We have recently built a social network – a community for sharing stories and support – for a CPG client. Our client had no ROI expectations and no comparable past experience. This was a completely new tactic, in a new medium, targeted at unquantified attitudinal goals. How would you benchmark this kind of activity?
Advertisers often struggle over what benchmarks to use or whether benchmarks are even relevant. Here’s what we did to provide accountability and justify the expenditure.
It is an unfortunate but understandable reality that while we often marvel at digital projects that spread like wildfire across the web, we rarely get a chance to look at the numbers behind them. Between January and May, we built, launched and monitored Jerzify Yourself (warning: sound on autoplay) to get just such a glimpse into the dynamics of spreadable content.
This has been the week of the Old Spice Man, and deservedly so. The campaign was brilliant in concept and execution. Kudos to everyone involved.
It may be that everything that needs to be said already has been, but I won’t let that stop me from sharing a couple of observations.
There’s a food revolution afoot in America. This revolution isn’t led by a celebrity chef or the first lady, and with the frequent presence of pork belly, it’s definitely not focused on slimming down our country. Rather, it’s a revolution focused on flavor, or more accurately flavors, and unifying our nation’s shifting populations into a shared narrative.
I had the pleasure of attending the Southern Foodways Alliance Field Trip to Buford Highway, Atlanta’s most prominent international corridor, along with some of the top minds – and hands – in Southern cuisine. The challenge was simple: two days, eleven meals, six cultural backgrounds. As my belly filled and the trip unfolded, I continually heard local chefs, bloggers, and critics refer to the international mish-mash of strip malls as their culinary “playground.” As the sole ad guy at the conference, I found the same inspiration when looking for emerging trends in the food/restaurant category:
The results from our location-based social network poll are in. We asked the question, “Why do we check-in?” And overwhelmingly, the answer is to accumulate social currency, read insider tips, and compete to be #1.
With YouTube now seeing 2 billion video views per day, Twitter producing 2 billion tweets per month, Facebook users spending over 500 billion minutes per month, and Foursquare adding 15,000 new users per day, there’s no doubt that Social Media is here to stay. And brands have embraced it as an important part of their overall marketing mix.
But brands must be careful when engaging within the social web to avoid what seem like common sense mistakes (yet they continue to still be made). I wrote an article for Business Week that describes 5 social media marketing mistakes: Continue reading »
We, at Hill Holliday, are fascinated by the location-based social network craze and believe in their opportunity for brands. At this past Tuesday’s Mashable Media Summit, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley indicated the popular location-based social network is seeing gains in the number of weekly check-ins increase by about 50k per week.
