Social Media (Part II)

It's an old image but a good one

You looked at the last post. You worked out the basics of your social media, looked at your audiences, understood your resources, and nailed down what you want to achieve and sorted out what sort of voice you want to have. Excellent!

Now you need to do is choose which social media channels you want to use that will compliment that. So what do they all do? How are they different? And isn't it all about Facebook anyway?

This is a very basic overview on some of the most recognised services (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn) to help you get some ideas, but with any sort of investment, further research is definitely recommended, especially if the habits of your identified audience does not match any of the channels listed below.

Additionally, this is very biased towards Europe: for example YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and more are all banned in China, so localisation of your strategy is super important!

Facebook

Facebook is without question the biggest and most active social network on the web, both in terms of name recognition and total number of users.

With nearly 1.8 billion active users, and over a billion people using Facebook daily, it's a good medium to reach a large number of people. The spread is fairly wide, with users throughout age ranges (often topping more than 70% in various countries) with a bias towards female-identified users.

It's also versatile with pages, groups, and targeted advertising, with it's strength is in its business to consumer reach. Facebook can be used to share photos, videos, important company updates and more, allowing for a wide ranging relationship. It's excellent for community building in many forms and bringing customers together. Advertising can be tied to demographics and locations, and is very good for local sales and brand awareness. Additionally, the site can be more low-maintenance than other social networks as it has a lower expected posting frequency than something like Twitter, and with the business features enabling scheduled posts it means you can be a little less tied to the pages, and people will scroll backwards on your page to look at prior entries.

YouTube

YouTube is the second largest online search engine after Google, has over a billion active users per month, and is heavily used as a resource for how-to content. The largest demographic of users is 25-34 year olds and 45% of users have some form of higher education.

If your customers and audience are asking questions, YouTube gives you the chance to provide unique, personality-filled answers to these questions and problems.

To use this, you must have the resources to have a good video editor. Whilst some companies choose not to, moderation of comments is a must. You can also engage via vloggers (video bloggers) who have dedicated channels with subscribed audiences, although they must always declare they have been sponsored and you are likely to need to pay depending on your industry.

Instagram 

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and is a visual social media platform based entirely on photo and video posts, and has nearly 400 million active users per month. It's all about the images, and offers easy-to-digest and aesthetically pleasing content. Images tend to be aspirational: beautiful images of travel, fashion, good food and such like, but there are images across the board. Companywise, if what is being sold can be visualised in an appealing way, this could be a good channel.

So who uses it? Well, Instagram has a bias towards a younger demographic with more than half it's users under the age of 30 with an equal gender split. More than 80 million photos are shared daily on instagram, and the platform, like snapchat, is almost entirely mobile. Instagram has a passionate community and has one of the highest engagement rates for brands, 58 times higher than on Facebook; however, it can be hard to find a niche. Company messaging needs to be heavily visual, and social media managers need to be good at photography and video editing.

Twitter

Twitter allows the sharing of short updates of 140 characters or fewer (ideally no more than 120 to allow for retweet handles) along with other media such as pictures, videos, URL links etc. By mentioning usernames in your posts, you can get the attention of other users and is one of the easiest ways to connect. It has around 319 million active monthly users, around 23% of internet users, and is slanted towards a more male-identified user group.

Twitter is effective for getting out news in a clear, concise fashion, skipping over the delays in press releases and other more traditional media, and is used as a resource by journalists. It creates a feeling of immediacy and access to a wide range of stakeholders, including knowing exactly what industry experts are looking into hour by hour, new developments, and can be a useful tool for handling customer service. Content is easily shared through retweeting, and creating the right tweet with the right hashtags can result in going viral very quickly. Along with LinkedIn, Twitter is one of the most professional/B2B focused channels.

It's worth being aware that Twitter is one of the most time sensitive mediums after snapchat. As Twitter moves so quickly, tweets tend to get lost quickly, so it's not the place for beautifully crafted content, and timing can be key to reaching a target audience. It also requires a quick response time: if a complaint comes via Twitter it needs to be at least moved onto private messages within a few hours, or face potential escalation. It is most easily handled through the use of apps like Hootsuite, allowing scheduling and easier searching.

Snapchat

Snapchat is another visual social media network which can only be used on mobile devices. It has 150 million active users, with 71% of are under 34 and around 70% are female. Whilst this has a large gender and age bias, in the UK more than 25% of smartphone users have snapchat installed. Users can send videos and photos to one another (which are deleted after 10 seconds), or post content to their public Stories, which disappears after 24 hours. As posts are so temporary, content is accepted to be a little more rough and ready than some other networks. Stories can be useful, but only users who have added a business can see their content.

