Continuing on from my earlier post into The Dark Knight’s social media campaign,  Warner Bros have kick started their seeding strategy for Christopher Nolan’s follow-up The Dark Knight Rises with a 12 month slow burn.

Already the site went live, playing some obscure soundtrack. Some persistent fan managed to slow down the audio and decrypted the message as #thefirerises . Tweeting the phrase fills in a part of an image of one of the main character’s Bane played by Tom Hardy.

In my post, A Guide to Social Media Propagation I outlined the key considerations for establishing a successful seeding strategy. This latest Dark Knight Rises campaign prompted me to realise that what I neglected to mention was the question what is the time plan for delivering the social strategy?

In the case of such an anticipated franchise such as Batman, the strategy could have been to put a news blackout to raise curiosity for the movie’s launch. Rather, like Warner Bros did for The Dark Knight, the digital strategy is built on building up anticipation over the course of 12 months by drip feeding information on the characters and storyline.

Initially the social strategy is relatively basic with a simple microsite and a twitter hashtag to lead the audience to the big reveal. Nevertheless I would predict that a more expansive campaign will take shape in the form of various sites, and across many mediums.

From a digital strategy standpoint I will look forward to documenting how this manifest itself over the coming months and I dare say this will start to move across a number of digital and offline channels.

Can a brand effectively take virtual shareholders as advocates of their brand? This is the question I ask regarding Empire Avenue – a hybrid game / social media measurement platform.

Effectively Empire Avenue enables users to buy and sell shares in a brand or individual based upon their output across other social media channels like Facebook, Twitter et al. From an individual perspective this is a compelling case. For example I invest in people whose blogs I read, or who I engage in commentary with. I have a vested interest because not only do I digest the content, but value is attached already to these people’s published output.

Now let’s extend the stocks and shares metaphor to brands. If I value a brand, there’s a sliding scale of engagement I can participate in online. 1) I can be part of the mainstream population e.g. a non fan who participates with a campaign inspite of the brand; 2) a fan who participates with a campaign because of the brand; 3) a brand advocate who becomes an extension of the brand and campaign – influencers who spread the word.

But do I attach value in the volume of engagement that brand chooses to adopt as part of it’s social media strategy and one in which Empire Avenue measures? Arguably no. It’s the content that interest me, that’s what gets me inspired, and moves me from the mainstream, to a fan, and ultimately an advocate.

So whilst Empire Avenue is an immersive game, it’s reach for brands is limited to being a research tool as oppose to engaging new and existing audiences. This research element is great news for digital strategists both brand and agency side to determine the reach of competitors.

Any digital strategist or planner worth their salt, needs to have an adaptable framework with which creative ideas can sit in. In this post I’m going to outline my framework and techniques that I’ve used when planning social media engagement.

Framework

One of the frustrating experiences within integrated agencies is that the digital space is often considered an after thought to be grafted later on down the process. This is wrong, wrong wrong. Just as traditional planners are drafted in at the beginning of a campaign, there is real value is bringing to getting a digital strategist / planner involved from day one to flesh out the landscape.

During the planning stage the following questions are invaluable in the execution of any digital or social media seeding strategy:

1. What are the goals and objectives of the campaign? Without a common goal and objective that’s clear, concise and understood by all can you have success
2. Who is your target audience? Here a planner needs to get really into quantitative and qualitative data to understand who the audience is and where they are located online. You can segment audiences behaviour based upon their social profile, the digital channels they inhabit and the interactions they perform in those channels.
3. Getting people to participate?  What are the motivations that compel people to interact on online? Is it self-actualisation, altruism, clarification of status? It’s around these considerations that tangible incentives and triggers need to be established that can influence audience behaviour. {insert pyramid]
4. Reducing the barriers for participation is key after researching the audiences key motivations. You can come up with the most brilliant campaign idea but if the user experience is bad or the build poorly executed then success will be hard to attain. Therefore consider what the functional needs of the audience are in each digital channel.
5. Making the experience as frictionless as possible needs to be another consideration. I recently worked on a campaign where the existing signup process took a good 3-4 minutes to complete. Looking at making the most effective and simple process for people to engage with a site or campaign is another key consideration.
6. What creative assets do you have at your disposal? If you have existing assets the first thing to do is to perform an audit to see if they fit with the creative idea. Discard those creative assets that are poor quality or no longer relevant for the campaign. My advice is do involve the client in the audit process to help facilitate the process
7. Ask yourself and others the question why would any one share? If you have access to research groups I would actively encourage anybody to ask their chosen audience what compels them to share online? (As a side note I asked a research group a few weeks ago if they created anything online? This was met with a resounding no. But when I rephrased the question do you upload and share photo’s, links, and video? It was an equivocal yes!)
8. Determine your communication plan or seeding strategy. Borrowing from Dan Zarella’s presentation on The Science of Timing he comes up with a number of stats. Retweets work best late in the day and in the week; weekends are best for Facebook sharing; Experiment with emails during the weekend; send emails early in the morning; blog on the weekend for comments; blog early in the morning for links; and blog more frequently
9. Align KPI’s that are relevant to the goals and objectives of the campaign. To aid the process walk through the user journeys to determine the key interactions and don’t fudge the importance of ROI.

