Propagation Planning

Branded Content for Anthropologie

Don't get caught in the Click Trap

I really like this presentation from The Barbarian Group, particularly slides 31 and 32+. Clicks don't equal marketing success and advertisers got caught up in the possible growth sector of banner advertising. The writer also addresses the problems that publishers have had in adjusting to new media.

Publishers and the Internet: Beyond Display Advertising

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10 Steps to help you become a Social Media Ninja

The Blog eConsultancy has a great post by Jake Hird that I wanted to share here on 10 Steps to help you become a Social Media Ninja:

1. Preparation

You need to do your homework. It’s no good rushing in, without a clue about what your overall business goals are. 

Once these have been established, then you can figure out what place (if at all) social media has in helping reach your objectives. Leading on from this, it will also become easier to identify key areas of engagement and therefore allow you to focus on the areas that will be of greater benefit. Econsultancy’s Social Media Template Files contain a strategy guideline that you might find useful as a starting point. 

2. Patience

As the adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same thing applies to any social media activity: it generally takes a fair bit of time to establish a positive presence. 

In creating any online presence, levels of trust need to be established. Especially given that social media generally requires a two-way engagement between users and your organisation, it could take a while before you begin to see your objectives being met. 

Be patient and don’t panic. If your strategy is solid, then you’ll start seeing results. 

3. Weapons

Your chosen social media weapons should be selected by your strategy, objectives and overall business structure. Don’t use something just because it looks cool. For example a blog may be a lot more beneficial than using Facebook in delivering regular updates to your users, or Twitter as a customer service platform may be more help than user-reviews. 

There’s a lot of choice out there, but more importantly, there’s also a lot of advice to help you chose what might be best and how to use it effectively. 

4. Stealth

Sometimes it works to your advantage to keep things quiet. If you’re planning to engage in social media, it can often help to start off small and find your feet, otherwise you might end up looking extremely silly. This is why it’s important to treat social media as a process of evolution. Why spread yourself across twenty different channels badly, when you can easily manage only a couple with great results? 

5. Honour

Protect your organisation. Carefully monitor what people are saying about you both directly and indirectly - and think before you act. This applies to both responding to users and to your general social media activity. 

6. Aggression

Don’t be shy. Be active, go to events, network online and offline, ask questions. Experiment (carefully – see point 4). If Rome wasn’t built in day, it was almost certainly built with a bit of backbone.  Being aggressive in social media doesn’t necessarily mean intrusive or threatening... It can equally mean being bold and dynamic. Which direction of aggression you take is up to you. 

7. Cunningness 

Be tactical. More often than not, organisations join a social media channel because they see their competitors there... But they fail to establish whether it’s working or not.

Observe where others are going wrong and step in with a better approach or side-step it altogether. For example, a financial institution is more likely to have better engagement through LinkedIn, than it by jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.

9. Skill

Practice makes perfect. Hone your social media skills by continuously educating yourself, reviewing your existing strategy and performance and by experimenting. (See point 6). 

9. Calmness

Things can go wrong. And they often do.

Not panicking is the key to success. It doesn't matter if a user is being negative (or even your own staff) or your social platform has crashed, things can be rectified. 

10. Style

Social media is pretty cool. And it can make an organisation or a business look good... But making a half-baked effort will backfire.

If you have all the right foundation points in place, you can carry off a stylish social media presence with ease: there's a lot of companies already doing it, so there's no excuse. 

Spreadable Media Checklist

Dan Zarella, a Social and Viral Marketing Scientist wrote a great post about his Viral Marketing Checklist. Like many of my readers, I hate the word Viral but the tenants behind the thinking is really strong. This is a great checklist when planning components of propagation planning. His list includes:

[ ] Goals Have you defined your campaign’s goals? Do you know what you’re trying to do (in an actionable and quantifiable way) and have you identified the metrics you will use to identify success? Keep in mind that certain, identifiable and targetable types of users tend to be more prolific in spreading content, be sure to target these people.

[ ] Vector Research Have you identified the demographic you’d like your campaign to “go viral” in and have you researched them to know what types of content they share and where they share it from?

[ ] Uniqueness & Novelty Is your campaign truly new? It can be a new take on an old idea, but there must be some kernel of novelty present because otherwise, who cares?

[ ] Utility Is your campaign useful, or will it improve user’s lives? If people believe they are helping someone by sending your content to them, it will dramatically increase your chance of going viral.

[ ] Incentive Have you provided some way for users to receive some kind of value by spreading your content? Freebies and product samples are an easy way to accomplish this.

