Much like Kenneth Cole’s mishap earlier this month, the social buying site Groupon found itself in hot water after its Super Bowl commercial that seemed to mock the struggles of the Tibetan people. The organization has since pulled its ad, with Groupon founder Andrew Mason taking personal responsibility for airing the commercials. While Groupon [...]]]>

Much like Kenneth Cole’s mishap earlier this month, the social buying site Groupon found itself in hot water after its Super Bowl commercial that seemed to mock the struggles of the Tibetan people. The organization has since pulled its ad, with Groupon founder Andrew Mason taking personal responsibility for airing the commercials. While Groupon continues to rank in the top 10 free application list in Apple’s App Store, it will be interesting to watch its long-term trajectory, especially as it prepares to enter the Chinese market, in addition to facing competition from many other social buying sites.

Many are incredulous as to how Groupon wasn’t aware of the commercial’s obvious problems, even if the company was trying to mock itself and not Tibet. Incidences like this underscore the importance of cultural competence when planning any kind of public campaign. Cultural competency requires, at a minimum, research on the potentially controversial issue, an understanding of the current environment, and focus groups to test the concepts. If Groupon had tested its commercials with the representatives from the groups mentioned in the ad, the company would have known immediately that the approach would not go over well.

In the social marketing world that strives to make a positive impact, cultural competency is even more crucial, because we’re not selling products. We’re selling education, awareness and behaviors that enrich lives – many of which are culturally different from our own. Expanding our true understanding of and respect for other cultures may mean the difference between a population’s success or failure.

A worthy example of culturally competent social marketing is the Ad Council’s Superhéroes campaign from March 2008. The campaign sought to lessen the stigma for Latinos regarding going to the doctor and encouraged them to go for regular health check-ups. The volunteer agency researched Latinos’ knowledge of the health care system, preventative health, and their attitudes and behaviors concerning their own well-being. Most importantly, the agency researched what culturally relevant factors would motivate Latinos to see a doctor, and formulated those factors into the campaign. It is notoriously difficult to evaluate health campaigns’ positive outcomes, but the agency did right by not assuming it knew the specific cultural factors beforehand, nor did it assume it knew better than its target audience.

Bravo, Old Spice.  Bravo.  Your viral ad campaign featuring Isaiah Mustafa is one of the most brilliant social media-based advertising campaigns that I’ve ever seen. It is certain to become a case study in how to effectively reach huge numbers of people.

How many people?  Let’s recap now that one week has gone by since Old [...]]]>

Bravo, Old Spice.  Bravo.  Your viral ad campaign featuring Isaiah Mustafa is one of the most brilliant social media-based advertising campaigns that I’ve ever seen. It is certain to become a case study in how to effectively reach huge numbers of people.

How many people?  Let’s recap now that one week has gone by since Old Spice started posting videos on July 12.  I calculated the total number of views the campaign had received by adding the “Views” figure displayed publicly for each video to find the sum for all of the videos in the effort.  As of 6:45 PM EST on Monday, July 19th, videos categorized under Old Spice’s “Responses” playlist had received a staggering 36,229,190 views.

Let’s put those numbers in perspective.  36,229,190 views since the campaign started on July 12th is:

• 517,559 views a day, 21,564 views an hour, 359 views a minute, or about 6 views per second for a solid week.
• 85 times the number of views of Sarah Palin’s YouTube videos; 8,320,523 more views than John McCain’s YouTube videos; and only slightly less than 25 percent of the total number of views of Barack Obama’s videos.  As a note of clarification, we’re talking about views of the videos themselves.  YouTube refers to this number as “Total Upload Views.”
• If we figure the videos average about 30 seconds each, it totals 301,909 hours, 12,579 days, or 34 years and change of viewing.

Like I said, staggering.

How on earth did Old Spice pull this off?  Crystal Borde, in her post on how this campaign might seed ideas for advocacy videos, makes the excellent point that Old Spice took care to target influential accounts on Twitter.  But on a bigger picture scale, Old Spice recognized the value of integrating their traditional and online campaigns to maximize impact.

