1. Today’s Social Media Tips

    Two quick thoughts on social media for this Monday morning.

    First, we need to stop checking boxes, and start thinking a bit more.  Or maybe it’s that we need to start thinking a bit less. Not quite sure. 

    Either way, I see far too much social media “strategy” that goes like this, and it needs to stop.

    1. List out all of the “current” social media platforms that we an think of (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Vine, etc).
    2. Try and find/make things to put into each bucket.

    We need to cut that shit out.

    Instead, start with an idea, a goal, or a desired outcome that you want your brand and messaging to have when someone encounters it. Now go out and make things that drive towards that outcome. You’ll figure out which channels/platforms to use, and which to ignore.

    Second thought, is that we need to consider social media as being bottom-up as much as top-down. Maybe even more.

    What I mean by that is this:

    Top-down is explicitly driven by the brand and pushes the user to do something. Think contests and calls-to-action, that sort of thing. Brand tells user what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. If you rely on this method, there’s a good chance that you and your brand are inherently uninteresting.

    Bottom-down is creating awesome products and experiences, that have talk-value naturally built in. Your brand becomes social because people want to talk about it, not because they’re part of some Pavlovian Facebook experiment. Strong, confident, secure brands and strategists love this approach and do it well.


  2. This is actually hilarious.


  3. Nice work for Carlsberg beer. Via @mayzyap.


  4. I think it might be time to stop putting hashtags in television commercials. Or maybe it’s just time to get a bit more honest about what their place is, or isn’t.For starters, putting a hashtag on the end card of a tv spot is not a social media strategy. It’s a ham-fisted thing that marketers do, so they can somehow map tv spend to any associated social media conversation as a means to better quantify ad performance. At best, it’s an awkward swing at adding a tracking and measurement layer to the campaign, that everyone can see. It’s sort of like if your end-card URL had ?src=AdCreative1&medium=television tacked onto the end of it, and you expected viewers to run to the web and type that exact string into their browser bar so you could better track how the spot was working.The wonderful @fart (yes, I am quoting @fart to make a point), put it a bit more succinctly: In my opinion, the big issue here is that a hashtag in a tv spot only provides value to the advertiser, and gives nothing back to the viewer. It’s really just our way of instructing users on how to tag their conversations, so we can more easily organize and count them. There’s nothing in it for the consumer at all. Where things get really silly, is when we go off and talk about how “effective” a “strategy” that this is, getting all self-congratulatory about it. Somehow connecting the spread of hashtags in Superbowl spots, to brands “getting” social media. It’s a completely false premise. To me, an uptick in hashtags on tv spots doesn’t in any way demonstrate that advertisers are now better getting social media, or that users are caring any more about brands than they did before. It just means that like all good marketers, we’ve found a neat trick to get people doing something, that we can all count. And to be clear, I’m talking about advertisements, not television shows or content. In those instances, there can (and often is) actual community and conversation, the organization of which, does in fact provide real value to the user.

    I think it might be time to stop putting hashtags in television commercials. Or maybe it’s just time to get a bit more honest about what their place is, or isn’t.

    For starters, putting a hashtag on the end card of a tv spot is not a social media strategy. It’s a ham-fisted thing that marketers do, so they can somehow map tv spend to any associated social media conversation as a means to better quantify ad performance. At best, it’s an awkward swing at adding a tracking and measurement layer to the campaign, that everyone can see.

    It’s sort of like if your end-card URL had ?src=AdCreative1&medium=television tacked onto the end of it, and you expected viewers to run to the web and type that exact string into their browser bar so you could better track how the spot was working.

    The wonderful @fart (yes, I am quoting @fart to make a point), put it a bit more succinctly:

    image

    In my opinion, the big issue here is that a hashtag in a tv spot only provides value to the advertiser, and gives nothing back to the viewer. It’s really just our way of instructing users on how to tag their conversations, so we can more easily organize and count them. There’s nothing in it for the consumer at all.

    Where things get really silly, is when we go off and talk about how “effective” a “strategy” that this is, getting all self-congratulatory about it. Somehow connecting the spread of hashtags in Superbowl spots, to brands “getting” social media. It’s a completely false premise.

    To me, an uptick in hashtags on tv spots doesn’t in any way demonstrate that advertisers are now better getting social media, or that users are caring any more about brands than they did before. It just means that like all good marketers, we’ve found a neat trick to get people doing something, that we can all count.

    And to be clear, I’m talking about advertisements, not television shows or content. In those instances, there can (and often is) actual community and conversation, the organization of which, does in fact provide real value to the user.


  5. Freemium Presentations

    If you’re a startup, vendor, ad agency, or anyone else that’s looking for some new revenue streams, here’s a free Saturday morning idea for ya - in presentation purchases.

    image

    As an advertising strategy wank, I run a lot of client meetings, where I present ideas and insights, that ultimately lead into strategies. I always thought it’d be fun to treat these presentations like app makers and publishers treat freemium content. 

    Meaning, give the audience just enough of a presentation so that they want more, and then charge them (in the meeting) to unlock the content that they really want to see.


  6. Feel Your Run. Some great new work from my team at Hill Holliday, for Merrell.


  7. Still one of my favorite Super Bowl spots ever. Monster.com came out of nowhere, and hit it on the head with this ad. 


  8. Really pretty work for Sierra Nevada, from Digital Kitchen.


  9. Agencies, here’s a lesson in believing in your ideas. When KBS+P was thinking up a holiday campaign for its client BMW, a young team, Jr. AD Aaron Perez and Jr. CW Chris Lane came up with an emotional idea that followed drivers traveling back to their loved ones on the “road home.” The client, however, ended up taking a different approach but the agency loved the idea so much, it shot it anyway.

    The Road Home


  10. Nice work from ESPN highlighting the Manchester Derby.


About me

Boston guy, creative thinker, digital doer, restless mind. I'm an advisor at Custom Made and Vice President, Digital/Social Strategy at Hill Holliday. Thoughts are my own.

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