Youtube, Footlocker and More Viral Campaigns

Before I start, I understand that it is a little rich labeling any video on youtube as automatically ‘viral’. Linking Youtube and ‘viral’ video culture is more a meta-commentary on the format of youtube and the history of viral videos, which have often been originally hosted on or have ended up at Youtube (remember some of the first viral videos were decidedly ‘gonzo’ in style, which Youtube with its largely amateur videographer user base lends its self perfectly to). Initially ‘Viral’ was a term used to highlight the ‘virus-like’ spread of a video (or other media form), but now there is a clear ‘viral’ element to some videos and campaigns, especially considering that there are marketing and communication companies who are purposely attempting to exploit the phenomenon of viral media. This is no secret, they make no attempt to hide it, and so in this respect a video can have ‘viral’ elements just as a documentary has certain documentary elements. Whether these videos do in fact become ‘viral’ or not is another question all together, and one that is hard to answer considering the various and wildly varying ideas on what constitutes ‘viral’ exposure.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock for the past 3 months, you will probably know about the Old Spice Guy (hereafter OSG) in some form or another. The basic premise was an interactive ‘conversation’ between the old spice guy and the youtube audience at large. The result? a gargantuan beast of a social media campaign which resulted in around 1.4bn campaign impressions and 40m video views within one week of the original ad going live. Not only that but Old Spice sales are up 27% since the campaign launched, and 107% in the last month alone. Considering the cost of filming a good-looking, ripped & half naked black guy in-front of a green screen can’t be that huge, we’re talking serious ROI for Old Spice, and the potential for huge investment into the digital and social media marketing world – everyone wants to do what Old Spice did.

Frankly these lofty aspirations are unrealistic. It really is once in a blue moon that seriously good creativity and business acumen meet in the right place, and even if those two are present the market needs to be ready for it. There is a certain ‘decompression’ after a campaign such as that. People simply wont respond in the same way over and over, there needs to be a cooling off period.

Thats not to say there is no point, just don’t go thinking that you have the next Old Spice tucked up your sleeve, or that the digital agency you just went to has either.

Onto Footlocker. ‘It’s a sneaker thing’ is the clever hook attached to the current Footlocker campaign which has been rolling out across the internet and TV screens for some time now. A recent development has seen a collaboration between Footlocker and Youtube celebs ShayCarl, KassemG and Bret the Intern; two teams under Kassem and Shay fight it out in a food fight to the death in an otherwise deserted high school cafeteria.

The Footlocker element is brought in with some clever vary-focal camera shots of a hall full of brand new sneakers and the use of sandwich bags to protect these nice new sneakers from the ensuing mess – all of which are put on AFTER the ‘foodfight’ shout. Check the video’s below:



And the voting video:

Shay Carl and Kassem G alone have a combined subscribership of around 1.6m viewers. Unlike the Old Spice advert, however, these viewers are already invested in the institutions of Shay or Kassem (or like me both). There is a whole community built around them already. With Old Spice we saw a new face who could engage the entire Youtube audience without your having to belong to a subculture first. The interactive element, also, is lacking a certain focus which the Old Spice campaign had (and was arguably the thing which stimulated the most on and offline word of mouth). In this we get to vote for the winner, as opposed to being able to actually interact with OSG. For these reasons, this campaign is unlikely to reach the proportions of Old Spice.

I can’t decide if this is clever marketing or not. The audience is fairly limited, but it still can’t have cost much to do which makes ROI a much easier figure to achieve. As I said, the OSG’s magic was his novelty and fresh faces always make more impact. I’ll be interested to see how this drives sales to Footlocker. It is, however, evidence of companies seriously looking for new ways of promoting their products, which is a good thing for the digital marketing industry. Whether they are all getting it right or not is something we shall have to wait and see.

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Social media stats that you can’t ignore

Courtesy of Socialnomics09 on youtube…






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Is Foursquare blurring the line between digital and real life?

Geocaching to Geotagging

Following the removal of selective availability from consumer GPS devices in May 2000, a strange new permutation of letterboxing began to develop. This ‘game’ involved placing ‘caches’ in various places and distributing the GPS coordinates via listing sites for other people to find. At these caches would be a log book and perhaps a trinket or ‘treasure’ which the finder was welcome to remove and replace with something of equal worth. Geocaching was born. In a way this was the first type of significant interaction between the internet and the real world, and a whole community of geocachers was born – much like the social networking sites of today. This grown-up treasure hunt was inevitably going to be redefined in the wake of new technology and new media influence. Enter Foursquare.

Foursquare is a social media hub, where people can post status updates much the same as Twitter and Facebook. Foursquare, however, is specialised in that it focuses on geotagging – using GPS and cell networks to triangulate your position, allowing you to ‘check in’ at various places and venues throughout your day (or night). Foursquare also adds achievements into the mix, where by after meeting certain requirements you earn badges which are appended to your profile.

