Do our current business models work in light of the rise of social business? Rawn Shah asserts no. With many throwing different theories around, Shah lays out a logic for his arguments and why this works for many business models. And this intrigued us for how this will change professional education and overall collaboration.
This Tuesday, May 1st, at 11:30am ET, Social Media Week founder Toby Daniels will be talking with Rawn Shah via Google Hangout On Air to learn more. You’re invited to join us. Find us here and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Want to know more about Shah before tomorrow? This may help: Rawn Shah explores collaboration and social business methodologies within and beyond organizations. He writes the Connected Business blog on Forbes.com, and is the author of seven books, his latest being “Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs” (Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, 2010). For a decade, he was a columnist and editor for technical journals such as JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, Network Computing World, Windows NT World Japan, IBM developerWorks. He is currently Social Business Strategist for the Worldwide Enablement team in IBM Collaboration Solutions focused on business processes, determining the business value of collaboration technologies, and governance and ethics in social business.
A month ago, we introduced you to our Global Curator, Don Tapscott. In addition to his role with us, he is an adjunct professor of management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, globalization and the economic and social impact of technology on business and society- and let us not forget his musical role as keyboardist in Toronto-based band Men in Suits.
Now, we can add to his bio a Thinker50. We are excited to announce Don has been listed as an Business Idea Guru in the top 10 of Thinkers50. Thinkers50 is the definitive global ranking of management thinkers published every two years. This prestigious award is based on voting at the Thinkers50 website and input from a team of advisers led by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove. Don was chosen out of thousands of nominees and was selected based on originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and what Thinkers50 calles “the elusive guru factor.”
A couple months ago, someone started to post some pretty weird videos on the Facebook page of Suzelle Berthier. In one video, she was kissing someone, in another she was shoplifting, in yet another one, she was sleeping in her bedroom. Who was filming her? No one seemed to know.
Suzelle’s friends started to react, thinking it was all pretty scary. And Suzelle herself asked for help. Estranged from her sister, Gaelle, Suzelle asked her friends to call Gaelle on her behalf. And they did. In fact, people made hundreds of calls. Unfortunately, it didn’t help Suzelle. She was found dead in her apartment.
Intrigued? So were 16,000 registered players of Detective Avenue, a transmedia film and game series that recently ran in France. Produced by Murmures Productions, Detective Avenue was financially supported by Orange and was the winner of the telco’s first Creation Workshop (Les Ateliers de la Création) in 2010.
Transmedia: Orange Supporting the Pioneers “Transmedia perfectly illustrates what a network operator like Orange can bring both to the world of creation, and to the world of content consumers,” said Jean-François Rodriguez, Vice President of Games and Social Media at Orange, upon launching Detective Avenue this spring. “To encourage their emergence and support these new forms of narration, we are calling on all our channels, creation and broadcasting tools, and actively engaged in the development of a large number of projects. But this would not be possible without the creativity of a new generation of producers such as Murmures Productions, who we have been working closely with on the Detective Avenue project.”
For Laurent Guérin, Transmedia producer at Murmures Productions: “Detective Avenue is an innovative program which harnesses the effective fit between different media, screens and the use of social networks to maximum effect. For a content producer, transmedia opens up incredibly rich resources and additional depth in terms of how a story is told, in keeping with viewers’ practices and expectations. Working with Orange has made it possible for this story to exist on all the services that an operator offers its customers”.
At MSLGROUP’s Critical Conversations blog, we are following the transmedia trend quite closely. In fact, in our 2011 Social Predictions report, we predicted that transmedia–storytelling across diverse platforms enabling audience participation–would build momentum this year and that brands would start to see the opportunities for conversation and brand-building.
Detective Avenue, which ran for five weeks this past spring and enabled people to collaborate, share clues and solve the murder mystery, cost 710,000 euros, spread equally between the production of two hours of video (58 episodes) and all the new-media aspects: creation and hosting of www.detective-avenue.fr, an iphone app, and salaries related to the creation and maintenance of the social media platforms, content etc. Orange was the largest contributor (390, 000 euros); France’s National Center of Cinematography provided 200,000 euros and Murmures Productions funded the remaining 120,000 euros.
Wooing Brands
I have personally been following the Detective Avenue story, having met Laurent at a transmedia barcamp, an informal, participatory conference, in Marseille a couple months ago. I also caught up with him at a recent event hosted by TechMap Paris (which launched earlier this year during Social Media Week) and Lunch Club after Dark, two networking groups here. “We wanted to show and prove that a model like this is possible, from an entertainment perspective,” Laurent told a crowd of Parisian marketers.