The social channels are awash with the ongoing debate of Social Media ROI and whether it’s relevant. To my mind, it’s easier to dismiss something as being irrelevant without putting in the effort to understand the dynamics. The vast majority of people who call themselves social media ninja’s / guru’s etc have a vested interest in continuing to keep social media wrapped up in fuzzy thinking.

To my mind the genuine thought leaders in social media are those willing to apply qualitative and quantitative insight into our online social interactions and to put themselves under the microscope of critical thought.

I want this to go viral…

If I had a penny for every time somebody says the phrase ‘I want this campaign to go viral’ I would probably have £2.52. It’s very easy to fall into the fallacy that the idea behind a viral must be good, rather then to ask the question was it executed successfully. Through the next series of blog posts I’m going to determine some of the key factors to consider when propagating ideas through social media channels and debunk the myth of so called ‘viral’ ideas.

Rice Famers

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a whole chapter is dedicated to the techniques and dedication of paddy farmers to grow sufficient rice to support their families. Gladwell offers the following insight in an interview for NPR in November 2008:

Rice farming is the most labor-intensive form of agriculture known to man. It is also the most cognitively demanding form of agriculture … There is a direct correlation between effort and reward. You get exactly out of your rice paddy what you put into it.

Why not extend that concept of providing a rigorous framework when planning out a digital or social media campaign?

Our Online Motivations

The first question to ask is what causes people to spread ideas, concepts, and memes to others? To borrow from the ever insightful Patricia McDonald there are 5 key motivational touch-points

The internet and the social media channels that sit on top of it have set the conditions for our messages to be propagated in real time and to an audience of billions. This is a seismic shift away from the communication and propagation of ideas by governments, big business, and advertising firms. Instead it’s never been easier to create and share an idea online with our peers. To broadcast as well as consume online content.

Reach and Influence

Given the framework the internet has provided in enabling us to reach a mass audience, the propagation of those ideas is influenced by two factors: reach and influence. Griffin Farley’s presentation asks that you ‘Plan not for the people you reach, but for the people they reach‘. Griffin also down plays the role of the influencer in the transmission of  ideas, and illustrates the point with the analogy that it isn’t the influential cigarette that burns down a tinderbox forrest. The point being that you need to target and plan the right channels rather than the right influencer to influence those channels.

However taking the idea further, if you have a close-knit online community, with a clear understanding of the motives and patterns of behaviour that operates within that community, the more likely that the concept of influence transcends the select few and becomes endemic within that community. The social reputation service Peerindex seems to have the factor of context in mind when it comes to applying a measure of a person’s influence within a particular field.

Rinse and spin your Marketing Campaigns

In his video presentation – The Science of Social Media, Dan Zarella of Hubspot explains that our time and attention is the scarce resource with which viral ideas need to compete and evolve in order for us to engage. There is no magic formula for a viral idea, rather ever evolving marketing campaigns have to applied in order to determine what resonates with the audience.

Lifespan and the f-word

Another key factor Dan addresses is the level of commitment required by the user to interact with an idea. On a sliding scale you could have retweets, that take up a fraction of a person’s time, compared to say to the level of time and attention a person invests in writing an informed article for Wikipedia. Similarly the fecundity – how quickly an something grows – of a tweet in inversely proportionate to it’s lifespan. So tweets have a short life span compared with a published article. Planning for propagation has to factor in the attention span and level of commitment required by both broadcaster and the recipient and the likelihood of them passing it on.

Summary

There is no such thing as a guaranteed viral campaign. I’ve been in meetings with some very senior social media ‘Mad-Men’ demanding the next great idea is guaranteed to go viral without discussing how the campaign is going to be executed against. But in part 2 I will try and illustrate techniques that will increase the likelihood of something being propagated.