Here (from Australia's Mumbrella) is a great case study of the dangers of letting your tradditional agency (in this case Saatchi & Saatchi) design and run a Social Media campaign.
This comes back to the point I blogged about before - earned media requires a differnt mindset from bought media .... Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi lerned this in public.
"......Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.
It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.
And as Saatchi & Saatchi has demonstrated, it now goes without saying that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.
For Toyota, I still think that running a live social media pitch with the five competing campaigns was a good thing. Even without this week’s events, it will have learned a lot. And by doing it in the public arena, the entire marketing industry got to learn too.
Where it went wrong was in giving too much leeway to an agency with little apparent social media experience and seemingly too little risk control to accompany that.
As an aside, it was interesting to note that another agency on the shortlist was Oddfellows, a long term partner of Toyota. A traditionally based agency, Oddfellows didn’t have the hubris to claim to be able to understand social media on its own. It partnered with social media agency The Population.
Saatchi & Saatchi apparently decided it could fly solo. Rather like many media planners think they’d make a good creative, I wonder if Saatchis thought social media was easier than it was.
It began to go wrong for Saatchis very early in the process. For starters, a film competition is such a tired idea. There was no twist. The brief was simply: make a film featuring a Yaris, and win a relatively small amount of money.
The accompanying Facebook page felt that it was being moderated by somebody who had just discovered the internet, and was catching up on the last few years’ memes. It posted links to the likes of the OK Go treadmill music video, the Johnnie Walker Robert Carlyle ad and “Guy catches glasses with face”. All great virals, but also familiar to anyone who’d spent much time online in the last year like the target audience. It didn’t position the Facebook group as somewhere to go to catch the latest and hottest.
No wonder then that as rival agencies’ Yaris campaigns began to get up stream, the Clever Film Comp got stuck on the grid. Facing the embarrassing prospect of no entries, the agency abandoned the idea of genuine user generated content, and with it what many would consider social media authenticity.
It forwarded this email to production house contacts:
From: Rob
Subject: Clever Comp
Hey creative people
I’ve got something that you’ll (or your housemates, brothers, sisters, artistic friends etc will) be interested in.
It’s a film comp in aide of promoting Toyota Yaris.
“A film comp? I don’t have the time!” you may say, but listen up. So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December. Voting is done on hits and comments so if you’re in first you have a huge advantage. And you don’t have to make an ad, just put a Yaris in somewhere a la the ‘number 8′ or ’spring’ in Tropfest or something
First prize is $7,000. $3,000 for second and $1,000 for 3rd. At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand.
Details are in the attachments. If you win, I’d love an all carbon fibre road bicycle for Christmas.
Cheers y’all.
-Rob
As a result, this skewed the entries. If you promote the competition as an ad agency to your production house contacts then what you’re going to get back are slick would-be commercials, rather than short films. This was, as we now know, to prove important.
It certainly suggests that by this point the agency’s aim was to avoid the embarrassment of having very few entries for its contest, rather than to run an authentic, engaging competition.
.... " more
CMOs at the recent Forbes CMO Summitrecognize that social marketing affects nearly all forms of digital marketing, including e-mail, advertising, search and Web marketing. It shouldn't be treated as a silo. Even so, there's confusion about how to develop a solid strategy. Here are some suggestions for how they might do that.
Social Marketing Affects All Digital Marketing Channels
CMOs must think of social marketing as a horizontal effort across all of their digital marketing assets--not as an independent experiment.
Most consumer brands, including Skittles, Best Buy and Dell, have integrated social marketing into Web marketing efforts. Yet beyond traditional Web marketing efforts, social technologies have implications to other digital channels. For instance, e-mail providers Silverpop, StrongMail and Responsys already have social marketing integration by encouraging consumers to share e-mails with their social contacts in Twitter, Facebook and beyond.
More dramatically, Google and Microsoft's Bing announced partnerships with Twitter, promising to integrate tweets in search results. Eventually, tweets, blogs, and Facebook wall posts will influence these search results. The effects on paid search marketing are unpredictable.
Customers Don't Care What Department You're In
Not so long ago, flare-ups around customer support issues could be swept under the rug. Now, customers have a soapbox from which to tell everyone how they feel about your brand. From shabby employees at Domino's embarrassing the company on YouTube to off-brand (if catchy) music videos like United Breaks Guitars', customers are yelling back at brands--and sharing their opinions with millions of people at the same time. Search engine results about your brand are affected by this Web chatter. For example, searching Google for "Dell Support" results in links to blog posts about less-than-stellar customer service. Customers just want their problems fixed; their gripes can cause a lot of problems for a brand.
Technology Is Cheap, Yet Soft Costs Are High
As marketing budgets have been cinched, efficient channels like word-of-mouth are more attractive than ever to CMOs. Social tools are inexpensive, if not free. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, most social marketing budgets make up less than 5% of companies' overall interactive marketing cost centers. The most expensive solutions available to maintain community platforms or brand-monitoring solutions may cost $100,000 a year.
The tech tools are cheap. What's expensive: education, roles, processes and agency costs. Getting a department ready for an entirely new way of conducting marketing takes patience--and resources.
Develop A Pragmatic Approach
Marketing leaders should get their organizations prepared for social marketing with the following three insights:
Dedicated social roles should be enablers, not controllers. We now know that social technologies are pervasive and affect all digital assets. Yet to be successful, CMOs should appoint dedicated staffers to coordinate efforts. Success will require these people to teach, provide resources and select technologies on behalf of multiple business units. Take, for example, Intel's Social Media Center of Excellence, which is a team that trains, helps, and enables other business units with this new medium.