And from a business model perspective? The results are mixed. Orange clearly saw the benefit of supporting an innovative project that was enabled by mobile phones and an Internet connection. But Laurent and his team did not have any luck securing advertisers for Detective Avenue.
“This kind of program needs massive exposure but the experimental nature of it made it a tough sell,” Laurent told me. “Prospective sponsors kept saying, ‘Show me the figures’ but this hadn’t been done before. It’s the price of being a pioneer. And it’s also a question of [a] brand willing to take a risk.”
Indeed, the metrics for Detective Avenue—seen just in French and in France—are a strong indication for the appetite for multimedia storytelling, gaming and creative collaboration. If the project had been in English, it likely would have taken off internationally given Orange’s support and the high level of engagement, Laurent said.
Even if you don’t speak French, I think you will agree that this trailer draws you in. Suzelle has just died. Gaelle, her distraught sister, is about to start her murder investigation.
Website Metrics/Five Weeks
16,000 registered players ; 75% were 15-30 years old ; 60% were women
For those interested in the particulars, here is what Laurent’s team produced :
120 videos for the website, Daily Motion and YouTube, including 58 video episodes recounting the story of Gaelle’s murder investigation and dozens of other videos including suspect profiles, their “secrets of the past” and trailers.
Facebook daily newsfeed and forum for exchanging clues, theories, solutions
Daily questions and 100 clues
Points, badges, rankings and gifts for the 16,000 registered players
Text messages and voicemails through a “click to call” program; players could receive answers to daily questions or listen in on conversations between characters by sending an SMS
Twitter newsfeed and forum
iPHone app with exclusive content: suspects’ secrets from the past
TV viewing via Orange cable
The Future of Storytelling
What’s in the cards for Laurent? He is committed to transmedia and hopes that brands will commit, too.
“Marketing today is all about audience engagement, and I can’t think of a better strategy for delivering on that,” Laurent said. While traditional advertising is great for awareness, nothing beats the interactive, participative, and addictive story that transmedia provides. With all the opportunities, both brands, producers, storytellers, telcos–you name it–most everyone can partner and benefit.”
Sally O’Dowd is engagement editor at Paris-based MSLGROUP, the speciality communications, PR and engagement network of Publicis Groupe. She curates content for the MSLGROUP Critical Conversationsblog and worked on MSLGROUP’s social media predictions report, which can be found here. She can be reached at sally (dot) odowd (at) mslgroup.com. Follow her on Twitter @sallyodowd. Follow MSLGROUP @msl_group.
Having interviewed internet filmmaker Alexis Niki for a blog post about transmedia during Social Media Week in February, I was excited to hear a couple weeks ago that she was speaking again in Paris at an event hosted by two networking groups: TechMap Paris (which launched during SMW) and Lunch Club After Dark.
Alexis and transmedia producer Laurent Guérin (see related blog post here) discussed the relationship between brands and transmedia storytelling, one of the 2011 trends that my MSLGROUP colleagues discuss here.
To get us thinking, Alexis shared quotes from two transmedia pioneers:
“Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media.Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of diverse entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”
—Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California professor and author of Convergence Culture
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“In order to understand how to implement transmedia successfully you need to know story.”
—Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, who has worked on projects such as Avatar and Pirates of the Caribbean
For Alexis’ part, she says that humans have always enjoyed participating in stories, whether through religious rites and rituals or talking about The Office at the water cooler. Today, a diverse mix of digital technologies enables people to participate more fully in a story, creating momentum before a movie hits theaters or adding a new thread to an ad or PR campaign.
She notes that a transmedia project, whether originating with an ad, a book or a film, is more than just cross-platform storytelling. Transmedia takes the idea of working across platforms one step further, to include audience participation in the storytelling itself.
It is in that context that Alexis showed a couple examples of transmedia in action.
Old Spice
The Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” advertising campaign started with great storytelling, the foundation of all creative advertising since time immemorial, and took on transmedia aspects as the story grew.
The campaign, featuring former NFL football player and actor Isaiah Mustafah, was built on a universal truth: women and men fantacize about each other. With a tongue-in-cheek approach, the series of ads enabled people to laugh at themselves and their fantasies, Alexis said. (For a related blog post about this ad campaign and our own transmedia-inspired antics at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, click here.)
