audience engagement, campaign success, mass media, media attrition, online communities, Rollerskating Babies