Category Archives: digital media

August 17, 2012 · 8:57 am

Your Name Here

Let’s end the week with some Foodie Friday Fun on beverages.

A logo used, and trademarked, by PepsiCo for M...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have seen an announcement that Mountain Dew was adding another product. They added something called Johnson City Gold, which is a malt-flavored addition (Olde English for the younger set?) to the line. However, according to Food Business News the Johnson City Gold product name may be short-lived. As part of the test market introduction, the company is running a contest to establish a new brand name. Sound familiar?

It should. There was another contest recently called “Dub The Dew” which elicited such fine names for a new green apple-flavored soda as “Diabeetus,” “Gushing Granny,” and “Moist Nugget.”  This is what can go very wrong in these days of a marketing department of millions.  A noted hacker group hijacked the contest (with pretty hilarious results) and Pepsi, to their credit, admitted in a tweet that “Dub the Dew definitely lost to The Internet“.  Ya think?

I admire the Pepsi folks for letting their customer at Villa Fresh Italian Kitchen (the local guys who actually ran the contest) give it a try.  I’m also a big fan of a well-executed practical joke.  This wasn’t the first time an internet-based naming program had gone terribly wrong.  It probably won’t be the last.  There’s a lot of good sentiment in wanting to listen to your customers, but remember that your customers in this case are a younger demographic, just the sort that thinks the creation of a new internet meme is way better than the creation of a new brand.

Maybe the promotion succeeded – after all, I’m writing about it as have many others.  Is any PR good PR?  Maybe so in this case – it’s all pretty harmless fun.  But it might be neither fun nor harmless the next time, and thinking about that balance between welcoming the crowd into the conversation and controlling the message is an important part of marketing these days.

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August 16, 2012 · 11:05 am

Trust

Johnny Carson turned around his TV career with a show called Who Do You Trust.

Johnny Carson

Ultimately, I think marketers can do the same for their many of their campaigns by asking exactly the same question as if they were their consumer targets.  Whom do they trust?  The answer is “not you” until you’ve earned it, and the places and ways to do that are, increasingly, via social media of some sort.  After all, eMarketer “forecasts that Facebook will have nearly 826 million users around the world this year, up from 650.7 million in 2011.”   Furthermore, a survey of US adults conducted by About.com found that 84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources. The study found that there were 10 primary trust “elements,” or cues, that brands must establish in order to engender trust, including accuracy, expertise and transparency.  eMarketer again:

In a social media context, customers wanted to see that brands had a significant number of positive reviews, and that they didn’t go out of their way to hide the negative ones. The survey found that 41% of respondents said the ability to see reviews on social networks added to their feeling of trust in a brand. Reviews played a bigger role in cultivating trust than seeing that friends had “liked” or recommended a brand, or that the brand had accumulated a large tally of “likes.”

Friends trust their friends or friends of friends or entities that are human, particularly when they’re in review mode.  Corporeal things, not corporate things, if you will, until those corporate things have a human face. Earlier this week I’ve written about how brands need to stop behaving like brands as well as how a cup of soup had a ton of marketing value while some marketing expenses fell flat.  While I hadn’t really planned out a theme week here on the screed, maybe a reminder each day that we need to speak to our audience transparently, honestly, and in a human voice isn’t a bad thing.  What do you think?

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August 13, 2012 · 9:25 am

Stop Behaving Like A Brand

A research study I read last week got me thinking about how I work with my clients on their use of Facebook and other social media.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Wildfire, a company that makes software for social media interaction (Facebook contest pages, for example) conducted an analysis of 10,000 social media campaigns over the last 9 months and focused on the top 10% of performing efforts.  The point was to identify strategies that seemed to work well.  If you’re interested you can get the report (registration required) here.   As reported by The RealTime Report:

Wildfire finds that for each person who shares content from a campaign on Facebook, 14 new people will learn about that campaign in their news feed. In addition, for every 10 advocates (those who are capable of bringing new followers to a campaign) a brand gets to join its social campaign, they’ll get 13 other people to interact with the campaign in some way. Overall, brands that are highly effective in engaging with advocates and content-sharers via campaigns see three times the interaction (Likes, shares, comments) on their Facebook pages when compared to other brands.

Impressive although I wonder how the transition to Timeline and the inability to set a contest or other Wildfire-type tab as the default on a brand page has impacted the results.  Even so, only 17% of fans share brand activity.  Then again, why should they?  Too many brands are focused on building a bigger audience (generating “Likes”) and not on any sort of collaboration among the fan base.  The companies who use Facebook and other social media well aren’t using those platforms as glorified broadcast channels.  Ask yourself what brands you follow (if you follow any) engage you.  I don’t mean they keep you coming back looking for discounts but they almost seem to be people.  You’re interested in what’s going on with them.

One of the strategies suggested in the report is to provide clear calls to action.  I don’t disagree, but how many of your friends ONLY post messages asking you to sign a petition or do something else that they feel is important but might have little relevance to you?  Providing exclusive content is a great strategy but not if that content only has value to the brand.  What’s the user benefit?

Social media isn’t like other media.  As a company, it’s less about you than it is your consumer.  That can be a hard change of perspective but it’s one companies need to make.  Stop behaving like a brand and start behaving like a friend.  I know of companies that do this well – tell me which ones you think are on that list.

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