TAG | marketers
Since we’ve recently highlighted a few of our favorite social media case studies, this week we thought we’d bring attention to some top social media agencies and what they are doing. These are the agencies that are setting the bar high and implementing innovative social media marketing.
There are many types of social media companies; some are research focused, some feature a team of app developers, some are extending and developing upon tradition PR. The best social media agencies combine these skills and help companies extend their brands through training, long term strategy, and execution.
Mullen is a full-service modern advertising agency, with clients ranging from Fage Greek yogurt to the Department of Defense. National brands like Zappos, Olympus and Jet Blue have turned to Mullen for campaigns; last year, the social-media savvy JetBlue chose Mullen as its lead advertising and marketing agency. The You Above All campaign featured a full mix of media including online, social media, in-flight, print, and out-of-home components. For the social media portion of their campaign, the agency created a series of hidden camera scenarios called Ground Rules. The unscripted videos poke fun at other airlines’ service policies by featuring real people in being deprived of things they’ve come to expect, such as legroom in a taxi and a full can of soda from a street vendor. The videos were primarily shown through a YouTube homepage takeover.
Ignite is a social media agency completely and exclusively focused on social media marketing. As opposed to PR and marketing firms that offer elements of social media marketing (like Mullen), Ignite’s team of tech, creative, account, and strategy professionals form a complete social media company, solely dedicated to the interactive and social media markets. Their work for Bing is one example of their success in the social media market. Bing wanted a tab on their Facebook Page that would showcase the variety of what Bing Travel has to offer its fans. Ignite created a tab with a standardized background to tie all of the individual pieces together; each individual section engages the fan in a different aspect of Bing Travel. Fans can also share Bing Travel elements on other social networks, by retweeting Did You Know facts on Twitter, for example.
Crispin Porter & Bogusky, an advertising agency based out of Miami, is known mostly for viral marketing techniques. Their Subservient Chicken campaign for Burger King was created to promote the chain’s TenderCrisp chicken sandwich and the “Have it Your Way” campaign. Crispin created the “The Subservient Chicken” web page, on which a “chicken” performs actions based on user input, showing pre-recorded footage and appearing like an interactive webcam. The site is meant to capitalize on the slogan: “Get chicken just the way you like it”.
Have you come across any social media agencies doing some truly innovative work? Let us know in the comments!
This week, we continue our interview series by speaking to Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a marketing software company. Volpe leads the company’s lead generation and branding strategy through inbound marketing and under his leadership, HubSpot’s marketing has won more than 30 awards and been featured in over 20 marketing and business books. Volpe also co-hosts the weekly marketing podcast HubSpot TV, blogs frequently and is very active in social media and as a marketing speaker.
What are your thoughts about the ROI of social media? Two things: First, the ROI is huge. There has been a big transformation in what marketing is effective today. You used to be able to just tell people what to think of you in advertisements and sell to them with cold calls. Now consumers have all sorts of ways of blocking that outbound marketing. You need to attract people using inbound marketing, making it easy for them to find you in blogs, search engines and social media. So, as part of an inbound marketing strategy, social media can be a great and valuable tool.
Second, I am not sure why everyone is holding social media to such a precise and exactly measured ROI when marketers have done all sorts of things for decades that did not have a great measurable ROI. Sure, you can measure the ROI of social media pretty well, but why hold it to a higher standard than print ads or events?
Are marketers that promise ROI setting expectations that cannot be delivered solely by social measures? Maybe, but it is not because of ROI they promise. The reason that is a mistake is that social media is actually not all that helpful or effective on its own. Social media is just a technology like the phone or email. Using it alone is not useful or effective. You need to have something useful, valuable and interesting to talk about in social media and a way to convert those social media connections into leads and sales. So anyone that says they can use social media alone to deliver ROI might not have a great strategy and might be misguided.
Is there a difference between ROI or “impact”? If so, is one more important? No difference in my mind. The R in ROI is the impact that your activity had. Technically ROI also compares the impact to the cost or investment, so maybe there is a little difference, but the concept is the same.
Does a consultant or agency need an ROI mindset when they work with a client? If so, how do you find out? Yes. Marketing today is measurable, and all good marketers measure what they do. I think clients should demand ROI and reports from all of their vendors. It often makes sense for the client to use their own analytics to measure what their consultants or agencies are doing, so they have an unbiased view. Smart marketers and companies take an active role in their marketing, and if you do outsource some of it, you are the ones who manage it, set the goals, and measure it.
