Comments on: What brands will need to be careful about as Social Media grows!

By: harshilkaria

harshilkaria — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:50:22 +0000

I think what you are simply talking about campaigns vs conversations.

I agree that conversations have to be a part of social media and that was the whole point of this post. The conversation must continue – even if you switch agencies – which brand managers don't realize!

Campaigns on the other hand (going by our thread) will be helped greatly if they sync social media into their scheme of things – again thats what i was saying, in such cases the way social media is used is important.

And then as you are saying, the campaign should sync with the conversation – but the conversation should never stop!

By: Social geek

Social geek — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:34:44 +0000

I dont think you get what you yourself are saying here. You are comparing Sunsilkgangofgirls and ForceIndia today vs Mitsubhi today. You should compare their statistics at the peak of their campaigns ie when sunsilk was at its peak and when forceindia was at its peak and do a comparison of costs + relevant tg reached + prospective brand recall among those reached etc etc to even make a comparison.
Also what you forget the length.. the very fact that sunsilk still gets 200 uniques a day is their brand recall post media spends ditto for forceindia. Im not saying these campaigns are good all im saying is that mitsubishi or bangalore are in the same vien.. short term buzz oriented incentive driven and offline media backed (tv ads and print ads is huge my friend) social media campaigns that use social media just as a database collection or a destination platform. How many of these use social media as a conversation platform? That is the key question.. The point im making is one needs to stop being myopic by using social media as a marketing platform and use it as a conversation platform. Mind you conversations are ongoing endless and scalable.

My point is big deal! the website has turned into a blog or a facebook page but the marketing is still happening offline to drive clicks, unique visitors or registrations to the site.. Also with regards to bangalore what is the point of multiple separate fan pages? why not create a single bangalore fans destination and this contest couldve been a part of that? There is no wholistic thinking and also no longterm thinking.. right now social media is playing the role of a contest host and thats about it.

It is certainly much much more than that and what all these so called social media analysts and experts who tweet whole day dont realise is this very fact. They sell clients shortterm buzz promise, Clients spend money and at the end whats left is a sad few numbers and no clue on what exactly it did for the brand and no future course of action to leverage what they now have.

By: harshilkaria

harshilkaria — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:02:34 +0000

There is no doubt that currently there is a big PR machinery behind social media! Im still not sure how we can judge social media completely in isolation. Ofcourse from the point of view of expenditure it needs to measured in isolation – maybe measures also need to come in which compare the impact of TV (or other allied mediums which work with social media) when social media is married into the same.

So for example The Great Driving Challenge got 10000 registered couples. 6,50,000 unique visitors to the website in a month. I don't have the figures for the number of test drives and subsequently the sales. That's scale in my opinion. The TV budget was miniscule – ads only on Times Now which has a pretty poor GRP.

With Sunsilk its a different case. The objective was to start a sticky providence community – today i've heard rumours within the agency that manages Sunsilk saying that they get excited even when 200 people come to the site and stay for more than 3 minutes. Same goes with Club Force – Force India F1s network – they have not more than 60 unique visitors on any given day. Thats a big, big failure in my opinion.

In my opinion, brands that work smartly understanding the medium correctly and meshing it with other mediums well will be remembered.

At the end of the day, taking what you said a little further, performance matters – not only per medium but in terms of the holistic strategy. And if performance comes at a lower cost by putting social media intelligently in the mix, clients would be more than happy! There however, as i said earlier, combined metrics need to come into place along with the generic social media metrics many people are already building…

By: Social geek

Social geek — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:27:14 +0000

If creating a social destination and pumping the campaign with ads is concerned then sunsilk gang of girls was the biggest case study! See there are a lot of aspects – right from objective of campaign, cost of campaign, impact of campaign, its tg relevance and what its achieves on completion of the campaign.. Its easy to see campaigns from outside and term them nice or not so nice what matters is what these campaigns do in reality. Any advertising campaign isnt about scale its about objective – message – delivery and impact. And thats how even social media needs to be judged (in isolation mind you!). Again there is a challenge here because you may many times not agree with the client objectives with social media but then thats where consulting or advisory role of an agency comes into play.
Its early days and as I stated earlier learning is key. The so called successes of today would look like the stupidity of yesterday in hindsight. Its like how in the early days of the internet popups overtook the web and we all know how stupid we were but at that time they were hugely successful.
In the same way dont get colored by numbers on social media or hoo haa that some guys create what matters is longterm sustainable scalable brand experience for brands and the one who can create that will leverage social media better than those who create hype.

By: harshilkaria

harshilkaria — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:24:13 +0000

Sure – they weren't pure social media campaigns. Im not sure that we will ever benchmark 'pure social media campaigns' – the ones that will really succeed will be the ones that have social at the center of strategy and at the same time are able to leverage the rest of the media mix. Having a 'pure social media' benchmark is wishful. Then you'll have nonsense like Ford using Twitter to quell a PR storm as a case study.

I agree with the pursuit of perfection.

By: Social geek

Social geek — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:50:32 +0000

The two campaigns you hail as social media campaigns weren't purely social media in that sense. Mitsubishi was backed by print and with an SEM budget and Bangalore too had tonnes of SEM ads during this compaq cup..

India is still to see a social media case study and the points you mentioned are the growing pains for any medium. Be it brand managers or agencies both need to invest, engage, make mistakes and evolve. Any social media agencies which says they know how to build engagement is 'bullshitting'. At the end of the day we are people driven companies and good people will do good work eventually. We all try our best and we all put the effort some plans work and some dont and that is the case with every advertising medium today.