“Brightens up your grad’s dorm. Unlike a creepy gothic roommate, who can be a bad influence.”
….. all it takes to ward off the influence of bad poetry and clove cravings is funky colored scandinavian pillows?
this is amazing! djarum isn’t gonna know what hit it.
really, ikea! what are you thinking? even the goth students need cute pre-fab dorm room furniture, and instead of trying to figure out how you can get in on that sort of demand (hint: modified decor color palette) you deliberately hang a “no blacks” sign in your ad?
now you’ve gone and done it, ikea. there’s apparently already a tempest brewing in the goth online teacup, with folks sending out emails to their community mailing lists and including the contact info for ikea’s customer relations and social responsibility contacts. (maybe this could be a useful political activism strategy? just tie policy into lifestyle as opposed to social justice and people will get all caring about your shit and everything?)
anyway, ikea, let this be a lesson to you:
you don’t have to agree to EVERY snarky idea some hipster jr. advertising associate pulls out of his butt.
starting this blog seems kinda like merging onto a freeway. one doesn’t just take a sharp left turn and blurt out some sort of doctoral thesis, rather it’s a continuous, gradual process of edging closer and closer to the main flow of traffic, with ideas expanding on ideas, expanding on ideas.
i’ve been tinkering with this draft for a while now, about what i’ve got to say on the way i see the value of social engagement marketing being discussed, which is, like, oh man, just a big monster of a topic that only seems to make the post more and more unwieldy the further i delve into it.
so, i think, rather than waiting until i’ve got the whole thing complete enough to just barrel at a 90-degree angle against oncoming traffic, i’m going to tackle a bit of the onramp–as i see it–at a time.
** curves ahead: **
please be forewarned — i am NOT an online media expert. i do NOT have any kind of technology background, and quite honestly i couldn’t do math to save my life. my perspective comes from almost a decade of producing events and experiences that bring hundreds and now thousdands of people together, and create a platform for interaction on some incredibly visceral levels. large-scale live event creation is sort of like a “control” running parallel to the online experience creation experiment, and there are a myriad ways in which each informs the other.
my perspective also comes from studying PEOPLE and SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, (there’s a reason this blog is called “social creature,” after all). if i was doing what i do in a rural village in africa, it would be called anthropology. in l.a., however, we call it marketing.
so…. with an understanding of THAT basic caveat in mind, here’s an initial attempt at getting on that bull that’s the discussion about “the value of social engagement marketing,” and seeing how long i can stay on and ride it.
myth #1:
THE INTERNET INVENTED SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT MARKETING
nope.
guess again.
before it was about pressing Enter, it was about pressing the flesh. before web 2.0 there were tupperware parties, door to door salesmen, and patent medicine shows. all of these involved the same exact elements as what’s currently referred to in such clinical terms as “social engagement marketing,” and its potency as a selling method was never in question. before advertising, in fact, this was the only method there WAS.
but though the internet didn’t invent it, it DID upgrade it. as the tools for generating and enhancing social interaction got way fancier (and also more removed from immediately physical interaction) they seem to have also made us confused. we now look at this whole process as if it’s some alien anomaly we’ve never encountered before, when the truth is that this process has been in existence for AGES. for, in fact, as long as human beings have known how to communicate.
Strong, E.K. (1925). “Theories of Selling”. Journal of Applied Psychology9: 75-86.
A lot of models are known in order to sell, e.g. the BOSCH-Formula, developed by Peter Hubert for the international sales training for consumer goods.
