Digigen & The TinMan

Debate has raged since Facebook launched about who owns the social conversation. Should it be PR agencies, because as Andrew Bloch puts it in a recent article in Campaign because they “are the experts in telling the story, not selling the story”. Should it be Creative Agencies, because they can react quickest with content and creativity, plus they have some of the best writers in the business. Or should it be In-house agents working for the brand, as they are closest to the brand heartbeat.

To tell you the truth, on reading all the different cases put forward by all the different areas, the question isn’t “who owns the social conversation”, but actually should it really matter? Sadly, Bloch’s article highlights the fundamental lack of understanding of social media and social conversation by talking about them “controlling” the conversation. Surely, this misses the point somewhat that social media conversation is difficult to control and the struggle that PR have is the adaptability when the conversation gets “off message”.

Anyway, I’m not criticising Bloch, my point is that there is no need for one person, one agency type to own the conversation. It doesn’t really matter. There are so many different elements of social that each agency can find its own field and adapt. There are some great modern PR exponents of this, Dan French at Clifford French, Zac Schwarz at Shine, to name a couple I have worked with and know well.

But then there are some great creatives who understand what can drive social conversation and we are lucky to have two here at The Brooklyn Brothers, Ali Alvarez and Cali Oliver.

A couple of years ago 2008, I created this very, very, very simple triangle of where I thought social media was at. I still think it applies and giving the desire to pick “who owns the social conversation” perhaps it helps somewhat. But then again who cares.

Apparently, this is how you calculate the ROI of social media. But let me expand further below the jump…

It was the moment people in the room had been waiting for. The presenter was at the start of his presentation into Social Media Effectiveness. The slide was a picture of a cup of tea. The accompanying summary “Trying to find the ROI for Social Media is like trying to find the ROI for a cup of tea”. Silence descends on the room. People leave. Social Media slowly dies.

If this is genuinely what we think about Social Media ROI, then the industry is in big trouble. I know there are exponents thinking differently about ROI, trying to approach it and create a smart way of looking at how Social Media contributes. We all talk about “effectiveness” but what we show is “affect”, not actually a ROI. How come we can’t get there any quicker?

When I first started in the industry, the year 2001, we were attaching margins to search keywords for clients like Expedia. It was simple. We knew the page people landed on and could assign a value to that page, then link back to the keyword. We can create goals in Google Analytics and link that back to unique URLs, so we should be able to link a video view to a visit to a sales page.

The problem is we focus on engagement. Engagement is simply the first stage in a consumer journey. Yes, we should be producing content that is engaging, but there are different types of engagement as highlighted below.

We need to start taking the lack of proven ROI seriously. Otherwise Social Media might just be left on the side as “something we tried”, I’m looking forward to the next IPA Social Media Effectiveness conference where we have genuine case studies about ROI, Effectiveness, and some award winning effectiveness campaigns.

The Being Henry campaign has been a roaring success. Although there have been a few critics, namely on comments on Creative Review, the new type of interactive branded content seems to have created pretty wide appeal. Part of the success of the campaign has been the seeding of the campaign through the Brooklyn Brothers social team, it has helped to create wide participation rather than simply viewing.

In addition, to seeding trailers and a making of, we have been hard at work creating more tangible assets such as the boxes of Donuts which are now appearing on news desks, in blogger mailboxes, and other influencer areas. The film is all about choices and the donuts are too. Check out the photo below to see what we mean.

We believe part of any social campaign should be to create something more tangible than just an email. Thor have done it with their goodie boxes and we believe we have done it through our Donut boxes.

Cast your mind back to 2000. Can you remember what the internet looked like and how it was shaping up? Google was on the rise, Hotmail was booming and social media, well that was a completely unknown area or term. Of course, there were social media and social networking sites, but they hadn’t been named as such. They were simply places you hung out, chatting.