Weiden & Kennedy, the creative agency leading the campaign, leveraged the power of social networks, asking Old Spice followers on Twitter and Facebook, as well as users on Reddit and Digg, to submit questions for the Old Spice man. Celebrities such as Alyssa Milano, Ashton Kutcher, Rose McGowan and Christine Applegate even got involved.
And here is where the participatory aspect of transmedia comes in, Alexis said. Milano began engaging with Mr. Old Spice via Twitter and then she herself started to create video responses, asking him (or rather P& G) to pledge $100,000 to the National Wildlife Federation’s Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund.
In this regard, Old Spice is a great example of how people can participate and even create new story threads using the diverse mix of technologies available to them.
The Dark Knight
Entertainment 42 won the Cannes Cyber Lion in 2009 for its Why So Serious ? alternate reality game (ARG) to promote The Dark Night. It contains all the elements of a good transmedia project—a compelling story (the movie itself), fan participation, games and clues, the use of digital technologies and even events, such as the one organized for fans at Comic Con, Alexis said.
When granting the Cannes award in 2009, Cannes Cyber Lions Jury President and Ogilvy Chief Digital Officer Lars Bastholm noted that the ”Why So Serious? campaign aggregated the elements of the Batman cultural phenomenon with an ARG, and added that the 18-months build-up prior to the film’s launch heralded a welcome trend in brands taking more time to create deeper relationships with consumers.”
This case study highlights the worldwide anticipation for The Dark Knight film:
“The web has given us great opportunities to tell stories in different ways, and to have it spill off into the lives of people, and create communities that can discuss it, discover it and figure it out…and give the audience a chance to participate in the story,” says Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment. “The never-ending online story is just starting to be written, in that people are thinking about storytelling for the web in a different way.”
Below is a video with more from Susan Bonds:
Along with several MSLGROUP colleagues, I share a real passion for transmedia, and what it means for creative storytelling and the exchange of ideas. And you? Are your a storyteller or marketer getting into transmedia?
Sally O’Dowd is engagement editor at Paris-based MSLGROUP, the speciality communications, PR and engagement network of Publicis Groupe. She curates content for the MSLGROUP Critical Conversationsblog and worked on MSLGROUP’s social media predictions report, which can be found here. She can be reached at sally (dot) odowd (at) mslgroup.com. Follow her on Twitter @sallyodowd. Follow MSLGROUP @msl_group.
If you’re not familiar with the world of museum experts, Communicating the Museum Conference may not ring a bell. However, to those that are busy with branding, communicating, marketing, advertising or even curating museums, this conference is the highlight of the year. It is organised by professionals for professionals and is attended by members of MoMA, Tate, V&A, Louvre, you name it.
Essentially, all the well known and successful brands are there to share best practices and up and coming brands are there to take notes and network. The conference is organized by AGENDA and this year’s edition was hosted by the Museum Kunstpalast in the elegant city of Dusseldorf. AGENDA is an international public relations agency for museums located in the heart of Paris. I was lucky enough to attend and wanted to take a moment to share an interview I conducted with the person behind the GoogleArt project - Amit Sood and his successor – James David.
1. The GoogleArt platform offers an unique on-line visit in 17 world-class museums. The benefits of the GoogleArt platform for the end-user are amazing, but what does the on-line exposure at the GoogleArt platform give to the museums? Have you or the participating museums analysed and linked the on-line user behaviour to that of the physical visitor?
James Davis: I can give you the answer from Tate’s perspective, which was my previous role at Tate. The advantage from the museum’s perspective was absolutely about reaching the audience. People who have never heard of Tate and were not aware of the Tate collection and the great art work involved, could encounter it through the project because Google has a very wide reach. With regard to the connection between the on-line visitor and potentially the physical visitor, Tate is researching that right now to find connections, and totally there are some people that ask in the gallery about the project and references and relationships between the two.
From the museum’s perspective being on GoogleArt is certainly something that helps drive potential visitors to the museum, but that’s not the reason for involvement. However, it’s a very positive side effect of the involvement in the project.
Amit Sood: Quantitatively what we can measure is the traffic to the museums’ website. And it has increased, that’s a fact. Qualitatively the brands of the participating museums have benefited because of the media coverage. But does the online help the offline? This is very difficult to measure because you need to find some assumptions and make some correlations and that we leave to the museum to do because they know how much traffic they have on the website and how much traffic they have in the offline.