[ ] Stickiness Have you included the ability for users who love your campaign to become engaged in a more long-term fashion with it? Email or Feed subscriptions are the obvious ways to do this.

[ ] Call to Actions Have you included viral calls-to-action that will trigger user’s desire to spread your content (which you should have identified in the research stage)?

[ ] Optimization Have you made sure that your content is easy to share? Is the URL short and permanent? Did you include tools for users to share it on social sites? If you’re using some form of video, can users embed the video on their own sites and profiles?

[ ] Remixing Have you made sure your content can be remixed by viewers? The process of communal recreation is important to “going viral” and you should make sure your campaign is a platform for users to express themselves with it. Think about things like personalization and customization.

[ ] Conversation Does your campaign have mechanisms in place to allow viewers to talk about it (both with you and with their friends)? Comments sections are the most common way to include this.

[ ] Seeding Once you’ve created your content, do you have a strategy for seeding it among users who are likely to share it? Don’t succumb to the “if you build it, they will come” trap, you need to place your campaign in the path of your target vectors.

[ ] Tracking & Analytics Do you have analytics systems in place so that you can track the spread and growth of your campaign as well as measure its performance against your goals?

[ ] Backup Plan Viral marketing success isn’t guaranteed, so typically I recommend clients plan to launch more than one campaign. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you have a plan if your first try doesn’t “go viral.” (Glen reminded me to add this in the comments, thanks!)

Mobile application that lets you see the whole picture

This is a great example of using Mobile with print to see the whole picture. Axe Day and Night ran a print ad where the user had to use a mobile device to complete the photo. Perfect for the teenage boy target audience where the user now has social currency and a valuable discovery to send to his teenage friends.

This is an example of an asset that might be used in Propagation Planning to complete the story being told.

If you let people mess with your content it gets more spreadable

Faris Yakob shared some of his thoughts on Propagation Planning:

As Henry [Jenkins] points out, people do not spread things to spread them. Like so much social communication, it has a social function, both phatic and generous. It operates within a gift economy, where value is generated in transference, not purchase.

Further, as I’ve endlessly pointed out, if you let people mess with your content, it gets more spreadable - because people suddenly have a personal stake in its propagation - this insight was at the heart of propagation planning, learning that we took from the Sony work and applied to the digital activation of the Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign, the digital longevity of which was driven entirely by remix culture.

At 22squared we recently used this thinking for one of our clients, Buffalo Wild Wings. Our media team (Judy Popky, Melanie Haley, Matthew Wentlent, Brittney Watts) partnered with the Big 10 Network Video Mash-Up. Powered by Gorilla Spot, the Buffalo Wild Wings Video Mash-up allows fans to create personal highlight reels of their team out of Big Ten Network footage, complete with sound effects and music. 

Currently, we have over 500 videos created in a 2 and a half week period. Early indicators are that this will be the most successful video edit campaign executed by Gorilla Spot. We are very early in our campaign and I was happy to see that we already had more Facebook embeds than Emails sent.

Videos made: 516
Videos watched: 18,242
Ave time on site: 5:08 mins
Ave time on editor page: 7:22 mins
Share emails sent: 145
Facebook embeds: 155

Buffalo Wild Wings and the Big 10 Network have given our fans something of value and something personal to share with their friends. 

Propagation Planning wins Grand Prix at Jay Chiat Awards

Actually the Vaseline - Prescribe The Nation won the award by following and photographing the path of Propagation Planning. BBH went to Kodiak, Alaska and met a sweet influencer named Petal who went on to 'prescribe' Vaseline to her friends and then they went on to talk about who they prescribed it to. To date the counter on the website 3,017,142 prescriptions over 51 weeks.

Showing the exponential power of one person and how that product recommendation spread is exactly what marketing today is all about.

Full list of winners:

Grand Prix:
• BBH, New York: Vaseline (“Vaseline Clinical Therapy: Prescribe the Nation”)

Brand Experience & Innovative Design
Gold:
• COLLINS: and Civic Entertainment Group, New York: CNN (“Fingerlicking and Politicking”)

Silver:
• SapientNitro, South Brisbane, Australia: Tourism Queensland (“The Best Job in the World”)

Bronze:
• Ignited LLC, El Segundo, CA: U.S. Army (“Virtual Army Experience: The U.S. Army’s Potent New Recruiting Tool”)
• JWT, London: Wilkinson Sword (“Going With the Mo, Not With the Flow”)
• TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles: Gatorade (“Packaging Re-Design”)

Honorable Mention:
• Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco: Doritos (“The Scariest Place on the Web: Hotel 626”)
• JWT Brasil: Coca-Cola (“Who was Better: Maradona or Biro-Biro?”)