Snapchat is excellent to create story and interactive content with a specified and engaged audience in a less formal setting, especially as the app includes chat features, messaging and other media content. 

LinkedIn

Whilst LinkedIn started as a professional networking site, it is now a knowledge and information-sharing hub. It has more than 35 million active users per month, has an older slant age range than most social media with the biggest demographic just being between 30-49, with the 50-64 age range just behind and is slanted more towards male-identified users. Users have the highest education level of all sites, and generally the highest incomes.

It allows professionals to showcase expertise, publicise awards, form professional communities, give business updates to relevant and interested audiences as well as network. LinkedIn via it's blog functionality has the best opportunity of enabling companies to become thought leaders through original content, and users tend to spend longer per page than in many other sites. It also provides a repository of information about a company and is a standard port of call for anyone doing any sort of research. However, it's worth being aware that it has one of the lowest engagement rates of any social media: simply put, users won't click a like for the sake of it, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Of all the social media, LinkedIn is the most focused on business to business and professional in tone: this is most certainly not the place to put up pictures of your cat unless you work in some sort of animal health industry.

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There are of course, many other channels, but this is a place to get started. And when looking at which channels you wish to engage with, always remember that it's better to focus on one or two channels, than try and cover a gamut and get overwhelmed.

Have fun out there!

On Social Media (Part I)

I recently finished a 12-month contract for a medical publishers, which was interesting and probably deserves several posts of its own, but in the meantime I am currently in the process of sorting out another position. In a recent interview, there was a question on social media and which channels they should be using.

Who let all these guys in here?

Whilst there are an ever-increasing number of options, there are a number of core platforms that have managed to maintain users and market share, and it’s choosing between these that can cause grief.

So how do you know which ones you should be using? Well, it's a combination of a number of things and there's no one good answer because different channels have different pros and cons.

Before you start to register your name on YouTube or Facebook, you need to ask yourself these questions:

1. What do you want to achieve? This is obvious, but are you looking at improving customer care, or are you trying to make a way for people to place complaints? Are you trying to create a way to keep people up to date with your company and products? Do you want to encourage conversation or build relationships? Do you want to establish yourself as an authority? Each one of those aims leads to a slightly different media channel.
2. Do you meet an unmet need for your target group? Whatever your aim is, as with any digital project you should aim to meet an unmet digital need to give people a reason to look at your social media, even if that is to give a good communication channel to your potential customers.
3. Where do your target audiences go? If you know who your target audience are, try and identify where they already go to. People are creatures of habit, and it’s much easier to hijack off an existing habit than make them go to somewhere different. Perhaps Instagram would be perfect for your goals and targets, but if your target market all use snapchat, then go there. Hunt where your targets roam!
4. Your available resource (staff): Doing any sort of social media takes a lot of resource in terms of time. You are looking at a minimum of three and a half hours per week: half an hour per day with an extra half hour on Monday and Friday to initially plan the week and assess how the posts went at the end for each channel. Additionally, the higher the interaction and speed of reply needed, the more your staff need to have flexibility be able to respond to social media, so the staff cost goes up. Additionally, you need to consider where your staff are physically: responding can be more difficult if they are field-based rather than desk-based, and how will you manage holiday cover? What do you have the staff resource to do?
5. Your available resource (Money): YouTube is a fantastic channel, but unless you are doing videos on your smartphone or have basic recording equipment in your office, videos (both animated and film) will cost you money to produce. Similar with high quality photography. You need to be aware of ongoing costs in the channel/s you choose.
6. Frequency: How much do you have to say? Do you have exciting news every day that you want to convey? Are you mainly reposting existing articles/videos/opinions? Some channels need more new content than others and you need to bear that in mind.
7. Company fit: Some channels are more formal, and some are more informal. This can be tweaked, but if you have a couple of options it’s worth trying to use one more in keeping with the ‘tone’ of the content and the vision you have for your communication. 
8. Industry fit: Are you in a highly-regulated industry? Do you need all marketing collateral to have regulatory approval? Does your company culture like to check all communications before they are sent out into the wider world? The stricter the controls you are under, the slower the channel you want on social media. You can get away with a 24 hour turn around on Linked-In, but that’s not going to fly on Twitter where more than an hour could spell the difference between a PR success or a disaster.

Once you have a clear idea of your aims, your targets with their habits, your available resource and how you want to be perceived, you then need to pick your channels.