2. We already know that online visitors can make their own collection of art on GoogleArt and share it with friends, which is amazing. Have you envisaged any new social features in the future?
We thought of more social features, but it’s too early for us to figure out what they might be. We are seeing that people love spending time telling their friends what they found in a painting or what they think about a painting and we want to try and get these emotions out there in an easy way for the users. Whether that’s through creating a community or through integrating more social media tools, we don’t know, but we are evaluating different options. I think in the next phase you will see a few more social features or I would rather call them interactive experiences for people who love the same thing. So, if you love a painting and I love a painting, how can we talk about it?
3. There are 17 museums currently represented at the GoogleArt platform. And you announced that you are planning to add new museums to this collection? My question is in general what does it take to add “plus one”?
Well, as I mentioned during the presentation, the negotiations and going through all the legal aspects a museum is bound to is quite a lengthy process, but once this is done, what it takes “to add one more” are the three different components of the project – the street view, the giga pixel and the high resolution images, and then there is the meta data. Essentially what it takes on the museum side is, the museum needs to select what they want to show in the project, that’s something we leave to them, we don’t interfere on the curation. Once they are ready, they start working with us and we take care of the different operations – the recording of the selected museum halls with the street view trolley, taking the high resolution and the giga pixel photographs. We also provide them access to upload the meta data… and then we launch! So basically we provide all these resources totally for free and the museum has to arrange the location, the time and the coordination with us. There is a lot of effort that the museum has to put themselves, but Google will provide the different tools for the different steps.
4. Would you call the GoogleArt a stable project, i.e. do you have the resources to support any museum that wants to join, even if it’s not a renown museum. Or do you have any plans to make it an open platform?
Amit Sood: In the next phase we will have some elements that will be more stable and will allow some museums to upload their collections and show it on the platform. But if the question is can we do street view for every museum in the world, it’s very difficult because there is operational work involved and whenever there is an operational element involved scalability is slow. We’ll see as we move along, things might get easier to do. We would like more museums to join in phased manner as we test new tools that allow for greater scale.
5. Are there any new art projects that Google is working on or projects that you would like to see realised in the future?
Amit Sood: Different Google offices always work on different projects. For example YouTube Play, which was done with the Guggenheim museum was done with some friends of ours based in New York. Recently we did a project with the Getty museum and the Google Goggles™ app. So, there are lot’s of different art projects, but some of them are one-off initiatives and some others like the GoogleArt project are rotating initiatives. What is very important in Google is that we don’t approach things as a big project. For example when we started the GoogleArt project we started as something very small, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something going on somewhere that will blossom into something big one day.
Elina Zheleva is working for the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne. Currently she is located in Paris, where she is finishing her EMBA and is specializing in Marketing and Communications. She is a co-founder of the SocialEast.eu project.
It is increasingly evident that social media is no fad and within the medium online photo sharing is quickly becoming a significant force behind increased user engagement and interaction. Buddy Media, one of the more prominent social media consulting solutions, points out that user engagement on Facebook spikes 20% on pages that incorporate photographs into their content strategies.
Noting the power of photo sharing, companies are quickly adapting to respond to this dynamic. The companies below, and the tactics they’re leveraging, provide us with insight into the evolution of content sharing and a sense of what we can expect from the industry moving forward.
Color’s patent-pending advanced proximity algorithms locate all other smartphones using this application. Every photo and video is instantly shared with other nearby phones. Photo Credit: color.com
Color is an application for iOS and Android devices that – at the heart – is a proximity based photo sharing solution. Essentially, Color digitally connects multiple smartphones, which are within a pre-specified range of each other, and allows those users to “digi-sync” their photos, videos, and text to one defined destination. Picture going out on a Friday night for a friend’s birthday. You can bet there are at least 5 people taking pictures and/or video. And of course – these individuals sporadically document different parts of the night. No clear time line exists. Things become lost in translation. Only bits and pieces span across an extended period of time, leaving many gaps. Color’s patent-pending advanced proximity algorithms locate all other smartphones using this application. The work is done for you on the spot. Every photo and video is instantly shared with other nearby phones. Seamless and intricate - with no uploading, emailing, or attaching required. Their website and brief demo can be found at www.color.com.