In Crystal’s post, she linked to the ReadWriteWeb post on how the videos were made.  That article links to this blog post by Mark Borden, who interviewed Wieden+Kennedy’s Iain Tait for Fast Company.  The entire interview provides a great analysis of the project,  but this response in particular stuck out to me:

One of the unique things taking place in the studio is we have a team of social media people, we have the Old Spice community manager, we have a social media strategist, a couple of technical people, and a producer. And we’ve built an application that scans the Internet looking for mentions and allows us to look at the influence of those people and also what they’ve said. They’re working in collaboration with the creative team that are there to pick out the messages that: 1. Have creative opportunity to produce amazing content; or 2. Have the ability to then embed themselves in an interesting or virally-relevant community.

It’s not just picking people with huge followings, it’s a really interesting combination.

Here we see the true spirit of integration that made this campaign the overwhelming success that it is.  Social media experts, creative experts, technical experts and producers were all working together to make a product in real-time that supported the overall goals of their client, and stayed true to Old Spice’s brand and message.  What’s more, the team put strategic thinking into their online outreach decisions – just as you would for any traditional outreach campaign – to ensure that their efforts would impact as many people as possible.  They took a long-established brand and a relatively new advertising campaign and adapted it to make it compatable with an emerging medium. All while staying true to Old Spice’s overall marketing and communications goals.  It is worth noting that this was a campaign that was taken very seriously, and involved substantial investment of time and resources.  While not as expensive as say, a Super Bowl spot, it demanded time commitments from a broad team, extensive strategic planning and investment in the medium.

Old Spice and Wieden+Kennedy, again, bravo.  You’ve set a pristine example for communicators everywhere on how online efforts can inform, support and enhance traditional outreach strategies – and vice versa.

I hope you’ve seen on TV or someone has forwarded you the “new, great-smelling” Old Spice “manmercials” featuring Isaiah Mustafa. Recently, the ad campaign has taken a more personal tactic.

Yup, he’s talking to the ABC’s “Good Morning, America” host George Stephanopoulos – though I doubt we’ll be seeing President Obama shirtless at [...]]]>

I hope you’ve seen on TV or someone has forwarded you the “new, great-smelling” Old Spice “manmercials” featuring Isaiah Mustafa. Recently, the ad campaign has taken a more personal tactic.

Yup, he’s talking to the ABC’s “Good Morning, America” host George Stephanopoulos – though I doubt we’ll be seeing President Obama shirtless at a White House press conference. In the second phase of this Wieden+Kennedy-created ad campaign, the Old Spice man spoke via online video to more than 200 people, including LATimes.com’s Adam Tschorn, who just blogged about it and actress Alyssa Milano who tweeted about it.

By creating these personalized online videos directed at users interacting with Old Spice in the media, on YouTube or via Twitter, the campaign quickly and inexpensively expanded its reach and exposure. The videos are getting lots of buzz — especially the wedding proposal one — and are shared throughout the Internet and in social networking communities.  This is creating opportunities for additional coverage for Old Spice in earned media hits.

Wouldn’t this be a great social cause tactic to get the attention of policymakers in Washington, D.C. and in your own communities? All you would need is a interesting set-up, a message, a spokesperson, a list of influencers and a digital video camera. It could be the 21st century version of sending a open letter to Congress, instead your letter would be watched, instead of just read, and easily passed along.

ReadWriteWeb blog posted a behind-the-scenes look at how the videos were developed, but here are some of strategies inspired by Old Spice’s manly towel-clad spokesperson to keep in mind when you replicate this approach in your own advocacy campaigns.

1. Keep it simple. This communicators’ mantra applies to all of the work we do, but its power is beautifully illustrated in this video campaign. Old Spice kept the spokesperson and set-up virtually the same for all of the video shout outs; only the message changed. Simplicity will be key in keeping costs low and brand recognition high.
2. Target the right people. Wieden+Kennedy did their homework and identified people with either large followings or people with unusual requests that were already engaging with the campaign. Instead of picking on random people, they created video responses to those who would expand their campaign’s exposure by sharing the video with their followers or create earned media opportunities in non-ad trade media that rarely exists for ad campaigns outside of the Super Bowl. Free online exposure can be the bread and butter for advocacy campaigns on a budget. These personalized video messages could be the vehicle, if you select the right targets who have the ears (or Blackberrys) of the right audiences.
3. Maintain your tone and purpose. Personalized video responses were kept brief — under a minute in length — and maintained the ad campaign’s tone. Also, the video responses never lost their focus to reaffirm the ad campaign message (manly men use Old Spice) and reinforce the new brand for the product.
4. Don’t take yourself to seriously. Okay – Isaiah Mustafa is selling men’s deodorant and not a critical social issue, but humor can still take you a long way even when talking about serious topics. While videos about important causes are passed around the Internet, your e-mail in-box, Twitterfeed or Facebook page are probably mostly filled with humorous videos. If you can find the balance of irreverence and persuasively getting your message across, you could have a viral phenomenon on your online video channel.

