During the initial wave of social media adoption by businesses and brands, conversation was key. Brands were lauded not for using these tools to sell, but for using them to chat. To listen. To appear human.
But that mentality may be shifting.
Remember Seinfeld? It was one of the most popular TV shows of the ’90s, but it was also (in theory) “a show about nothing.” Each episode consisted of a tightly-wound series of in-jokes derived from absurdly pedestrian circumstances, which gave viewers a chance to relate. In short, it was the kind of show designed to be relived around the water cooler for not just the next morning but the next few months… or longer. (Personally, I have friends who still celebrate Festivus.)
Why did Seinfeld succeed? In part, it was because — at the time — no one else was talking about nothing. When everyone else has a plot, you can break the mold by only having subplots.
Social media works the same way. When everyone else is selling, it’s easy to stand out simply by offering customer service. But once everyone starts using social media to “join the conversation,” the conversation itself becomes diluted. That’s when people start needing something… else.
When we helped Bigelow Tea create their Twitter and Facebook channels, conversation was key. Just chatting with tea lovers was enough to help Bigelow gain traction with the social media users they connected with.
These days, every tea company with access to the web is on Twitter and Facebook, which means Bigelow needed to shift their focus away from mere conversation and back toward informational value like their content-rich blog. They’ve begun offering successful sweepstakes on Facebook and Twitter. And their Facebook page has become a conversation that’s heavy with links to their teas and gift sets.
The results? Facebook is now one of the primary drivers of Bigelow Tea’s online sales, with plans to expand their strategy even further in 2011.
What has this shift taught us? Yes, people still like to talk tea… but they haven’t stopped needing actual value from their brand interactions, either.
So… what’s your brand’s Seinfeld ratio? How much time do you spend talking about nothing?
When our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2010, we at Creative Concepts helped them develop a related 30 Under 30 contest to celebrate the innovative ecological ideas from young people across the country. During their celebration, they asked everyone a question:
“Where do you think sustainability will be thirty years from now?”
After all, for a company who designs every aspect of their cleaning products with the environment in mind — from their ingredients to their facilities to their packaging — the future really is their business.
This question may have initially been asked of some of the country’s top eco-bloggers and entrepreneurs, but that’s was just the tip of the iceberg. Who Ecover really wants to hear from is you.
(Yes, you.)
They’ve opened the discussion to everyone, because they believe everyone has a stake in our planet’s future. And Ecover is listening — on Twitter, on Facebook, and on their blog. They want to know what you think about sustainability, and what concerns or suggestions you might have.
Because reaching a business milestone is certainly something to celebrate, but if there’s one lesson Ecover has learned in their thirty years of creating eco-minded cleaning products, it’s that tomorrow is what really counts.
When you’re the top specialty tea company in the United States, you reach a lot of tea lovers. Our client Bigelow Tea is using social media — from Bigelow Tea’s Facebook (and, yes, MySpace) pages to their YouTube channel, Bigelow loves to share their tea knowledge with the world. (After 65 years in busiess, they know a thing or two about tea.)
But how often do their customers have a chance to share what they know with each other? Normally, it’s not easy. Fortunately, we at Creative Concepts are helping Bigelow Tea bridge that gap.
Last month, the Bigelow Tea Twitter account asked its followers if they had any tea tips worth sharing. The results were instructive, and they formed the basis of a helpful blog post that allowed Bigelow’s fans to learn from one another.
This isn’t Bigelow’s first foray into customer connectivity. Earlier this year, they hosted their first Bigelow Tea Social in New York City, where bloggers and foodies alike came together to talk tea (and get their fill of free samples). How was that live event conceived of and managed? Why, on Bigelow’s blog and Twitter account, of course!
And while tea is obviously a communal drink to begin with, Bigelow Tea isn’t the only company finding new ways to bring their customers together. Our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary of creating ecological cleaning products with a live event that united green bloggers, media-makers and innovators, all of whom swapped stories and tips until the party ended. How did we at Creative Concepts help Ecover organize this event? With a Facebook contest hosted on Ecover’s blog!
Social media: bringing companies and customers together — with the emphasis on together.
For example, our client Bigelow Tea has been doing some great contests, with prizes that range from free tea to free tickets for Wayne Gretzky’s annual hockey camp. The cost of entry? Simply liking Bigelow Tea on Facebook. Who wouldn’t trade the few seconds it takes to click a button in exchange for a chance to meet The Great One? (For all you non-hockey fans, that’s Gretzky.)
When Bigelow recently gave away the herb plus tea gift set on Facebook, the one-week contest earned them more than 400 new Facebook fans. That’s a 7% increase in their total number of fans, which rose from 5720 to 6162. If they did that every week for a year, they’d nearly double their fanbase in 12 months.
And what’s their investment in this venture?