The concept is truly revolutionary. Between all of the clutter in the mobile world today – the potential of this idea can reach foursquare proportions. What I mean is there are parallels: the location-based concept combined with mobile photography blend a “checking-in” function for your pictures. Imagine you are at a Yankee game or a Bob Dylan concert. Now, picture your foursquare feed – and then your Instagram library. By loading this app, you are checking-in with only photos. Exclusivity really is key here. You may stumble and scroll through recent photos behind the Yankee dugout or backstage at Dylan’s rehearsal. My imagination may be getting ahead of itself. Nonetheless, the possibilities are endlessly intriguing.
Kaptur allows a user to easily arrange all media from an event so everyone’s photos, videos, and status updates can all be found in one place. Photo Credit: kaptur.com
Kaptur, unlike Color, lives online and focuses on the consumer’s need to structurally organize their photos to one location. Their platform lets a user easily arrange all media from an event so everyone’s photos, videos, and status updates can all be found in one place. Once you have media organized this way, you can treat it as a single album and download all at once, share with friends, and organize however you like. A great use case for this are weddings – as exampled on their website at wedding.kaptur.com.
Proximity-based software is irrelevant in this case, since wedding albums are inherently selective and specifically organized (bride’s family, groom’s family, friends, etc.). I asked owner and CEO Tej Bhatia what changes he envisions in this field and how Kaptur plans on adapting in a rapidly evolving arena. “While social networks are ‘social’ and photosharing does ‘share,’ both are still based on the concept of user profiles and photo albums, neither of which scale well for groups. Kaptur provides a solution that scales without changing any existing user behavior when it comes to social networking and photo sharing.” Simple yet brilliant. From the looks of it, they are poised to move the photo sharing industry further along towards a more synchronized, all-inclusive digital destination.
Twitter’s recent integration of a native, in-house photo and video sharing service into it’s platform is a real game changer. You are able to enter a keyword or search term which will return results, in addition to a filmstrip of photos and videos. Photo Credit: twitter.com
Which brings us to the beast in the room (or more appropriately – on the web): Twitter. Now, we already know the power of 140 characters. We’ve seen the social, marital, and political repercussions time and time again. And of course, we’ve found out that an image is definitely worth a thousand words, not just 140 characters. So why is this relevant when it comes to photo sharing? People posting pictures to twitter has been around since Day One, right? This is all true. Twitter’s recent integration of a native, in-house photo and video sharing service is the real game changer. Third party companies, such as TwitPic and YFrog, become rendered obsolete. Only time will tell if they are the ones that evolve and adapt to this shift of power.
This would also mean that all of these photos and videos, uploaded by the Twitter community, would become searchable. Very similar to the hashtag experience, a specific keyword or search term will return results in addition to a filmstrip of photos and videos. Categorically speaking – this gives Twitter a huge x-factor when it comes to competing with Facebook. Unlike Facebook, you are able to search through the masses without pre-specified privacy restrictions. The “public domain” that Twitter has created will only compliment the search-ability of their photo sharing service. Google Images might have to watch it’s back.
This brief overview of emerging tactics confirms that an exponential number of innovations are being made in the field of digital photo sharing. Between proximity, organization, and mass outreach – one can argue that an exciting road is being paved right in front of our eyes (and hands, ears, etc.). Our society wants things to be quicker and easier. These wants, one by one, are rapidly coming to fruition.
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Stan Bashmashnikov is a contributor for the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team based in New York City. He runs stanmichaelbash.com, a social media consulting service and online blog covering social media, creative advertising, and events. Follow him on twitter (@stanmichaelbash).
On May 24, Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere when he wrote “Being an expert in social media is like being an expert in taking bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich.” Which is to say, Peter doesn’t think much of the social media experts, gurus, mavens, etc. that are flooding the market calling themselves professionals.
25 May 2011, Amsterdam - big crowd – Internet geeks, entrepreneurs, investors and aficionados alike.It was at the backstage of the SIME conference in Amsterdam that we managed to find Erinn Marzo – Vice President at Buddy Media, in London. The Buddy Media Platform provides tools for brands to launch and maintain their Facebook pages, grow their fan bases and monitor feedback. According to CrunchBase it is the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers. Erinn has been with the company since 2008 and is responsible for Strategic Brand Partnerships. She is currently in London setting up their new office. So in one of the coffee breaks, over some coffee and stroopwafels we had the chance to ask her what she thinks about the future of Facebook and social media branding.
Buddy Media’s tagline is “Every brand needs a buddy”. Who is your company’s buddy? In other words how do you promote and maintain the Buddy Media brand?