While he may be “a ridiculously handsome man,” Isaiah Mustafa has proven that an effective communication strategy and tactic doesn’t need a lot of money or resources. It relies on an imaginative, creative idea. While the campaign has ended, I’ll let you have a moment with Old Spice to say farewell before you start filming your own targeted videos and encourage new audiences to pass your message along.

With the rise of Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, we constantly hear concerns about privacy.  From worries over college students posting career-impeding photos to concerns over unfettered access to addresses or phone numbers, users of social networks have to be careful what information they make available about themselves and their organizations.

Now, an [...]]]>

With the rise of Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, we constantly hear concerns about privacy.  From worries over college students posting career-impeding photos to concerns over unfettered access to addresses or phone numbers, users of social networks have to be careful what information they make available about themselves and their organizations.

Now, an interview with an anonymous Facebook employee written up for online magazine the Rumpus gives us new insights into just how much information Facebook has about you – and it is a lot.  These revelations allow us to provide some recommendations for organizations using Facebook for outreach efforts.   Select quotes from the interview:

Employee: See, the thing is — and I don’t know how much you know about it — it’s all stored in a database on the backend. Literally everything. Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That’s what most people don’t understand.

This statement can be summed up pretty easily: everything you do on Facebook is stored on a server, and can be pulled up through some simple keystrokes.  Further clarification from the interview:

The Rumpus: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?

Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information —

Rumpus: When you say “click on somebody’s profile,” you mean you save our viewing history?

Employee: That’s right…[cont.]

***

Rumpus: So this is every viewable screen?

Employee: It’s way more than that: it’s every viewable screen, with all the data behind every screen…[cont.]

As the employee says – literally everything.  Indeed, it is right there in the Facebook privacy policy:

Information we collect when you interact with Facebook:

Site activity information. We keep track of the actions you take on Facebook, such as adding a friend, becoming a fan of a Facebook Page, joining a group or an event, creating a photo album, sending a gift, poking another user, indicating you “like” a post, attending an event, or authorizing an application. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact you shared it.

What’s more, the privacy policy also outlines the content that Facebook views as “information you provide to us,” which includes private messages, and seems in line with the other content the company admittedly stores about its users:

Content. One of the primary reasons people use Facebook is to share content with others. Examples include when you update your status, upload or take a photo, upload or record a video, share a link, create an event or a group, make a comment, write something on someone’s Wall, write a note, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on Facebook (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.

The interview goes on to reveal some other interesting facts about Facebook.  For example: did you know Facebook performs psychological analysis on users?  It is well worth reading in its entirety (P.S.: go here for instructions on how to remove metadata from photos).

To some, this is will be somewhat alarming news.  After all, if Facebook can view everything you or your organization does, what prevents them from sharing that information with outside parties, or even your competitors?  For those organizations that may share sensitive information on Facebook to what they believe is a closed network, how can you be sure that information won’t get out to larger audiences?  Is this information truly private, or only private until the right price point is reached?  While these scenarios may be unlikely for a given individual or organization, the reality is that we simply do not know how Facebook uses their database.

Indeed, these are serious questions.  So what should you do?  Close up your Facebook shop and run for the hills?  Well, no – this isn’t necessarily a reason to panic.  After all, you’ve likely been using Facebook for quite awhile and haven’t seen any confidential information leak out from your account.  But the revelations in this interview do give cause to provide some basic reminders about Facebook usage:

