Case Study: Using social media to build pre-campaign momentum

Problem
I am Unique (IAU) is website created by FOXTEL to promote the features of the FOXTEL iQ2 set-top unit, which allows subscribers to create a personalised TV viewing experience. To celebrate this theme of “uniqueness”, the site allowed visitors to create unique intricate 3D portraits of themselves made up of videos, photos, stories, and words. They could then share their portrait with friends and family through the web, and via Facebook Connect. With limited resources and a practically non-existent media budget, one of the objectives of the site was to launch with a bang by tapping into social media to build interest in the subject of “uniqueness”. The goal was to then position the iQ2 box as a device that gives you TV perfectly tailored to the “uniQue you” with the iQ being at the center of uniQue.

Strategy
Given the “techy” skew of the iQ2 being an advanced HDTV device that would appeal to “early-adopter” types, we decided to leverage the equally “early-adopter” tech-loving Twitter community to build momentum.

Our strategy was to spark an interest in “uniqueness” in all its forms and gain a loyal base of followers who could then be introduced to I am Unique once it launched. At that point we could then encourage the followers to go beyond the twitter platform to share their “uniqueness” by creating a portrait on the IAU site.

This was followed up with a blogger outreach program and online PR seeding strategy to get as much word-of-mouth promotion online as possible, and therefore help with search engine listings.

Implementation
We created the @iamunique_tweet twitter account and started tweeting in order to gain followers. This initially started with tweets about unique people/places/things found on the web. This provided a form of entertainment for followers and it seemed to work.

We then started challenging people to tweet “what made them unique” and asking them to include the #iau hash-tag so we could track responses. Fun responses from followers were re-tweeted for all followers to see.

RT @laurengreta I am Unique because I think i have the biggest hair ever #iau

RT @theoutcast i am an into personality with a gold aura and into the paranormal #iau

RT @xChrissyBabexI hav a lovable personality get along with pretty much anyone love to party/fun also bend my thumb back #iau

RT @sourina: I am unique because I can fit my fist in my mouth #iau

RT @andyeakin: I am unique because I completed my first Ironman in 12h24m (swim 3.8km, bike 180km, run 42.2km) 15 months after heart surgery. #iau

Throughout this initial campaign we made an effort to engage with followers through discussion, re-tweeting interesting tweets and generally becoming part of the ‘community’. This continued for a month.

There was a deliberate strategy to attract certain people to follow us. These included as a primary target, influential australian-based bloggers, and marketers. As a secondary target we wanted Australian twitter users. Overseas followers, although nice to have, were not potential FOXTEL customers, so effort to engage with them was not a priority. The exception to this were overseas bloggers and marketers who had the potential to spread the word once the site launched.

Getting these preferred targets to become followers was a somewhat difficult exercise as @iamunique_tweet did not have an identity or a blog to establish its own credibility. The solution was to start following these people and conversing with them. Again, it seemed to work.

Rightly or wrongly, for the first month whilst all this “engagement” was going on (and prior to the launch of the IAU website), the FOXTEL brand was never mentioned as being behind the Twitter account. It is worth also noting that at this time we did not mention or promote FOXTEL, the iQ2 box  or the IAU website through our tweets. We stuck to the strategy of engaging with an audience and growing followers who were interested in the “unique” theme that was the subject of the tweets, and the interesting content that we were generating.

Once the IAU website went live, the strategy for the @iamunique_tweet account changed. Firstly, the twitter profile was updated to reference FOXTEL and the IAU website URL so that it was very transparent that the twitter profile was a part of a wider campaign by FOXTEL. In terms of content, the tweets maintained a similar theme of promoting unique people/places/things found on the web, however we also started tweeting about unique portraits that had been created on the IAU website, and encouraging our followers to visit the site and express their “uniqueness” by creating a portrait. Although this did not generate enormous traffic to the site, it was enough to spark off conversation as our followers were the audience we wanted to target.

Results

During the first 8 weeks we gained over 600 followers to @iamunique_tweet. There was no specific target we were aiming for. So can’t really say if this is a good result. However, this was more than double the followers of @foxtel.  This base of followers did prove to be valuable in soft-launching the website. We managed to get a good chunk to visit the site, and many tweeted about it too.

There was no negative feedback around @iamunique_tweet suddenly revealing itself as having a brand behind it. Although we were very careful to ensure that we were not misleading people, or promoting the brand at all prior to the site launch when the brand was revealed. I would stress caution when trying to do something similar. It s a fine line to tread.

