Monday, June 16, 2008

Seminar at Cannes Lions 2008 "The Social Metropolis"

Newsletter from GoViral:

The Social Metropolis
The main theme of The Social Metropolis is Digital Brand Activation. In the following you will be introduced to how you do Digital Brand Activation and why you should be using a Digital Brand Activation approach.

What does Social Metropolis mean?
Media is democratizing – participation is taking over from more passive media forms. This leads to a greatly diversified and fragmented media place – one where it is harder to engage people.
Ultimately, the attention economy of the Social Metropolis is a zero-sum game. The attention somebody gets, someone else is denied.

One of the key challenges is to stay on top of the developments in the Social Metropolis. Just like a real city, the infrastructure develops all the time. Technology is the driver of all this, but it is also what will help us re-activate our brands in the social media world. Technology can help us reach the right people and measure our activities properly. Just think how well we have defined the traditional formats of mass marketing, and how much time we are spending, planning the right channels to get the desired outcome. The same consistent structure, quality, and insights are needed to achieve and maintain a high quality on your social media campaign plan, only the target can now be 1000 destinations instead of 10. The answer to this challenge is: The right mix of good content, the right technology and good media planning.

Social Citizen Activation
The framework for Social Citizen Activation regards Content, Activation and Attention; a) Content; we need to get content right in order for people to like it. b) Activation; we need professional and technologically aided distribution, if we are to succeed in reaching the right people c) Attention; mapping what we plan to do and measuring properly, what we achieved, allows us to receive feedback, benchmark our social media campaigns and gradually improve our activities. This is basically the three stages we take you through at GoViral – content evaluation, seeding and tracking with some spice and some insights to why these three phases are the right ones.

Digital Brand Activation
Bringing something to the table for users, in order to receive their support, requires a very different mind-set and set of tools than traditional advertising. There is a major difference between getting people to promote a social cause, and the interests of your company. Quite frankly, social epidemics are quite rare, especially for companies to instigate on purpose. The solution can be found in "big seed marketing" and "always on".

Big Seed: The central thesis of our book is that between the traditional mass marketing approach, and the newer influences such as viral marketing, is an important gap that marketers can capitalize on. Inspired by Duncan J. Watts, we propose an approach called 'Big Seed Marketing' that combines viral marketing tools with old fashioned mass media techniques in a new and creative way. Big seed means optimizing your content strategy and your distribution strategy to craft effective campaigns.

Always on: A central concept in marketing is the campaigns. All of marketing are set up today to plan and execute campaigns. 'Always on' addresses what happens when people are talking all the time, and you are only talking three months pr. year. For that, we have described the entire circle of marketing as a) search, b) review, c) buy and d) affect others. This circle covers the user's journey from potential customer to active brand advocate. 'Always on' invites the reader into a world, where people are discussing, reviewing and rating your product and brand all the time. A metropolis that never sleeps…
'Always on' means optimizing your online strategy to make sure you are present at all the main touch points of the consumer journey, that you have enough content available, and that you help the users get the best experience. This includes community building, easy access to help, services and guides, experiences and much more.

Nike Hyperdunk
The Nike Hyperdunk is the company's lightest and strongest basketball shoe ever. Weighing in at only 13 ounces, the Hyperdunk is 18% lighter than the average Nike Basket ball shoe, giving you better performance on the court and, apparently, allowing you to jump over speeding Aston Martins.
Nike produced two co-branded videos, featuring basket ball superstar Kobe Bryant jumping over a speeding Aston Martin and a pool of snakes, together with the Jackass crew.

Content. Activation. Attention.
The content of the video is great, because it just on the verge of unbelievable, but not crossing the line. Did he actually do it? Since the content is of such high quality, the activation phase is easier. People pass it on, if it is good enough. Companies still need to work professionally with placing the content in all the right channels, though. Attention is difficult to speculate about on this one, but having constructed the campaign with multiple clips, Nike managed to generate more than 7,5 mio. views over the first running weeks of the campaign, just on Youtube. More than 1,5 mio. additional views came from spoof videos or responses to the campaign. In addition, several of the spoof videos link to the original ones, creating a more vibrant user experience as well as better results for the campaign.

Did Kobe Bryant actually do the jumps or were they fabricated? Judge for yourself:

Aston Martin <
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWeEFV59d4>
Pool of Snakes <
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBJZXyfLrpU&amp;feature=related>

Kind regards,
Pernille Hegnsholt
http://goviral.com/viralradar.php

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