Offer solutions – talk about the endresult benefits for the customer
Stimulate the senses – let the customer test your product
Cross your sales – think of all the necessary accessories
Hit the closing point – sell when the customer is ready to buy
….ask open questions and offer solutions, stimulate the senses and think of all the necessary accessories. sounds a lot like “social engagement,” wouldn’t you say?
and all of this happening before the invention of media as we know it, let alone the application of social media.
before we go any further in this conversation (and i do hope to make this a conversation) about evaluating the “ROI of social engagement,” we must first take the follwing into account:
the internet does not exist in an easy vaccum.
the online measurement of the effectiveness of social engagement marketing is a PARTIAL measurement of the full social picture.
to measure the remainder of the social picture you will need a shitload of radio transmitters and a good number of soviet psychics. don’t worry, they’re on order, and will probably be a service package offered soon by these guys : http://www.mworks-inc.com/about.html
i believe that because the internet did not spawn either the concept or the application of “social engagement marketing” (only the terminology), nor did it eliminate all its prior forms, but rather ENHANCED them, it’s vital to recognize that any measurement of online social engagement will NOT be a measurement of its TOTAL effectiveness.
– – –
thanks to the following folks for their insight, info, and sounding boards for this in one fashion or another:
there’s more to come on this, for sure, but if you’ve got any thoughts on this particular part of the onramp, feel free to use your turn signal in the comments.
my favorite part is where she goes, “you don’t know anything about me.”
and he says, “i know everything about you sweetheart!” and starts spouting off all sorts of demographic statistics. perfect case in point about the difference between knowing your demo (defined by the market), and understanding your user’s identity (defined by the user).
and speaking of identity…. i found it particularly curious that the creator of this video is european. if you know anything about the european stereotype of the “american male” (insensitive, egomaniacal, daft) it’s kind of hilarious to consider the role of the “advertiser” being based on that stereotype.
just saw a great bit by sarah dopp about the trend of an established company’s new community site campaign that involves an outdoor advertising strategy to drive traffic–case in point: reebok’s goruneasy.com that i already wrote about glowingly HERE.
what i find particularly interesting about this approach that’s being adopted not just by reebok, but starbucks as well (letsmeetatstarbucks.com), among what’s sure to be a coming slew of others, are the kind of pre-web 2.0 strategies–and their benefits–that are getting incorporated in this technique.
Billboard-to-web community-oriented marketing is being adapted with high visibility.
By sending people to a campaign-specific website, they can monitor their campaign’s site traffic ROI without any confusion.
we’ve been employing this tactic in concert promotion for ages. the simplest way to determine the effectiveness of any ad is to isolate an offer, for example, letting radio station X promote a particular kind of discount offer that no other outlet is pushing.
it’s incredibly interesting also to consider the significance of using outdoor media to promote a web 2.0 site of a consumer goods brand. this is the multi-platform kind of “meta-strategy” that i think is going to become the standard for a new kind of campaign. one that fuses the best of the old (it don’t get much older than billboards, yo) with the new, and in the processfuses engagement WITH awareness instead of relegating the two to their own separate ghettos.
ok, i admit it, i totally love reebok’s new ($30 million, multi-platform) campaign announcing their community site www.goruneasy.com. i’ve been seeing their billboards all over town, and even just watched an ad on their site, and it’s so fucking clever and cute and makes me laugh every time i see some new bit of their creative.
here’s one of my favorite images from the campaign:
The Run Easy campaign is a breath of fresh air from Reebok in a category obsessed with an obsessive attitude towards athletics. Nike has been successful positioning its brand to serious athletes, thus attracting millions of other consumers who admire but do not imitate this level of dedication. Too often both Reebok and Adidas ad campaigns have looked like pale clones of the original Nike strategy. This new multimedia campaign from Reebok aims to position Reebok squarely with casual athletes. It is a risky but worthwhile endeavor.
way to draw the running-shoe consumer identity line, and fucking stake your claim, reebok!
interestingly, here’s nike’s community site: www.joga.com. a site for hardcore soccer enthusiasts, and with a definitvely non-english url… what is it? i’m guessing like…. portuguese for “game”? (it’s juego in spanish… anyone speak portuguese?)
could the community sites of two companies that sell essentially the SAME freakin’ thing be ANY more different?
good to keep that in mind, that the community strategy approach can be just as varied as any other aspect of a campaign, and depend just as much on the kind of user you’re aiming to engage.
yet another question to throw into to the cauldron where that “how to measure the effectiveness of social engagement” mess is stewing: well, did your strategy engage the right audience in the right way?
campaign announcing their community site