Foursquare in numbers

Foursquare is certainly growing fast; they have increased their user base from around 275,000 users in January 2010 to nearing 2,000,000 as of Jun 29 2010. Not only that, but estimates suggest they are significantly outpacing rival geotagging site, Gowalla, who have around 400,000 users, and are growing their user base 10x slower than Foursquare. The staff numbers at Foursquare have also grown. From the two founders, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai a year ago they are now 27-strong, and have recently secured $20M in venture capitol to expand the business.

However, it is the break down of the user statistics of Twitter and Foursquare which are so interesting; while Twitter has 50x as many users as foursquare, only 20% of those users have tweeted more than 10 times, and 41% of those users have never tweeted at all. Foursquare, in comparison, has incredibly high levels of interaction: 57.4 % of users have checked in to 50 different venues, and 77.3% of users have checked in more than 30 times in a month. This speaks volumes about the motivations of users at the two different sites;  Foursquare users are clearly more interested/motivated to interact.

The stats all look very rosy, but it is worth mentioning that Foursquare is still dwarfed by the supernova’s of Twitter (100M users) and Facebook (500M users), so lets keep the Veuve Clicquot on ice for the time being.

The marketers catch on

Of course the power of this medium has been recognised and exploited by various organisations and agencies who have successfully (and unsuccessfully) used it as part of the marketing mix.

Non-profit organisation, Earthjustice, have spun a campaign (covered by mashable) to engage the younger demographic in California, and to encourage them to consider, and get involved with ecological issues. As a bit of an eco-warrior (more an eco-peon) myself, this is particularly attractive to me. Without digressing too much, it is important that we look to ways of getting the younger generations interested in looking after the planet, and the use of new media is a clear avenue to consider.

There have, of course been ‘unsuccessful’ (read crude) attempts at utilising Foursquare, one such example is discussed over at aboutfoursquare.com. The Expendables, a movie by Sylvester Stallone involving guns, explosions, death and probably some gratuitous nudity, has been promoted on Foursquare by leaving ‘tips’ at foursquare venue pages in 11 US cities. The author of the post, William Beutler, remarks on the campaign and calls it ‘gimmicky’, recognising that the marketers at Lionsgate haven’t really understood the point of social media marketing – to create conversations. Their approach has been misunderstood, lackluster, and ultimately a good example of how not to use Foursquare and other platforms to engage with consumers.

A host of other organisations have also taken Foursquare’s platform and turned it into a marketing tool for their products and services, but the one campaign which keeps popping up in my mind as an example of both an incredibly creative use of Foursquare and other social media platforms, but also a clear focus on creating conversation through these media is the Jimmy Choo campaign.

The innovative ‘catch-a-choo’ campaign was designed by social media agency, Fresh Networks, and involved the shoes (the new range of Jimmy Choo trainers) taking on a life of their own and checking in to various locations around the city of London. This gave social media users the chance to ‘catch-a-choo’ and win a pair for themselves in a digital meets real life treasure hunt (much like geocaching in a way). This campaign created a heck of a lot of buzz, and some impressive figures too. Over 4000 individuals participated in the hunt, which was covered by outlets such as Reuters, Marketing Magazine, PR Week, Mashable, Vogue, and The Evening Standard, and daily trainer sales went up an impressive 33% during and following the campaign.


Foursquare controversy

It was inevitable that geotagging would throw up some concerns. Questions about how to balance the privacy of the platform arose, questions on how safe it is to use geotagging for fear of home invasion or stalking also came about. Unfortunately, these concerns have been largely justified as one blogger found out when she was stalked by a creepy guy as a result of her Foursquare usage. The man in question actually rang a restaurant she was dining at and spoke to her asking her to go for a bike ride with him.

There have also been concerns around how secure your data is with Foursquare. When the team were approached by a white-hat hacker and were told about a number of exploits and leaks they were subject to, they responded with a message stating they would fix the problem. After 9 days the company responded again and notified the hacker that they had fixed 1 out of 3 ‘privacy leaks’ and were working on the others. Since then, nothing has been said (to my knowledge). Story here.

A system like this is also open to abuse, which blogger Jim Bumgardner of KrazyDad.com found out in his exploration of what could be done to cheat the system. The post (which has a response from co-founder Dennis Crowley) documents Bumgardner’s various exploits of the platform to achieve some lofty achievements, one of which was to become the ‘mayor’ of the North Pole from the comfort of his own home. (somewhat overshadowed by 15 year-old Parker Liautaud who genuinely managed it)


Theory: Connecting analog and digital spaces

As a concept Foursquare is a strange one, but for some reason it works. As people become more and more ‘mobile’ with smartphone’s, netbooks, ipads and other cutting-edge technology then it only seems like a natural progression to mix the two domains somehow. Foursquare is doing that incredibly effectively. I am wondering, however, if there is a limit to the ‘good’ side of this story. While I’m an avid user of social media, and I love the conversations and the interaction that happens with it, I wonder if this is a step too far. Where will it stop? At what point does someone draw the line and say this is where the two worlds stop merging. Ultimately if there was a global blackout, we’d all lose our digital lives, and would be forced back into the physical space that we are increasingly ignoring as technology advances. You can’t see a map for all the satellite navigation units that exist today, it wont be soon (perhaps we’re already there) before you can’t see a street for all the phones attached to their biological appendages. Come to think of it, we really are there already.

