Skittles Twitters The Rainbow

What if a real company decided to turn their whole site into a twitter conversation?

That’s what skittles did in what can only be described as a bold move to embrace Web2.0.

What a unique approach. In a traditional viral campaign, you launch a viral concept and it takes on a life of its own, living in media largely beyond your control. Skittles did one better. They launched a viral campaign and turned their website into an incubator for the virus. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is! An argument could be made that the skittles website isn’t core to their product sales, so replacing it with a twitter results page isn’t as big of a risk as if a B2B company were to do it. But still, you have to respect the moxie of Skittles’ Web 2.0 marketing team. What a great campaign!

Cisco Ends the Search for the Perfect Valentine's Day Gift

This is a great B2B example of a viral video. This video was posted to YouTube, blogged about and Twittered about and in 5 days has over 8,400 views!

3M Goes Viral for All the Wrong Reasons

Rather than paying a $2,000 licensing fee for an already viral photo, 3M decided to recreate a fake watered downed version and call it their own. Now, they are going viral but for all the wrong reasons. This is just one of many posts that have and will be written about their faux-pas rather than their savvy marketing. What they should have done is taken notes from Motorola's marketing folks. When Motorola saw the fame and viral effect of the "Backdorm Boys" they didn't try to steal their idea with their own recreation. Instead, they approached them with an offer that resulted in their participation in what ended up being the "most effective use of interactive marketing - new media" at the 2006 Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards.

Next time someone should make sure 3M gets the memo...

Coffee's for Closers

Go viral or go home
Since 1996 Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson has claimed he invented “viral” marketing when his portfolio company, Hotmail, included a line on the bottom of each email that said "Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/."

Although viral marketing as we now know it was used by companies much earlier, the Hotmail example perfectly illustrates why marketers chase “viral” as if it were the cure to stopping spam. After getting the right message, the biggest challenges facing marketers are message distribution and authentication. If someone doesn’t see your message, you lose. If they don’t think it’s legitimate or don’t trust its source, you lose. Viral campaigns solve both those problems; accelerating propagation faster than we could ever do ourselves and authenticating the message by having it delivered by a trusted source. It’s marketing Nirvana. Forget visions of sugar plums dancing through my head - when I sleep I see social networks acting as Force Multipliers; delivering my carefully packaged message to receptive and qualified customers.

Easier said than done
But hey if it were that easy everybody would be doing it. There are many perils on the long winding road up the peak to Marketer’s Paradise not the least of which is crafting the perfect message. But let’s say you get through that, how on earth do you build a messaging vehicle that has the potential to go viral? And even after you do that what’s really the benefit of doing so? Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of viral effectiveness on buying decisions? I mean, even if the message is right and its delivered by a trusted source in a reasonable time frame is it more effective than a billboard in Times Square?

We’re still very early in our understanding of how effective social media and other 2.0ish technologies will be in helping plain Jane campaigns achieve “viral” status, but the returns so far are encouraging.

One thing that’s much harder to measure however is the effect of networks on individual behavioral (buying) decisions. We know that message reception and retention will be higher when coming from “the network”, but how influential is “the network” on decisions overall?

Viral messaging or networked buying?
New research out of Harvard Medical School indicates that social networks may have more to do with individual buying decisions than we thought. When coupled with Social Media Marketing campaigns this can be much more powerful than just a more effective message delivery campaign. Instead of just permeating an effective message, a “tuned” network could theoretically process a message and if followed up with positive product purchase experiences, directly influence the purchasing decisions of others in the network. This makes the “message spreading” potential of viral marketing seem downright anemic. Traditional viral marketing still relies on the effectiveness of my message to be effective. But if this research holds true for Social Media networks, then there might be a more compelling and cost effective way to harness “the network” in marketing campaigns that transcend traditional message delivery.

When thinking strategically, its easy to get caught up in thinking that marketing is about messaging and message delivery. But its not. Its about selling product. Too often I think we’re content with getting qualified buyers to the table. What if we could more directly influence actual buying?

Certain markets are already operating in this paradigm and as I consider new campaigns in the future I will certainly be looking closer at “network influence on buying behavior” campaigns rather than the traditional “network influence on message delivery” projects that have worked for us in the past.