As this post is already getting fairly long, more on the channels themselves in Social Media (Part II).

On Awards and the Importance of Localisation

Last month, the UK Team won an Internal Marketing Award (First Runner-Up) for a campaign that I ran at the end of last year.

Presenting the elevator pitch of the relevant UK
Campaign at the Awards Dinner.  There was a black and white
theme: I don't usually dress in monochrome!

It was an interesting process.  Each of our corporate offices were allowed to enter up to two marketing projects which we felt were particularly noteworthy from the last calendar year.  Submissions had to include information on strategic relevance, target markets, implementation, ROI (both qualitative and quantitative) and anything else particularly relevant.  Each marketing team in each country reviewed the circulated submissions and ranked them based on a number of specified criteria, a little like the Eurovision Song Contest.

The idea is for the global business to exhibit some of the best ideas with the aim of consideration for implementation elsewhere, as well as to give a level of recognition for the efforts involved over the past year.

The very different approaches showcased the unique properties of each country's markets.  I suspect this was also reflected in the scoring as well as different countries will have scored partly based on personal experience, and that in many cases the same project could have wildly differing marks.

Looking at the different projects and assessing whether or not we could use them in our own markets highlighted one of the key considerations in any global company: the importance of localisation.  Many of the projects were extremely good, yet would not be applicable in the current form to other territories.

Often, large global companies will create campaigns to be used in their subsidiaries.  This is important as it ensures brand continuity, clear consistent messaging and cuts down on the work needed on a local level.  However, no campaign should ever just be adopted without a level of analysis and evaluation for appropriateness against the target audience.  Culture, habits, phrases, communication and channels will all need to be checked.  In top down campaigns, localisation is often perceived as a threat to the brand; a dilution which causes damage.  However, without the flexibility to localise, most campaigns are dead in the water.  Brands need to be able to be recognisable whilst still meeting the different needs of the segments they are trying to reach.    

Badly localised adverts are common, especially on television.  Beyond bad dubbing and using obviously non-local locations, there can be inherent cultural issues.  Proctor & Gamble, who are generally fairly savvy, got it very wrong when they used an American advert in Japan which showed a husband walking in on his wife bathing and touching her.  Whilst in the US this was seen as sweet and a depiction of married intimacy, in Japan it was viewed as an invasion of privacy and was felt to be in very poor taste, depicting a bad marriage due to the lack of respect being demonstrated.

Communication channels too can be overlooked: a basic issue for any global social media campaign is that both Facebook and Twitter are currently banned in China, and have been since 2009.  Many countries have bans on blanket emails, and opt-in/opt-out countries will have very different approaches to e-Blasts and electronic CRM communications.

Translation/phrasing blunders can happen, and even within the same language localisation can be needed: for example US/UK spelling varies, and extraneous 'u's can be the difference between someone engaging or disengaging on a piece of text.

If you know your segmentation and your targets (your ST of the STP mantra), your campaign has to fit them in all aspects.  And using the indigenous marketing personnel is one of the best ways to do so.

And on that note, I'm off to go and put the Award Certificate somewhere!

Cellulite, Palm Oil and Orang-utans? Why Social Media and Over-Regulation Doesn’t Mix

Nutella, the famous Italian chocolate spread and chocolate sweets manufacturer is currently in a lot of PR hot water in France at the moment.  It’s an amazing example of how not only to completely cock-up your social media campaign, but to actually damage your brand as well. 

The concept of their "Say it with Nutella" campaign was pretty simple.  Nutella decided that for PR purposes, they would make a small web-based application where you could type in your name, and it would display a picture of a Nutella pot with your name on instead of the brand name.  You could then post it all over the web to your heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that everyone would know how much you love the chocolate and hazelnut goodness.  This had already been done in Italy with great success.  

A gif containing a set of some banned
words thanks to Rue 89.  Apologies
to the easily offended souls out there!

Of course, when you release something into the wild, you have to accept that a small minority of people are going to try and subvert it.  Just think of the Nike ID campaign where you could get your name embroidered onto your trainers: an MIT Student caused Nike huge amounts of negative publicity by asking for 'sweatshop' instead of a name, and went public with the back and forth emails when Nike refused.  And as a rule, the internet is far worse for this.  Nutella seem to have been aware of the danger, and took steps to protect themselves.  Thus people who tried type in something not entirely wholesome got a 'this word is not allowed' message.  Except, more and more people kept experiencing this, way above what would normally be expected, and some really weird words seemed to be banned.