1. Recognize that everything you say and do on Facebook can be accessed by somebody else. While there is no explicit reason to believe that anybody will be accessing your account, the possibility always exists.  As such, be cautious in your emails, uploads, wall postings and so forth – you have no way of knowing who else has access to them.
2. Deleting something from Facebook does not erase it entirely. As mentioned in this interview, Facebook keeps backups of everything by the hour.  If you put it up, it stays in their server until they decide they don’t want it anymore.
3. Don’t put anything on Facebook that you’re not comfortable with everyone seeing. Going beyond the information storage that Facebook has admitted to in this interview, this is just good, basic social networking advice.  You can’t control what people do with the information you put on Facebook – so if you don’t want something republished or re-purposed, Facebook may not be the best place for it.
4. Understand that Facebook is running a business, where the information you provide them is their number one commodity. While Facebook is a great service that allows you to stay connected to friends, family, and fans of your organization, like any other company, Facebook is ultimately about its own bottom line.  The Facebook privacy policy would seem to support this.  It is summed up in this line: “We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you, reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so.”  In essence: if you don’t tell us otherwise, we can share your information with anybody that we want, for whatever purpose we want.  While updating your privacy settings can eliminate some of this potential, it seems as though it can’t control if Facebook is accessing your messages, pages you view, and so forth.  If you don’t want Facebook to be able to use certain information for their own purposes, don’t put it on Facebook.

This revelation is no reason to run away from Facebook.  The platform can still be used to great effect to build networks, reach supporters, and expand your message.  This knowledge simply reminds us to exercise care in working with the service.

It remains to be seen how the privacy ramifications for Facebook and other internet giants – like Google, for example – shake out in the end.  These companies do have a stake in protecting our privacy; after all, if none of us trust them, they lose their user base.  But should there be a greater obligation for providers to inform their customers exactly what information is being collected?  Or does the responsibility lie with us, the consumers, to be informed as to just how our information is shared and sold?  Is there ultimately a government interest in protecting privacy by regulating the way our information can be stored and shared online?  These are just some of the new questions of the digital age that are still being answered.  In the meantime, we as consumers must demand greater transparency to understand exactly how our information is being used.

Will football soon be the only reason to watch the Super Bowl? That’s what I was asking myself when I came across this article on MediaBullseye.com.

For Super Bowl XLIV, Pepsi has decided to forgo its traditional Super Bowl ads – like the one below from 2009 – in place of a cause-based social media [...]]]>

Will football soon be the only reason to watch the Super Bowl? That’s what I was asking myself when I came across this article on MediaBullseye.com.

For Super Bowl XLIV, Pepsi has decided to forgo its traditional Super Bowl ads – like the one below from 2009 – in place of a cause-based social media campaign for its newly launched Refresh Project.  The Refresh Project is designed to accept nominations and award grants to people and organizations working to make a positive impact in their community.  Pepsi will use Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social media sites to raise awareness, generate submissions, and interact with their customers about the project.

The Super Bowl is one of the few times annually when people are not fast forwarding through commercials, so I was fascinated that Pepsi has decided not to go with a big television ad this year.  While what Pepsi is doing is a potentially groundbreaking decision, will it really stick?  I think back to my college and graduate school communication classes where professors drilled into us the importance of traditional media outlets like newspapers and television.  They repeatedly stressed that we should not rule these outlets out in our future careers, despite the rising popularity of new media platforms.  But with the decline of newspapers and decisions like this one by Pepsi, will academics and public relations professionals soon be changing their outlook?

Undoubtedly, the value that Pepsi sees in social media is the personal aspect. This is an opportunity for people to see Pepsi as a “person” that they can interact with, thus helping Pepsi grow trust and establish credibility.  From the article:

“The floodgates are going to open and nearly every business will want to do the Pepsi thing. False prophets are waiting for your money to help you talk at your customers. The rest of us will talk WITH each other, like PEOPLE do.”

Pepsi has done its homework and will use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to effectively manage the expected onslaught of Refresh Project consumers. This gives Pepsi the capability to tailor each message to the individual customer by tracking information the customer has already provided, enabling an interaction that can grow, becoming more involved and personalized.  Pepsi understands that people will respond better if the Refresh Project is seen as a “person” that they can relate to and interact with.

It’s a fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming, world that we live in today where social media is often misunderstood yet embraced at the same time. The fact that a company like Pepsi realizes the value of social media enough to throw its total weight behind it in lieu of the biggest television advertising opportunity of the year says a lot about what tools like Twitter and Facebook can add to a campaign.  It will be interesting to see how well this works for Pepsi and the Refresh Project – but I believe a move of this magnitude helps pave the way for less innovative companies and organizations to fully embrace social media and become “friends” with its customers.