A simple execution. This is a Mini branded positive news tweet stream.
About Postitweets: "We all know there is plenty of negative news in the world and we think
it’s time to start focusing on all the good. Positweets is the
destination for all the latest positive news and updates from Twitter.
Here, you can see what others are saying and post your own
#positweets!"
It's filtering mechanism aggregates fun stats & animated graphs.The site was created by Slash7 in collaboration with Federated Media. FM represents more than 100 of the world’s most
respected websites, blogs, and social networking applications. Positweets has enlisted the help of "positributors" including @AlleyInsider,
@BoingBoing, @Trendhunter and
@venturebeat, who will be sharing positive vibes using the #positweets hashtag.
This execution demonstrates a strategy that positions the Mini brand as a filter. That is not new - but the players behind it are. Could paying social media influencers to propagate an idea or subject matter be the model that turns the ad industry on its head?
A great piece of new research on Gen Y woman was released by PopSugar Media (www.popsugar.com). The two-tier study
revealed that Generation Y women are the most influential age group when it comes to defining trends in
popular culture. Gen Y women, in turn, are discovering new brands and
getting most of their style inspiration and product recommendations
from blogs and social media.
This report examines the Gen Y women’s sphere of influence of lifestyle trends, how
technology and social media help them expand their sphere of influence,
and how marketers can target and communicate with this group.
The survey uncovered some critical Dos and Don’ts when Marketing to Gen Y Women:
Do realize context matters. Gen Y women aren’t likely to click on your ad, but they are influenced by advertising nonetheless. The context they encounter an ad in largely determines their trust in a brand. Trust in a site translates into trust in an advertiser’s brand, particularly for brands they’re less familiar with.
Do be honest. For this generation, transparency is a form of currency. Gen Y women are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives on the Internet. This is also a generation that’s come of age the same time that reality TV, confessional memoirs, and personal blogs have become commonplace. They’ve become accustomed to a heightened level of transparency among their peers; they now expect it from brands.
Do engage in dialogue with your audience or customers. While it is somewhat trite to call online marketing a conversation, marketers ignore that fact at their own risk. Smart marketers monitor the conversation, respond directly to tweets that mention them, and allow their customers to converse with each other. Gen Y women have already redefined authenticity, basing it on the opinions of their online peers. For marketers to connect with Gen Y women, they need to connect with their peers, rather than privileged experts, such as celebrity endorsements or third-party seals of approval. Additionally, Gen Y women respond favorably to being treated like a VIP. Engaging them in dialogue (through Twitter, contests, or competitions) helps them feel a more personal connection to a brand.
Do integrate your media across multiple channels. Gen Y women are multimodal. They move between the Web and their mobile phones with ease, and, unlike Gen Y men (who have all but abandoned TV), they still watch television. Marketers need to be consistent in their communication across multiple platforms, since there are manifold opportunities to connect with consumers.
Don’t get too comfortable. When it comes to their social networking sites, Gen Y have proven themselves to be fickle. They’ve already moved from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. Smart marketers need to monitor where Gen Y women are moving toward online, and react accordingly when the next network hits.
Don’t ignore Twitter. While there has been media coverage lately claiming Gen Y is less devoted to Twitter than their older cohorts, Gen Y women are using it differently than other generations. They understand it is a promotional platform and subscribe to the feeds of brands that provide “exclusive” info—new products, new information, links to coupons, and deals only offered to followers.
Don’t dominate the conversation. While marketing to Gen Y women is a multidirectional dialogue, marketers need to be wary of dominating the conversation. This is a generation that expects to be heard. In focus groups, many of the participants claimed that the quickest way to get them to unsubscribe, unfollow, or unfriend a brand’s communication is to bombard them. While Gen Y women want to connect with their favorite brands, marketers need to toe the line between relevant info and spam.
Don’t underestimate the marketing savvy of Gen Y women. Gen Y women, perhaps more than previous generations, understand the value of their personal information and attention. If marketers expect Gen Y women to share their preferences, ideas, and attention with them, they need to offer quid pro quo to those consumers. While it may take the form of discounts on products or access to exclusive products or deals, it might also take the form of recognition for contributions—using a customer-submitted photo or video in advertising or featuring customer-submitted ideas on an official blog or website.
