#40 The Future of Marketing is...Social.

Audiences today do not want to be talked at. They want to be engaged in conversation. Social media gives us the power to do this, allowing us to define and control our brand. There is a shift from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. Here are a few tips to take advantage of social media.

• Facebook. To help spread the word about a new campaign, why not ask employees to change their Facebook status to announce your latest campaign? If you have 20,000 employees, most likely 10,000 of them have Facebook. With the average person having 100 friends, your announcement could receive over 1 million impressions for free. Ask employees to include their LinkedIn Profiles – now you have 2 million impressions for free


• YouTube. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people more about your industry. This channel would feature a series of short, focused videos that educate your audience on related topics that help position you as an industry expert. The videos could highlight benefits and features of your products.


• Twitter. To help build and establish your company as an industry expert, top executives should create Twitter accounts to help position your company’s executives as thought leaders in the industry. Tweets should be business-related topics that talk about industry trends and forecasts. Zappos CEO has 1.6 million followers and is following almost 400K people. A total of 430 Zappos Employees have Twitter accounts. This presence helps Zappos engage and participate in conversations about their company.


• Flickr. Flickr is a great way to help promote events that your company sponsors. Photos can be optimized to show up in search results and increase brand awareness. Using Flickr to increase branding opportunities for KeyBank’s sponsorship of a 10K race, the Key “Bank to Bay” gallery has alone received 6,000 views following the event.

W6M: People visit social media sites every day, why not join them in what they are already doing?

#35 The Fun Theory

Volkswagen believes that the easiest way to change people's behavior for the better is by making it fun to do. They call it The Fun Theory.

W6M: Volkswagen tried something different and almost 2 Million people watched it in 6 days. Impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that they were able to change people's behavior, choosing stairs over escalators. How do you plan to change your audiences' behavior?

#34 Choose Your Own Ending

Digital Buzz: YouTube campaigns are changing and so are the ways you can develop interactivity with video. Since the introduction of video hotlinks we’ve seen more and more “interactive” videos & story telling campaigns emerging. This new campaign called “Choose Your Own Ending” by DropTheWeapons.org is an interactive film that allows you to decide what happens next. You can interact with it, choose what to do and decide how it ends!

W6M: This is a fresh idea that you will start to see more of. If you grew up reading "Choose your own adventure" stories, you are really going to appreciate these. The campaign created by DropTheWeapons.org is outstanding.

#20 Social Media Map

Social media are the means for any person to: publish digital creative content; provide and obtain real-time feedback via on-line discussions, commentary, and evaluations; and incorporate changes or corrections to the original content.

W6M: A number of my posts talk about social media (YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, etc.). When I found this Social Media Map created by Overdrive Interactive, I thought I would include it for reference.

• When you create a viral video, the first site you think about uploading your video to is YouTube. But there are a dozen more Top Tier sites that you shoud also submit your video to.
• When you optimizing your site, people typically focus on Yahoo, Google and MSN. There are again a dozen more Top Tier sites that you should also try to get listed on. Your competition may be duking it out on Google, which would allow you to take over ask.com or dogpile.com.
• When you think Social Media, you want to create videos, get ranked on the search engines, blog, wiki and podcast. Try to take advantage of these and figure out what works best for you.

My advice would be to not focus on a single area or site, but get listed on as many possible.

#1 Carmelo Anthony Etch A Sketch Video wins 2008 ABA Best in Show Award

The 2008 ABA Overall Award Winner was developed by Adcom for KeyBank: a brand awareness campaign to introduce viewers to KeyBank's KeyClub . The video featured Etch-A-Sketch artist George Vlosich who created a customized portrait of NBA star Carmelo Anthony. A time-lapse video showed the Etch-A-Sketch portrait as it was being drawn. The video, then uploaded on several Internet sites including MySpace, went viral. To date, the video has been seen by a million viewers and after being picked up on hundreds of blogs, websites, and major search engines. A PR and communications program supported this innovative campaign.

W6M: The Carmelo video was the second video created by this artist. The first video featured LeBron and recieved over 2 million views. We took a chance that lighting would strike twice and it paid off. Often times coming up with a viral idea is difficult, but you should try to take a look at partnering with someone that has proven success.