Digital advertising v social media engagement

Recently I yawned a bit too much when reading a well put together article called “Digital Dreams” in the Sunday Business Post.  In general, it attempted to summarise how the Digital Advertising Industry works and how brands should approach engaging with digital.

I was bored primarily because it espouses Google SEO, CPC and display advertising as the key tools of effective digital advertising. So. What’s my problem?

These blunt tools represent an antiquated push model of display and click-through advertising and are no way reflective of the emerging offerings in digital advertising, which are fundamentally based on two-way consumer engagement and interaction. 

Whilst it’s very sad to see the likes of advertising industry bellwethers McConnells (traditional) and i-level (digital)  sold / liquidated, the fates of these companies are merely indicators of the fundamental restructuring of the traditional and digital advertising industries.

Advertising has always been about influencing the one key person to spread the message to their friends. Consumers are influenced by their peers. The world of advertising communication has now flipped from one-way projection to two-way engagement.  Social media makes it easier for word of mouth recommendations to flow from peer to peer. Thus, the effectiveness of one-way advertising diminishes the greater the flow of social conversations.  

Social media provides us with mass market media channels to enable the spread of social (word of mouth) influence. The challenge for advertisers is in effectively connecting with the limited number of key influencers in social groups.

Personalisation and socialisation is now the norm and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. In fact, it has always been this way - recent technological offerings have just made it much easier for people to enagage (e.g. Facebook). Privacy debates will continue, but online social is not going anywhere. 

All online activities are set to come with the same level of personalisation you get in the local corner shop, by connecting and exposing a users’ social networks of friends and peers. Word of mouth, peer to peer recommendations has always been the primary influence for purchasing.  This significantly increases the value of social media, yet the core underlying challenges remain. How do I engage the key influencers? What is the output of my marketing activities in social media? Collectively, we need to find the answers.

With all of this is two-way interactivity between networks, brands need to connect with the connectors in these networks.  Whilst in the short term it may pay for a brand to spend on one-way digital advertising, in the medium term, the effectiveness of this form of digital advertising will diminish considerably compared to effective conversation management on social media.

Social media should be leading any form of digital strategy. Without social, digital is just a very blunt messaging tool.

Declan

Facebook platform flakiness post F8

The facebook platform is being a bit of a pain at the moment. The wider community is also seeing the damage. Blog piece below from a decent source. 

http://lianza.org/blog/2010/04/25/the-facebook-f8-story-that-no-one-seems-to-be-writing/ 

We have a number of apps going live over the next 2 weeks and we are taking a conservative approach to managing facebook platform risk.  

Using Facebook Fans to Drive Campaign Engagement

The recent Hunky Dorys campaign cleverly integrates Facebook fan pages and a micro-site to drive audience engagement. The sexy rugby campaign has been causing quite a stir in the Irish media. There have been objections and compliments coming from all angles. 

We don’t want to talk about the merits or not of the content used in the Hunky Dorys campaign, but would prefer to talk about the work we did with Huguenot to help them integrate the micro-site with the Facebook Fan pages for the red rugby team (brunettes) and the blue rugby team (blonds). 

The ad campaign makes clever use of the Fan numbers on Facebook to literally drive the sexy rugby scrum between the two teams. The team with the most Facebook fans wins the scrum.

The site uses Facebook connect / (Social Plugins) to allow supporters to login using their Facebook account and choose which team they want to support by liking their Facebook fan page. Visitors to the site that become a fan of either of the teams also gain  access to exclusive content in the teams’ ‘kit bag’. This includes desktop screen savers, videos of the Hunky Dory rugby girls in training and mobile phone wallpapers.

We really like the innovative use of Facebook fan pages to allow supporters to engage and become part of the campaign ! We think there are many ways this approach could be used.

So who do you support? The blonds on the brunettes? Have your say on hunkydorys.ie

Conor      

Facebook V the internet - F8 Developer Conference

There was a lot of geek talk, poor presentation skills from Mr Zucks and no mention of location based services on the Facebook platform. Yet the announcements from Facebook genuinely have the potential to transform and dominate the web for years to come.