The biggest success was that it was this intial twitter chatter about the site resulted it it being blogged about quite a bit. This was quite valuable from a search engine perspective. Being a new site, and a flash-based one at that, a presence in search engines was non-existent at launch. Blog posts and tweets that mentioned the site were the first things to be indexed, and therefore the main source of traffic. At the time of writing this post there are now 17800 google references for iamunique.com.au

A big achievement was getting a meniton on Mashable.com which resulted in a big spike in traffic, and spawned a number of other blog posts. Smashing magazine also gave it a mention, along with numerous design blogs such as Koflash, Best Web Gallery, and Design Charts where the site peaked at #2 in the top 40 websites for a week in May 2009.

In terms of  building momentum and meeting pre-launch objectives for the site, and I think the activity was a success. To be honest, this ultimately did not translate into instant success for the wider campaign and website itself. However other factors come into play at that point such as the site functionality, and further promtion through paid advertising.

Unfortunately a couple of weeks after the launch of the site, the resource and budget to continue engaging with the audience dried up, and tweets were kept to a minimum for the remainder of the campaign. We were therefore restricted in our ability to see how we could further drive site traffic via social media.

Lessons
This was  an interesting learning experience to see how a pre-launch twitter campaign would work. At the time there were few examples of this. So it was all a bit of trial and error. Key lessons learnt during the project:

• Add value and make it interesting
  With a twitter profile make sure the content you generate provides value or is entertaining in some way – otherwise it is just spam.
• It is hard work and DOES cost money
  Despite it being “free” to create a presence on Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot of energy and time required to engage with followers and fans. It is a big drain on time and energy.  Despite doing a reasonable job at this, it was still hard to continue to get people to interact. Once they had tweeted “what made them unique” there was not much more we could really ask them to do. As the number of followers grow it also becomes harder to engage with all of them one-on-one.
• Target those that can help you
  Targeting influential bloggers, designers, and marketers worked for us. When we went live they were the ones who saw the site first and started to spread the word. This helped immensely with referrals for site traffic, and that all important search engine listing.
• Define the role for social media upfront
  From the start we had a goal to leverage social media and specifically Twitter as a way to launch the site with some momentum, and to generate some online buzz that would lead to blog posts, and search engine friendly links through to the site. All our energy was used to achieve this. Budgets didn’t allow for us to extend this beyond launch therefore longer-term engagement was not the strategy. Perhaps this was an opportunity lost that could have made a greater contribution to the overall campaign, however as this was not the objective at the start I would have been a distraction if we changed tac half-way through. A Facebook page was set-up when the site went live, however this did not have a clear strategy tied to its existence. As a result it only achieved around 60 fans.

I hope this case study gives you some insight and lessons to apply to your next social media campaign. If you have any further insights from campaigns you have run I am keen to hear about them so post a comment.

Using the Web to help others

I have been a fan of TED Talks for some time, and often find myself watching a video or two for some inspiration or enlightenment. For those of you who are unfamiliar with TED, it is a non-profit organisation that started out in the early ’80s with the goal of spreading ideas around the three worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Amongst other things, TED holds an annual conference where guest speakers address an audience on a variety of thought provoking topics.

In our busy lives we often don’t take enough time to sit back, take stock, and consider different things in the world around us. With TED you get exposed to some really smart ideas from really smart people.

Earlier this week I stumbled across a talk from Jonathan Zittrain, a social theorist who argues that in the increasingly modern and self-absorbed, materialistic world we live in, the Internet provides a platform for random acts of kindness between people.

It got me thinking about using technology for the greater good, and inspired me to seek out some other examples where organisations and individuals are using the web – not to make money, but to help people.

Yes this is a “feel-good” blog post. Are you feeling all warm and fuzzy yet?

Peace on Facebook
http://peace.facebook.com/
This initiative from Facebook helps to promote world peace by showing how the social networking site connects people and allows people to share their ideas thoughts and beliefs with others. There is a powerful little graph that shows Facebook friend connections created each day between people of different countries, religions, and political affiliations. It shows that despite tensions or conflict that may exist in the world, there are people who bridge the divide, and become friends with people on the opposing side. It’s a powerful, and rather inspiring story.

Other initiatives on facebook include Facebook for Good – a page were people can post stories of how facebook has helped people “give back to their communities, effect change or connect with someone important to them.” Including the heart-felt story Bob the cat who had been missing for two years but was reunited with his owners when they were contacted through facebook after posting a message about his disappearance.

Google.org
Google commit 1% of the company’s “equity and profits in some form, as well as employee time, to address some of the world’s most urgent problems”. Given they make a lot of money, then this is a significant amount. The funds are managed by Google.org who spends it on interesting projects like Flu Trends which maps the intensity of flu outbreaks globally by monitoring what search terms people are plugging into google.

Google also channels funds to climate change initiatives such as the Google PowerMeter that helps people monitor their electricity usage online.

Twitter
There are countless stories of how the Twitter community has turned to the social networking platform for help in finding missing children, saving a man from Egyptian justice, helping a woman having a seizure, and my favourite – helping Guy Sebastian find his lost guitar. Although I can’t help but wonder if he never found his guitar then that would be a good thing?