At which point, someone technologically savvy went into the code to investigate what was restricted.  With a little bit of ingenuity, they managed to pull the full list of blocked words.  From my perspective, there were four groups:

1. Obscenities: this is actually relatively morally defensible as a majority of Nutella’s key audience are probably under 18 or buying on behalf of children who have access to social media.
2. Trademarks, such as 'Coca Cola' or 'Microsoft': again, reasonable on legal grounds because theoretically Nutella could be seen in breach of copyright should the images be spread on social media.
3. Words which could be theoretically be used to contravene the French laws on hate speech, especially the 1990 Gayssot Act, which includes a five year fine for holocaust denial, and criminal penalties for defamation based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any handicap .  For Nutella this meant banning words such as 'Hitler', 'Muslim', 'Judaism' and 'Lesbian' (but not 'gay' strangely).  Whilst the fact you can't put 'Jew' onto a image of Nutella jar has been picked up by the British media and decried as evidence of discrimination, it is almost a direct lift from the legislation and is defensible, if ill-judged. 
4. And finally, what can only be dubbed as the “Oh God we hope no-one brings these up” topics, and include things like ‘obesity’, ‘fat’, ‘palm oil’, and ‘orang-utan’.  And this is the major cock-up because you cannot justify censorship based on paranoia of your own working practices.  Nutella have listed and blocked every topic where they feel vulnerable, and these exact topics have been distributed all over social media.  It’s like the classic joke when someone tells you not to think about elephants and suddenly all you can think about are grey pachyderms, except this herd is going to stomp all over your brand equity.  

So now on social media, there are a lot of questions.  Why is Nutella so worried about palm oil?  What are they doing over in Borneo/Indonesia?  Are they deliberately destroying rainforest areas for their plantations?  Is it more likely to cause obesity than other chocolate spreads?  To make the situation worse for the company, the current French internet game of the month seems to be to try and get around the restrictions.  Maybe you can’t do Orang-utan, but what about Oran-gutan?  Or Oranutan?  And once people manage a work around, they post it proudly on social media, reinforcing the message and linking Nutella obesity and rainforest destruction as well as more swear words than you can count.  

The problem for Nutella is that the internet is a realm of looser of societal rules.  Whilst no-one would consider breaking into an office to rifle through a computer to look at concept artwork for a campaign, anything on the internet is seen as fair game.  You can’t put restrictions on anything beyond the bare minimum because whatever you do will be publicly scrutinised so has to be defensible, and there are a lot of people out there better at programming than your average corporate web department.    

This fiasco illustrates some very basic rules of online marketing:

• If you are going to use something, you need to have a basic understanding the technology and its limitations.  I'm pretty sure that had Nutella realised that it was even possible to get the full list, they wouldn't have done it. 
• Expect anything interactive you put onto the web to be potentially subverted by a small minority and don’t panic when it happens.
• Keep a level of perspective.  So what if a couple of people write ‘Obesity’ on an image and post it on Facebook?  It would be gone from most people’s feeds in an hour and be forgotten.    
• There is a skill in dealing with ‘hecklers’ with a modicum of grace: if you can do so, generally these things are over quickly and don’t affect your core audience.  In other words, keep your cool.  One or two images with a comment on palm oil aren't going to put off your standard consumer.  Sadly, people have a level of unconscious blindness over things they don’t want to see when it involves giving up something they want: see things like Climate Change vs car use, or the demand for meat over conditions in battery farms.    
• And the cardinal rule: if you can’t defend something, don’t put it on the internet.

In the almost-words of the infamous 1980s TV advert; “Ah, Mr Ambassador, you are really spoiling the jungle with your Orang-utan murdering, obesity-causing treat!”.

Sky/Game of Thrones: How to do an Social Media Enhanced Exhibit in Three Easy Steps

Last week, I went to the Game of Thrones exhibition in London at the O2.  

Put on by Sky for fans of the show, it contained props and costumes from the series, as well as interactive exhibits, such as a VR experience to climb the Wall.  Ostensibly, it was a reward for subscribers to Sky and to create a positive ‘buzz’ around the new series.  As someone who went, it was great: we got to geek out over banners from the show, heft a giant great sword , play with some interactive exhibits and have an interesting evening. 

I overheard people in the crowd asking why Sky had done it.  Now the O2 isn’t cheap to hire, advertising the exhibition would not have been low cost, there were a large number of staff involved, and Sky didn’t even charge for the tickets. 

So why did they do it?   