The main announcement is that Facebook is going to put “like” buttons all over the web, with an initial focus on publishers (news content sites).

This concept is not new. For the last couple of years we have had similar offerings from Digg and Delicious to name a couple. I’m a huge fan of Delicious (where you bookmark all your favourite content onto one site and then share your bookmarks with your network / wider community). Betapond uses Delicious to centrally visualise any content that is bookmarked on Delicious with the tag “Betapond”. This content is then pushed to our home page.

The main fall back with Delicious is that there is no method to get access to your existing network of friends. Whilst I might “digg” a piece a news article, there is no way for me to know if my friends also “digg” this content. With this new feature, I will know which of my friends has already read or liked this story. This information will be displayed to me on the publisher’s website (ie the sports / news website that I’m reading). This type of connection is invaluable as it supplements my reading experience with contextual feedback from my friends. Facebook describes these peer to peer connections that enable personalisation as the “social graph”.The impact of social graph based personalisation is already being seen. The Huffington Post already personalises content based on what stories people in your Facebook social graph have read.

The bottom line is this: the Facebook platform is on course to be the CRM platform of the web. As Facebook integrates into the web, the flow of data through its platform is going to grow exponentially. This data is going to be critical in assisting brands in connecting and monetising their social media / web / Facebook activities. 

Declan

social media communities – organic v paid

Over the past month we have had the pleasure of working on some large facebook campaigns involving rapid scale in conversations / fan growth. Some of this growth was paid for through traditional and social media marketing / advertising. In other cases, the growth was down to competitions and promotions to drive fan growth. (a user couldn’t enter the competition unless they became a fan of the fan page)

What I’m trying to figure out is what industry we are in. It seems to be a blend of media buying for social media with the new version of direct marketing using social media promotions. I was recently involved in a talk to some up and coming digital entrepreneurs in Dublin and this exact issue came up. My current personal view is that it is ok to blast buy your immediate fan base. Assume that 30% to 50% of these fans will fall away and plan your future conversations against the remaining group of people

What I’m struggling with is the value of this “purchased” community versus a traditional organically grown community. These are decent brands, with good messages. Maybe I’m just a purist (naive?). Either way I do realise that the real challenge lies in keeping this audience engaged once you get their attention in the first place. This requires a pretty honest view on your brand, who you are and where you are going. Thereafter it is all about decent creatives, solid metrics and some form of road map of where you want the conversation to be in 3 year’s time.

It’s clear to me that there is a new set of rules and metrics emerging on how to engage with consumers through the use of social media. At its most fundamental level it is all about having the channels in place to amplify positive word of mouth messages from your customers / influences. There is no better advertising medium than social media to maximise word of mouth.  Positive word of mouth comes from honesty and a thought through social strategy. 

Declan

To like or not to like. Some recent Facebook text changes

Facebook recently announced a change to the text description of “fan”.  Any call to action  / fan buttons will now be “like” instead  of “become a fan”.

It’s all a bit confusing. Whilst it sounds straight forward on the face of it, there are numerous connotations for news feed descriptions and comparisons to the native facebook engagement ads.

We welcome any move to increase the popularity of facebook fan pages by making it easier for fans to engage.  On the flip side there is a decent chance that users will get confused between “like a fan page” and “like” a status update.

By increasing the popularity of fan pages the power of the medium will increase substantially from an advertising perspective. The potential cost of all this is an ever increasing amount of news feed content. No doubt facebook have some better algorithms on the way to filter same.

The medium term impact that this will have on facebook SEO and organic SEO is not known.

The official FB communication of this change can be seen here.

Hey! Don’t Spam My Wall.

Facebook yesterday announced some welcomed changes to their policies around publishing to users’ walls. We welcome them - but others may not be so all embracing. We consider user wall posts from apps to be the holy grail of user generated social marketing. Their integrity should be protected at all costs. 

The policy changes basically state that you can Not post to a user’s wall unless they click a button confirming it. Exceptions are made for certain apps that have a fundamental need to auto-publish to your wall e.g. an application that integrates with twitter to republish your tweets to your wall. 