The year was 2000, the film was Pitch Black. The problem? Trailers of Pitch Black had been booed at the Cinema. The film distributor involved had spent a fortune securing the rights to distribute the first Vin Diesel film. A poor performance in the box office and it could have finished off the film distributor. The solution? A highly social and sensory experience.

The Pitch Black strategy was the brainchild of George Bryant, one of the founding partners of The Brooklyn Brothers in London. When I heard about Pitch Black, I thought it was the original social media strategy. Generating conversations by creating a sensory experience amongst a niche group, amplifying a film and turning it into the beginnings of a cult brand – The Chronicles of Roddick.

The strategy was born out of an insight generated at a focus group. There were ideas about darkness, the focus group were blindfolded and told to talk about the darkness and what it meant. One girl highlighted the fact that every weekend she spent hours in darkness. She was part of the illegal raves happening all across Orange County, with DJs like Sasha and Carl Cox playing to them. These massive warehouse parties lasted for hours, most of which was in darkness apart from lasers and lights.

They came up with the idea of plunging these people into total darkness. Faking a power cut and bringing in the trailer as if it was something real happening to them. Its such a great idea that even now, you can imagine it happening and having the same effect. A modern War of the Worlds if you like. You need to skip to around 5mins (carries on for about another 3/4mins) in this video below.

Pitch Black Rave via Noolmusic.com

The idea was amplified even further by using sites like Rave World where a live stream of the events was hosted and clubbers who were sat at home could see what was unfolding in the warehouse parties in LA and Chicago. It led to Pitch Black having a massively successful opening weekend and helped launch The Chronicles of Roddick.

My feeling is that this is truly one of the original examples of social media. Its a great case study for social, live streaming and sensory marketing all happening together. A cutting-edge social media solution from 2000, who would have thought it?

A Model for Pitch Black

I recently had a really interesting conversation with a favourite client. We “clashed” over a chart I produced saying that insight and data are what drives digital strategy. The client had recently attended a conference where big players such as Unilever were saying that data is killing marketing. Interesting.

At that point in time I didn’t think that was the case, but actually perhaps she was right. I don’t think data is killing marketing, but I do think bad research, pointless numbers, or data lacking real insight is. Not a day goes by where I don’t see data from a social media agency or research panel, pointing out how great social media is or who isn’t great at it. These are interesting, for a bit, but I think they are damaging to the industry that we work in. Fundamentally, this sort of research is clouding the more serious issues that we, in social media, need to answer. (continues below…)

Some recent examples include:

- Nielsen’s  “People who follow celebrities, also follow brands” (Link here)

- Radley Yeldar’s “Not all the Top 100 FTSE companies are that social” (Link here)

- Peer Index’s “whoever has the most influence on twitter is the best social agency” (Link here)

Its not that I completely disagree with these reports, I just don’t feel they are going to help drive the industry forward to the point where we are a meaningful force, with hugely credible research supporting investment. As we have seen, and as Brian Solis pointed out, Social ROI and research is time-consuming. It takes time to pull together tools which don’t always answer the questions we post on their own.

I think focused research, potentially lead by the IAB, will enable all parties to sell in the idea of social media without the slightly dismissive notion that “companies simply aren’t committed to being open and transparent”. The more we push out meaningless stats, hand drawn infographics, and basic panel results (I saw one recently for 40 people and it was being billed as conclusive) the less seriously people will treat tools like BrandWatch, Radian6, or others.

My background is data, direct response, boring I know. However, I do think its the responsibility of all of us who work in social media, those who study social culture and preach twitter/facebook, to create groundbreaking research into what we do convincing more clients than just Coke to invest sizeable chunks of their media and ad spend.

The key things I would love to find out are:

- What the differing ROI of followers/fans/likes are across multiple industries.

- What is the value of an influencer tweet/post/update about our brands.

- What is the path to conversion from a video play to an in-store sale.

- What factors should be considered in the differing approaches to social channels and how do these convert to sale differently.

- How successful is the shortening of the commercial process by “socialising” your commerce platform.

I’d much rather see these. And you, what would you like to see?