Catch Up Lady

Stream 2009: After the One Night Stand

At Stream, I helped facilitate a great session with Jory Des Jardins (co-founder of BlogHer) and Christine Cea (Director of Brand PR, Unilever) entitled After the One Night Stand – How To Get Beyond Buzz and Create Sustained WOM Programs. Our session focused on this challenge from three perspectives: the agency, the client, and the partner.

Getting Beyond the Campaign Think One of the biggest challenges in creating sustained WOM programs is that budgets and mindsets are locked into campaign cycles. This mentality is not conducive to social media programs, which are centered around creating a long-term, open ended dialogue with online stakeholders. While some WOM programs are specifically designed for short-term deployment, many others stop simply because the campaign the social media effort was attached to ended. Unilever has broken out of this with respect to social media by creating a taskforce that provides leadership and oversight for all social media efforts across brands. Many other companies have started hiring in-house social media experts who serve a similar purpose. On the agency side, we discussed selling the program you want to execute for your client. While you may be planning for a campaign that occurs over a finite period of time - build in a budget to maintain the relationship.

Organizational Structure

At present, few companies are set up internally to handle the "soft costs" associated with a sustained WOM campaign - from running a Twitter handle, to playing a community manager role. The ideal solution for brands at the moment is to have their agencies transparently assist in co-managing these aspects of the campaign, and, through trainings, help brands create internal capacity that can take on more of these responsibilities in the long term.

Understanding Audience Behavior and Partner Advantages

Rooting your WOM program in robust audience and partner research is another key ingredient in creating sustained programs. On the research side, understanding your target audiences online behaviors helps you craft a program they will want to engage with continuously. Choosing the right partner can afford you a deeper level of community understanding - as they are intimately familiar with not only metrics on their audience, but also smaller nuances that can help make your campaign a long-term success.

Optimizing a Program for the Long Haul

What works in Month 1, might not work in month 6 - so planning a program that evolves is key. There are two ways to make sure you're ready. The first is laying out a value exchange - understand what a brand can do for the campaign/influencers, and what the campaign/influencers can do for the brand over the long term. Make sure your value exchange is solid, and offers value as time goes by. Building on that concept, optimization is the second key. Don't build a cathedral and walk away - make sure the agency and the brand are involved in week to week fine tuning that ensures the campaign stays strong and meets needs.

Demonstrating Value Through Measurement

And what would our discussion have been without a long conversation on measurement?? All present agreed that measurement, and demonstrating the long term value of social media was integral to creating sustained WOM programs. I shared Ogilvy's Conversation Impact measurement model, which maps to the marketing funnel and focuses on metrics like reach (that tie out to existing marcom efforts), as well as engagement and action - which is where WOM programs can uniquely add value. Additionally, integrating social media measurement into brand's existing measurement reports helps demonstrate where social is adding value and can help make the case for longer-term planning and execution.

What are other obstacles to creating sustained WOM Programs, and how can collectively overcome them?

I Fell In Love At the Apple Store: R&B meets Technology!

There's nothing not to like about this rap, home made at the Apple store on 5th Ave in NYC.  Not only is the song "catchy as hell" according to Gizmodo, but it combines two of my favorite things - atrocious R&B and technology.  Hells yes!

The song was recorded by FattySpins on one of the demo MacBooks at the store.  He freely admits there appears to be a "homeless giant" standing behind him in the YouTube description, and defends himself against green screen accusations by posting the rough cut and stating, "If you're wondering why the other people in the store hardly turned around, then you've obviously never been to New York." 

HT to Catch Up Bro for this find.

Stream 2009: The Myth of the Viral

I was fortunate enough to spend the last few days at WPP's annual Stream Conference - which brings together some of the brightest minds from around the network in an unconference format to discuss the what's next in digital and technology communications. Some of the best sessions I attended were the ones organized around lists - be it potential "truths" presented for discussion, or co-created outputs. One such session was The Myth of the Viral presented by YouTube.

“Viral success happens, but it doesn’t just ‘happen’”.

Myth 1: I don’t have to promote it

The most successful videos are rooted in smart creative and promotion. Videos need a robust syndication and promotion plan that incorporates elements such as video ads, brand integration on .coms, influencer outreach, and social networking plays.

I think this is the most frequently overlooked aspect of video - today YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the US, so the Field of Dreams approach to posting your content is definitely not enough. Any time you want scale in social (and who doesn't?!), a promotion plan - often rooted in paid media - is a must.

Myth 2: I can just put a video on YouTube and users will find it

Naming, tagging, and engaging content people spend time with all help you index on YouTube. To stand out you have to understand search terms that people use, and search optimize against those words.

Search is IT - for video and anything a brand puts on the web - 80% of web sessions start at a search engine, and 91% of Internet users search daily. Search intent modeling is now essential to everything from SEM/SEO to messaging to consumer behavior research to tagging. 

Myth 3: Consumers don’t like branded content

Branding is ok if it’s tasteful and appropriate to the content – stripping the brand out, or having all UGC content is not necessary. Examples: Samsung Omnia i900 Unboxing, riffing on the unboxing video trend (3MM views), or my favorite Smirnoff Raw Tea Partay (5MM views).

Consumers are accustomed to contextually appropriate branding - as long as your adding value (humor, knowledge, exclusivity...) you can "get away" with branding that delivers on your messaging in a subtle way.

Myth 4: It’s not just about one video

Come up with ideas that people can replicate easily, so that viewers feel empowered to create additional content in response to the original piece. If you’re smart, you can build an ecosystem around your content.

This was a really smart point - think of things like the Cadbury Gorilla, which spawned so many spinoffs that Cadbury at one point set up a shadow site to house them. Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Myth 5: Being in control is a good thing

Take advantage of your accidental spokespeople who are creating content without the brands “permissions." For example, McDonald’s has leveraged a UGC McNuggets rap in advertising, and UK’s Cillit took advantage of a popular UGC techno remix of one of their commercials. Another common YouTube fear is the inane comments that are often left on videos, the discussion group felt that brands need to have tolerance for the YouTube community and the good/bad comments – and be confident that silly or unnecessarily disparaging remarks are often shouted down.

Ahhhh, control! The age old question. One of the best arguments against leaving your head in the sand is that, in many cases, consumers are *already* appropriating your brand in some way. Listening to the conversation gives you more control and a platform to start a dialogue that could be leveraged proactively or reactively in the future. One of the best examples of nimbly reacting to video content was how Chris Brown and Sony responded to the JK Wedding Dance video, in which a couple danced down the aisle to Brown's "Forever." Instead of wigging out, Sony Music used ContentID to claim the audio content and opted to put music purchase buttons next to the video and use YouTube insights to examine a new demographic and "come up with new distribution, sales and marketing ideas." Sales of the song jumped from 3,000 to 50,000 in one week in July.