I’m not sure I know anyone who works in advertising who doesn’t love the show Mad Men. Their season 3 promotion allows you to create your Mad Men avatar! I had to jump right on this. That’s me in the bright blue in the middle.
Needless to say, I think this promotion is a brilliant use of social media and viral marketing. Check the Twitter avatar of half the people who work in advertising and they have changed over to Mad Men avatars in the past few days. But the question always becomes, how do you prove success on promotions like this. RTC wasn’t involved in this promotion, but here’s what I’d do. Until the show airs, you can’t determine real ROI of increased viewers. So, right now we’d be watching the leading indicators. But what are those leading indicators? Here are a few of the stats we’d be watching:
On my way home last night I was checking twitter on my blackberry before pulling out my Kindle
to read for the rest of the commute home. Yes, please process that sentence. I’m that girl.
It was a post by uber-geek Wil Wheaton that caught my attention:
Despite my outgoing personality and insane level on social media involvment, I’m not very good at the conference/cocktail party networking thing. I attribute this to my being an INTJ and a Virgo. The “I” of INTJ means I tend to be introverted, and not comfy making small talk with tons of strangers. The Virgo means that I like to control situations and have things neat and orderly (not my house, just my life).
Nutshell is I suck at just chatting up strangers unless I have some specific thing I wish to say to them.
Thank goodness for the “back-channel.” I’m at the ePharma Marketing Summit and if it weren’t for Twitter (and my colleague Croom), I wouldn’t have spoken to a soul. Twitter is the introduction to a whole bunch of new people and thanks to one smart person, Shwen, we had a “tweeple” lunch yesterday where many of us met in person. Social media and technology has opened up an entirely new avenue of conference and post-conference networking.
Here’s my approach:
Twitter during the conference. always using the conference “tweme” code (trust me they all have them now, and they are usually pretty simple to figure out). I do it almost as a way of taking notes on what is being said more than commenting and giving my opinions.
Start following interesting conference tweeple, be sure to “@” them when they say something interesting and “retweet” good posts by other people. Be sure to look for the official conference Twitter person. There’s probably one there.
Ask at least a couple of public questions during QA sessions, if you can come up with anything good. It gives other people a reason to come and talk to you! Do start with your name. I’m terrible about remembering that part. Today I would have been the “woman in lavender.”
Organize tweeple meals or at least attend them. You can just listen and nod attentively, if nothing else.
When you do talk to people in person don’t just take the business card and file it away. That night, the next morning — hit LinkedIn.com! Send them a network invite( mention that you just met them at the conference, refer to your conversation to jog their memory).
My boss insists that I at least talk to a couple of people at every conference and convince at least one person that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to social media, so I’ll get invited to participate on panels at future conferences. I guess you could call the whole approach “influencer networking.” Often conference back-channels can be thoroughly overwhelming and distracting, thank goodness for the back-channel at ePharma or I’d never speak to anyone!
[tags]networking, social networking, conferences, back channel, twitter, linkedin[/tags]
Last week I had the privelege of speaking at a 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) meeting of Kansas City advertising agencies executives. They were in NYC for a day of marketing & advertising fun for the Kansas City Council Board of Governors meeting at AAAA headquarters. It was quite a full bill of speakers with topics ranging from trends in media planning to consumer insights, and of course social media.
I decided to take advantage of SlideShare.net to socialize my social media presentation to the folks at AAAA, and anyone else who might be interested.
This is the second or third time I’ve done this presentation, and I’m now inspired to do a part two. So look out for the 5 Myths of Social Media & Marketing (Part II) in the near future. Here are the Ten Myths of Social Media & Marketing, the first five are covered in this presentation:
Social computing is a niche activity
Only a few people are involved in social computing/media
Only millenials are into social media
It doesn’t matter if your audience are "inactives"
I’ll be heading up to NYC this week for a fun-filled day of Social Media presentations. The day will start off with a presentation to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, better know as the 4As. Their are having their annual Kansas City day where executives from KC agencies come to the Big Apple for their fill of marketing presentation goodness. I’m part of a fairly intimidating bill of speakers during the day. Thankfully, I’m early on so I get to set the bar. Can’t say if it will be a high-bar or low-bar — but still. Then I head of to RTCRM‘s NYC office on Madison Avenue to give the same presentation to the team at our NYC office.