Who says your brand needs a big ol' web site? Evidently Skittles has realized that media everywhere applies to their brand.
The collapsible application allows you to scurry around the social networking pages and groups that skittles has set up.
This seems like a great way to organize your "earned" media. While this may be the future of the web for brands who are not transactional destinations - the execution has left out an important social component. Sharing. too bad that the app does not let you post it, embed it, or share a link to it.
Hurray for skittles! I think that this is a good way to redefine your brand by the conversations that people are having about you.
Shhhh... I hear something. (my RSS feed-reader acting as a glass pressed against a thin wall) It's a Armano's conversation about A Moment of Truth for Digital Agencies. The candid post spurred an observation about our entire industry. Agencies still live in the "service" economy. Visit an agency site, lots and lots of TALK about "conversations agencies". Seems like an oxymoron when you read their case studies and capabilities and they show desperate :30-second spots, websites, widgets, landing pages and emails. They may have changed logos, redesigned their web sites, started blogs
and re-thought their approaches but they are still servicing clients
who don't understand what it takes to deliver a real conversation. Why is this?
I think there are a five factors driving this.
Old definitions of Brands remain. Our clients who sell products or services have forgotten that a Brand is what consumers think and how they feel about their products. The brand is my perception of the human characteristics consumers have given your product after becoming aware of your relevance. Great brands play on our emotions and facilitate our existing passions. Brand managers are really product managers. We the consumer are the "Brand" managers.
Control issues. Most companies as well as brand and product managers are over protective of their images and don't want you to own their brands. They want you to buy their products, but they are unwilling to let go and listen to something besides their business school text books.
Social relevancy. Do you have something interesting to say? If you want to want to have a conversation you need to know a little something about what's important to me.You should want to be provocative. If you want to sell me something you need to tap in to my desire to have a relevant conversation with me. Most products miss this one entirely.
Fear of standing for one thing and not everything. Most companies fear outside opinions. The point of marketing is to provoke a response. So what if my product says something that people do not agree with? It's important to have an opinion and to take a stand. You may actually learn something. If you stand for fitness, what about your product facilitates that fitness? What "brand" of fitness do you stand for? If you stand for everything you will be a nothing. No one, no product and no brand can be everything to everyone.
Bad listening skills. Some marketers and creatives have not stopped to listen. The research is out there. The passions are in constant evolution and people are talking in public so that we can measure their interests. In the conversation economy the quiet listener and inquisitive spectator is the most an important asset.
The vast majority of product companies out there suffer from one or all of the above. They too are still doing business in the "service" economy. What they are missing is that consumers have been bombarded with constant one-way yelling for far too long. That one-way yelling has reached the point of mass cynicism. Breaking through requires insightful connectivity no matter the medium.
There are a few products that have begun to create amazing conversations worth following. Pepsi, Dove, Flip Video, Nike and Showtime offer a great learning opportunity for marketing organizations.
Real conversations require courage. You have to grow a pair. Decide what your going to say to consumers and be proud and consistent. You have to take a stand and be prepared to lead. Be prepared to be criticized, learn from that criticism while staying true to the core of the idea and never accept failure. Look at the evolution of Showtime. The minute they decided to create original content that stood for something different - viewers followed and created tribal villages.
Conversations require social relevancy. Be contemporary and of the moment. People create movements products can facilitate them. In America today we are the cusp of a new day. A rebuild. What will your product or service bring to that party? Look at Pepsi. (need i say more?)
or Flip Video. Flip has managed to be socially relevant through the constant innovation and putting their product at places that have social relevance. I look forward to seeing them yield emotional insights from their partnerships with YouTube and Facebook. Those insights should lead them to a more emotional tapestry of conversations.