That’s a great question. I would say we have lot of buddies. Everyone who works at Buddy Media, we call them buddies. Everyone of those people has a network of people, who just because of the nature of our company and how personal it is to everybody, does quite a good job of promoting us. We have excellent friends in the form of our board of advisers and our board of directors. All of them helped us quite a lot in terms of getting exposure for Buddy Media as a brand. It is important to make people understand that we are a technology company, but we enable marketing programs for brands and agencies, which is probably not so obvious from the name. And then in addition to that the agencies that we work with become our buddies. Once they use our system and understand that it’s valuable they do a good job introducing us to different brands that they work with.
What are, in your opinion, the future trends in social media branding?
I think commerce is a big one, but not only commerce on Facebook, which a lot of people are experimenting with now. We found that this is actually not always the most ideal interaction that people want to be having on Facebook directly. So, Facebook commerce, but powered on existing e-commerce sites. This is becoming really powerful. The users go to a site, they engage, share and understand reviews about a product using Facebook technology and then complete a purchase that in some way is tracked back to Facebook and to the originator of that message,. That’s becoming a huge traffic wave for Facebook- and when combined with Facebook’s direct products like Places and Deals, Facebook commerce is becoming a large initiative for brands.
Buddy Media is the leader in Facebook Marketing, can you share with us what are some of the new Facebook tools that will help brands leverage off the social networks.
One of the features that we just developed for our Platform and continue to enhance is this idea of a pledging application for Facebook. We found that so many people discover Facebook, and rightfully so, as an ideal place for social cause awareness, charities, as well as phenomena like crowd-sourcing deals, opportunities, and discounts. What the pledging does is it allows you to say ok, when you get 50 000 people or 100 000 people on Facebook to say “I pledge my support for this cause” or “I want to participate in this deal”, much like Groupon does, then we as the brand are going to unlock a certain piece of content for them or a discount or voucher offer. In the case of non-profit awareness, perhaps when we get 100 000 people to pledge then we will give 100 000 or 50 000 euro away or whatever it might be to a non-profit initiative. So, because Facebook is inherently social and people want to be virally spreading the word about something they believe in, it’s the ideal place to leverage a technology piece like this that connects it together.
Buddy Media has recently acquired Spinback. The Spinback EasyTrack Plugin™ and EasyTrack Analytics™ allow the brand to measure sales from social networks and to identify their influencers on social networks. This hits directly into the ROI issue. What other tools would you like to see developed for measuring ROI and helping brands make decision on how to allocate their marketing spends.
Another excellent question… we were discussing earlier on stage about geolocation and integrating things like Facebook Places with geo-technology. Right now there are not a huge number of tools that help you track that local aspect with your deal or promotion. Creating something that ties in and sorts out the mobile specific data, i.e. people who are checking in using Facebook Places have slightly different behavior and different patterns of returning to the site. What that data shows when compared with the open web, that will be really important in the future because mobile is becoming more and more of a significant area for Facebook as a company and for everybody who is using Facebook to promote their business. So, I would love to see robust tools that present both of those sets of data next to each other to allow marketers to compare behavior across online, mobile and in-store.
How do you see your business beyond Facebook?
I think the question is really not about going beyond Facebook, but how is Facebook going beyond Facebook.com. We are always going to be tied to Facebook technology because we believe in it and we believe in what it’s doing for the internet. We’ve been very close with Facebook from the beginning. Now we are going beyond developing tools just for Facebook Pages to creating technology that measures how Facebook is impacting people’s behavior all over the internet thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph technology.
In other words it’s still Facebook, but because Facebook is moving beyond Facebook we are certainly going to be moving with them.
Elina Zheleva is working for the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne. Currently she is located in Paris, where she is finishing her EMBA and is specializing in Marketing and Communications.
Bowel cancer affects 1 in every 18 people in the UK. Because of the symptoms associated with bowel cancer it is difficult to encourage people to talk to their doctor.
In the UK, April 2011 was Bowel Cancer Awareness Month. Throughout April Beating Bowel Cancer launched new promotional content and activities, including a new website, video (The Bottom Line) and a strategic online campaign to raise awareness of symptoms and the importance of early diagnosis.
I spoke to the charity’s digital development manager, Angela Cummings, to find out more about what they did, and how social media influenced their strategy. See highlights from our conversation below!
What were your objectives for the online campaign?
