Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The first step in developing a campaign for a client in the world of social media has been the identification of a platform of choice, usually based on knowledge about the segmentation of different users, their preferences as a group for a platform or the desired campaign behavior being native to one.

With the ever increasing number of changes to facebook, the API, the page layout and the rules around using the platform to communicate with real life people are starting top wake agencies up to the issues around committing a campaign to a single social platform. What used to be a choice made for manageability might now be a big risk to success.

Social contests, competitions, content production, interaction and crowdsourcing seem as though they’ve become staples of the marcomms landscape with larger players moving money away from traditional ATL into the social web. The social web as newsmaker also seems to be growing in importance, with message integration needing to be as current and as relevant to get the “viral” multiplier effect that we’re chasing as both brands and agencies.

Which brings me to the inspiration for this post. When G-Star and their agency got together to talk about fashion week they chose a very different direction when the got to the platform of choice conversation. They decided to build a platform of choice for the targets of their campaign.

The concept is to find four citizen journalists to cover fashion week in NYC (here’s the link, if you’re keen)

Where the departure from tradition happens is that they’ve asked people to self idenity the channel that best fits them.

If you’re a facebook queen, you need to connect your profile and upload a photo of yourself that shows your love of denim (create personalised, engaging content your friends will comment on.)

If a tweet seems more your style you’ll need a big audience that listens to at least some of what you say and you’ll need to craft 140 characters that get the team at G-Star interested (prove your ability to write platform specific, engaged copy.)

Flip camera owners will need to connect to their YouTube account and share some quality documentary footage that already exists, or some new stuff especially for the content. (Be able to cover the event in a way that really brings it to life.)

If images that are still seem more your style, share your best fashion shot from flickr. (Stylishly capture fashion.)

This to me has real potential, tagging or submitting your photo on facebook should give them the opportunity create an engaged group ready to disseminate content when Fashion Week hits. Cheery picking a twitterer should allow for furious coverage when folks are looking for the lowdown, leading to a bigger share of voice in traditional media. Tie these two amplification strategies to two quality producers of moving and still imagery, house it all on a microsite with inbound and outbound links from the platforms they’ve engaged and you might have a property that leads Google ratings for the year to come.

The real nugget of value is if you’re making a decision about platforms of choice. Try making it about your audience not your administrative overhead.

Toyota Australia has taken an unusual move in developing a social media approach for the market here, briefing five agencies and challenging them to make something work for a mere A$15,000

The first few campaigns have broken, and pickings are slim.

• One Green Bean have put an American Werewolf in a Yaris, enabling all the twitterverse to get a cheap ride around Sydney, should the stars align and this one cab wolf be able to oblige. Passengers are snapped with Wolfy and uploaded, as well as be encouraged to live tweet the lift to their network.
• Hothouse have lifted one of the old internet meme standby’s, making a lego film about a prison break, with a real life yaris being driven by some massively out of scale lego men. They’re asking for comments on why yaris is so clever on the YouTube host platform and giving away a car at the end of it.
• The Population are playing on the car’s role as the ultimate city car and leveraging Sydney Melbourne rivalries to drive a facebook page war between the two cities, asking existing fans to recruit new ones, add comments and building a (maybe) useful permission asset along the way.
• Saatchi & Saatchi have made no real effort at all, asking users to create an ad, offering up 7k as a first prize. Perhaps spending some of the cash on the design of the page would have made this more appealing and they might have an amazing strategy to leverage the content that they’ll get (or maybe create in-house)
• Iris seem to be waiting, perhaps to take advantage of the noise around these campaigns.

The social media echo box is awash with negative comments and admonishments for Toyota for perpetrating such an injustice on the public of Australia, Laurel Papworth has a lengthy post covering a lots of the errors but I think she goes too far with the comment “social media is NOT an experiment”

Back when we were still living in a world where TV always delivered sales, this type of open pitch would have been impossible. Production of TVC’s completely preclude it. It also would have been visible to a very high percentage of the market, making confusion and ridicule very likely.

The digital environment turns that logic on it’s head. Cost per action advertising has led to a situation where multi variate testing is not just common, it’s necessary. Starting with a broad, somewhat unfocused approach and then increasing investment once a channel or message has proved engaging is very much a best practice approach.

I’m not naive enough to believe that social media campaigns are the same as web based ad serving, but the cost of building for these platforms is much lower than for TV and apart from a few highly interested and talkative “new media” experts, I’d suggest that badly thought out, usury ideas don’t offend, they simply don’t cut through and die out, unnoticed and ignored.

Using a ready, fire, aim approach can be very successful in learning about the social media environment and how consumers see your brand, it’s voice and it’s place in their live’s. The real danger in adopting this type of approach doesn’t lie in the quality of the ideas but in not backing what works.

Mumbrella has an excellent post, with links to all the campaigns if you want to go see.

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