Well, much as I’m sure Sky would like to be seen as philanthropic and value driven, it was less to do with creating a reward for loyal customers, and everything to do with some very clever social and viral marketing. 

The key things they did were:

1. Create high level of prestige for visits
2. Encourage loyalty and participation in visitors
3. Massively encourage viral/social media sharing of the exhibition.

So how did they do this?

1.  High Prestige for Visits

First off, they offered limited numbers of tickets.  Restriction in supply often leads to a higher perceived value on your basic supply and demand.  This came with a specific and publicised date for booking in the same way as high demand/high cost events such as concerts, creating a mental association of high cost.  And the process of having to struggle to get a ticket automatically makes it more valuable – the endorphins of competition definitely play a role!   

Timed visits also meant that the exhibition was never empty, and there were always queues outside as you waited for a time slot, again re-emphasising the value of the visit and seeming wanted.  You never had quiet patches.

Venue-wise, the exhibition was staged in the O2, a high reputation venue which hosts expensive shows, again priming that perception.  It didn’t need to be there as the exhibition was actually fairly small comparatively and in a side suite of rooms rather than in one of the halls, but the expectation was impressive.

2.  Encourage loyalty and participation in visitors

When you arrived at the venue, you needed to queue.  Our slot was at 8pm, but we didn’t go in for a while.  Whilst queuing, a staff member came up and got you to register on a website on their iPad.  This gave you a unique code to use in the exhibition, and a login to a unique page just for you that had audio guides and information on some of the exhibits.   

Now it's worth noting that not only did you have to register your details, but you had to choose a faction from the story during the process, automatically creating an involvement in the exhibition.  The feeling of being special was enhanced further by having an 'in character' message from the head of your faction on your personalised page, thanking you for your loyalty.  

Each time you accessed your page during the exhibition, your name was shown with a welcome message, as well as your faction allegiance. 

3.       Massively encourage viral/social media sharing of the exhibition.

The set-up of the exhibition very much encouraged sharing.  To start with, visitors were all carrying their smartphones already to look at the information on the exhibits as per the registration mentioned above.  So they were looking at something they find interesting, with a smartphone in their hand, with the camera pointed in the right direction.  Pretty cunning!

There were deliberate set up photo opportunities as well – for example there was a statue of one of the antagonists with a sign/call to action “have a selfie with a White Walker”: less people would have done it without instruction, but I bet it was one of the most shared sets of photos on social media once the idea was planted.  

Additionally, Sky must have done a lot of market research to work out what the key ‘triggers’ were for their customers that would make them want to post about their experience, and then designed interactive experiences that could be shared in different formats. 

There were three main ones that stuck out:

• Video: Get flamed by dragon fire – this was a 4 second video against green screen where you could be ‘flamed’ by a dragon with directions and taken by the staff there on professional cameras. 
• Images: Get made into a ‘white walker’ – they took a couple of professional photos of you in front of a green screen, and then transformed them into one of the series antagonists using basic photoshop.
• Own photo share: Photo on the key prop (‘The Iron Throne’) – there was a replica of the Iron Throne by the exit with good lighting available for own photos, and you had to queue past it to get out.  This was guaranteed to work as a lot of the print advertising was various actors from the series sitting on the throne with a caption on who would own it: pretty much anyone who went would have wanted a photo on it.

Options 1 and 2 were not simple: they needed trained staff to run the cameras and sets, and they had a number of audio-visual professionals behind the scenes doing the editing work in near real time, as the output appeared within 5 minutes.  However, these were some of the most popular exhibits with a minimum of a 10 minute wait on all of them.

This meant you saw the videos/images whilst you were still in the exhibition surrounded by the excitement and positive vibes created by the high prestige feelings.  Not only that, but they were uploaded onto your personal page from the registration with ‘share’ options.  This means the organisers could (and will) monitor social media, so can track exactly how many shares were put forward and on what format.   Remember there was a chunk of queuing at a number of places (which must have been calculated as they had time slots), so a lot of people had their phones in hand from earlier, and therefore shared the videos and photos whilst waiting out of partial boredom. 

Did it work?

My photo on the Iron Throne.

Had to be done, and yes,

it was shared on Facebook

So we have an exhibition which created feelings of being special within the audience, gave feelings of belonging to an select group, and offered high value social media content (which they could track), whilst making people wait around with their phones in hand. 

I'd say an unequivocal yes.  Despite the costs involved in the exhibition, their return on investment in terms of social advertising must have been enormous.  

Someone should definitely buy their marketing department a box of doughnuts!