To engage with supporters and encourage them to donate and share campaign content
To raise awareness of bowel cancer symptoms and the importance of early diagnosis
The Bottom Line was particularly aimed at men aged 40+ who are often reluctant to visit doctors and discuss their symptoms
Those people who had taken part in a previous fundraising challenge were encouraged to share our promotional film, The Bottom Line, to everybody they knew who had donated. The film was also promoted through online advertising, on our Facebook page and through Twitter. We also ran a Twitter competition to encourage retweets using #TheBottomLine hashtag.
You used a lot of film as part of the campaign. Why was this?
We use film in two ways. Firstly to promote awareness of bowel cancer symptoms, which is The Bottom Line. Secondly, we use film to illustrate Louisa, one of our in-house nurses, answering frequently asked questions.
Film is engaging and lends itself well to being spread virally. During April we encouraged supporters to help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter and email by asking their friends to watch The Bottom Line and embed it in their own blogs and websites. The film provides longevity as a tool on our website to show why it is so important to act on symptoms early.
Our FAQs film works well because people are often nervous about calling a helpline particularly when discussing issues they find embarrassing. Watching a film of one of our nurses not only answers their questions but makes them feel less anxious about calling our helpline because they then feel as if they have already have met Louisa. Film also helps people with low literacy skills.
We have also used film of bowel cancer patients, because feedback has shown that people find it helpful to hear from others who have been in a similar situation.
Was this the first ‘online’ campaign Beating Bowel Cancer has delivered?
In 2010 we launched our Cheeky Warning campaign, which was a digital campaign aimed at raising awareness of bowel cancer symptoms amongst young people. We learned from Cheeky Warning that people enjoyed being able to support us through Twitter and Facebook and that running a competition was a good way to get people on board. We also learned that some channels worked better for us than others: a Facebook app that we developed for that campaign had limited success.
How has social media contributed to the results of the campaign?
Social media channels contributed a great deal to the success of this latest campaign.
The Bottom Line spread virally through Facebook and Twitter and resulted in many online conversations both from existing supporters and new followers/fans. They included people concerned about symptoms, newly diagnosed as well as those interested in supporting our cause by fundraising or helping spread the word. We are currently supporting a number of new patients as a result of the campaign. As well as the online noise that the campaign created we also delivered the following results:
Our online donations increased by 135% during April
We had the highest number of monthly visits to our website ever during April which was a 26% increase from March
We saw a 10% increase in calls to our nurse helpline
4,200 views of The Bottom Line during April
1,500 views of our nurse FAQs films during April
We gained 250 additional Facebook fans and 368 additional Twitter followers.
We encouraged supporters to contact their local Member of Parliament (MP) and encourage them to support a debate – 73 MPs committed to this, which is a great result
What aspects of the online campaign are you most pleased with?
We are pleased that The Bottom Line had 4,200 views during April and was named Digital Campaign of the Week by Third Sector magazine.
What would you do differently next time?
Ideally we would have had the film ready earlier so that we were in a position to show it to other organizations prior to Bowel Cancer Awareness Month. This would have meant they could have the film available on their websites and social media channels from launch day.
How did you work with other organizations online?
We were able to work with both NHS Choices and the UK Department of Health. NHS Choices are now hosting The Bottom Line film on their site. We also worked with Rowlands Pharmaceuticals, Thames Valley Cancer Network and various other NHS and Screening organisations.
A number of our supporters added details of Bowel Cancer Awareness Month to their blogs and websites.
Did you receive any negative feedback or questions as a result of the activity online?
Not this time. During April 2010 when we were running Cheeky Warning a couple of people questioned why we were only aiming a campaign at young people. With that in mind this year’s campaign was aimed at people aged 40+, in particular men.
Has the activity from April influenced your long-term digital strategy? If so, how?
We now have two year’s worth of evidence that digital campaigns work and proof this time that engaging with supporters earlier helps with the initial distribution of content and online partnerships.
It has also helped all those working for and supporting Beating Bowel Cancer to understand the impact and influence that digital can have on our work now, and in the future. It will make use of social media and the web much easier to justify in the future.
You can follow Beating Bowel Cancer on Twitter or find them on Youtube.
On May 24, Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere when he wrote “Being an expert in social media is like being an expert in taking bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich.” Which is to say, Peter doesn’t think much of the social media experts, gurus, mavens, etc. that are flooding the market calling themselves professionals.
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