Keep the Social Momentum Going

Brand building is easier when your brand has fans; connecting with your company excites them. But their enthusiasm will eventually die down if you don't respond to their expectations. Here's how to keep fans' enthusiasm alive long term:

Talk about your customers' problems. Initially, your fans may wait patiently for that next product feature or color announcement. But eventually, talking about your product — no matter what you say — will start to bore consumers. Marketers need to address their fans' problems to create the long-term value customers grow passionate about over time. Just like more boring brands, brands with lots of fans need to find out what's important to their customers and then provide a brand-sponsored solution that caters to their needs.

Turn your branding applications into media assets. Once you've connected with brand enthusiasts, your Facebook pages, communities, blogs, or videos may become attractive to compatible brands from other companies — or other divisions within your own company — that share a common audience. Procter & Gamble, which started Beinggirl.com to promote feminine care products, now helps adolescents learn about other company products like Herbal Essences shampoo on the site.

Be ready for real-time social interaction. Just developing social applications won't maximize brand enthusiasm and engagement. Better to participate actively in anything you create, since your fans will value your company's presence. Twitter is ideal for providing instant thrills to brand fans. For example, Kingfisher lets followers engage in the quiz around IPL to keep the buzz alive around the brand.

Take the brand momentum fans create offline. Marketers need a way to keep brand enthusiasm going — both online and offline. This can be as simple as giving them coupons to share with friends or hosting an event that lets them interact with your new products.

Hire vendors and agencies that have worked with all-star brands. If you're ready to develop a social application, you need to understand how online fans behave. Choose technology vendors and agencies that have experience with brands as popular as yours. Partners like OgilvyOne can develop a long-term social asset your enthusiasts will continually interact with.

Using Social Applications In Ad Campaigns

After working in an advertising agency I have realized that the majority of marketing budgets go to advertising, and there is a significant opportunity to enhance it with social tools. But social media marketing typically generates longer-term relationships, which means that it is out of sync with the quick-hit nature of most advertising.

To enhance an ad campaign with social elements, interactive marketers should know their audience’s behavior, commit to the communities for the long term, plan for transitions or community exits, and develop new campaign metrics.

What I really feel is that Social Applications enhance traditional advertising and that is what I am going to talk in the first part of my topic.

Advertising is by far the largest part of marketing budgets, but it’s typically a time-limited spend with a specific objective, like increasing awareness. Social media, by contrast, gets less than 1/4th from the average marketer but builds brand advocates and word of mouth over the long term.


So should you use social applications in ad campaigns? Yes, but it takes skill to adapt this longer-term strategy to the quicker pace of ad creative and placement. Accounting for these differences, you can use social marketing in five different ways to enhance your ad campaigns:

1. Use communities to launch and extend campaigns.

If you’ve already built a community of brand evangelists, use them to help disseminate the message. For instance, when Vodafone recently launched its new Vodafone Zoo Zoo campaign, the company got more than 3 Lakh (0.3 Million) Facebook fans. These Facebook brand evangelists got all the new services ad as tag it “I like this,” leave a comment, or share with a friend.

2. Use campaigns to begin building your long-term channels.

Lenovo, working with the agency OgilvyOne, allocated a portion of its marketing budget for the High Security Laptops to bring its “Face Recognition Feature” campaign to the social media world. Marketers developed programs within MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to help support people during the product launch. While these programs were created for short-term use, Lenovo continues to use them as long-term platforms to provide product for their followers.

3. Build communities around existing events — or create new ones.

Use social communities to build excitement around events that are relevant to your brand. For example, PepsiCo used major events such as the inauguration of US President Barack Obama and the Super Bowl to support its “Refresh Everything” campaign.

In December 2008, Pepsi created a YouTube channel asking people to submit April 29, 2009 a video message to President Obama, and these videos received more than 200,000 views. Pepsi also created a Facebook application, a Tumblr site, and a mobile site.

Or you can create your own events, as Tata Tea did with "Jaagore" campaign where it asked people to register and become part of the voting community and get more involved in asking people to come out and exercise there voting rights.

4. Enhance display media with social tools.

There are options to make your display mediasocial. PopularMedia’s “Influencer Ads” entice users to get friends to join them in contests or other marketing programs by incorporating the advertising content into the user’s blog, social network, Web site, or email.

Coca-Cola recently used SocialMedia.com’s WOMI product, which features a “social advertising engine” that identifies the influential friends within a social graph to generate positive word of mouth for brands or products. Result: a 33% increase in purchase intent for Coca-Cola’s cherry Coke brand in one week.

Other tools such as Facebook’s engagement ads, Media6Degrees’ behavioral targeting, Spongecell’s social calendar tools, and SocialVibe’s cause-related applications offer marketers ways to enhance their paid media campaigns.


5. Integrate your brand in external communities.

MySpace is beginning to integrate branded content into its social ecosystem. Sunkist, for example, is the exclusive sponsor of “The List” on MySpace, which is a music franchise that highlights new or popular music and hosts concerts in four different geographies. Sunkist has an online presence within this online community and sponsors exclusive content for the events. While similar to traditional sponsorships, these types of programs allow brands to integrate original content into the social world.