Page 93 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

The advertising industry moves between trends very quickly, and it seems that
brand utilities are already out of the limelight. What’s gaining favor now are apps
that use crowdsourcing. For example, Lays potato chips used this type of application
to solicit ideas from consumers for different chips flavors. In the program’s first
year, consumers submitted four million flavor ideas. Called “Do us a flavor,” Lays
designed the promotion so that an expert jury narrowed down the choices to four,
which were put on the market. The winner was then chosen based on fan votes
(through the application again) and made a permanent fixture on store shelves.

Podcasting

A podcast is a digital audio file that is made available via web syndication tech-
nologies such as RSS. Although it’s not, strictly speaking, social media, it’s often
classified as such because it allows anybody to easily syndicate her own audio
content. You can use podcasts as a way to share information with your audiences.
Often, podcasts take the shape of celebrity interviews or discussions about your
product or brand. A successful example of a podcast is the Butterball Turkey Talk
podcast. It’s a seasonal podcast including stories from Turkey Talk hotline work-
ers. You can subscribe to it via iTunes and other online podcast directories.

Podcasts typically don’t form a whole SMM campaign in and of themselves but
work well with other parts of a campaign.

Sponsored conversations

Sometimes the most effective SMM campaigns are the simplest ones. These cam-
paigns engage with consumers in a straightforward, authentic fashion on a social
platform while also aggregating other conversations, pointing to new ones, and
stoking the community. An early pioneering example was when Disney partnered
with Savvy Auntie (www.savvyauntie.com), an online community focused on aunts
without kids, for one such effort, which is shown in Figure 4-2. Melanie Notkin,
who runs SavvyAuntie.com, tweeted about Disney’s Pinocchio movie in March 2008
to coincide with its Disney anniversary release. She tweeted about themes in the
movie, often in question form, encouraging others to respond. Her 8,000 followers
on Twitter at the time (today, she has more than 24,000) knew that she was doing
this for Disney (every tweet about Pinocchio had a special tag), but because the
tweets were appropriate for the audience, entertaining, and authentic, the campaign
was a success. Since that pioneering example, there have been many more scenarios
in which brands have partnered with influencers around sponsored conversations.

A very different example comes from Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress
company, that used video to provide value to its consumers in thoughtful ways.
While this example technically isn’t a sponsored conversation, they treat it as such
and it incorporates several different concepts that we’ve discussed in this chapter.

CHAPTER 4 Launching SMM Campaigns 77