Strategic Public Relations

Brands Go Offline, Get Experiential for Social Media Success

Starbucks, Best Buy and Home Depot are some of the most successful brands in social media.

And one of the secrets to their success can be found offline.

• Starbucks makes sure customers have access to exclusive content through its Starbucks Digital Network.
• Best Buy uses mobile and QR codes to take consumers from the printed circular, online to in-store. Once in-store QR codes continue to help inform the consumer's shopping experience.
• Home Depot's robust how-to channel on YouTube makes easy to see why the brand's in-store demonstrations are a popular way to "turn doing dials up a notch."

These socially-established brands understand the importance of using online and offline to increase customer engagement. The above examples might seem extreme or unrelated to other brands as these three brands have several thousand retail locations between them. So let's look at two, smaller consumer packaged goods examples of using experiential marketing to bring a brand to life.

Peeps Random Acts of Sweetness Tour: Just in time for Easter, the Peepster Volkswagen “chick” is touring "the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest to celebrate its new online store and to connect directly with loyal fans and new fans in select markets."

During the sugar- and marshmallow-fueled road trip, the Peepster will distribute candy and provide photo opps while updating the company's Facebook page. This effort has also resulted in a ton of online buzz in the process.

Little Debbie Million Smile Mission: Little Debbie is going on the road to make one million people smile. It's all thoroughly documented on Facebook.  As the Little Debbie's airstream travels across the nation, it is adding photos to its Million Smile Mosaic and giving away prizes -- including an Airstream.

Why Experiential Works
I've always been a fan of mobile marketing. It builds on a consumer's existing brand experiences and connects them directly with the brand to help create even more experiences. But without an online, social component the experience can start and end at a single event. Twitter and Facebook icons festoon the Airstream and the Volkswagen for a very specific reason.

So which comes first -- online or offline? How often is this a linear process? Regardless of which comes first, don't get so focused on the online efforts that we neglect to connect them to and to intensify them with offline efforts.


Cross-posted to my work blog.

Empire Avenue: SHINY!

As the Easter Bunny readied to blast kids across the nation into a sugar orbit, Empire Avenue was turning the social media world into a low roar of posts, comments and simulated tock trades -- over a holiday weekend no less. Check out Wikipedia for a straightforward definition that may or may not explain why this social stampede took place.

Love/Hate Relationships
We see lots of reactions when a social site comes out of nowhere to be the flavor of the month -- from effusive praise to effusive loathing. I more than understand the range of emotions -- I've been there. We feel the need to react to the shiny new before understanding it or we risk not being part of the movement.

The need to be first at the risk of being informed is crap.

Everyone wants to wrap up the new into a neat package by comparing it to another existing service and pitting the two against each other in the classic story format of protaganist vs. antagonist.

And we know how well that (doesn't) work. "Remember how FriendFeed was going to kill Twitter? More recently Google Buzz was dealing the final blow to our 140-character-friend. Facebook's Placesz-Z-zzzz was going to kill Foursquare. And before Facebook's email news was even announced, it was deemed a Gmail killer. But I thought email is already on life support? I refer to the killer, uh, overkill as The Highlander Complex."

It's a nice, neat way to wrap up news into a classic story format of protagonist vs. antagonist. But history shows us it doesn't work.

Shiny Crisis Communications
So I'll take a page out of crisis communications and tell you what I know and what I don't know. For a variety of reasons, I signed up. Simulated stock trading intrigues me for reasons completely unrelated to the murky stew of influence, brands and popularity. And before I lay into the Evil Empire/Star Wars or Electric Avenue/Eddy Grant jokes, (as hard as it is to resist) I'm going to wade through a few posts I've curated while experiencing Empire Avenue myself. Then I'll decide what the ultimate value of using the site might be. I'm focused on the personal value to the individual users and to brands.

If you haven't signed up for Empire Avenue, you don't have to do so. Or you can do so here. But you don't have to know if it rules or drools -- not until Monday when all the kids show off their Easter haul during homeroom.

Capital One Tries to Score with Branded Entertainment

Regadless of how you feel about last night's game, college basketball season is over. But Capital One's YouTube Channel Spoof: Visigoth SportsNet promises that "March is about to get Medieval" and it serves as the centerpiece of Capital One's NCAA-themed campaign.

The subjectivity of sports, comedy and timeliness aside, I think this is an important example of branded entertainment's potential.

Ads Morphing Into Entertainment
Capital One is far from the first brand to take this approach. While you may argue the entertainment value is questionable, it’s a step in the right direction for any brand trying to launch a story-line extension. Its Viking plot line has always made “What’s in your Wallet?” a more humorous and memorable question.

The Battle for Attention Spans
It’s interesting to consider that consumers are expecting more content from brands as their attention spans continue to dwindle. Capital One’s approach is also a defensive measure to capture a few more seconds of its target market’s time.

So it's no surprise to see the :30 second spot evolve into a longer, web format….and smart that it’s not being blown out into long form content. The Capital One series reminds me more of The Daily Show than Sports Center. But the challenge is deciding how long the story should go. Remember what happened to the Geico Cavemen when they were given a series? It was the longest month in TV.

Middle Ages’ Middle Ground
Branded entertainment offers Capital One a comfortable, more sustainable and successful middle ground. And as brands, media and consumers continue to morph their roles, it’s an interesting development. We’ll surely see even better examples of this format in the future. It depends on the story and its execution.


Cross-posted to my work blog 

 

SXSWi | Friday Flickr Fix | 04.01.11

While you're sorting through which tech posts are fact and fiction, I'll just serve up some photos for you. In hindsight, I could have focused just on taking photos at SXSW and I would not have made a dent in event coverage.

My approach in the future will be much different. In the meantime, here's a set of the pics I generated while in Austin. The set makes it look like I was a "promotional anthropologist" based on all of the columns and tables consumed by stickers/posters/fliers that I wound up capturing. Regardless, my set is a blink in the more than 27,000 already posted to Flickr.