I suppose my point is that everyone needs a break from technology occasionally, but increasingly the venue for this seems to be disappearing. Will be ultimately sense a disconnection from what is ‘real’ – perhaps that is a tad nihilist, but a question worth asking all the same.


Conclusion

Foursquare is in its relative infancy, but already there have been some really creative and effective uses of the platform. There does seem to be a large amount of ‘good will’ towards Foursquare also, and a 2 Million strong user base is a good place to build from towards the future.  As a medium Foursquare has the potential to be a nexus between online and offline buzz.

There are some bones of contention, however, what with questionable privacy settings and leaks, and questions over personal and home security still raging, and it is clear that the team have some work left on the drawing board to fix. Overall, though, if they get it right in the coming year, Foursquare will become a very powerful tool both in a marketing sense, and in a just-having-fun kinda way too.

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Word Of Mouth in Action

Until recently my ‘grasp’ of WOM was fairly elementary and in all honesty, it remains so; my knowledge is largely limited to reading case studies and taking people on face value that WOM, is incredibly powerful.  To me WOM was another marketing technique that contrasted against the hundreds of other models that have come before it. It seemed fresh, it seemed organic, but I hadn’t really grasped how it happened or worked.

In a recent blog post @100heads, a recent Mckinsey article on the merits of WOM is discussed. The article boasted, among other statistics, that WOM is behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions, and that WOM generates more than twice the sales that paid advertising does. The (clever)  folks over at 1000heads call for a prudential perspective in the face of what could be sensationalist representations of ROI. They recognise that there are many factors influencing these outcomes and are working on a platform that will give investors a tangible monetary figure for the buzz that their campaigns create. Every conversation will have a monetary value.

As a concept that is freaking cool.

Now I don’t want to digress into a discussion on ROI where word of mouth is concerned, that perhaps is something for next time, but since I’ve only recently worked it out I want to tell you about MY revelation. It may not be spectacular, but it was an awakening all the same.

I’ve always been a **bit of a geek** as my lovely girlfriend would like to put it, I love technology, I love learning about products, learning how to get the most out of a piece of software. I especially love gadgets. The ‘smartphone revolution’, however, was something that I initially resisted. You see, I like to think about myself as a bit of a trend-setter, but I missed the boat and subsequently spent a significant amount of time berating the people with smart phones and exclaiming things like ‘my w880i lasts on standby for a WHOLE week, and your iPhone is out of battery already and its not even 5pm’. I was clearly, as the Chinese would say, wearing a green hat. I was jealous.

The battery life of the iPhone, admittedly, is / was a bone of contention for me (and why I eventually went for an android handset), but I loved what it was doing, and what you could do with it.

The iPhone more or less marketed its self.

Fast forward to recently. My w880i was feeling the strain, having lost a few buttons and sporting a thick layer of dust between the protector and the LCD. Its time was coming to an end. The battery life, also, had begun to wave to 4 days standby time. I was in the market for a phone, and Android had taken my fancy.

It wasn’t until an acquaintance of mine, James, came over during a surprise party that we were throwing for my sister, that I finally came face to face with an HTC Hero, and while I didn’t play with it, the brief, and essentially positive conversation that we shared was enough. I was sold – I would buy an Android.

The initial excitement from getting my HTC Desire has not yet subsided a whole month on. I have had several conversations about it to friends of mine, TWO of which have gone and purchased the same handset off the back of my endorsement. This was weird for me, to see WOM happening right in front of my eyes, and I didn’t even know I was doing it.

I guess as revelations go its fairly weak, but it still caught me off guard. WOM as a concept is an abstraction from what happens in real life. It’s a buzz expression, a glorified hook for WOM companies to get the attention of their clients. Rightly so, while the phenomenon is effective, there is no reason that everyone would know this. Marketing strategy has for so long concentrated on figures, promotions, advertising etc that it failed to even consider the basic background noise of social life. Ironically WOM agencies need to market the idea of WOM.

My problem was that my head was wrapped up in the abstraction, despite knowing what it was about. Not until I saw it happening infront of me did I see how incredibly salient and powerful WOM is. While I can’t say that this is the case for everyone, people who I have explained it to have often seemed confused or not quite on the same page. The old ‘yeh yeh’ but the vacant expression behind the eyes. Another blog post @1000heads has lamented that while they see the power of WOM, the pockets of the clients are not yet fully open. From my experience, perhaps they would be more flexible with their cash if they could be shown WOM happening in action; examples and such are all well and good, but not until they truly understand the core of WOM, (something they already do and have done for as long as they have been talking), will they see it for its true power and potential.

Perhaps then, there would be more significant investment into the industry.

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