For the first time in IBM’s C-suite surveys, chief marketing officers were included in the mix. And the results show many of them feel unprepared to deal with the volume and complexity of information available through social platforms.
Browsing: Social media
Most of Tourism New Zealand’s sizable marketing and comms budget now gets directed towards digital channels in an effort to get ‘active considerers’ on the plane. And its latest work via Contagion is trying to tempt the Gen Ys back for some backpacking with Storiesbeatstuff.com, something the agency believes is “possibly the largest social media campaign a New Zealand agency has produced”.
In a world gone social, influence is critical. And Telecom is bolstering its earned media credentials with the launch of Smart Network, a new online hub that showcases the work of a bunch of creative Kiwis.
Gamification, the use of game concepts to engage users, may be the new buzzword in digital marketing, but if you’re hoping to ride the merry wave to the top, marketers need to do their homework first.
In a world where the internet is rarely more than an arm’s length away, broadcasting is becoming increasingly social. TVNZ’s youth channel U claimed to offer New Zealand’s first technology-based integration of social media into TV with its U Live Facebook application and, as part of its Rugby World Cup ‘One Love’ campaign, TVNZ is tapping into the ‘second screening’ trend once again with Grandstand, “a pioneering web-based chat-room” built by Tequila\.
Dr Obvious has diagnosed the RWC as being a pretty hot social media topic (recently released stats show there have been more than 1,931,215 tweets about the #RWC2011 over the past five weeks when you include all teams, hashtags and @rugbyworldcup). And, as this infographic shows, the All Blacks are winning the conversation wars ahead of Sunday’s trans-Tasman semi-final stoush.
When a kitchen appliance brand launches an advertising campaign with the title ‘Rambo’s Undies’ starring Mikey Havoc and Hayley Holt you know you won’t be getting a standard appliance ad with the obligatory mud-stained children’s clothing. And that’s exactly what Kiwi owned appliance brand Parmco wanted when they signed off on the Parmco Challenge.
In an effort to create a snapshot of New Zealand through the eyes of social media, Vodafone recently asked Kiwis to share their Tweets, Txts, status updates, videos, and pictures as part of Share Everything Day on 8 July. And the end result of all that sharing, a short-film created by Satellite Media, was released on Vodafone’s Facebook page today.
As everyone knows, the internet is a wonderful thing to waste time on and social media is often singled out as the biggest cause of this timewastery. Now comScore’s Media Metrix service has delivered some local proof, with its recent study on internet usage in New Zealand showing social networking is the most popular online activity, accounting for one of every five minutes spent online in May.
Hopefully. After one week of playing with it, I’m impressed. The ease of keeping your profile secure from certain people and being able to easily see exactly what information is displayed to who, as well as the addition of “Hang outs” and a few other features is great.
Ecostore’s latest campaign has been pushing the ‘I’m not a guinea pig line’ to encourage consumers to opt out of using nasty chemicals often found in other baby, beauty, body and household cleaning products. Now, in what it claims is a marketing first, it’s taking that idea a step further by trying to get consumers’ entire Facebook networks to do the same.
Vizualise NZ general manager Carl Pavletich (L) and director Rupert Deans
Even an earthquake striking in the middle of a massive international project didn’t slow down Christchurch-based digital agency Vizualise for long. But if it wasn’t for cloud computing, director Rupert Deans says continuing to work on a “major project for a US-based charity” that’s yet to launch would have been impossible.
YouTube and Ridley Scott captured the world in action to great effect recently with Life in a Day. And now Vodafone is taking a similar idea and localising it with Share Everything Day, which aims to find out what New Zealanders are sharing and how they’re using social media.
In this edition of Michael Carney’s Marketing Week, how pollinators differ from influencers, social media’s skeleton is dug up, Sky future-proofs itself by looking at use-by dates for recorded content, short and sweet marketing snippets and an event for marketers hoping to prosper from the Rugby World Cup.
If you think a ‘like to enter’ competition on your company’s Facebook page is a cunning way to grow your follower numbers, you’re probably right in the short term. But if you treat it as a loyalty database, be prepared for some repercussions.
Over the past month we’ve rolled out our Colmar Brunton nzgirl Women’s Tracker presentation to agencies and clients and one of the key discussions from the preso has been around Twitter. While the most commonly bandied-around, unlikely-to-be-grounded-in-fact number of participators in New Zealand is around nice percent I suspect the reality is much smaller. And in an industry more likely to be exposed to new communication tools, I found only a very small number of people actively participating. In some agency meetings, often in a room of twenty media buyers, not one of them was tweeting.
Facebook seems to have stumbled upon the perfect mix of narcissism and voyeurism. But in an effort to promote its new Core i5 processor, Intel has taken that to new, very impressive extremes with one of the coolest online branding efforts we’ve ever seen: The Museum of Me.
