Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

It seems like every company nowadays has taken use of a social media platform where they can connect with their customers. Even the local dentist around the corner from where I live has a Facebook page you can like! And it is fully understandable if you think about the opportunities related to this type of marketing; it’s minimal of costs involved (compared to traditional media), you can build and support your business’ image through the way you communicate, it’s an opportunity to create a dialogue with your customers compared to the traditional you-listen-to-me-now-monologue. Even if the dentist so far has only gotten 20 likes, it’s a start and for small businesses it’s important to be visible in order to generate new customers, and to even keep the old ones.

But if we look at the other end of the scale, the companies topping the Fortune Global 500; why should they bother with all this social media stuff when in reality the people they reach out to in this way is only a per mille of their whole customer base. Take McDonald’s for example, they have 64 million customers in their stores everyday, and when multiplied into customers per year… Well, with that secure flow of people buying their burgers why should they even care about their 10 million+ fans on Facebook?

And then we have Walmart; the ruler of the corporate world in terms of generated revenue, landing the top spot of the Fortune Global 500 for the second year in a row. When talking about such extraterrestrial numbers as Walmart’s revenue, can it therefore be that the resources they put into maintaining their social media channels in fact equals what they potentially will earn on the additional sales coming from their marketing efforts in these channels? When you think about it, they are already getting their (piece of the) pie in the areas where they’re in, so percentage-wise it can’t really be significant can it?

I read an article the other day and one of the comments left from one of the readers shared this point of view. The article was about Walmart’s Foursquare check-ins showing that they had a total of 149,000 check-ins in the Thanksgiving week and approximately 35,000 of those came from the US’ busiest shopping day the Black Friday. In the comment the guy stated that

“If every single one of the ~35,000 people who checked in at Walmart on Black Friday spent an extra $10 because of this check-in. (…) That would equate to an extra $350,000 of revenue for Walmart. For comparison, Walmart’s total annual sales number is over $400 BILLION. The impact of Foursquare would boost its sales by a whopping .0001%.”

I guess he has a point, and it almost seems like the big ones can even save money on cutting back on their social media involvement, so why shouldn’t they?

I would say a definite no, they should not. It’s not all about the money (yes, of course in the end it is, but bear with me) it’s also about securing the future sales. Having a platform where you can communicate, for better or for worse, is crucial. The communication will take place, you being a part of it or not. And no company would like to live through the scenario of BP’s Gulf of Mexico nightmare or the release of the two Domino’s Pizza workers’ Youtube video, not at any rate, but at least not without having a megaphone to use for damage control! So if you are my local dentist, McDonald’s, Walmart or anyone in between I see without a doubt more pros than cons for keeping that social media activity up.

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Apparently, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is doing some PR for itself. The age of social media has led to a blurring of the lines between marketing and corporate communications. In fact, so many things brands need to do nowadays puts even creative agencies in the territory of PR or vice versa.

The change agent being social media empowered consumers, the effort to redefine PR is quite aptly also a social media crowd-sourced effort in which people can submit their definitions on the PRSA website. A new definition (last updated 1982) may be overdue, but even so, the NYT speculates it may also be an effort to disassociate the industry from the notorious PR Eff-ups of the last couple years:

Among the more notorious examples are BP’s mishandling of the aftermath of its accident in the Gulf of Mexico; Facebook’s hiring of a public relations agency to try generating articles that would criticize the privacy practices of its rival, Google; how ChapStick increased complaints about a new campaign, which asked consumers to “Be heard at facebook.com/ChapStick,” by repeatedly deleting negative comments about the ads from the Facebook page; and how Netflix lost hundreds of thousands of members with a plan, later rescinded, to divide into separate businesses.

Nevertheless, I wonder how an official redefinition can help. In the de facto world of the communication business, PR is no longer the top-down message manager of yesteryear. Just like ad agencies cannot be the top-down message creators of yesteryear any longer.

