In light of this, Paddy Power has taken to the campaign to that great, big, unregulated, amorphous mass of electronic information where anything goes and it does so it can be seen by the world. In short, the internet.
Rubber Republic is handling the seeding and online PR side of the campaign. You can watch the ad below:
The BBC has published a very snazzy, interactive map showing how internet penetration has deepened and spread across the globe between 1988 and 2008.
A simple slider enables you to skip through the years, picking out landmark developments at different intervals. Surprisingly, given its size and dominance today, China’s relationship with the internet didn’t start gaining serious traction until 2003.
Perhaps, it’s even more surprising to see that internet penetration in China still lags behind the rest of the world, but surely not for long as more people move from the countryside to the country’s growing cities.
I was also confounded to learn that the UK lagged behind Australia, Iceland, and New Zealand back in 1998 in terms of what percentage of people in those countries were online.
However, as the UK has a far greater population than those three countries it’s perhaps not that surprising on closer inspection.
But, on a personal note, I now realise how far ahead of the curve my parents were back in 1996 when we first began surfing the web at home.
Just two years later, only 16-20% of the UK population was online. Major props to the folks for that one. Yet, my mother still routinely asks for help with her internet set up, despite clearly being something of a trail blazer back in the mid-nineties.
Separately, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the spread of internet usage with a recently published diagram showing where Google get its revenues from, enabling the search giant to become the main beneficiary from the inexorable rise of the internet in a purely commercial sense.
It’s worth noting that despite all the hype and investment in recent years behind apps, browsers and Google-owned sites, search accounts for by far and away the lions share of the company’s revenues, though you could argue the brand halo effect of these new ventures means that they all inextricably linked to one another.
What’s so annoyingly complicated about social media buying is that you’re not just buying the media, but you’ve also got to factor in buying the social bit too. And when it comes to buying social things get a way bit complicated. After all, buying friends just doesn’t work.
So how do you deal with planning and buying social media? Well the main issue is the fact that the very nature of social media means it’s earned media – i.e. people share / advocate your ads – and not directly bought. This therefore means that you don’t buy social media as such, rather you buy “social media potential”.
Social media potential is all about optimising the opportunity for your content to be shared and talked about. The very nature of this means that the planning aspects of a social media campaign are more important than ever.
To help, we’ve developed up a donut – a social media planning and buying donut to help map out the key things to factor in when planning / buying a campaign:
Conversation / community mapping: first up, map out the communities you want to start conversations in, and plot what those conversations might look like (i.e. who’s going to say what)
Conversation catalyst creation: next stop is to create your “conversation catalyst” – i.e. make your viral film / game / idea that’s going to be the catalyst for all the social internet chatter.
Small seed: small seed is all about seeding to a small number of highly targeted, relevant and influential people to start sharing and talking. Small seed optimises advocacy, and is typically based around blogger / twitter outreach.
Big seed:big seed is all about seeding to a bigger number of lesser influential people – but still in a relevant and targeted way. Big seed guarantees reach, and typically involves using an ad network like the Viral Ad Network.
So having done all this – how should you judge success? Well ideally, your campaign would have spread from its initial seeds resulting in both advocacy and reach – in the perfect world that meaning a high number of relevant people talking about and sharing your campaign.
I’ve got a whole bunch more thoughts on the detail of planning social media campaigns + measurement – though I’ll save these for later . . .
@Rubber_Republic
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the US trade body for the online advertising industry, has just published its first ever social media buyer’s guide.
Some will argue that social media cannot be bought, and as such is earned media. The idea that earnt media and paid media are distinct is something we always try keep front of mind in a transparent way. The importance of transparency has been keenly debated of late.
We tackled this issue in a recent presentation, and argued that advertisers can earn peer-to-peer messaging through a well-executed and well-coordinated social and paid social media campaign.
For example, a brand may buy video views as paid media on a cost-per-engagement basis through our Viral Ad Network, but generate additional video views as earned media through viral pass-along of the video.
It’s good to see a major trade body defining a nascent part of the market, given it’s sometimes tricky to measure and evaluate the direct cost of activities such as social media PR outreach compared to other more established forms of communications.
As the guide itself says: “It is accepted today that any effective social media campaign should have an owned and paid media plan as its foundation in order to achieve earned media objectives.
“Earned media may or may not have direct cost associated with it, and it can include PR, outreach, and activities initiated by users over and above any specialised paid-for engagement such as word of mouth (viral), pass along, repeat usage.”
The publication of the guide is timely given that as many as two-thirds of 133 chief marketers surveyed by the IAB said they planned to increase social media budgets in 2010, which if true should trickle down to the UK market.
Following on my previous post about the Social Media Premier League looking at which clubs are doing well at social media, and which haven’t got themselves sorted out yet, we’ve now put together some thoughts about how clubs should be putting together a framework to optimise their social media activity.
The initial model we’ve developed for football clubs is based around 4 areas of activity: direct sales, relationship building, PR and affiliate marketing.
