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What companies don’t understand about social media

In 2006, Scott Ableman and some of his co-workers pulled a practical joke, covering another co-worker’s Jaguar with 10,000 Post-It Notes as it sat in the company’s parking garage. Ableman, an amateur photographer, captured some photos of the prank and put them up in his Flickr account.

The photos quickly began to spread. Licensed under a Creative Commons License, the images began to appear all over the web and became Flickr’s “Most interesting” for several related keywords. At one point, the American broadcaster ABC News picked up the story, doing a segment about the practical joke.

A year later, well after the attention had died down, 3M, the makers of Post-It Notes, approached Ableman about licensing the image for a mainstream campaign. After some negotiation, Ableman quoted them a price of $2000 to use the image for the entire campaign. But 3M responded saying that they had been quoted a price of $750-$1000 to take their own, similar image.

In the end, 3M decided to create their own image and use it for the campaign. Soon though, the web was buzzing about the 3M campaign. And not about the corresponding YouTube channel, the contest or the voting. Rather, the talk was about 3M, a multinational corporation, “ripping off” an amateur photographer.

It turned what should have been a wonderful viral marketing campaign into a social media disaster. It was a misstep that could have been easily avoided, if only 3M understood what it took to get a strong viral campaign going.

The lure of viral

As of this writing, the top video on YouTube is Avril Lavigne’s music video “Girlfriend” having been watched over 100 million times. This exposure cost Lavigne and her promoters almost nothing beyond the cost of making the video. YouTube hosts the content, pays for the bandwidth and, in some cases, offers revenue back to the artist that created it.

This type of exposure, if done over network television in the United States, would have cost approximately 2.7 million dollars. However, on the web, it can be almost free. This is why many companies and advertising firms view social media as a low-cost way to expand the reach of their traditional advertising efforts, much as what 3M was attempting to do with its effort.

The problem is that viral marketing is not as simple as advertising. It has much more in common with public relations. Rather than crafting a message and then putting it out, one has to build something that a media, in this case the web at large, will carry.

This means that the focus of viral marketing is less saying what you want and more about building goodwill and getting users to help you promote your company. Without that goodwill, the social nature of the Web can quickly turn against you. There may be no way you can turn it back around.

To avoid that and reduce the risk of viral marketing, there are several rules advertisers and others seeking to use social media need to understand.

The seven rules

• It’s not about the money: On the web, a video of a young man dancing to a song has as good of a chance as becoming popular as does a major music video. Social media is about being creative and producing something that people enjoy, not about spending the most money.
• If you build it they may not come: On the flip side of the coin, building a new great new video, image or other campaign does not mean that visitors will be drawn to it. With so much content on the Web, even the best content can gets lost. This can be overcome through traditional promotion, such as partnerships with social media sites, or through perseverance, putting out good content consistently, building an audience over time.
• There is no privacy: If your campaign even has a small amount of success, it will be covered from every angle by the web community. As the 3M case reveals, even the private dealings of a campaign can become public matters easily. This means a campaign has to be approached with the best of intentions from the outset.
• Size does not matter: Just as money doesn’t matter, size and reputation do not matter either. Just because your company is well-known and respected does not mean that it has an advantage over an unknown. Social media is the great equaliser. However, you can often use your size or reputation as part of the larger idea, giving you more options for creativity.
• Be different: If your efforts mirror something that has been done before, they will not be taken up and may even cause some to call your company a “copycat”. It is hugely important to be original and offer people something they have not seen before and something worth talking about.
• Share and participate: Social media is about being social. It is not a one-way street. It is vital to participate in it not just as someone trying to promote using it, but as someone that is part of the community. That includes voting and sharing. Participating in the community as an equal may not have an immediate benefit, but it can pay off in the long run.
• Social media is a gamble: Even if you do everything correctly, social media is still a gamble. Like predicting the weather, we can only make an educated guess at how any move would be received. Social media can easily backfire, especially if a company has a negative reputation to start with.

Conclusions

In short, social media can be a boon for promoters, making it possible to get millions of dollars worth of exposure for almost nothing. However, it can also be a tremendous gamble and is prone to backfiring at a moment’s notice.

Minimising the risk and maximising the benefit of social media means understanding the pitfalls, obeying the rules of the web and bringing something to the table that others have not seen before.

If BlendTec can sell blenders based upon its viral campaign, just about anything can be bought and sold over the web. It’s just a matter of striking the right chord and building up the goodwill to have your fans take your message with them.

 

Tags: 3m, joke, photographer, scott ableman, social media, viral marketing, youtube,

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