Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

There are a lot of interesting things happening on twitter, and amazing connections being made. I’m connecting with CEO’s, entrepreneurs, authors, producers and adventurers, when I started following Richard Branson he only had 400 followers and he followed me right back. The opportunity, as I see it, is to connect with people who inspire me, and to try and provide some kind of value back to the people that follow me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that some of my tweets (maybe of others as well) are worth capturing on my blog, nuggets that I would like to discuss further, seeds of ideas if you like. I was thinking I’ll just pick my fav 10 or so in a week and post them as a tweet digest. I’ve avoided the auto posting of tweets as most of them, to be quite honest are probably totally irrelevant.

The genius of google, it connected people with ads when they were searching, the genius of twitter is it connects people when they are ready

(BTW that is exactly 140 charicters with no extra spaces or punctuation)

#Advertising - TVB predicts National TV Spot ad spend declining by 11.5% to 15.5% in 2009 http://cli.gs/mEbMvZ

“RT: @don_draper [out of character]: Wanted to tell you all first - I’m officially done tweeting as Don will be handing the account to AMC.”

(RT is twitter short hand for ‘retweeting’ or quoting someone else’s post or tweet)

“The story behind the Mad Men twitter experiment http://cli.gs/s2EGA4 thanks @don_draper “

“if you watch poker or bbc america on TV in the US you will have access to some of the worst advertising ever experienced by a human being”

” @stoweboyd LOL just read the headline “Karl Long Batters The Economist” http://cli.gs/YhZ4aL “

“Ha ‘Despite a lack of expertise, more than 67% report they will increase their social media advertising budget in 2009′ http://cli.gs/X4bbvT “

Nokia has put together a quite ambitious stop motion video involving a cast of thousands, which included a very cool stop motion block breaker game using people as the gaming pieces. I’ve seen plenty of stop motion games reenacted, like the famous space invaders in the theater but I think this is the actual game you can play using stop motion people as the characters. The Block Breaker game shows up in the middle of the video and you can navigate directly to it by clicking on the middle section of the time line.

I think it would be really fun if they did another version that enabled people to swap in pictures of themselves, possibly friends, and maybe had a bit more of a high score component to it.

German web site Pundo3000.com has done a case study of 100 product and package shots of packaged food and compared it to the reality of what is inside the package. Great stuff, we need a US version of this because even the product shot of herring bits in sauce looked nasty

Funtasticus has grabbed a lot of the images so you can see them on one page, and they are a lot of fun, this should be a flickr group.

Found via a new image bookmarking community called We Heart It

Sure it’s an old advertisement from the era that had Doctors endorsing cigarettes, but this kind of misleading information is still rife all kinds of outbound communication from ads to packaging. From telling me that a packet of chips (crisps) has two serving sizes, to saying 0% fat and then loading up with sugar or HFCS, to saying a chicken is “all natural”, to describing a petrol company as an “energy” company, it all serves to erode the “benefit of the doubt” that I will give companies and drive me toward companies that I trust. One thing is for sure my trust in companies is mostly built, slowly over time, through many interactions, across many different facets of their business. This is why the web and social media are so powerful and disruptive to business as usual, I have so many ways to interact with, companies, to experience every facet of their company in different ways, and learn through other customers experiences, companies are really laid bare.

After thinking about this a bit I searched around for “missleading advertising” stuff and came across this study from the Journal of Consumer Affairs from 1981 titled Consumer Perceptions of Advertising as Misleading

Wow, if that was 1981 I hate to think how many people think “most” or “all” advertising is misleading. Anyone know of more recent studies?

UPDATE:

From Idris Mootee’s excellent MBA presentation on the future of marketing

The cluetrain manifesto, a book conceived 10 years ago, predicted and described many of the forces that have been most disruptive to business enabled through “web 2.0″.

The point “markets are conversations” was true then but the impact of that statement has been realized very slowly by businesses over the last 10 years. Amazingly the advice and insights in this book is still extremely valid, although the tone is probably a bit strident at this point, no one should need convincing as to the truths laid out in this book.

There was recently an even in New York to discuss the relevance of the cluetrain 10 years on which was liveblogged by Josh Bernoff at Forrester. At this conference Doc Searls had a few words to say about advertising which I think are worth noting, as I think companies and agencies are still addicted to an increasingly infective and failing format/approach.

Case in point advertising on social networks, take a read of this Business Week article on the effectiveness of advertising on social networks.

Getting back to “markets are conversations” surely at it’s worst advertising is fake, inauthentic, monologue, because companies are scared to have a conversation, that’s the stuff people tune out? That’s probably the bulk of advertising, but surely at it’s best advertising can spark the conversation?

So what mechanisms does your advertising agency provide to help “continue the conversation”?

Just read this over at JaffeJuice and Joseph extrapolates that the chance basically only 5% of people with the TV on are actually paying attention to advertisements. Wow, I thought it was only half of advertising that was wasted, we just didn’t know which half

Anyway, I’m not sure how representative I am but I can’t bare to watch television that is not time shifted in some way, in fact if I happen to channel surf and find something I want to watch i’ll pause it, and go an do something else for a while and come back so I can watch it with the option to fast forward. Interestingly I do find myself on occasions rewinding if I see a movie trailer or something I’m interested in.

Source: BigResearch

In response to the Ad Age article To Lead Overall Brand Strategy, Digital Shops Have Much to Do David Armano has posted on the Critical Mass blog the 10 things he thinks Digital Agencies have to get better at, he calls it a moment of truth for digital agencies.

It’s worth reading and chewing on.

LOL, is it me or is this guy taking some swipes at scoble:

“blogging even if your wrong” when scoble was talking about search and then the closing classic picture of scoble leaving the apple store in triumph with the iPhone?

Is there a bubble, absolutely, but as with all bubbles there are some companies that are doing brilliant work and are creating tremendous value. The trick is to pick the companies that are creating real “value”, and IMHO I would avoid business models that rely on driving people to advertisers. Yes, yes, I know Google, but I actually think Google creates value by connecting people with what they need, advertising is secondary, a fine distinction but one worth thinking about and maybe elaborating on more.

Tay Zonday of the original Chocolate Rain has done such a brilliant job of selling out here with Cherry Dr Pepper with his new song “cherry chocolate rain”.

This is in many ways the new celebrity endorsement ad, and quite a good strategy, but requires companies or agencies to keep their fingers on the pulse of the internet zeitgeist. Probably a much more reliable approach than companies trying to make their own “viral” videos.

hat tip to Steve at Adrants

Update: in the week since I wrote about this about 30,000 people have watched the video, that is 30k people voluntarily watched an AIRLINE SAFETY VIDEO! Wow.

I wrote about my Virgin America experience a couple of weeks ago and the one thing I searched for was the safety video, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Well Chet Gulland at their agency Anomaly just put it on youtube and sent me a link so here’s the update. Airline safety videos generally make me want to poke needles in my eyes, so it’s refreshing when a company tries to do one a little bit differently, and tries to make it a bit more bearable.

The message that they manage to get across here of course is “if we tried harder to make this video bearable imagine what we’ll do to improve the rest of the experience”.

The interesting thing about this as well is that i’m sure no one has ever complained about the safety announcements, most customers have probably accepted that they have to be boring and mundane. What Virgin has done here is make something better that you never expected, and that is even better than improving things that everyone already knows need improving. The other side effect of this amusing video is everyone actually watched it and who knows maybe even remembered where the life jacket is.