Campaign for Existing Brand
Gold:
• BBH, New York: Vaseline (“Vaseline Clinical Therapy: Prescribe the Nation”)
• Euro RSCG, New York: The Atlantic (“Is The Atlantic Doomed?”)
• TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles: Pepsi (“Refreshing an Icon”)
• JWT, New York: JetBlue (Bigwigs: Making Jetting Newsworthy”)

Silver:
• DDB West, San Francisco: Brita (“Filter for Good”)
• Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco: Cheetos (“WTF Happened to Chester?”)
• McCann, New York: Dentyne (“Making Face Time With Dentyne”)

Bronze:
• DDB, New York: United Technologies (“Cross Section”)
• The Escape Pod, Chicago: OfficeMax (“Power to the Penny”)
• JWT, New York: Cadbury (“Stride: Enough Is Enough!”)

Honorable Mention:
• JWT, New York: Microsoft (“Because It’s Everybody’s Business to Take It Personally”)
• JWT, New York: Stouffers (“Reigniting Stouffer’s Iconic Status”)
• Ogilvy & Mather, New York: Post Shredded Wheat (“Progress Is Overrated”)
• Team One, El Segundo, CA: The 2010 Lexus RX (“Making Change Matter”)

Campaign for a New Brand
Silver:
• JWT, New York: Schick (“Making a Private Buzz Public”)
• M&C Saatchi, London: Ladbrokes (“Forward Accountability”)

Bronze:
• Bates141, Mumbai: Virgin Mobile (“Building a Youth Brand in a Youthful Country”)
• Olson, Minneapolis: Nike (“Nike Bauer Hockey”)
• SapientNitro, South Brisbane, Australia: Tourism Queensland (“The Best Job in the World”)
 
(No Gold or Honorable Mention was awarded in this category.)

Idea for New Product or Content
Gold:
• MRM Worldwide, New York: U.S. Army (“Straight From Iraq”)

Silver:
• Anomaly, New York: By Lauren Luke (“Lauren Luke”)
• JWT Brasil: Johnson & Johnson (“Band-Aid by Alexandre Herchcovitch—Reinventing One of the World’s Greatest Product Inventions”)
• BBH, New York: Mrs-O.org (“Mrs. O: From Blog to Brand in Under Six Months”)

Bronze:
• Cutwater, San Francisco: Ray-Ban (“Never Hide Films”)

(No Honorable Mention was awarded in this category.)

Media Communications
Gold:
• BBH, New York: The Commission on Presidential Debates Online (“Tearing Down the Spectacle & the Spin”)

Silver:
• Fallon, Minneapolis: Syfy/NBC Universal (“How Battlestar Galactica Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DVR”)
• SapientNitro, South Brisbane, Australia: Tourism Queensland (“The Best Job in the World”)

Bronze:
• Anomaly, New York: Converse (“Domaination”)

Honorable Mention:
• Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco: Adobe (“Layer Tennis: Season One”)
• Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco: California Milk Processor Board (“You Really Can’t Lose With Gold Spandex”)

Research
Gold:
• MotiveQuest, Evanston, IL: Toyota Prius (“Selling a Car by Not Selling a Car”)

Silver:
• The Martin Agency, Richmond, VA: Wal-Mart (“Rediscovering the Soul of Wal-Mart”)

Bronze:
• DCSNET Comunicações, Brasil: Group2 (“The Group That Analyzes a Group is a Group2”)

(No Honorable Mention was awarded in this category.)

Social Strategy
Gold:
• Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco: Häagen-Dazs (“Where My Bees At?”)
• JWT, Mumbai: The Times of India (“Teach India: When Over Two Million Unlettered Indian Kids Said ‘Jai Ho’ ”)

Silver:
• M&C Saatchi, London: Change4Life (“How Open Source Marketing is Helping Us Change4Life”)
• Neiman Group, Philadelphia: Coalition to Stop Pennsylvania Teens From Drinking and Driving (“Full Apologies”)

Honorable Mention:
• Grey London: Women’s Aid (“Calling ‘Cut!’ on Domestic Violence: How Women’s Aid Used Celebrity to Change People’s Minds”)
• R/GA, New York, Ad Council: That’s Not Cool (“Helping Teens Draw Their Own Digital Line”)
 
(No Bronze was awarded in this category.)

87 Things Google thinks are cool

When Google tells you that these 87 things inspire them... pay attention. These are the tools that power propagation planning.

Augmented Reality for Speakers

I'm surprised that the marker could be a 'face' but this video showcases how it works:

ESPN Interactive Storescape