Propagation Planning

Break from Blogging

Hey everyone,

My wife and I are about to have another baby in 5 days so I'm going to take a break from the Blog for a few weeks to welcome a healthy girl to the world. If you see any good examples of brands that get people to spread the word for them just leave a comment and a link.

Thanks for keeping Propagation Planning alive and interesting with your readership! I'll see you as soon as I get some sleep and come back to work.

Social Media Influence for Community Managers

Mashable had a great article from Paul Worthington who is the head of strategy over at Wolff Olins in NYC (where my friend Kelly Stewart works, who also happens to be an amazing marksman with a shotgun but that's another story). According to Paul, losing control is the primary reason clients don't spend more on Social Media. However, control is not the goal of advertising and this is how Paul explains it:

The reality is that great branding has always been about influence and not control – influencing consumer choices and desires in a manner conducive to your goals and their satisfaction.

In today’s world, the way to achieve this is not through bigger advertising budgets or better creative, but through involvement – first by observing the conversation and then by involving yourself in it. As a result, it’s likely that those brands with the most effective influence strategies rather than the most effective control strategies will be the most successful.

Paul goes on with his article to explain three ways that a brand can be a good influencer:

1) Listen than respond: Brands are not generally good listeners, mostly because they’ve never had to be. Before engaging with the conversation it’s important to first listen to it, see what is being said and interpret what this means. Once you engage with the conversation it’s important to be honest and to have real sense of empathy in what you say – if people are excited and interested in your brand you must be supportive. If people have issues or problems with your brand you must seek means of genuinely helping them.

2) Be comfortable with ambiguity. Conversation is messy, real time, and often capricious. At first what you see will appear chaotic, unmanageable and intimidating. The reality is that it isn’t your job to manage or control it – but to respond to it. Here you must learn to filter what you see and think in order to respond and take part. Here is an example from Wachovia:

3) Filter through your purpose. If you’re a great listener, and you’ve become comfortable with ambiguity, you still risk being overwhelmed by the conversation pulling you in multiple directions. Here, having a strong brand purpose is a crucial tool – it becomes the tangible filter through which you listen and respond. It defines the nature of your brand’s conversational voice, and is fundamental to the influence that you seek.

I think this should be the role of community managers and three things that they do as they engage in the conversation. We can't control it, but we can influence it to shift our way and change sentiment from brand critics to brand advocates.

Social Media Tool: Fallon Skimmer

You may have seen the article in Adweek where Fallon launched a social media reader called Skimmer. Skimmer looks very similar to Snackr or Tweetdeck but much more robust and I thought I would review the pros and cons for you.

Pros:
1) You can view video from within the application which is great
2) The user experience and design is wonderful
3) Once place shop to see all Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and Blogger updates
4) Anyone can download it, you don't have to be a part of Fallon to use it

Cons:
1) When I Filter out all information except for the Blog feed nothing appears
2) Of all the people who have downloaded Skimmer from my network, NONE of them use Blogger. Planners in particular have been known to use Typepad as the Blog platform of choice.
3) I would like to see a fuction to upload any RSS Feed and I have not been able to find that yet
4) Also the Tiny URL did not work when I used it

Until Skimmer can mirror the full functionality of Snackr, I'll probably keep the system that I have but I see great potential for any advertising or marketing professional to use a platform like Skimmer to follow friends, professionals and brands.

Fitness First: OOH can be good stimulus for talk value

I like seeing good creative with good consumer insights getting talk value online. This is an example of an OOH campaign that had strong contextual placement and consumer engagement as stimulus for Propgation. The innovative guerrilla marketing campaign in Rotterdam for Fitness First is made by Marco de Jong, Thijs Bontje and Jurriaan Noij of Dutch creative agency N=5 in Amsterdam.

Paul Van Veenendaal of LaComunidad wrote a great post on the Viral Blog about this campaign:

When people are trying to fit more exercise in their life, they are always told to start walking to work or get off the bus a few stops earlier and walk. Recognising this, Fitness First decided to target people at the bus stop while they were waiting for a bus.

By teaming up with CBS Outdoor, Fitness First transformed the bus stop bench into a weighing device. Anyone who sat on the bench would have their weight calculated in kilos and this figure would then be displayed on the digital bus shelter billboard.

Branding in the Age of Social Media

Mike Troiano or @miketrap, who was once the CEO of Olgivy & Mather Interactive, recently wrote a good presentation on Scalable Intimacy for a conference called Ignite Boston. This presentation takes many of the founding principles of brand strategy and shows how to use those principles and refine them for social media.

I agree with Mike on many points, but the most important one that relates to Propagation Planning is achieving a similar Result through social media that one might get through Reach based mediums.

