JitterJam® Social CRM

Everybody loves a good viral video. Whether you are watching funny cats or the Old Spice Guy duke it out with Fabio, viral videos are sure to entertain. Companies consistently try to achieve viral status with their marketing efforts, as a single viral video can provide millions of brand impressions and a level of buzz unattainable through paid media. However, creating viral videos isn’t a marketing strategy, rather it should only be a goal. This is because the power to make a video or campaign go viral lies in the tweets and shares of millions of social users and not in the hands of marketers.

One danger to considering viral marketing a strategy and not a goal is focusing more on the video than the actual campaign. By this I mean allocating more time and budget to video production, special effects, and promotion channels than to the execution of the campaign strategy. To ensure the best chance of going viral, try allocating resources in the opposite manner. From what I’ve seen, simple videos documenting complex and creative campaigns go viral more often than complex videos documenting simple campaigns. Here are two such videos, which both went viral because of the creativity of each campaign, and not each video:

Tropicana Natural Energy: In France, Tropicana created a billboard covered in oranges with the words “Energie Naturelle” (natural energy) glowing on the front in neon. The catch was that the oranges provided 100% of the energy needed to light the sign, and this received a very positive reaction from the crowd.

Heineken Soccer (Football) Heist: After creating a fake classical music and poetry concert on the day of the biggest soccer match of the year in Italy, Heineken then recruited girlfriends, professors, and bosses to ask boyfriends, students, and coworkers to attend the phony concert. On game day the concert room was packed, and at game time the heist was revealed and everyone was thrilled.

Why did these campaigns go viral?
As you can see, marketing campaigns with the best chance of going viral use emotion to spark interest. Curiosity, joy, surprise, and awe are just a few of the feelings that Heineken and Tropicana successfully created with these efforts. The second reason they were so successful is that viewers appreciated the brands’ efforts to give something to them. In the Tropicana example, this was as simple as something neat and innovative for a Paris passerby to look at, while in Heineken’s case they gave people the chance to watch one of the biggest soccer matches of the year. Online viewers will likely remember these videos the next time they see a Heineken or Tropicana product. These memorable positive brand impressions are another reason that viral marketing can be so valuable and effective.

What other marketing campaigns have you seen go viral? In your experience, do these viral instances occur more often because of the creativity of the campaign or the video? Let us know what you think!

Videos via Adverblog and Guerrilla Communications

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

In our past discussions, we have talked about how individual initiatives are the genesis of the use of social media / social marketing within a business or a brand, and that these initiatives are usually driven by a single purpose—a use case. The sixth use case in our Creativity Coffee series, Measuring Buzz and Sentiment, focuses on the “first steps” that many brands and businesses take when engaging in the social realm—listening for brand chatter and measuring the sentiment of that chatter.

In a prior discussion, we talked about how social media opens the door not just for “media impressions” (aka Building Brand Awareness) but direct engagement with consumers. However, many brands cannot close the loop between social engagement and retail sales (e.g. soft drinks) and media impressions are key towards understanding the ROI of their overall marketing campaigns. Many brands monitor social media and measure buzz and sentiment as metrics for their messaging through other media. Others monitor buzz and sentiment to ensure that they can act upon any negative trend or incident. In this Creativity Coffee, we discussed how brands are using the data they collect when monitoring social conversations and tackled issues around who SHOULD be monitoring their brand. Here are the ideas that sparked from the discussion.