I can hear developers and marketers complaining in the corridors - “I can’t believe we have to get the user to allow every post”. Wrong folks! If that’s the way your thinking, stop now. The conversation that should be “we really need to make sure our app/content is compelling enough to make our customers want to post it”.

People never deliver ‘word of mouth’ without knowing they are doing it, so why should it be any different on Facebook? 

Conor

Facebook stats for Ireland - March 2010

Recently facebook shared some Irish info and stats with us. Outlined below are some of the highlevel numbers. The gender and sex numbers are 2009, however the usage numbers are from March 10. 

The key number that pops out to us is that 847,000 people visit Facebook every day in Ireland. That is a pretty large number and stacks up favorably against the reach of any traditional media medium. Granted the reach is highly segmented, but that has both pros and cons. No matter what way you work the numbers there has got to be only one conclusion. A brands facebook strategy has to be top of the shopping list for the remainder of 2010.

Some of the interesting stats are as follows: 

• Active Users - 1.45m 
• 847k active daily users
• 83% of users come back to facebook every week
• 73% penetration of the online population
• 55 / 45    Male  / Female 
• 27% of users are > 35 years of age 
• 35% of users are 25 - 34 years of age

Declan

(consent received from facebook to publish the above stats)

Adidas Interactive Campaign - Innovative but off centre

The new Adidas interactive campaigns are up and running in the US. Some great concepts and creatives. Nearly all of the outputs are heavy flash-type micro sites,  some interactive video (good) and an online game. The weird and funky thing about the game is that in order to play it you need to get your Adidas runner/shoe scanned into the game using augmented reality webcam type stuff. Sounds cool but I’m not convinced of its take up. Try getting away with holding your runner in front of a webcam whilst in the office.

The interactive video content is a video catwalk/catalogue with each scene being used to model one specific garment. Different models for each individual piece and a different scene. Good stuff and it works.

What surprised me was the lack of any decent Facebook integration or social messaging. Adidas has 2.5m Facebook fans. The production spend for this interactive campaign must have been huge. Despite the size of the offering, the user experience is somewhat disappointing due to plugins required and the lack of normal intuitive navigation and usability.

The interactive fashion show could be so much better if you could bring your friends into the experience of browsing the catalogue - garner opinions from your friends on the catalogue; generate natural user-generated conversations; have the group decide on the best new pieces, etc, etc. 

Check it out for yourself.

Adidas 2010 Womens Look here : http://www.adidas.com/originals/nl/#/content/womenslookbook

Adidas on Facebook here http://www.facebook.com/adidasoriginals

Interactive creativity and facebook app design

A personal bugbear of mine these days is the lack of good quality creatives from a facebook campaign perspective. This includes creativity in general on digital platforms.Only bad facebook app design is worse. Since the start of the year I’ve participated in many discussions around the lack of digital creativity which has got me thinking about it further. At a recent @digital_lounge event  Mark Curits of @flirtomatic kicked off some healthy negativity around the lack of creativity on digital platforms.  There is no magic answer to this question. However, I think there is a wider industry acceptance that interactive creativity needs to be driven by putting the user / social interaction possibilities at the centre of the digital asset.

Creativity has to come from compelling user interactions. Interactive creativity is all about sparking a user / viewer / fan to interact with the content.  The current focus of the industry seems to still be around flash micro sites and creative banners ads.  In the age of social media, this is not creativity. Digital creativity should be all about designing web experiences with the primary objective of sparking user interaction (on any medium).

For me, I think one of the key metrics of facebook app creativity should be the quality and quantity of news feed interactions.

What fascinates me is the sheer scale of user touch-points and interactions now available to creative types. The evolution of the web, social media and the mobile has resulted in a fully converged ecosystem of advertising mediums.

Over the coming months we are going to publish a series of blog posts on facebook app design, usability and creativity.

We are also going to work with some guest bloggers to post various views on digital creativity and creative interactivity.

Please do get in touch if you would like to participate, need a hand or would like to disagree.

Declan