The top five points Mike wants us to remember includes:
1) Brand is the response, not the stimulus
2) Economies of scale drove mass media
3) Relationships needed to differentiate
4) Social networks promise intimacy
5) At a scale to impact the enterprise

Scalable Intimacy

View more presentations from Michael Troiano.

Microsoft does branded content right

Great entertaining video about the new Internet Explorer 8. Found on Talent Imitates, Genius Steals. They don't talk directly about all the product attributes or give a demonstration, they just tell a good story that weaves in some of those elements.

Dissecting Domino's Bailout Facebook Campaign

I woke up this morning and checked the Twitter-copy-cat-Facebook page and saw an interesting graphic from my friend Amy Rose, one of the smartest media buyers I've ever met.

 

The graphic caught my eye, the legal copy is annoying but I'm sure CP+B had to put it in there. Most importantly the contextual relevance of mixing "Domino's" with "Bailout" and the unique URL was intriguing. So I clicked on it and it took me outside of Facebook to a microsite where this video played:

The website starts with some branded content, a video of the CEO in Washington DC talking about his bailout package and how he will personally deliver the pizza as the grand prize. Doesn't sound like the type of CEO that is in the news today.

To propagate the campaign they choose to single out Facebook or you could write in an email. I'm curious to see if the phone number has a SMS Text component but I didn't try.

To break down the consumer journey we had:
1) Saw it in the Facebook news feed
2) Brandend Content Video explaining the purpose of the idea
3) Contextual Relevance in Messaging
4) Contest to win Pizza for a year
5) $15 Bailout Package
6) CEO will deliever grand prize
7) Email campaign to share the offer with a friend
8) Ways ot share with your Facebook Network

The campaign starts with Social Media Monitoring and ends with Social Media Actions that the consumer can take. This is a great example of planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach.

I write about this stuff because it shows how we can turn the advertising funnel on its side and give our brand advocates tools to spread the message for us.

My wife's favorite Facebook App that also saves the rain forest

Like many agencies, we have clients that have products and services who target the Mom consumer. While it is easy to look at case studies from Axe, ESPN, Nike as great creative it is not always easy to find that great creative that engages the Moms (outside of cute babies and puppy dogs).

So I'm always on the look out for social media examples that my wife spends a lot of time with. 3-4 weeks ago my wife didn't know very much about Facebook but now she schools me in the application and usage of the platform. Today I wanted to write about her favorite Facebook application that also saves the rain forest.

My Fairyland. My Fairyland is an application where you name and own a fairy character. This character tends to a garden that includes pots and bottles to grow flowers. As you grow a complete flower (takes about a week) and harvest the flower it saves 2ft of rain forest.

While the societal causal aspect got her to start the application the social aspect is what keeps her checking her fairy garden every 3 hours or so. Her other Mom friends all have fairies and they cast spells on each other, water plants in other gardens and search for animal critters like bunnies, frogs and snails.

I think this is a great model of a narrative that can keep the attention and create social interaction between Moms using Facebook as the platform. It has the right amount of game mechanics, awards and gifts that make it interesting and fun.

As Seth Godin described in his book Tribes, when creating tools for communities the application should be more fun than cool. My Fairyland does a great job of providing hours of fun.

Propagation Art

My first job in Advertising was marketing Bandai Toys Power Ranger action figures. The FCC had so many restrictions to marketing to kids that the creative output became very formulaic for all action figure television advertising. This is where Deviant Art comes into play.

Jonny Starwind (if that's your real name?) over at Deviant Art has a page on their website to showcase his photography. He took a photo of a Power Ranger and then mashed it up with inspirational word art series to make something that was contextual, relevant and humorous. The artist comments included, "Ever wondered what happened to the Power Rangers when all the monsters were destroyed and no one wanted their help?"

Jonny was able to extend the story beyond the writers and create an alternate universe that he expressed with this photo. So what can marketers do this image, how can they use this 'Fan Art' to their advantage?

What about seeding art like this on blogs that talk about parents that lose their jobs? Tips to break the news to young children using characters that they relate to? These images may be directed towards an older audience but that audience can use these characters to talk about their own troubles.

Most important to creative professionals, it allows them to break out of the kids advertising mold and use these characters and personalities in new ways.

Jet Blue: CEO's Only Branded Content

George Parker over at AdScam pointed out a great campaign by JWT for Jet Blue called Big Wigs Welcome. CEO's only!

When I worked for JWT LA in the late 90's, media planning and buying was still in-house and the creative was second fiddle. So I'm glad to see JWT getting news on creative achievements instead of big media budget wins like the old days.

The creative is top notch, the branded content is amazing but it lacks other Propagation techniques or a deeper level of engagement with the campaign. I should be able to become a fan of Big Wigs on Facebook, or apply to be an Assistant's Assistant on Twitter not just an email. This campaign could have a lot more legs, especially since it is so relevant to the times.

I would like to see more from JWT and Jet Blue.