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Social Media Consulting vs Viral Advertising: Can All ‘Creatives’ Please Go Back to the 80s

POSTED BY: Roger Warner / CATEGORIES: Branding, Facebook, Online PR Agency, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing, Twitter
POSTED ON: 04 Feb 2010
TAGS: Online PR, Online PR Agency, Social Media, Social Media Agency, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, YouTube

Social Media consulting is not an opportunity to go wild with creative-led, viral-inspired, 60-second advertising.

A virus is an illness – much like a Social Media plan without a stack of analytics to back it up and a deep understanding of how Social tools actually work and why people use them.

Your goal ought to be to gain strong, low-friction distribution of your messages (i.e. lots of ‘impressions,’ ‘interactions’ and ‘referrals’ – i.e. discussions, comments, Tweets, bookmarks, etc). To get there, strong tactics are far more important than ‘creative’ (i.e. fun, whacky, humorous) ideas. Research is essential. Sitting around in a brainstorm session with dry wipe markers and anecdotal evidence from ‘my cousin Sarah who’s really into YouTube’ isn’t.

My beef is this… Much advertising agency-led Social Media consulting is a step back in time to 1980-something. Don’t buy me? Check this out:

In the 80s, advertising was hot, hot, hot. Everyone was in on it. Noel Edmonds was on payola for Austin Rover. And Ridley Scott was winning Nobel Peace prizes for deranged hallucinations like this and this. The standard rubric was: find a hot subject (i.e. a viral, a meme) and do a spot of ‘brand association.’ Hence, Abbey National becomes synonymous with motor racing, Maltesers get a Flash Dance makeover, Rover gets the golfer/Noel Edmonds treatment and Chanel allows people in housing estates to live life like the cast of Dynasty. All in all pretty naff.

Social Media Consulting Gone Very Wrong

Today, we have bright sparks aligning Habitat with Iran on Twitter, and Toyota suggesting that everyone should go create a YouTube video about its products in return for very little at all. We get it: Social is hot… but just because it is doesn’t mean a whacky punt of an idea on Social Media channel X is going to get you any traction. This is 80s thinking. If you’re with it, then go find that DeLorean and go home.

Social Media Consulting Done Right

To do this stuff well, you need:

A strong understanding of the target channels: Twitter, etc
A strong understanding of publishing platforms: Wordpress, Disqus, tubemogul. etc
A strong understanding of our audience targets and their ‘Social’ behaviour (i.e. how they use these things)
A strong understanding of content, topics, formats and trends

None of the above is particularly ‘creative’ in a beard-stroking way.

In fact, experience tells us that the kind of campaigns that work well on Social Media have more to do with ‘utility’ than ‘creativity.’ For example, everyone’s fave, Dell:

In this respect, good ‘Social Media consulting‘ isn’t Marketing at all. Or, more to the point, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re support pieces, tools, widgets, and direct conversations with customers – things that genuinely HELP people or provide interest other than ‘Oh WOW, isn’t that wonderful / funny / creative / thought provoking’.

Not much of this list requires a man in a black roll neck to figure it out. It does, however, require an understanding of how and why people are using Social Media in the first place… and then baking it in to some other business or marketing / communications processes.

In other words, Social isn’t real Marketing / Advertising – but it becomes marketing / advertising once it’s out there in the public domain on the big bad web. (An ‘@’ reply on Twitter may not be a Marketing-driven thought, but it’s definitely a Branding result.)

My feeling is that the next time you sit down to do some Social Media consulting / planning / Online PR / whatnot, then STOP. Go call for an analyst. Ask him/her to get deep into some trending tools and your site analytics and then come back to you with recommendations on where to start. Next, give this research to someone who knows how your customers are using Social Media, and ask them to suggest some tactical plans. Then get the ‘Creatives’ in.

Social Media Consulting for ad agencies/brands, in a Nut

If nothing else, just remember this: don’t go do an ‘ad’ and expect it to go ‘viral’ just because you shove it on YouTube.

Your thoughts…?

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Viral advertising

The explosive growth of social networking and book marking sites has created new space for viral marketing. Viral Marketing may have a strange name but it can be a very effective way to create exponential growth and greatly increase your popularity and visibility.

plainlazyclothing

Utility has been used for years in other media, it is the way briefs are written, but then it is creativity that delivers the unique idea that hit the masses. That @£$% in a gorilla suit playing drums to an 80's soft rock legend actually helped to launch Cadburys in the U.S. to millions of people (although maybe then they wouldn’t have been bought by Kraft?!!). While useful, helpful, direct conversations are great and an integral part of marketing, I am not sure that useful, helpful, direct conversations can do the same thing for brands like Cadburys?
New media does help us to be a little bit more clever with who we target and Seth Godin said that you can reach the masses via minorities through word of mouth which is what you’re suggesting.
Old media is not dead however.
Realistically new media is just one part of the real world. Most us of us are not aware of new social media platforms, it is really only early adopters - that make up about 13.5% (Rogers) of the population - the rest of us are not looking around for the latest social thing.
This is great for selling tech products (Dell’s? What a boring advert BTW, every geeks favourite! The same people that watched a live stream of Jobs launching the iTampon!). But what about products that only really have emotional selling points? I can’t see masses of people discussing whether to buy a Dairy Milk or a Flake on twitter? So they have to sell a feeling, an emotion, one that millions of people will enjoy watching and pass around. One that works in magazines, TV and petrol stations.
So utility for products that need research and discussion, and stick to creativity for products that people pick up whilst standing in a queue to pay for their petrol?
Old media is not dead!