1. Larger companies are already monitoring sentiment and brand awareness/buzz.
• Brands have traditionally used customer surveys to understand customer brand sentiment.
• Larger companies are often more comfortable doing surveys and keeping results private.
• But public brand chatter, including positive and negative comments, are going on regardless of whether the brand is listening and monitoring social conversations.
2. If a brand is monitoring buzz and sentiment, what should they be doing with this data?
• Evaluate whether their overall messaging (transmitted through social and other media) is taking hold
• Over time, see how the brand’s campaigns are impacting buzz and sentiment (more positive, more chatter, etc.)
• Risk mitigation: Identify a crisis threat/situation and identify key influencers to help change the sentiment or address the issue
• Use information (comments and ideas) for product development and improvement (that’s next week’s Creativity Coffee topic!)
• Identify areas for improvement (quality control red flags)
• Identify key influencers to help promote the brand
3. What is an influencer for a brand?
• There aren’t that many influencers for a brand; usually less than a dozen people are true brand influencers
• Buzz and sentiment for social media is driven by the 98/2 rule–the top 2% are going to have influence over a vast social circle
• Brands who engage and develop relationships with consumer advocates enable their message and brand goodwill to be propagated in an organic, natural manner in the consumer’s own voice; it carries much more weight than a brand-initiated message with other consumers
4. Is there a line where a business is too small to be monitoring buzz/sentiment?
• A mom & pop store…does it make sense for them to be monitoring social networks for buzz/sentiment?
• What is the tipping point for size of community and business that makes measuring buzz, trends, sentiment worthwhile?
• Quantity of conversation going on about a brand drives whether they should monitor and measure the buzz and sentiment.
• Even if a brand or company is below that ‘line of demarcation,’ they might want to measure brand buzz as a baseline for future growth.
• If a brand isn’t monitoring, they won’t know IF their brand spikes in social buzz. Also, you never know when a conversation is going to erupt; it may not be specifically about YOU, but it could impact you in some way (competitor, market, etc.)
5. A company SHOULD monitor its brand regardless of the technology.
• In a small business, someone in the company usually needs to “love technology” even for a minimal amount of monitoring to happen. But it’s easy to have even basic brand monitoring (e.g. Google Alerts).
6. Progression of social monitoring.
• No monitoring. Lots of businesses aren’t monitoring for social chatter about their brands. Why? Many are consciously or subconsciously afraid of getting ‘bad news.’ Company culture and methods may also prevent them from adopting new media and technologies.
• Data as reality. Businesses may think they know the cause of a specific result, but by mining data versus using intuition they can learn the real cause for an effect. But the brand must be willing to act upon that data (even if it’s not what they want to hear). E.g. Supermarket scanner data. After scanner data was available, the more forward-thinking food companies used that data to get an advantage–picking the “right” shelf space to drive more sales, stocking product by market, etc. That’s one huge benefit of social media–getting more data about consumer response and using that data to get a huge competitive advantage.
7. Consumer perception IS reality.
• What consumers perceive about a brand (versus the brand’s message) IS the brand’s reality. The whole idea that the brand has control over the consumer’s perception and conversation is an antiquated idea but deeply rooted in traditional business and media.
• But brands need to be careful. The vocal social person may not be representative of the brand’s majority of customers. They just might be the most vocal (squeaky wheel) but may drive the brand to make the wrong decisions overall.

Are you monitoring buzz and sentiment about your brand? How do you act upon that information? Let us know and join the conversation!

Today marks the fortieth annual celebration of Earth Day, and it is an understandably popular topic across the Web right now. Both the phrase “Happy Earth Day” and the hash tag #EarthDay are currently trending topics on Twitter. But there is one specific Earth Day-related search phrase we’ve been really interested in all day, and that is “Earth Day resolutions.”

Why Earth Day resolutions? Well, a resolution is actionable—it’s something someone wants to get done. And there is therefore an opportunity to help. For a business in the eco-friendly space, Earth Day resolutions offer a wealth of possibilities. To name just one example: a search on this simple term would bring up dozens of potential customers for a cloth bag manufacturer (ditching plastic shopping bags has been a popular resolution choice).

Days like this need not (and should not) be exclusively about direct, immediate conversions, however. For the eco-friendly business, like the client who first turned us on to the idea of Earth Day resolutions, establishing a presence in a holiday- or event-related conversation can be just as much about showing a passionate dedication to the ideals set forth in the company’s mission statement. Letting customers and prospects know you care deeply about the same things they care about is never a bad move.

Either way, if your company is engaged in social media marketing, the opportunity to help or to inspire on a day like today is one that should never be passed up.

Last month, I wrote about the importance of measurement in social media campaigns. In that post, I identified three things you should be tracking in particular: the buzz building around your company and industry; the ROI on the special promotions you’re running; and trends in the development of your contact list.

We’ve already talked about trends in the development of your contact list. This time, let’s focus on the buzz building around your company and industry. Here are three tips on how to handle it.

Contribute without selling. Don’t enter into the conversation looking to sell. As with any social media interaction, enter the room with the aim of being helpful first and foremost. Be subtle and tactful as you try to raise awareness of your product or service. This is especially crucial if the conversation is about your industry in general and not your company specifically.

Don’t duck in and duck out. Become a presence in the conversation, not just the person who sneaks into the picture to get noticed, then leaves. This ties in with the point above: Show your potential customers that you are engaged in this conversation for the long haul, and that your first interaction was not just a token appearance or some kind of marketing stunt or trick.

Research the origins of the buzz. A key piece of reacting to buzz is anticipating and reacting quickly. If you didn’t react as swiftly as you’d like this time, the key to reacting quicker next time is in understanding where the buzz started, how it started, and who started it. If you’re seeing buzz consistently originate from the same people or sites, it might be time to start tracking what they’re saying more carefully. Use tagging or segmentation features in your marketing platform (like those found in JitterJam) to create a group of contacts you should be checking in on more regularly.

Those are just a couple of the strategies that come immediately to mind when thinking about buzz management. Have anything to add? Drop a note in the comments below.