Making this fact official may help in giving the industry a bit of common purpose and feel-good. Something, that ad people have, frankly, been kind of struggling with for their profession as well. How fitting then that its the PR folks taking the lead on this, staying true to the old PR mantra: If you don’t like the conversation, change it.

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Apart from the fact, that Louis CK is always hilarious, he has some pretty awesome observations on people’s behavior when it comes to social media

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Check out this lovely TED Talk Julian Treasure on 5 ways to listen better.  It’s much more than just a typical “You should listen actively”-type talk.  It’s more about how we develop real understanding with each other and the world around us.

He discusses the lack of listening skills that have plagued humankind, practically from the invention of writing, and also talks about some pretty magical ways to listen better in your everyday life.  I was reminded of the You Are Listening To Los Angeles site we featured here a while ago.

Julian talks about listening positions, which planners should be well acquainted with, where you shift the attitude of what you’re listening to or the filters you’re receiving the information through from active to passive, from being critical to being empathic, from in or out of your cultural norms.  It’s a great technique to get conscious about the filters and ‘move to different positions’, i.e., develop your understanding of the topic or conversation in different ways.

What caught my attention, however, was the section where he talks about listening for leaders, teachers, spouses, parents or friends.  He uses “Rasa”, the sanskrit word for essence or juice, as an acronym for:

Receive - pay attention

Appreciate - show that you are engaged

Summarize - make sure you understood

Ask - expand your knowledge

I would change the last one to Ask/Act - and encourage marketers to examine their actions and activities to see if they are following through to truly expand knowledge together.

Are you consciously embracing listening?  Are your actions full of Rasa?

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Beautifully done.  Create and explore a virtual archive of your social life.

A wonderfully crafted, rich experience - but I wish you could have a little more control over the navigation.

Via Adverblog

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Bonin Bough, global director of social media and digital at PepsiCo, has a healthy attitude towards the role of social media. An attitude we’d like to see more of. Social Media is no magic bullet.

The fact that digital and social cannot rehabilitate brands or that they cannot be magic bullets seems very obvious.

Yet, these questions get asked, or at least you get the feeling that that is the expectation brands have after they finally nilly-willy accept that they need a digital strategy of some sort. This behavior makes one wonder if digital is now only seen as a lifeline for failing brand marketing. It can’t be. And indeed, if you cannot have real conversations about what your brand is strategically, what purpose it serves in the minds of people, and if you don’t work hard as an organization to remove internal barriers to allow your brand to take a fundamental stance in how it makes a qualitative difference in people’s lives, you will just end up using social media and digital channels in that very tactical way.

Thanks Bonin for saying how it is.

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How do you create awareness for a slowly dying and boring category such as cordless telephones?

You invent new conversations, or rather, provide new conversation partners.

My ex-colleagues at KKLD* did just that for the Siemens Gigaset phone by allowing you to talk to a nice parrot. On their Facebook page, you can get in line to talk to a parrot via webcam. And since it’s a fairly smart parrot, he will actually talk back at you if you say things he knows, such as “peanut”.

Nutty indeed it may seem, but it is also a smart way to provide traffic to what would otherwise been a fairly boring Facebook page filled with corporate press releases. Also, it takes the product category out of the category dynamic of being a burdensome or routine brand decision making process by making it more entertaining. Whether or not it will solve for the more underlying issue of market dynamics for cordless telephony is another story…

Congrats!

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http://youarelisteningtolosangeles.com/

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I found this great case study on Blankanvas for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), apparently put together by some folks from the Miami Ad School.

Watch the video here:

Balls of Pride from Jacob Sempler on Vimeo.

I love the idea of solving the problem by focusing on who the target is, and what barriers they may have for participating. Solve for the reasons why they might not participate, and then all you need to do is get the engagement right for joining up and spreading the word.

Nice case.

Via Blankanvas

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Since we post so many other agency’s successful campaigns, I feel it’s okay to also post something we’re proud of once in a while. In this year’s JdW (Jahresbuch der Werbung), we won in the Megaphone category, automotive category and durables category. The case is based on a social media strategy across offline and online channels.

Congrats to the team and a gutsy client.

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