As you can see, despite the increasing perception that society is becoming more self-centerd and narcissistic, with the help of the Internet, there are some people, and even some corporate organisations out there who are genuinely helping others (and the odd missing cat) through random acts of kindness. They don’t have to do it, but they do it anyway. So this post is dedicated to all those people who help make the world a better place. Happy Friday.

The basics of social media R.O.I.

Social media return on investment (R.O.I) has been a challenge to measure.  Especially when businesses are experimenting with social media for the first time. They may commit resource to a short-term trial project, with the aim of evaluating the results before committing to a longer-term engagement within online social communities. This great presentation from Olivier Blanchard gets down to the basics of measuring R.O.I from social media projects and puts things into a realistic perspective.

Why a traditional advertising strategy doesn’t work for digital

I have been thinking a lot lately about strategic planning within the traditional advertising sense. Having worked at a couple of ‘traditional’ agencies in my time, it has become obvious to me that the vast number of planning tools, strategy-wheels, comms matrix thing-a-me-jigs, and customer touchpoint & engagement model doovalackies that these agencies developed over the years are often lacking in something that makes them relevant in today’s digital world. These tools are often geared towards developing a campaign or series of campaigns, with an execution often lead through traditional media such as TV, & Print. Given the advent of social media, this methodology doesn’t work for digital. Here is why…

In traditional media, the advertiser controls the message. They set a campaign window in which a message is ‘shouted out‘ from advertiser to consumer. When the media budget runs out, the ads stop, and the message stops. There is a start and there is a finish. Simple. (Yes I know this is overly simplistic, and there are other things that come into play, but bare with me).

With digital, the message may be started by the advertiser, but could equally be started by an unknown individual. For example someone may tweet about a movie they have just watched, or their favorite new song they just heard on the radio. Once the message (initiated from the advertiser or an individual) is out there, it can also be echoed online by others at a very rapid rate. It can be commented on, forwarded, blogged about, tweeted, posted, etc. People can then start to comment, blog, tweet, post, about what other people have said about original communication. It spreads and evolves at a rapid rate from person to person and becomes an entity in itself in a somewhat uncontrollable way. A viral is not just a funny video on YouTube. It could be a tweet, an online conversation, a comment on a Facebook wall. A ‘traditional’ media strategy does not factor this in. It does not acknowledge that non-advertiser communication/promotion exists. It’s often just fixed on ensuring that the TVC to be produced has some sort of wow factor that will make it memorable, or that it shouts loud enough so that consumers will take notice.

The role of a digital strategy should be to try to influence, direct, and leverage this non-advertiser communication as it comes to life online, it must also try to predict how the message will evolve. As things are constantly changing and evolving, a linear process does not cut the mustard. With digital it MUST be a cycle of constant engagement, measurement, learning, refinement, and reengagement.

An effective digital strategy needs to factor in three spheres of communication, that are often overlooked by traditional comms planning:

• Campaign Message: This includes the core campaign message we want to control and broadcast ourselves. This can be done via a variety of digital channels, and covers all communication that drives product consideration by consumer. The message will be wrapped into a creative theme and may have a specific window in which it is “active”. Traditional strategy planning usually covers this one off pretty well. This has been the mainstay of advertising since advertising was invented.
• Managing Influencers: In the age of the social web, managing what others say about us online is just as important as what we say ourselves. An effective digital strategy will consider these influencers and provide them with targeted communication that will ensure they are leveraged to the benefit of the brand. Initiatives such as blogger outreach programs may be effective in educating some of these influencers.
• Corporate/Brand Presence This is the permanent online presence for the brand. Its purpose is to house the communication that about the product/brand that falls outside of campaign messaging. This could be in the form of: – Corporate “website” (doesn’t have to be a site. Eg could be a generic brand page on facebook) – Transactional messaging (ecommerce, data, CRM) – Brand protection & reputation management communications (online monitoring, product information, press releases, consumer guidance) – Search engine optimisation

In summary, traditional advertising strategy doesn’t work for digital because it doesn’t consider the “permanent and evolving presence” a brand can have though online channels. It also neglects to consider that the carefully planned campaign message being broadcast, can then be hijacked, manipulated, and distributed in uncontrollable ways though social media. A digital strategy sets out to manage and balance this ongoing communication as best as possible, whilst acknowledging that brand perception online is a constantly moving target. I am keen to see how agencies adapt to this challenge. So far, it seems to be a slow process. This has opened up opportunities for smaller, more nimble specialist agencies who understand digital comms better, to capture market share.

What do you think about traditional strategic planning processes? Know an agency who does integrated and digital strategy & comms well? Post a comment below and tell me about it.