I know you’ve probably seen this advert before, if not make sure you’re sitting down because it’s so funny!
This is one of the best bits of viral marketing I’ve ever seen.
Just to clarify, viral marketing where something that you have released spreads…like a virus. As people read/watch/listen to the piece they are engaged and pass it on to the people in their network that they think will be similarly engaged.
The problem with viral marketing is that producing that ‘viral’ piece is incredibly difficult to do because you never really know what other people will like – which is I guess why A&R execs working for record labels get paid so much money. Most companies don’t ‘get it’ as regards viral marketing. They somehow think that what they say about their company is of interest to ANYBODY but themselves, which of course it isn’t.
So the knack with getting this to work is in NOT advertising but just being cool/funny/interesting…unless you’re Old Spice of course!
I love horror stories. Since I was a lad I have enjoyed reading books which have scared the bejeezus out of me. James Herbert, Dean R Koontz, Stephen King and countless others.
But this weekend I read a book that I was lent by a friend which scared me in a way I’ve never been scared before. The book is “Six Degrees – our future on a hotter world” a cold and impartial scientific look at global warming and the greenhouse effect. In the book Mark Lynas draws together all the scientific research about climate change he can find and tries do draw some conclusions about what’s in store for us in the future.
He examines what will happen as the Earth warms by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 degrees. The book does not make a jolly read for anyone.
I know that 6 degrees doesn’t sound like much, the lower measurements even less so. After all, in the winter we may experience temperatures of -5 and in the summer +30…that’s a swing of 35 degrees, so what difference will 3 degrees make?
Well, he’s talking about the AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, not local seasonal variations. To put this in perspective, 18,000 years ago in the depths of the last ice age, where my house in leafy Hertfordshire would have been lodged under a glacial ice sheet almost a mile thick, when human life couldn’t survive during the winter, and where the landscape was blasted by 100mph freezing winds.
This icy place was a world that had an average global temperature just 6 degrees lower than that of today. So, as we play with our planet’s thermostat things will change in ways we can barely comprehend.
At 2 degrees, life will be very different than life today, water shortages, people dying from the heat (as local spikes mean that 45 degree summers will become normal across Europe) and widespread storms the like of which we’ve never seen before. At 4 degrees the human race will be squeezed towards the poles as the great deserts spread north and south from the equator, whole nations will be displaced to new lands. The world will be devoid of much of its biodiversity and widespread famine (and consequently war) and almost inevitable. The Amazon basin will be stripped of trees and there will be no way for us to turn back the clock. At 6 degrees it would appear that human life is pretty much doomed and we may have set-off a series of chain reactions which mean that ALL life on the planet is extinguished.
One worrying thing is that these scenarios are NOT millennia away, they are going to happen in our lifetimes if we keep going as we are. Another point of worry is that IF we cease ALL carbon emissions TODAY, we will be able to limit climate change to 2 degrees. If we keep going as we are…
Anyway, I would recommend that anyone who has children, cares about the environment at any level, or just isn’t a total idiot should read this book and digest what the message is.
Sleep well tonight…you certainly won’t after you’ve read this.
Over the last week or so, I’ve been devoting all of my time to developing a new talk based on the role that measuring and quantifying plays in social media if you’re a smart business, and how you should do something useful with these measurements rather than just looking at what’s happened and trying to work out why it’s failed.
As our sophistication about social media develops, we become more aware of the role that measurement plays. Putting numbers against each of the key measurables is a vital step in understanding your business ROI from social media. But it is just a step. The follower and comment statistics for our brand and campaign are meaningless if they don’t deliver a bottom line benefit.
Anybody who has studied business or run a business of their own will recognise that what a business does is basically very simple.
You buy stuff and sell it at a profit. That’s it…. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking products, services, time or a combination of all of these things, the model is very, very simple. Clearly there are functions which the business needs to have in order for this sale to take place. Marketing, HR, Accounting, Sales, Engineering, Facilities…but they are all there to facilitate the sale which is the engine that drives the business. Even hospitals, charities and governments run in basically the same way, except that their ‘profit’ is not expressed in terms of money.
Everything the organisation does should make the sale happen better – faster, more frequently, bigger, more reliably, to more people. Social Media’s role like every other business function is to facilitate this streamlining.
So why do SM agencies and consultants talk about Return On Involvement or Return On Engagement or return on ANYTHING but Return On Investment?
Because they either don’t understand ROI, can’t measure the return on the investment the client has made with them or – more worryingly – they don’t want the client to see that their work is failing.
ROI is a business metric, and must be applied to everything. If you invest £100 on social media (consultancy, your time, copywriting…) if you can’t measure a £100+ return then that money has been wasted because your business would have been better off NOT doing it.
If you’re not measuring the results then that’s crazy, because how can you possibly make an informed decision without being informed!
So, enter “Reverse Metrics” (my idea!) the science of reverse engineering your social media efforts, measurements and strategy to deliver a given result.
If this sounds like the sort of concept that you, your clients or your partners could benefit from then please drop me a line.
For all of you who are watching this experiment I have now reached the 1000 followers mark. Nobody is more surprised than me. You can read my last blog post here if you haven’t already seen it.
Now I have crossed the 1000 followers milestone – achieved with a tiny bit of management and by automatically [...]
Yesterday I was speaking at a brilliant event for the Middlesborough Business Forum…in Middlesborough. Now, I know that England is quite a small country, but believe me it’s a heck of a long way from St Albans to Middlesborough – but certainly worth the trip.
Anyway, there were a number of speakers in addition to myself [...]
I’ve just written a short document for a prospective client that’s a sort of overview of Social Media., and I thought that it might be worth sharing for those in that kind of ‘I know about social media, but I’m not quite sure what I know’ kind of place!
Firstly, social media isn’t an advertising channel, [...]
Step No. 3 – Brand
Like any other kind of marketing or communication in Social Media you need to be very aware of the effect your actions will have on your brand – your business brand or your personal brand.
In traditional marketing we are used to working with brand manuals. We often have ‘brand guardians’ but [...]
