All posts by alicelankester

Social marketing

Are Twitter celebrities “real”?

Here’s a site, just dedicated to figuring out if Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, etc. celebrities are real. Or not. http://valebrity.com/.

The site has rather a lengthy procedure you have to go through to make sure that you’re “real.” See it here: http://valebrity.com/tag/getadded/. So now you can find out if you’re really talking to that beautiful Brazilian model, or some kid in middle America typing on her behalf. Creepy.

Jeez. You just don’t know what’s real any more do you?

Social marketing

Getting starting with corporate social media marketing

There are dozens, no hundreds, and probably thousands of decent articles about how corporate brands should get started with social media marketing. This article may, or may not, bring you something new. For me, it reflects a little of what I have learned about how brands can start thinking about managing their marketing funnel online through social media.

Your social media marketing strategy is different to, or rather an adjunct of, your general integrated marketing strategy. The latter is about awareness building and demand generation and likely involves time-limited specific campaigns like product launches or specific awareness campaigns.

Your social media marketing strategy is an umbrella strategy. It should be included as a part of all the integrated marketing campaigns you do, and it should be an on-going evergreen strategy.

Here are some discussion points.

1. All brands can be social

How can you be social? Start a conversation with your customers. Do it through a blog, a Twitter, an online forum, a social marketing page. Make sure it’s staffed by YOUR staff. Not your agency staff. You need to learn this stuff.

2. Start with Twitter and expand from there

Twitter is an easy way to get started. And get started you must. I have another post on this blog about how to get started with Twitter. Commit to being on there every single day — including weekends. Choose one, or two, people as the official Tweeters and have them agree from the start on their approach, voice, strategy and the most interesting things to tweet about with your brand.

3. Be clear about your message

What is the message you want shared about your brand? Be clear from the start, and be consistent. Your message is not only your brand’s core value, but also your brand’s personality. Are you fun, irreverent, serious, youthful, crazy, honest? And what is the cornerstone message you want to keep coming back to?

4. Determine your investment in your social marketing program

You can spend a fortune on an agency to help you. Or, you can kick it off by getting out there and getting started yourself.

Bring in an agency when you don’t have the resources to manage and implement your campaign. But don’t leave all the strategy and key learnings to your agency. You have to have formed an opinion yourself and determined a good approach yourself. Don’t pay the agency for this work up front. They are there to validate, fine-tune, and reflect.

I strongly recommend at least one in-house staff person having hands-on involvement in all aspects of your social media presence. That way you are investing in your own corporate knowledgebase, not in your agency’s knowledgebase. Don’t abdicate all these important tasks to an agency. If you feel you don’t know enough, hire a knowledgeable person to teach you and do the work. Much more valuable in the long term.

Don’t start with ‘what will it cost?’ Start with what you want to achieve, how you can measure it, how you can get your feet wet with little or no cost.

Remember, there is a risk to being outside the conversation. Jump in and learn to swim.

5. Selling up to management

How do you convince management to participate when they may not have a clue what social media marketing is? Further reason to get started internally first and gain key learnings. “We wouldn’t have known this without having done that.” Show value and engagement in small ways, and then extrapolate value beyond that initial engagement.

Show off what your competition is doing in this area. Or, if they haven’t arrived there, show off cool things that related brands are doing. These things are very hard to measure in terms of strict ROI. It’ll take months to get something off the ground. If your management is very reticent, try to kick off with things that are low-risk and low-cost. There is no fee to start a Facebook fan page and a Twitter stream, so that’s a good place to start. Begin writing your own corporate blog, without publishing it, to show what posts might look like. Again, with a tool like Blogger there is no cost to get started.

Marketing best practices

How you can build your own creative genius

I am finding this article about Walt Disney’s creative genius very interesting. More than putting it work to at work, I’m going to discuss it with my children. Combining their creative dreams with a healthy dose of reality is a lesson it’s never too soon to learn.

Here’s how you can use Disney’s creative strategy:

1. Be a dreamer — what are you trying to achieve? What excites you and inspires you? What’s your passion?
2. Be a realist — what resources do you need? What’s your plan? What are the obstacles?
3. Be a critic — How does it look? To you? Your customer? Your audience? Don’t do this step too early and stymie your creativity. Sometimes it takes courage to be the dreamer, and the critic can make any dreamer feel their ideas are worthless.

Marketing best practices

What do great viral videos have in common?

Reading “What do great viral videos have in common?” It says they all great viral videos make you:

  • Connect with you personally, and
  • Want to share them with friends

No duh on the last one. That’s viral, isn’t it?

What this article is talking about is great viral brand videos. Not just great viral videos. Their analysis associates something (e.g. ease of use, overcoming of fears with the E-trade baby) with a brand. Great viral brand videos leave a positive association in your mind with that brand.

(Naturally this doesn’t apply to, say the classic Evolution of Dance. Which is just plain fun and funny and a video you are happy to watch more than once. )

What do all these successful brand viral videos have in common in their approach to content?

They are a little racy (babies looking at the girl’s backside and saying “shit”?) in the baby eTrade video.

They are funny and have a “how did they do that” component in Samsung’s LED video. This one also has a somewhat tenuous link to Samsung itself. I wonder if anyone will remember the Samsung LED connection? But I love the Welsh accents and the participants have a cool nerd factor.

Another one from over the pond: the Cadbury’s Eyebrow video. This one has the cute kids, as well as the “how did they do that” component. And it’s particularly fun for those of us who can only cock one eyebrow, not two. (I can only wiggle one ear too. Call me inept.)

And here’s a great one that makes you wonder how many of the people involved were shills, and how many were really dancing on the spur of the moment. The “life is sharing” message comes on quietly, and the theme is super fun in T-Mobile’s dance video on Liverpool Street Station in London.

Technology use

Thought provoking: why there will be many twitters

Dave Winer got me thinking. As he regularly does. “Why there will be many Twitters.”

Twitter is a vast, amorphous group of people most of which I have ZERO interest in. There’s just too much and it’s overwhelming. It is also taking away valuable time from my Google Reader, which is where I learn the most. In Google Reader, I am subscribed to around 200 RSS feeds. I have selected them. I don’t see anything else, just them. I can focus, read and learn. Twitter is like standing in front of machine gun fire. You don’t stand a chance!

So more special-interest Twitter networks are interesting. Ones where it’s only news. Or only music. Or only entertainment. Or only women. I like the last idea a lot.

Technology use

Who am I today?

I have the following profile pictures: IM (Yahoo, AOL, MSN), Twitter, LinkedIn my blog, my Facebook page, my MySpace page. There’s probably more, I just can’t think of them right now.

I just updated my Twitter picture. But that leaves all my other pictures the same. I need a tool that updates “who I am today” on all my profiles. I want to be wildly different EVERY day. I wish.

This isn’t a facetious idea. Teenagers today certainly try on new personas almost every day. They experiment with hair, clothes, looks, expressions. This would be a great way to show everyone “who I am today.”