Mary C. Joyce was the New Media Operation Manager of Barrack Obama’s electoral staff. German Techsite Golem interviewed her during re:publica, a german blogger conference last week. It’s not about the tools, she says, it’s the strategy. I almost guessed that…
There is a new ad idea for social media, called WOMI – Word Of Mouth Impression. Developed by a company with a name that says it all: Social Media.
It functions like a mini-application that spreads in my own social network of contacts and friends, and I wonder: does it do that automatically, whenever I interact with it? Here is the description of Techcrunch:
WOMI campaigns present visitors with ads asking them for some kind of input either though a multiple choice question or using a text field. SocialMedia then uses this input to customize ads which are shown to the user’s friends on the same social network.
For example, if an ad for Star Wars had a call-to-action asking if I was on the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force, it could take my response and then present my friends with an ad that said “Jason is on the Light Side, how about you?â€. In turn, their responses are passed on to all of their friends, making this among the first kind of advertising with a viral element.
This is spooky, unless they definitely ask users before they present their friends with the answers to the multiple choice questions. It’s like a facebook app that spreads as soon as you launch it, without even asking.
If however, the user stays in full control, it could turn out to be rather interesting. Especially if you get to see all your friends responses later on, too. People love to see how they compare in polls and questionnaires. This can be a huge playground for brands. More effective than regular applications/widgets in a sense, because of the „classical“ advertising component: „pushing“ these polls onto the profil pages of friends and contacts, instead of just mentioning in some news feed „XYZ installed application ABC“.
Traditional media no longer produces „predictable“ results and sometimes completely fails to activate certain target audiences at all. Hence brands are increasingly adopting social media tactics and moving into the social media space. This is no news. But for the big brands social is still very much a test lab. There are many marketing Euros ready to be spend on new ways to engage the target audience, but there are (yet) not many proven ways to spend these Euros effectively.
Related to this, two blog posts by Tom Smith caught my attention in the last couple of days:
Tom first wrote a post about why big brands struggle with social media (marketing):
1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel
2. It does not fit into current structures
3. Communities and content are global
4. Social media needs a long term approach
5. No guaranteed results
6. The metrics are new
The blogpost caused a long discussion about big brands in social media, causing Tom to write an update called „why we all benefit from big brand being in social media„:
This was around the idea that big brands shouldn’t be active in social media, as the presence of big business will destroy the consumer driven spirit and purity of what the social revolution stands for.
Big brand involvement for some feels like a sellout. However, now that social media is mass market, I strongly believe that this viewpoint misses the big picture. I believe that we all benefit as consumers from big brands being in social media.
1. Social media drives complete transparency
2. Social media drives quality product
3. Social media can be a great customer service channel
4. Social Media creates products that we want
5. You control the relationship
6. Big brands keep our access free
7. Big brands have interesting stories to tell
8. Users drive the content and conversation
Good food for thought, even though I think the example given for the customer service channel is a bit far fetched – I wouldn’t consider a twitter dialogue good service… But hey, some might like that.
I already blogged about the current Doritos contest before. At Adrants I just found out about the fact that Doritos has announced their 5 top contestants for the superbowl television commercial. These are:
1. „Free Doritos,“ Joe Herbert, Batesville, IN
2. „New Flavor Pitch,“ Oren Brimer, New York, NY
3. „Power of the Crunch,“ Eric Heimbold, Venice, CA
4. „The Chase,“ Chris Roberts, Burbank, CA
5. „Too Delicious,“ Michael Goubeaux, Los Angeles, CA
One of them will be shown during the superbowl. Even the contestants don’t know yet, which one will be aired. They will have to wait until superbowl sunday, in order to find out whether they won, or not. And they will only win the $1 mio., if the ad tops the USA TODAYs annual Ad Meter.
I don’t know how likely that will be, but if the ad competes against all the other professionally made ads of last year, it will be difficult for this particular consumer to rank high, I guess.
This is a fantastic idea that I had featured in my (german) videoclip blog two weeks ago – but it’s also great advertising, so I decided to show it here, too:
Wo ich sonst so bin...