Read more about Mike Volpe at his website.
This week, we begin our series of interviews with social media superstars. First up is author, certified Sommelier and brand strategist Rick Bakas, of Bakas Media in San Francisco. As the first Director of Social Media in the wine industry, Bakas has influenced new ideas and new concepts that connect wineries to new consumers through tweet-up tours and global online wine tastings. He specializes in translating personal and corporate brands to new media. This year, Bakas will be traveling the world educating businesses on how to build their brands online, stopping in cities including NY, London, Mexico, Sydney, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Munich and Napa, and speaking at the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
We asked him about social media ROI, impact and more:
What are your thoughts about the ROI of social media? In my opinion, “Return on Investment” is an outdated term based on the old way of doing things. New Media is just that—it’s new, which means we need to redefine what “return” looks like. The return we get in this new world takes on a new form we haven’t seen before.
I like to refer to it as ROA, or Return on Attention because the real magic happens when we’re able to get someone’s attention online and convert that attention into action. We’re increasingly overwhelmed with more technology and are bombarded daily with emails, text messages, tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook posts and all the other stuff in addition to the overstimulation from traditional media. We’re spending more time online than watching television so that’s where people’s attention is.
Going forward, savvy marketers will be able to nurture a healthy relationship online, so that at any given moment they can get someone’s attention no matter what channel they’re sending the message through. The true value is getting that mind share, even if for a moment and affecting a behavior such as a purchase. Where traditional media and new media share a commonality is Reach. In traditional media you pay for someone else’s reach for impressions. With new media you can create your own reach.
Are marketers that promise ROI setting expectations that cannot be delivered solely by social measures? Yes. In the previous answer I mentioned “return” taking on a new form we haven’t seen before. There’s a new factor in determining “return” called Time. Time is a multiplier now because digital content lives for a longer time. One single YouTube video could influence someone’s behavior in 2011 or 2016.
Marketers who promise anything related to social media are probably desperately trying to position themselves as experts out of a survival instinct, and are telling clients what they need to hear. No one can control digital content over time, nor can they guarantee how much attention they’ll be able to capture online.
Is there a difference between ROI or “impact”? If so, is one more important? Return on Investment, or as I call it Return on Attention, shares something in common with Impact. It comes down to Reach.
The number of impressions has a direct correlation to affecting someone’s behavior. In traditional media you rely on someone else’s reach like magazine readership or television viewers. In new media you can create your own reach. Either way you’re going for impact from impressions. The real magic happens when you leverage both at the same time.
Does a consultant or agency need an ROI mindset when they work with a client? If so, how do you find out? A consultant needs to have their client’s interest in mind. And because their client is most likely a business, then yes, working towards ROA should be the driving force.
When we work with client partners, we turn their sales funnel into an hourglass. We all know the sales funnel is about getting people to an action like a purchase, but the real beauty of new media adds a second half of the equation to the mix.
Ultimately, each client partner is going to have different objectives, so it’s good to start with their endgame and work backwards to build in the systems needed to accomplish the result.
For more information on Rick Bakas, head to his website.
What a powerful question. It’s the first step in creating engagement – you’ll hear us preach on engagement a lot here – and, asked properly, initiates a new dynamic. If you agree, we are now intertwined in an exchange of expectations. If you don’t, we separate and move on. Such as it is in life, so it goes in social media.
If a brand establishes a fan page on Facebook and promises information, offers or an “experience,” they expect that if you become a fan, you will actively participate as long as they continue to deliver their promised obligation. Sounds fair enough. As a matter of fact, it sounds like any social relationship you may enter into – lovers, friends, etc… The primary difference is that the onus is upon the brand to continually invigorate the relationship with new and exciting “stuff” lest boredom creep in and breed disinterest. Again, given the particular nature of the relationship, we say fair enough.
So, how do we as social media marketers maintain this lopsided relationship while ensuring that rewards are being reaped for our efforts? You got it – engagement. Make that “will you” question an active part of your social media marketing program. Don’t be afraid to ask people to do, try, ponder, consider, debate, refute, celebrate… things. If your audience is truly engaged, they will. If your request falls flat, then maybe you need to reconsider how you built your following (buying fans is questionable, and probably wont produce sustainable results) or what you are doing to keep them engaged (too much? too little? too fluffy? to pedantic?).
Plan ahead, ask the question and prepare for the discussion. Not only in social media, but in your real life as well.