Social Marketing Campaigns Need To Be Faster, Adaptive

Posted on March 8, 2008
Posted by Mike Berkley

Emily Steel wrote this article in the WSJ yesterday. It is a MUST READ for anyone interested in social media marketing.

The article highlights an upcoming Toyota ad campaign on YouTube as an example of how mainstream big brands are getting more aggressive with social media to engage their target demographic.

Below are 3 snippets that were particularly interesting to me.

“Marketers increasingly are interested in building games or contests, creating special sections on sites or even producing their own Web TV series. Those campaigns, however, typically require too much labor for what is often a niche promotion.”

This is the promise of social marketing: branded, social interactivity that is more efficient and effective than conventional advertising. But they need to be nimble to evolve with the social interaction, and nurture it. As an example, for Converse we created an interactive basketball game that hooks into the social graph on Facebook to enable competition between friends, fueling viral growth. After just 1 week in circulation, we are already mapping out an extension to the game (based on user feedback) for launch in a few weeks. Just as YouTube (the tech platform) worked with Saatchi & Saatchi (the creative) on the Toyota campaign, SplashCast (the tech platform) worked with Wieden+Kennedy and Anomaly (the creative) on this Converse campaign.

“Sites such as YouTube see personalized marketing campaigns as the key to getting big companies excited about advertising with online video.”

Yes, we certainly do as well. But here’s the kicker:

“One drawback [to these types of custom social media campaigns] is that because they require so much time and manpower, they aren’t the most effective way to generate revenue. A better model, they say, would be to offer a basket of interactive marketing options that can be individualized but also easily replicated.”

This “better model” is the definition of SplashCast. We literally give our clients a menu of interactive video, game, contest, and user-generated content features for them to pick and choose from. Because SplashCast is a social marketing platform (unlike YouTube), our deployment process is very labor efficient; we are able to create highly customized, branded video and interactive game campaigns for clients very rapidly.

OK, I hit (or broke through) the ceiling of allowable self-promotion on our blog. But these are important points of differentiation and areas of leadership for us. And I believe SplashCast needs to do a better job in making the Emily Steels aware of them.

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