This will be the 4th or 5th time I’ve done this particular presentation to either staff or clients, so I’ve got the shtick pretty down. I’m also grateful that this is a topic I’m more than well enough versed in that if I need to go off script, I can. I’m never sure how much people know about social media from a marketing context. Sometimes the basic presentation is a “duh” for people, so if the information I planned on presenting doesn’t thrill and chill — I can just move into something more compelling for them.
Truthfully, this really doesn’t happen often. The data in the “5 Myths of Social Media and Marketing” presentation I developed really is new to most people. Marketers, understandably, stick to the tried and true most of the time. Another factor in my favor is that while they may see the data, they may not really know how to apply it to their clients or marketing plans yet. And, frankly, most people have lives so they don’t follow this nonsense like I do. Thank goodness for that or I wouldn’t be nearly as employable.
I’m also hoping to be able to post this presentation deck to SlideShare in the near future. Been talking to the folks at RTCRM about posting it to the blog, with fairly good results. Of course, most of the time I’m busy working on client business or pitches — hence the long gaps in my professional blogging here and at RTCRMs blog. I do find time to post to Twitter. Thank goodness for the low pressure of micro-blogging.
[tags]presentations, blogging, social media, 4as, aaaa, advertising[/tags]
There’s been lots of buzz around Twitter since it launched in 2006. Twitter really came onto the scene at 2006′s SXSW conference and has been growing steadily since. Lots of brands are jumping on the Twitter wagon and more are wondering why anyone would care. At today’s Digital Coffee Klatch (DCK) for the RTCRM staff in DC, we’ll be discussing what Twitter is and how it is used for personal and marketing reasons.
One of the biggest issues right now with social media and marketing is that people seem to forget to match the technology to the business goals. There are specific types of social media technologies that lend themselves to specific types of business goals. Before jumping on the Twitter wagon you should know what it is you want to achieve and how you will measure success.
However, it’s good to have an understanding of what Twitter is first.
Here is the dicussion guide used at the Digital Coffee Klatch, I hope it helps to illuminate Twitter and the marketing possibilities for you. Questions? Twitter @carlenlea.
Brands using Twitter
Questions for Discussion: Why use Twitter? Is it good for Awareness, Aquistion, or Retention? What are key business or marketing goals that Twitter would be a good tactic to achieve? How would you measure success? What are the operational issues to plan for?
An article in Online Media Daily illustrates how privacy illiterate most people are. Most people are so privacy illiterate they don’t even know that they should care. In the article, author Nina Lentini discusses Facebook’s Social Ads and notes:
“Natural or not, finding oneself in an ad unexpectedly is a worrisome prospect. I enjoy Facebook and the fun my friends and I have therein. And I have been careful not to join a group that might come back to bite me. Still, I shouldn’t have to worry about my face–or rather the faces of my daughters–ending up in an ad.”
I don’t know how many people have come across these ads yet, but in effect they turn you, the Facebook user, into a product spokesperson. Ostensibly this happens with your permission, but most people really have no idea what they have agreed to.
Working in this industry and as focused on social media and emerging technologies as I am, the first reports about this issue with Facebook’s Social Ad platform really got my attention. When I discovered that making myself a “fan” of a company or brand gave them the right to use my face and name in their ads on Facebook – unless I expressly blocked them from doing so — kind of bothered me.
In Facebook’s defence, they have some pretty solid privacy controls for users. Most people just don’t even know they are there, which benefits Facebook’s advertisers. I have my privacy settings now to block anyone from using my name and face in their ads. This is why privacy literacy is so important. It’s really on the users to make sure they know what is going on, because it benefits companies like Facebook to not really tell you.
Here’s a few recent articles on Facebook’s ad programs and privacy concerns:
I think I’m officially in love with “Bonafide Marketing Genius.” No, it’s not just for dropping the f-bomb in this presentation. It’s for voicing what every client and have the people I work with ask me — and then giving a great, clear, concise explanation.
Everything is connected if you can see what's not being said, what's missing, and read between the lines. Understanding those connections not only makes us people, but better marketers. In the end, it's all about understanding how what you are doing is relevant to someone else.
My job is to understand those connections and be able to help you to not only be able to see them, but also use tthose connections to improve the world around you. Sometimes it's just why someone would care about your product. Sometimes its understanding how services like Twitter are help return a lost sense of community.
This site has been through many iterations since I first launched it in the Summer of 2000. Every iteration since 2001 is actually captured in the Internet Archive.