A prize (obviously, the more interesting the prize, the better)
Time (planning, designing & promoting the contest)
Shipping the prize to the winner
What would your company be willing to invest in a year-long doubling of their marketing reach?
Because you can rest assured that your customers are willing to invest the time to click.
You just spent weeks — maybe even months — crafting a social media campaign that’s guaranteed to amaze your customers, awe your competitors and endear your most loyal fans to you for life.
And then you blew it.
How?
Because you didn’t pay attention to the details.
The following three tips are so obvious, they should almost go without saying. Yet we see these same mistakes being made time and time again — sometimes, even by us. (Yes, we’re human too — which is why, like you, we sometimes need to remind ourselves of the basics.)
1. Proofread. Nothing hurts the impact of a message like a spelling, grammar or punctuation error. Whether it’s due to haste, laziness or simply lack of knowledge, these mistakes happen. The trick is to catch them before your audience does. Some of the blog posts we help craft for our client Bigelow Tea are reviewed by half a dozen people before they’re published, and the last person in line still catches the occasional gaffe.
2. Watch the clock. If you’re using an ancillary tool like HootSuite or CoTweet to schedule your messages in advance, you need to be aware of two extremely common hiccups:
Scheduling a tweet or status update to post at the time you’re writing it, rather than at the time you intend for it to publish.
Scheduling an update for AM instead of PM (or vice versa).
Because nothing hurts the ROI of your message like publishing it at 4 AM…
3. Recycle. You have a killer piece of content… but you only post it to one of your channels? Why waste it? For example, our client Ouidad may have great photos from New York Fashion Week, but if they were only posted to Facebook, they’d never be searchable on Flickr. Likewise, just because you’ve tweeted, blogged or otherwise discussed a topic once, that doesn’t mean everyone in your audience saw that individual message. Repeat the important stuff often, so your busy fans and customers can have multiple opportunities to connect with your big news.
Want more tips? You should follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
As we mentioned last week, social media is becoming increasingly important in building customer loyalty. If your customers enjoy interacting with your brand on Twitter, Facebook, etc., they’re more likely to see and act on your messages, from sales to reviews to requests for help.
But those requests for help go both ways. If you’re asking your customers for feedback, you should also prepare to answer their incoming questions. Here are examples of 3 ways our Creative Concepts clients have used Twitter to help solve their customers’ problems.
1. Store Locators
Both Bigelow Tea and Ouidad are store-based clients of ours. Bigelow Tea is sold across North America, while Ouidad has certified stylists in salons nationwide (and beyond). But sometimes their customers can’t find a certain tea flavor at their local grocer, or they wonder if there’s a Ouidad certified stylist in their neighborhood.
When these comments pop up on Twitter, Bigelow and Ouidad can reach out and offer lists of nearby salons or stores that can help a discerning tea lover or fashionista find what they’re searching for.
Just because your products or services are designed to solve problems, that doesn’t mean your customers necessarily remember to use them. Sales are one approach to reminding your customers that you exist. Suggestions are another.
During cold and flu season, Bigelow Tea offers moral support (and suggested tea remedies) to those poor folks with nagging coughs and sore throats. Or, when people voice their frustration with inefficient (or ecologically unsound) cleaning products, Ecover can confidently suggest their own line of household cleaners. (You can follow Ecover here.)
3. Shared Wisdom
Yes, a company is a business, but a company is also comprised of people — and your customers are people too. Sometimes, questions can come up that have nothing at all to do with your products and services, and everything to do with life in general. If you know the answer, don’t be afraid to offer it.
For example, letting someone know that a group of butterflies is sometimes called a kaleidoscope may not have anything to do with laundry detergent, but that doesn’t mean Ecover couldn’t share that information with a person who’d asked. Did it sell another bottle of product? Not necessarily. But it did remind someone that Ecover exists, and that they’re listening — and that they know a thing or two about the environment.
After all, at the end of the day, people remain loyal to the brands they feel best about. And when your brand takes the time to care, and to be personal, that’s one more reason for you and your customers to keep talking.
Want to talk more with us? Let’s connect on Twitter or Facebook!
In the past week, we’ve been hearing a lot about “New Digg” and “New Twitter” as both tools aim to become more robust and versatile.
Soon, you’ll be able to view more information about Twitter users and see their shared photos and videos without ever clicking away from Twitter itself.
Soon, you’ll be able to see which Digg stories are popular among the subset of Digg users you’ve chosen to follow, rather than just relying on the community as a whole.
To us, this sounds like both services are finding reasons to keep visitors more engaged and not losing them when they click away.
Or, in other words, Twitter and Digg are becoming Facebook.
Add to that the evolution of Google Instant and the announcement that Google plans to offer more social tools and it becomes clear that Facebook’s formula of being everything to everyone, all in the same place, is too hard for most rivals to compete against without adopting the same tactics.
