In the wake of Yesterdays Breast cancer awareness viral campaign, I’m reminded about why I love social networks and social media in general. It creates an environment for users to connect and share things that they care about, disseminate information quickly if you can reach the right influencers and above all provide another way for those who care about your product/service/charity to feel engaged and contribute on a daily basis. It also reminded me of why so many marketers have trouble embracing social marketing in their day to day campaigns, I mean honestly, who cares as much about the widgets they buy as they do about breast cancer?
For those of you aren’t sure of the campaign I am talking about here is the gist of it, yesterday on facebook, females everywhere started changing their status to a color. Seems harmless enough right? It all started with this message popping up in mailboxes.
“Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status... Haha .”
As you can imagine, guys everywhere started asking what was up. Some caught on, some didn’t, most of the time girls let the cat out of the bag ruining the fun for everyone, but it was wildly successful and spread like wildfire. It was interesting before you understood it to see people in your network who had no other connection but through you posting similar mysterious things. It got people talking. Why did it work so well? Why did so many women jump on board? I’m sure an number of people will give some more detailed analysis but I think it comes down to the old sex sells adage. The fact that it was for a good cause (breast cancer awareness) is a given for adoption, but it also made it fun, an inside joke to play on the boys, mixed with a little harmless dirty talk(the color of your underwear). It was like being in the schoolyard again. It was simple, genius and damn near impossible to replicate in a normal business context.
Some have tried and succeeded, the IKEA store opening comes to mind see link for video(IKEA Store Opening) where the first people to tag themselves as items in a showroom gallery to win the item, or Burger Kings Drop 10 friends get a free Whopper campaign(Drop 10 Facebook Page) and of course the most widely touted campaign of all, the Obama Presidential Campaign. Each of these all managed to make their offering note worthy, sometimes a difficult task if you sell certain items.
That’s why there is so much “spam” out there. Countless facebook pages and twitter accounts devoted to organizations that know they need to be there, but aren’t sure why and instead post special promo codes or press releases. As a user who’s there to be engaged and interact would you be interested in this info? Many marketers haven’t figured out how to use social media channels to their advantage yet, so they are just extending their normal batch and blast behaviors to new channels.
If you don’t have a product that your customers and prospects can’t stop talking about to promote you, or don’t care enough about to spread throughout their networks, there’s still a lot of value in social networks as a tool for customer service and intelligence. Companies need to be sure they don’t ignore it, because if your customers aren’t actively out there promoting you, you can be sure there are some that are badmouthing you. Becoming a part of the discussion is important so if you aren’t going to respond to complaints’, you will at least be aware of these issues your customers and prospects are talking about.
If they haven’t already, organizations need to invest in the resources to monitor and respond to what’s happening out there, and vendors are stepping up to provide tools to aid in these efforts. Eloqua has stepped up to include sharing and reporting tools to integrate social media into their automations suite(ELQ Reporting) and CRM giant Salesforce.com has integrations for twitter and facebook, and is even taking a social approach to its operations with apps like Chatter. The shift is coming and its not a bad idea to get prepared now.
Like when the boys on facebook didn’t know what was going on with color status updates, you and your organization don’t want to be out of the loop when its your company that the in crowd is talking about in the school yard.
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