From a bottom line perspective, social media can’t be ignored as a great way of driving direct sales – whether it’s last minute tickets to fill a stadium, or club promotions to sell merchandise – like DVDs or club strips. From a brand perspective, using social media to develop stronger relationships is a given – especially helping build stronger relationships with fans all over the world. The final two areas where social media can be invaluable is in the areas of crisis management – e.g. dealing with player scandals – and affiliate marketing – e.g. helping leverage additional value for your club sponsors.
From an overall perspective, the key thing to note is that your social media strategy should fit alongside your existing marcom strategies being used to optimise the bits social media’s the best at – i.e. being social!
At Team Rubber most of us use Mac’s all day every day. Ever use the Shift + Apple + 4 screenshot function? We all do. Ever noticed how sometimes Keynote presentations suddenly inflate in size to make you think “Have I accidentally embedded the Beatles back catalog?”.
Well this seems to be one of those ridiculous quirks of macs. It seems to be because the screenshots on a mac create PNG files. And when you embed PNG files in Keynote they for some reason become huge. Upwards of 30Mb. Bit rude to e-mail.
So the solution is to make your mac take screenshots as JPEG’s. And its really easy.
1: Go to Application -> Utilities and open Terminal.
2: Copy and paste this line of code (minus the arrows) in and hit enter.
>> defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
3: Restart your computer.
Voila – your computer takes screenshots as JPEGs and Keynote stops being such a c**k = <10Mb presentations.
Football and social media are perfect bed-fellows. Football teams command great allegiance from their fans and accordingly strong communities are built – each community gathering online to discuss their team’s latest game / transfer / scandal. For the majority, the online community is the only way they can connect with other fans given only a minority of fans have the chance to go to a live match.
So the big question for football teams is how can they maximise the potential of these latent communities, and the social (and £) capital within them. As a starter, last week we ran some desk research looking at how socially connected the Premiership clubs were – and for fun we’ve created the “Social Media Premiership” – charting how the various teams rank, based around some social media basics: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Man City are arguably way in front of the competition at the top of the league – where I’m sure Roberto Mancini would love to be in the real league. Although they haven’t traditionally had the biggest supporter-base of the Premiership teams, they’ve impressively built strong online ties with their core fan-base.
At the bottom of the league you’ve got Tottenham who inexplicably don’t have any official social media presence at all, which I’d hope will change in the coming months as it’s bizarre for a club to ignore the potential of social media.
Having said that, getting your social media strategy right isn’t as easy as you’d think, especially when it comes to maximising value re: cold hard sales – something that all Premiership clubs are no doubt keen to do. So maybe Tottenham’s social media reticence is down to a tactical slow and steady approach – pretty similar to Everton’s progress in the real league this year ; – )
*Notes on the research data: all data was collated the week ending 5th February. The number in brackets represents their league position at that time, and the blog numbers came from Google blog search. All other data came from the specified channel source.
Our project is called “The Bristol Job” and is a family heist movie about an 11 year old girl who discovers her parents are too poor to pay for her last school trip so decides to rob a bank with her two best friends.
However, if you are looking for Gladwell-eque answers or a one-size-fits-all pattern that can be applied to marketing you may be a bit disappointed – There is no social media marketing alchemy or hidden cabal of influence but more the affirmation that our networks are innately human (not technological) and those close to us (and up to three degrees removed) are extremely powerful channels that can change our behaviour, our wealth and even our health.
But Malcolm Gladwell fans do not despair, there are plenty of fascinating anecdotes to illustrate the points raised; including Corsican vendettas, Kenyan villages inexplicably consumed by infectious laughter (see YouTube video below) and a terrifying account of a virus spreading within World of Warcraft that has since been used by governments and the medical establishment as one of the most realistic scenarios for a global epidemic (NB its conclusions are not good).
Anyway no more spoilers from me. If you have read, are reading or intend to read it yourself it we would love to hear what you think about it.
And if you want a free copy we’ve got a couple spare that I am happy to send out if you promise to abide by the ‘Rules of Book Club’ – Read responsibly & share the love!
Do people prefer to share the good or the bad? Would you rather gossip online or spread stuff that leaves your friends, peers and social networks awestruck?
These are some of the questions the New York Times pondered amid a research project carried out by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.
The academics studied the paper’s list of most emailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months. They analysed the content of thousands of articles, using filters such as deliberate placement in the paper or on the home page to ascertain a true measure of what makes a newspaper article viral.
The findings are could be best described in one word: ‘awesome’. In short, the impulse that drives someone to share an article with someone else is much the same as the science behind the most popular and shared online videos.
The project revealed that people preferred emailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they would rather send long articles on intellectually challenging topics than short news stories.
What’s more, NYT readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, which was reflected in the popularity of science articles. More emotional articles were also more likely to shared.
But what makes a news article inspire awe exactly? The researchers defined the quality as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
They also set two separate criteria for defining the parameters of an awe-inspiring story: “Its scale is large, and it requires ‘mental accommodation’ by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. It involves the opening and broadening of the mind.”
You can read more on the subject here. As a quick aside, I came across the article behind this blog post through the New York Times iPhone app, which IMHO is pretty awesome. By far, the best newspaper app I’ve used yet.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the US trade body for the online advertising industry, has just published its first ever social media buyer’s guide.