Conversations require deep insights and simple observations. The need for psychological and sociological insight still remains. Listening to what people are saying is just as important as watching what people are doing. This is the key to making sure you are talking to the right people. Take a look at Nike. They decided they were going to be a fitness company instead of a shoe company. They have used technology, fitness tribes, and the power of peoples individual fitness needs to continue to innovate year after year.
This one is evergreen as well as the conversation that started the ubiquitous drive for marketers to try and replicate this "lightening in a bottle" viral hit. What I love about this example is that it not only uses insight, it continues to be socially relevant as well as courageous. Dove continues to strive to do the right thing for woman despite the critics.
Now that we have a few examples of conversations that have created brand movements we should strive to look at what we need to do to be change agents for our clients and agencies.
Which companies and or agencies have managed to create a real conversation? Which companies have done it all wrong? And during the downturn who will use conversations to connect people with their products?
This is a great video created by ad agency Scholz & Friends. The animation details the dramatic shift in the marketing reality over the last 100 years. What I love about this video is that asks an important question that we should be asking of the brands we work with. “Don’t you have something interesting to say?"
After years of “crafting messages” to appeal a mass
consumer market many brands have lost their ability to do or say
anything interesting. Te products and services that will survive the conversation economy will be companies that stand for
things more meaningful than just promoting the consumption of their
products.
Two years ago when I was working with MTV on a project for Hershey's at Spring Break in Cancun, I articulated why people would watch the realty based web-cast Ice Breakers Watch, Whoa & Vote. I said "We will all some day have our 15MB of Fame and the brands who facilitate it will win."
One year later, in a meeting an MTV exec quoted me back to me in presentation on Widgets. Then my client, the Dibs brand used it has the headline of their site when we launched the Dibs Film Fest. (my humble opinion was they should have used another headline as I thought that it was not consumer speak - it was marketing speak... or was it??? seems to have lured consumers to participate in the Dibs Film Fest)
As time has passed the idea - which was a take on Andy Worhal's line - seems to have caught on. I would love to know what brands you think are doing a good job of facilitating fame. And if you have your own brand leave me a comment so I can celebrate your celebrity as well!
Have you ever walked in to a five star restaurant and asked the chef for the ingredients pieced apart on a plate. Come on, you might wonder how its made but you would never want the chef to send you 5 or 6 ingredients unfinished to the table.
The same can be said of what clients expect of their agencies. So many agencies get lost in the strategy or technology that they forget that the end result (the creative product) is what sells our clients and more importantly what sells the consumer.
Never forget that the Creative Department, not unlike a stellar chef, not only to comes up with the Creative Idea (vision) but is responsible for taking our clients strategy and selling product with innovative break through creative thinking AND execution. When we don't do that, we risk everything. Imagine eating at a restaurant that had a lack of vision and charged a ton of dough... likely you would not go there again and your WOM would reflect it. Agency life is no different.
Neither our clients nor their target markets cares about what our technology or databases do for them… They are important parts of the story, and it is key that they work, but they do not sell. It helps facilitate the sell.
Inevitably what they do care about is; from a client’s side “Does the creative sell more product?”, and from the consumer side “Does the creative align with my aspirations and needs?”
In a tightening economy so many of our colleagues are finding that clients still need great creative products but that they need to be done without mind blowing technological advances or great operational change to their organizations.
Seems quite simple. Doesn’t it?
In an economy that is being driven by consumer conversations the Conversation is king. So what is the conversation made of?
Insight. Idea. And last but not least stellar Execution.
Mix in real time results and what you have is a cycle that builds lasting relationships with both your client and their consumers.
Keep It Simple - deliver a scrumptious, memorable meal - Make it about the work – and the work will sell. Like a meal that is unforgettable, the people will talk about it and you will have started a conversation.
Many of you have written in to make sure I was still blogging the digital world.
The answer is... Yes! Of Course.
The fast paced world of converged worlds has taken me from the interface of my Typepad account to the studio floor of Silver Cup Studios where I just finished up shooting for a new Nationwide Insurance campaign.
More campaign details to come when we launch in Mid September.
Photos from the road, the day, the meetings and a few ironic random finds. Catch up with me on my adventures! This is a visual time line of my life ON: The Road.
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