The Social Revolution
Editor’s Note: The Yahoo! Advertising blog recently asked several agency leaders one question: “How are you integrating social media into your creative?” Here is the response from Jeremiah Rosen, President of Campfire.
It’s not how it’s used, it’s what it adds to the conversation
Social media gives marketers the thrill of immediacy. It’s a real-time opportunity to explore relationships with the audiences circling our brands. For an industry that traditionally spends three months crafting 30 seconds of broadcast content, this improv-type atmosphere can be extremely liberating.
The energy created by this immediacy is what ends up making social such a powerful performance medium. We’re not broadcasting brand performance: We’re linking a series of meaningful interactions that bring the brand closer to its fans and that bring fans closer to each other. Social gives us the platform to identify and understand what our audience likes about us, and in return we find new and interesting ways to keep bringing it to them.
Social also provides us with the opportunity to create conversational value — to build equity outside of the brand’s owned and paid media channels. When we talk about “value,” it’s not an isolated metric. It can’t be confined to the number of views, followers and likes measured against how much it cost us to present that message. Instead, we measure the impact of our conversations by how they spread. That’s the true measure of engagement.
Let’s take Campfire’s client, Snapple, for example. Snapple drives brand growth via social conversations in its owned and earned channels. By using social media to instigate and extend the conversation, Snapple is maximizing its more significant investments in cause marketing, movie tie-ins and TV integrations on an ongoing basis. We’re extending its media shelf life so that the impact can be felt and measured for a longer period of time.
Immediacy. Energy. Impact. This all ladders up to something more valuable: helping marketers make better decisions on how to allocate their resources. By looking beyond what social media is and understanding instead the opportunities it presents, you can look forward to a much richer brand experience — and a much better story to tell.
(Source: yadvertisingblog.com)