What does this mean for your business? Simple.
Focus on the Experience, Not the Tools.
In 2005, everyone thought the future would look like MySpace. And everyone was wrong.
Today, agencies and brands are almost definitely scrambling to figure out how to get “good at Facebook,” since that seems to be the skill set that will drive social communication for the foreseeable future, regardless of the platform.
But they’ll probably be wrong too.
It’s not about Facebook. It’s about being a good communicator and having a story worth telling. Because if your brand can connect in a meaningful way, it won’t matter if your customers are using print, Facebook or mental telepathy.
Need help telling your story? Find us on Twitter or Facebook!
Online, people are forever in search of something new. Today’s big news is already tomorrow’s second-page Google return. (Which, thanks to Google Instant, makes yesterday’s news nearly invisible.) And this means your social media channels need to stay fresh or risk becoming irrelevant.
Unfortunately, creating new content is one of the most time-consuming aspects of social media. The prospect of creating a new video or blog post every week — much less every day — can scare away any business that’s already low on time or cash.
The good news is, you don’t need to start from scratch every time you create a new piece of online content. In fact, you already have a storehouse of material at your fingertips, waiting to be used (and reused) in your marketing efforts. Here’s how you can maximize (and multiply) what you already know — and save time in the process.
1. Write What You (and Your Employees) Know
We help our client Bigelow Tea create the content for their blog. After 65 years in business, there’s no shortage of information, advice and anecdotes that they can draw on to produce new blog posts. Why scramble to constantly find new topics and trends to discuss when their own employees have experiences and stories that no one outside the company has ever heard?
Turn to your employees — and your customers — for a never-ending source of inspiration.
2. Create an Ongoing Series of Tips
Earlier this year, we began curating a #DailyTeaTip for Bigelow Tea’s Twitter channel — a process some other tea lovers have begun to adopt. Bigelow’s tips are usually links to existing Bigelow Tea blog posts or FAQs, which provide answers to questions that people might not have thought to ask — from “Who is Early Grey tea named after?” to understanding the difference between green, black and oolong teas. We keep a dated list of the tips Bigelow has posted, and we repeat popular tips when appropriate — because if someone hasn’t seen a tip before, it’s still new to them.
Think of ways you could create a content series on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn…
3. A Picture Is Worth a 1000 Word Blog Post (Give or Take)
Promotional photos. Product shots. Print ads. Office parties. No matter how old or how small your company is, you’ve probably created hundreds — maybe thousands — of photos and images over the years. Odds are, your customers and fans would love to see all of those images in one place — and that means you have a nearly endless supply of easy content updates.
One of the most-retweeted accounts on Twitter is Mashable, the go-to news site for all things social media. Why? For one thing, their tweets are notoriously short — usually around 100 characters. This means they can be easily retweeted and commented upon within a tweet by their readers.
Yes, you have a lot to say. But you’re as pressed for time as your readers and viewers are. Brevity helps both sides win.
On Mad Men, the ad execs of the 1960s rely on focus groups and psychologists to understand their clients’ customers. Today, we have Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
Instead of employing tricks and misdirection to learn what people really think about a product or a brand, we’re now empowered to share our opinions with anyone who’ll listen, 24 hours a day. But this generational shift from privacy to oversharing has created a whole new problem: we now offer too much input, rather than too little.
Thankfully, the web is loaded with tools to help you understand what your customers (and your competition, and complete strangers) are talking about.
Managing multiple campaigns? Keep track of them with rich metrics analysis from Radian6 or Scout Labs.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of ways to listen to your customers. And now you can analyze what they say vs. what they really mean, all from the comfort of your laptop.
Of course, what you actually do with all that information is another story entirely — but at least you’ll never be in the dark again about what your customers really think.
Overwhelmed? We can help! Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!
The last month of US box office has been dominated by Inception, the latest thriller from director Christopher Nolan. Despite Nolan’s pedigree (Memento, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), Inception is still a huge box office surprise for one big reason: late summer is normally a cinematic dead zone.
With heat waves, family vacations and a general pre-autumn malaise ruling the day, this is the notorious timeframe when Hollywood dumps the films it doesn’t expect to be winners. And yet, here we have a complicated movie without blockbuster stars, and it’s earned over $200 million.
As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos famously said, “Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” And while that’s an oversimplified (and somewhat cynical) statement, it’s not entirely untrue.
The more people are willing to talk about you on their own, the less you have to convince them that you’re conversation-worthy. When people are voluntarily talking about your product, it allows you to invest more time and resources on creating those products that delight your customers, rather than creating noteworthy (but temporary) illusions of interest.
Ultimately, a great ad campaign can make a good product sound interesting, but a great product starts conversations all by itself.
You should start a conversation with us on Twitter or Facebook!