Research and Relationships

Session 3 panelists included: Max Kalehoff (Nielsen), Aaron Coldiron (Microsoft), Amy Shenkan (McKinsey), and Ellen Konar (Google)

Max Kalehoff started the session sharing a Nike 'Brand Association Map' which is used to visually gauge the temperature of the Internet - what's the theme, brand identity, reputation by looking at what's posted on blogs, forums and other user generated media.

He then shares his 'Top 10 Disruptions in Measurement':

1. Rise of online and digital (basically that there is a new way to collect data)
2. Attention erosion, research aversion-engagement (people don't want to be interrupted)
3. Speed of measurement increases
4. Data commoditizing and democratizing
5. Passive behavioral and attention measurement (where are people going and for how long?)
6. Measurement and analysis of unstructured data
7. Consumer centric measurement and planning
8. Qualitative comeback
9. Data integration comes of age
10. Attention-data ownership (who owns what?)


The viral component of the Internet is not always positive. An example of the Kryptonite Lock was mentioned - when a rumor that had been known for some time hit Internet and spread like wildfire in a viral video crumbling their brand and their credibility. The thing that makes this interesting is that they had the opportunity to prevent this - that had learned of the security flaw two years prior but chose to ignore it - had the pulled from the shelves then and corrected the problem they could have saved a lot of heartaches.

Ellen Konar from Google shared some interesting insights on what she explains as a 'peer-to-peer network' inside their firewall. People just find what what they are looking for "using search, duh." The information is unstructured and simply made available and if it's good enough to travel, it will. I think generally this works and for the next generation it will probably work just fine since grew up searching and know how to do it. It ties in perfectly with my belief that we are all in information overload putting us in 'just in time learning' mode - when I need to know I know it's out there and I will find it. There are two problems with this thinking - the first is one that I think will correct itself over time and that is that there are still a lot of people who don't know how to search; and two, we don't know what we don't know so there still needs to be some level of outward communication.

Amy Shenkan says 'The hardest thing to do is make sense of all the data.' It's all out there - digital breadcrumbs everywhere but what do we do with this information? Ellen Konar points us to Google Trends as a way to see what's hot at the moment and explains that they are looking at better ways to break up the data to make it more useful. But it's not just data anymore - we need to measure the stories and conversations that are happening and somehow quantify the valuable insights we are gaining from these conversations.

A woman sitting behind me silenced the crowd with her question about the privacy a user has when surfing the Web. For those who don't already know a lot of websites are passively collecting' information about you including where you came from, what you clicked, how long you stayed (or if you are on their site now). Did you opt in to that? Well there is that little privacy policy link on the bottom of most website.

Surveys - valuable or not? Ellen wasn't satisfied with the number of responses she got back from a Google Happiness Survey so they decided to start sharing the results - not just with those who took the survey but with everyone who was invited to take the survey whether they responded or not. This simple sharing of information makes the uses feel like they are getting something in return making them more likely to participate next time (what's in it for me?).

Are you voting for Ray Hopewood?

Of course not, he doesn’t exist – he’s a fictional character at the center of a viral marketing campaign that according to SF Gate has “served 45,000 videos in the first couple of weeks, 15,000 page views, and (has stickiness of) 1 minute and 40 seconds (per visit).”

Ray Hopewood may be a fictional character in the real world but in the virtual world he has a profile on MySpace, Facebook, and flickr. He's got his own blog, an ecommerce site, and banner ads on various other sites.

So how much gold is there at the end of the Social Media Marketing rainbow? I think that depends on the execution. My team’s Marketing 2.0 / Social Media Marketing plan is built around these execution strategies:

1. Understand the Rules of the Game – There is no ‘control and command’ when it comes to Social Media Marketing – you need to be willing to let go and trust that your product or service can withstand the truth. As the twelfth rule from The Cluetrain Manifesto, the original Bible of Social Marketing, states: “There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone."
   
2. Exploit Social Networking Sites – Spend time driving traffic to your site or campaign using new media sites. David Wilson has done an interesting study that shows which social sites are likely to provide the highest returns.
   
3. You don’t have to start a conversation to have one – Go where your customers are – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, or wherever it might be. Go there, sign up, connect and start typing. Starting a conversation is a lot more work than jumping into one.
   
4. Don’t forget the Basics – Content is still king. Whatever you have to say make sure it’s worth saying.
   
5. Learn as you go – No risk, no reward. We are all treading in new waters here – don’t be afraid to go out on a limb and see what happens – it worked for Ray!