Roger Warner, C&M

Hey Larry

Broadly, I agree with you... who the hell is going to discuss a Flake on Twitter? And, yes, these are emotive buys and so Creative-led branding and awareness and advertising are the go... A big poster ad in Victoria station *will* make me buy stuff.

BUT - my beef is with how all of this stuff is *planned*... I'm not saying trad advertising is dead. Far from it. I'm saying that applying trad ad planning thoughts to Social Media doesn't work. That's a very different thought. Social Media has a new dynamic that requires a new approach to creative and planning. See Rowan's point above on this.

i.e. the Flake ad will exist and do nicely, but don't expect a whole bunch of people to view it on YouTube (or talk about it on Twitter... as you say). And, if you want Social to compliment your Flake ad, then apply some (different) Social planning to it - and make sure it's based in analytics.

Thoughts?

(I think we may be in wild agreement here... : )

Roger

Sean O'Halloran

Roger
I am perplexed and slightly depressed that you should have to write this. As we may discussed before, ad land cannot do social even if it were capable. An ad exec advising a client to switch all that media spend into social media would be like a turkey voting for Christmas. And they'd be fired. Social is the opposite of advertising in many instances.
Unfortunately many clients still listen to the ill informed and get really bad advice on what the web is good at and good for. And quality content is still woefully under-rated. I mean, useful, helpful, direct conversations simply don't cut it when you can have a @£$% in a gorilla suit playing drums to an 80's soft rock legend!

Roger Warner, C&M

Sean - thanks for your sage advice. Now, where can one hire a @£$% in a gorilla suit playing drums to an 80's soft rock legend? That sounds like a winner to me. (PS: you've just won our 'Comment of the Month Award' - T-shirt on its way to you : ) Thanks for making my Monday. Love it.

Bethany Ansell

Our PR lecturer told us that when creating a PR campaign, don't be dazzled by the 'toys'. Take a step back and consider objectives and strategy first. I agree that there is too much 'how' and not enough 'why' being considered in social media campaigns at the moment, and sometimes I think online space is being used for the sake of it - not the most valuable use of time for a PRO. How do you explain to a client that you spent a day tweeting if you have no clear objective or method of measuring results? The key is to figure out how to creatively and perhaps 'beard-strokingly' communicate your message. But first you need a message. Social Media may not even be a worthwhile option in some cases. I wrote about this not long ago on my student blog: http://out-of-interest.blogspot.com/2009/12/soc....

Roger Warner, C&M

Hey Beth - agreed... having a message is a good place to start, and having a planned message is even better - like, backed up by a spot of research. We prefer calculators as accessories here to beards : )

Tommy Twanker

I liked the 80"s, tight faded jeans, Pringle jumpers, gold chains over polo necks; rubbish music, spots, smashing! Anyway, with a serious face and a slight frown, I do agree with the essence of this post. Using "social media" as a "push" medium is not the answer, although thousands of people think it is. You know who you are. Enabling and encouraging the sharing of content (which does need to have a value) is where the social web comes into its own (see the share buttons on this post and comments). To understand what "triggers' people to do this amongst their own micro-communities requires analysis of their motivation and associated behaviour. This means the collation and correlation of a number of data sets; time consuming task, but a necessary one. Understanding this, will dramatically enhance your chances of achieving high degrees of advocacy. I now need to have a rest, as I've used far too many big words there

Roger Warner, C&M

PS - apologies... something went wonky with Disqus when you first posted the comment. No idea, out of my tech comfort zone... but managed to resus it.

Roger Warner, C&M

Spot on Tommy. I'm inclined to go find a late 80s Wrangler ad to illustrate the point. Data sets rule meantime. (And bravo on the big word-set. Spot on : )

Rowstar

As someone who considers themselves a creative, I am not sure I entirely agree that there is no place for beard stroking in all of this. The idea of running analytics in a vacuum and leaving creative until last worries me. I'd like to see a marriage of data and instinct - beard-strokers and number-crunchers working together from the start to come up with meaningful, apposite and intelligence-informed strategies. I agree that lightbulb campaigns are outmoded, but as I said in this blog post last year, the more brains involved, the better. Get the analysts doing their thing, but give the creatives a chance to lend their instincts to that stage of the process, too. I think both camps could learn a lot from each other - everyone hold hands with everyone else, in other words.

Roger Warner, C&M

Indeed. I'm in wild agreement with you. My point is don't let the beard stroking loose without an analyst in the room, plus someone who understands *how* this stuff works... Happily, *you* are 2.5 of those people rolled into one.

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