Provide customers with a holistic experience. CMOs face a threat and an opportunity: Customer support issues are quickly cascading through the Web and affecting marketing efforts. Despite the risks, this is an opportunity for marketing to demonstrate leadership and provide a holistic experience across all customer touch points.
Marketing should work with support, as well as other business units such as product development and field teams, to determine ways to respond to customers using social technologies. Start by hosting brown-bag sessions where different business units can come and share, learn and talk. Then provide best practices, education and resources that help other business units beyond marketing.
CMO Insight: Social Marketing Affects The Whole Organization
Tying it all together, CMOs must first change their mindsets when it comes to social strategy. These technologies are pervasive and affect every digital marketing asset. Furthermore, every customer touch point in the company--from sales to support--can now be read online on the Web for everyone to see, share and comment. Armed with these insights, CMOs should approach social marketing as a culture shift within a corporation and align the proper resources.
A little while ago I spoke at the MMC09 - here is an interview done by the team just after the conference.
In the interview I cover the relationship between WoM and Social Media and how my company (Vocanic) approaches the planning of a campaign with its Groundswell(tm) methodology.
Here is a post by Andy Sernovitz, the ex head of WOMMA, who is now off doing his own thing called Gaspedal and authoring books and writing his Dam, I Wish blog
What I loved ( and got his permission to repost, thanks Andy) was the simple way he got rid of lots of the confustation (new word ...like it?) that is being weaved around WoM and Social Media.
To put Andy's sentiment into our own (Vocanic's) parlance .... its all about earning the recommendation.
Big Hairy Idea #1: It's Not ALL About Social Media
Social media is an incredible tool. It enables fast conversations, it enables widespread conversations, and it connects people who would rarely see each other. It gives speed and scale to word of mouth.
But social media is not word of mouth marketing. It's a tool we can use for the online portion of word of mouth. But it's not even the main tool there. I would argue that more recommendations go by plain old-fashioned email than all the social networks combined.
On top of that, offline word of mouth is so much bigger than online word of mouth. A tweet still doesn't beat a personal recommendation from a close friend.
So why are we talking about social media so much?
1. Because real word of mouth is hard. It requires big ideas, long-term commitment, and an honest dedication by a company to earn the respect and recommendation of its customers. You can't just call your agency and order up some WOM.
2. Because social media gives us an action step. It's fairly straightforward to do a campaign on Facebook or Twitter. You can call your agency and order up a social media campaign. And your agency, who is totally freaked out by this WOM stuff, can deliver a pretty good campaign.
Then you can show the results to your happy boss. Everyone feels good and gets paid.
Except... we completely miss the point.
The point of word of mouth isn't ecommerce; it isn't to count clicks and CPAs.
The point of word of mouth is to be a brand worth talking about. To be a company that people are proud to tell their friends about. It's to replace paid marketing with personal connections. To replace cash with love. To be fantastic.
In the first half of 2009 internet advertising weathered the recession and grew by 4.6% to £1,752.1m, despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period.
According to the bi-annual online advertising expenditure study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) - the trade body for digital marketing - in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) - , the internet has now overtaken TV advertising to become the UK's biggest advertising medium.
The UK remains the world leader in terms of market share for online, with the medium accounting for 23.5% in the first half of 2009. The results signal a significant restructure of marketing budgets as advertisers follow their audiences online and look to the internet for even more measureable and accountable methods.
Technology, telecoms and finance leading the way
The study breaks down the online display market by industry category, to identify the top spenders and how investment is increasing or decreasing across sectors. The results show that Technology is the biggest spender, accounting for 19.1% of the market, followed by Telecoms (13.3% rising from 9.7% the previous year) and Finance (13.2% up from 11.9). Entertainment and Media was fourth with 11.8%, while Consumer Goods saw significant growth up from 6.2% in H1 2008 to 8.1% in 2009 as FMCG marketers steadily increased digital budgets.
I love the safe is risky and risky is safe mantra .. the more I look the more I find it true.
Today I learned that Blockbuster is closing 40% of its stores in the US. Why? Because they stuck to safe ... they carried on their traditional retail based business model while Netflix was busy changing the game. Netflix did risky ... Blockbuster did safe.
Here is another example. Faberge
Faberge just launched their new website - from which they plan to sell their ultra high end jewllery. US$7m brooches included.
You cant actually access their site directly, you have to register and give your name and phone number and a Faberge representative will call you back - which they did while I was typing this post. Kiril (who is from the Ukrian) called & was super polite; he told me what my username and password would be.
Now I can browse the collection - if I have questions Kiril will call me back at the click of a mouse. If I am really interested in a piece then they will bring it to me to view.
I love the innovation of the business model. Faberge CEO Mark Dunhill had these very perceptive things to say ..
"Ad campaigns,. shops and inventory increase the risk. They increase the time it will take for that business to become profitable. We’re not in a position where we need to have a scattergun approach to drive either volumes or traffic to our Web site, or to sell vast quantities of inventory.”
“Could you give me a blank check please?” Dunhill said rhetorically of the traditional approach to building a luxury brand. “Hang around for 10 years while I build a network of flagship stores, fill those stores with very expensive inventory? Then we will sit back and wait and cross our fingers and hopefully we will be making money.”
“I could have done that,” he said. “I’m not sure I would have been successful.”
While some may think that selling upscale jewllery from a website is risky ... I think he has made a wise and safe bet .. as he says ... to do the traditional thing and open stores, stock with inventory and do expensive advertising (the safe, tried and tested route) would have been a much higher risk.