In just five-and-a-half years, Facebook has morphed from a network of four or five million college students in the US into a massive social network of over 500 million. It’s also gone from banner ads and text links to an advertising medium that’s completely transformed the way brands talk to their customers. Now Facebook has taken another big step in its social marketing journey with the launch of Facebook Check-in Deals in New Zealand, a geo-location innovation that allows users to look for relevant offers and discounts on the fly—and tell their friends about it in the process.
In our debut Colmar Brunton nzgirl Tracker, we uncovered some noteworthy social media statistics. While we’re all aware of high usage of Facebook (our results show 70 percent of respondents check/update Facebook daily or more), we were surprised by the sheer size of the networks: 65 percent had between 100-400 friends and the average number was 300.
There are a huge number of boring statistics we could tell you about. For example, the increase in the amount of tissues purchased by men on Sundays, ROI on SEO for CEO’s KPIs, or possibly even the amount of TV watched by people in Invercargill aged 45-46 between 6.15 and 6.30pm. But humans are simple creatures. And we’re interested in simple things. Like whether the end of Oprah is deemed to be more important than the end of the world. Well, if you believe social media, and you probably shouldn’t, it turns out she’s not.
This is a synopsis of the advice I give all of my clients during our initial meeting and some of what I talk about when giving my painful lectures/presentations. It is the slow, patient, credible, organic and day-to-day way of maximising your results from social media and I have found these principles to be pretty solid over the four years I have been involved in this industry.
Late last year, up-and-coming digital agency Young & Shand asked 150 New Zealand chief executives and marketing managers about their organisations’ spending intentions and planned commitments to digital marketing in 2011. And while the results showed there’s no doubt Kiwi businesses see digital as an integral aspect of the marketing mix, there still appears to be an unwillingness to splash too much e-cash.
Having recently given away a host of free beverages to celebrate its launch in Australia, Charlie’s will be following suit in the homeland and giving away bottles of its old-fashioned Honest Quenchers to overworked corporate slaves in Auckland next week. The crux, however, is that the request for freebies has to be made via its Facebook page.
After skipping last week’s #markchat due to the Pike River memorial, the Twitter stream will once again be flowing freely at 12:30pm today, with the topic being ‘personal authenticity vs professional brand – where do they meet and diverge?’ Also, for all those unable to ‘attend’ the chat, we’ll choose the five most salient/interesting comments made during #markchat and a link to the summary blog post.
‘Tis the season to embarrass yourself at the workplace Christmas party. ‘Tis also the season to think about presents for your loved—or, if Secret Santa’s on offer, unloved—ones. And while it’s tempting to get everyone you know a life size cardboard of yourself, charities are making their annual call for us to resist our childish, consumerist urges and instead be more grown up in our approach to giving.
Six international speakers and a range of local big brains from varied marketing and communication backgrounds came together in Auckland this week for the second edition of Social Media Junction and presented their perspectives on acheiving ROI from social media activity. But ROI is perhaps the wrong phrase to describe what was discussed. With the benefit of hindsight, it was more about content marketing: you’re on social media platforms, but what are you saying, how are you saying it, when are you saying it and are the customers listening and then actually buying or recommending to someone else who buys? Anyway, enough with the questions, here’s what the speakers had to say.
Like any new form of marketing, there was plenty of trepidation when social media began to go mainstream. And some senior executives still feel the jury is out when it comes to investing large chunks of budget in it. They want to know how it’s going to feed back into the business, and rightly so. So while the first phase of social media—the one where people jump online and create profiles—has already happened, companies are still figuring out how to make the central theory behind social media (conversation, not broadcast) relevant to the entire business.
Crisis communications is one of the easiest areas to study and gain an appreciation for tangible social media ROI. And while we can never fully prepare for a natural disaster or acts of God, the advances in digital media can help accelerate the recovery. They can also help change the structure and procedures of previously traditional and parochial communications departments, as the State Government of Victoria in Australia discovered when it was subjected to some of the worst bushfires ever seen last year.
One of the most successful people in New Zealand social media was on telly last week. On 60 Minutes, even, a little global current affairs franchise you may have heard of. He doesn’t have an American accent and he doesn’t have an iPhone. You’ll all know him but not all of you will like him: Cameron Slater aka Whaleoil.
We’ve had Yahoo!, Google, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, Snapr, Foursquare and numerous other strange made-up words making waves in the online/social media space in recent times. So whatever next? We’ve got two day passes to Social Media Junction 2 to give away, one to the ‘Social Media Marketing ROI’ course on 16 November and one to the ‘Social Media Content Strategy’ course on 17 November. So you could save yourself $595 and fill your brain with knowledge, and all you have to do is devise a suitably trendy, preferably ridiculous name for the next big social media tool.