The World Stops Turning

This week ABC announced the end of the run after 56 years for the soap “As the World Turns”.  Each of the over 13,000 episodes was scripted by writters, filmed by photographers, directed by directors, produced by producers, and acted by – well let’s just call them actors.  Lots of effort and cost that happened everyday year after year.  Given the much more cost efficient reality TV and talk-shows it’s become difficult to justify soaps.  But what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?

The internet is a medium for applications and content.  Both costly to produce.  Our history is ripe with examples of the lower cost UGC or “bot” created content trumping professionally created content.  Remember when the Yahoo search results used to be produced by paid humans?  Then Google’s “bot” produced search results without costly professionals deciding what to return for search results.  So when devising how to produce content think through how to produce that content without paying for it.  “As the world turns” has taught us the lesson that paid content will eventually always be trumped by a lower cost alternative.

What’s next — It won’t be long till professional quality scripted content will be created by the fan base.  Think of “LOST” living on past the fifth season but now written by the fans.  Sounds far fetched?  It is already happening.  Fan Fiction has been around since Sherlock Holmes was first written.  So let your fan base become your cheap content producers — and you might quickly realize that your fan base produces better content than the professionals!

1,000,000 Fans and Counting

A corny gimmick and some free publicity can get you a million or so Facebook Fans fast.  For proof check out the “If 1M people join, girlfriend will let me turn house into pirate ship” group to see how it is done.  This appears to be just grass roots craziness that caught on like virtual wild fire over the last couple days.  It’s hard to tell how the sparks were started but the content is pure geekdom gold (for those non-geeks, Pirates is a geek meme that is only rivaled by Ninjas).  They are trying to capitalize on the success of the site through a CafePress store where they might make a couple bucks.  But the effort doesn’t appear to be motivated by commercial gains.

Which is unlike the effort we saw a couple months ago from TGI Fridays.  Their Woody Fan Page promised a free hamburger for all if the fan page topped over 500,000 fans.  This promotion was also heavily featured on TV.  It’s a great idea that has to be executed very very carefully.  For a primer on what can go wrong just read through Woody’s Fan Page discussion board (link).  Here’s an example of damage control:

Woody Damage Control

Thoughts:

• I’m a huge fan of leveraging communications to build an audience that you can communicate to directly.  What was once your Email capture strategy is now your Social Network Fan base creation strategy.  The bigger your base the more effective the communication.  So look to include links to your Social Networking site in your mass communications.
• Using a gimmick to quickly build your base is a good idea if executed correctly.  But gathering the fans is just the first step.  You need a solid communication plan that nurtures that fan base.  And expect to dedicate resources to it.  But what better way to send a direct personal communication to million consumers!
• WARNING:  Think twice before setting up a persona as the face of your brand.  TGIF’s use of Woody is extremely dangerous.  As you can see for his post he is speaking “to the people at TGIF” — he is not speaking on behave of the company.  What happens when he gets arrested for indecent exposure?  And how does TGIF use this base three years from now when they want to do an entirely different campaign.

This campaign from Sprite is a great example of pulling together a couple of tactics to make a very compelling and engaging brand experience.  I find that too often agencies don’t stretch themselves to expand a core idea beyond the initial focus.  This example, developed by the FullSIX Group, goes above and beyond to integrate celebrity, viral video, user generated content, and SocNet leveraging the following:

Celebrity: The campaign’s core revolves around the up and coming English artist Katie Vogel as she tries to build a successful music career.  You get to follow her through her journey by watching YouTube videos and her Facebook updates.

YouTube: Katie’s music videos are posted for fans to rate and review.  The YouTube Channel links directly to Facebook!  Remember that at this time Facebook is not owned by Google — this is the first I’ve seen a YouTube channel integrating with Facebook.

Facebook: You can be-friend Katie on Facebook and follow her on her journey to be a star!  You can post to your Facebook feeds directly from YouTube!

For more details check out this article on Clickz (article here).

My Two Cents:

• This is the first time we’ve seen YouTube integrated with Facebook.  Keep an eye on this — it may open up some really engaging opportunities.
• The first video includes Katie breaking up with her boyfriend — it’s a bit too convenient to be true.  I’d be careful to mix reality with fictional elements.  You will quickly alienate your fan base if they don’t trust you.
• Katie doesn’t post enough.  She needs to be very active to keep the fan base engaged.  It appears she is only posting updates every couple of days.  I’d highly suggest the she updates every couple hours.

There has been a ton of press on Twitter in the last couple months.  So much so that Oprah has now done a show all about Twitter.  She does a great job of explaining what Twitter is in the above  YouTube clip.  As marketers here are a couple things to keep in mind:

• Twitter has no revenue stream — no business model.  The logical model would be paid key word driven advertising.  Where you could post an ad next to a Tweet that includes the desired key word.  The problem with this is that Twitter is a social networking platform and Click Through Rates have so far been unsustainable on SocNet sites.
• A business can start their own Twitter feed for a very live and personal connection to the brand’s fans.  The data suggests that the traffic is mainstream — check out these articles from ComScore.  But as they note, the mainstream-ness of the traffic may be more from the media coverage then actual usage.

http://www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/twitter_traffic_explodes.html

http://www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/breaking_news_and_making_news.html

• For ideas of what to do with your Twitter account check out this post by Chris Brogan:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

• Is Twitter an avenue you should explore?  There is no cost to entry other than the commitment — which is significant.  You’ll need a resource to keep active in the Twitter community to make the effort worthwhile.  Check out Twitter feeds from Sprint and Graco for ideas of what marketers are doing on Twitter. To answer this question ask yourself:

1. Is your audience on Twitter
2. Do you have a robust mutli-touch Social Networking program that would benefit from Twitter?  Twitter is not a isolated tactic — it needs to be apart of a complete communication strategy.
3. Do you have the resources needed to commit to Twitter.  Don’t just post your monthly coupon offer — it’s not worth it.  You’ll need a community manager to spend significant time managing your Twitter efforts.

Jack in the Box Viral Campaign

This example from the QSR Jack-in-the-Box gives us some very valuable insights into a very robust Social Networking / Viral campaign.  Check out this articles from Clickz (link here).  The details are:

• Campaign gets kicked off with a TV spot aired during the Super Bowl that shows the Jack-in-the-Box mascot “Jack” getting run over by a bus.
• Fan’s of the brand are then encouraged to follow Jack’s condition on the web site HanginthereJack.com,  28 viral videos updating Jacks condition on YouTube, photo’s from the accident scene on Flickr, updates on Facebook,  MySpace and Twitter.
• User Generated Content is solicited in the form of “get well notes” for Jack.

Some results:

• Over 12,000 fans on the Facebook page
• Over 7000 followers in Twitter
• 600 followers to the YouTube channel
• Each of the 28 videos were viewed between 50,000 and 200,000 times

Clickz lists Apollo Interactive as the agency behind this very robust effort.

Thoughts:

• Wow, this was a very robust campaign around a great theme.
• The response was impressive.  Especially the YouTube video views.  It’s difficult to get these kinds of numbers.
• I assume a lot went into the campaign AND a lot went into promoting this campaign.  The Super Bowl spot alone was several million $$.
• The big take away for me is that in order for a Viral / SocNet campaign to be successful it needs to tap into a message that will resonate with the audience.  In this case — hoping Jack comes out of his coma — hit that nerve.