The Toyota Scion social media campaign is amazing for two reasons. First, the casestudy written by the agency lists a few „rules“ for social media strategy which I find quite interesting. You can find those listed below.
The second thing: in the case study, it sounds like a huge, complicated social media campaign, when read quickly. But instead, it’s just a crowd sourcing campaign from what I can see. Users can create their own scion crest on the Scion Speak Website, download it, upload it to facebook or stick it to their car. Nothing more, nothing less. One of the key parts of the campaign was engaging a grafitti artist, who designed all the details you could use to create the crest:
With Scion, we ensured that we developed Scion Speak in collaboration with the Scion enthusiast audience. In fact, we used some of the leaders of the existing online Scion communities to help us to develop the Scion design language. We also ensured that this brand site was designed for purely social and expressive purposes and did not feel like a corporate or money-generating venture.
So apart from the general idea, which seems to fit well to the target audience here are the social media strategy considerations that were mentioned in the casestudy:
Define the key social behaviors of your target online. Where are they socializing? What are the social habits, (e.g., Forrester has social-networking consumer profile segments such as critics, spectators, sharers, etc.) online?
Identify your brand’s social behavior and objective in the social space. How should it socialize with your target? What is the brand’s primary purpose in the social network? Facilitating self-expression? Listening? What is its role at this social party and what useful tools can it create to facilitate this?
Create social-media content; don’t advertise on it. If you’re not providing content, ensure that you are providing a useful service. Social media helps people manage their social lives. It enables them to do something they are already interested in. It gives them the tools to allow for this. Social media provides a service—information, connection points, etc.
Be careful you’re not duplicating established social communities. If your audience is using a strongly established community (i.e., recipe sharing), why create a duplicate, marketing-based branded version of the same community? Why would your target leave the existing community for a branded version of the same offer?
Don’t hijack consumers’ social networks. At the least, marketers should be invited into the social culture. But even better, marketers should create their own culture that consumers want to join. They should also be mindful of forcing friends to endorse products among their peers. Users should be voluntary brand ambassadors, not an enforced sales force.
These points might make it into my set of powerpoint slides regarding social media.
Adverblog found this musical prang of lastminute.com which promotes their last minute ticket service for theatres (I think).
As nice as the idea appears, it is (as it often happens in advertising) not a very new idea. May it’s the first time, the idea was used in a commercial. But on YouTube, there are videos of the „prangstgrup“ that date back to August of 2006! See this clip here:
You can see a company logo in this clip several times, but it is not too obvious. Only once you see this clip, you get a URL that provides more info about who’s behind it:
Once you visit the website mentioned at the end of this clip, you can see it’s done by Allianz, a German insurance company. It’s nicely done, but I am still surprised to see an insurance company go through all this effort to show their logo. But since it’s very entertaining, I won’t ask any more questions 😉
Just when you thought that everybody who wants to use a (corporate) blog in their communication has tried (and sometimes failed miserably), Becks opens the bottle and starts a blogger casting.
Here is what they want:
You live by the blog. You have a way with words that hold people captive. And you don’t shy away from being in the public eye. Then we want you. Give your two cents worth, and we’ll give you a handsome salary and other bright perks. Your name and blogs will be seen by many around the world. Others have 365 days, you have 365 entries in a year. You get to work with Beck’s and a congenial creative team in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You might even relocate to a greener pasture. Sounds too good to be true?
„Our consumers actively seek out links to new trends and genuine material from around the globe. They have a desire to learn about people who share the same values as they do. The Beck’s new columnist will help uncover and highlight relevant and exciting topics for our consumers, enabling us to better connect with them.“
The idea is not new, but it could work well for becks, if the blogger manages to connect will with the becks consumer. But there are several possible negative outcomes:
The blogger will blog too much in favour of becks undertakings: it might not be sufficiently authentic and people might stop reading.
The blogger will blog very independently and could soon be a ‚celebrity‘, successful even when disconnected from the becks brand. Hence the image transfer to becks might decrease over time.
The blogging could turn out to be extremely boring regardless of the being authentic or not. Again people might stop reading it.
In either case it is a comparatively small investment (at the cost of probably only a few TV commercials) with a large possible upside to it.
Googletube just announced a new mechanism through which advertisers can book preroll ads precisely on those ads, that are on their way to become viral. Sounds great, considering the fact that there are around 150.000 new clips uploaded to youtube everyday.
YouTube buzz targeting works on an algorithm that looks at a number of viewer activities, including how many times a video is chosen as a favorite, how favorably it’s rated, and how quickly it picks up views, to determine which clips are about to „go viral.“
Advertisers can capitalize on the momentum by choosing to run overlay ads on these videos, with the possibility of combining buzz targeting with other options like time of day, gender and category targeting. As with all YouTube products, the ads only run on partner videos–or content from professional, semi-professional and even amateur producers that fit the targeting criteria, and have their express consent. (from here)
In the same article from which I got the quote above, Eric Schmidt ist quoted saying that the best youtube products will come out this year. This is one of them – some others might concern the tracking and measurement offerings, which have also greatly improved over the last couple of weeks!
Wo ich sonst so bin...