Why big isn't always better

Something Justin Flitter said at the recent Social Media and Mobile Apps conference got me thinking about the way brands approach social media.

What he suggested was:  in the real world our best friendships are made up of many lightweight interactions - and that brands who truly want to build a friendship with their fans might be more successful if they acted the same way.

Think about it like this. Say you made two new friends today. One of them you will only see once over the next three months spending a long weekend hanging out together. The other you hear from every other day – a quick text, a coffee or perhaps they comment on something you posted on facebook. Which person do you think you’ll have the better relationship with?

Now apply this to a brand:

Brand A puts a lot of time and effort into creating a whiz-bang new app – it’s cool and fun so you download it, but after a while the novelty wears off.  Brand B has a twitter account where they regularly share links to interesting and useful content. Which brand do you think you’ll have the better relationship with?

Delivering big ideas and big results is what every agency (and some clients) aspire to – but it shouldn’t be at the expense of doing the day-to-day well. 

In fact there is no reason why a successful social activation has to be big. At the same conference Mike Wilson from .99 explained how hard it is for agencies – and corporates – to pull together a truly integrated idea. When this does happen those involved deserve every award they win, but in the meantime go for something smaller and more perfectly formed.

Lots of small but clever interactions could deliver better engagement that one big all-singing, all-dancing, here-for-a-good-time-not-for-a-long-time activation. 

A lot of time, money and resource can go into creating a video which gives just one – or if you are lucky 2 – status updates to Facebook. It might be really clever and engaging, but once that status update is posted you’re back to wondering what to do with the other 364 days of the year on your conversation calendar.

Content sharing is not content curation.

“Curating” is the new buzzword around town, and like most new buzzwords their meaning can be easily misconstrued.

The other day I came across the “Second annual Content Curation Adoption Survey” informing me that “95% of Marketers are Curating”.

While I have no doubt a lot are through Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks, the penny dropped when I read that “of those respondents that indicated they had not knowingly curated in the past six months, 100 percent of them had, by sharing an article, blog post or other content with a prospect or customer”.

Breaking news: sharing an article with your facebook fans or twitter followers is not content curation.

Content curation involves gathering digital content from a range of sources and then sorting, art directing and representing that content in a way that creates an editorial experience. It’s not about creating, it’s about sifting through the raft of content available on a particular topic and presenting the best and most relevant pieces of information to your audience. It’s something you do regularly and consistently. There is nothing random or one-off about it.

So what makes for good curation? Google it and you’ll find a myriad of lists and opinions. My five favourite are:

Have a reason for being: knowing what your point is will make it easier to filter content, and to build an audience. It’s a bit like making a mix tape – knowing who it’s for and what you want to say makes picking the songs easy.

You can’t survive on curation alone: You will gain more credibility with your audience, and more support from other curators if you are also creating your own fresh and interesting content.

Give it the personal touch: automated curation tools are popping up all over the place but curation does require the personal touch to ensure quality content is being shared.

Quality not quantity: if time and resource is an issue then sharing quality content once a week will build more credibility than sharing rubbish content daily.

Become part of the ecosystem: always remember the content you are sharing is not yours! Always, credit your sources.

Content curation is a long term platform that needs a strategy behind it. If your objective is to become an authority on something, then you can only do this by building up a following of people who trust that authority.

Wake Up - Its 2012

The team at Blackberry Australia have learned a very valuable lesson this week. Their Wake Up Australia  teaser campaign generated such a high level of interest and intrigue that they had to out themselves over a week before their big reveal – which is still set for 7 May (countdown clock still ticking down).

It seems they planned three week teaser campaign. Three weeks! That’s, like, a lifetime in the digital world. According to my five minutes on Google - in three weeks:

-          14.7 million people join Facebook

-          1.8 million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

-          2 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube

-          3.7 billion tweets are tweeted

-          151 million photos are uploaded to Flickr

-          1.7 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook

In the age of social networking news travels fast. Very fast. And we would all do well to remember this when planning campaigns and activations even if they aren’t strictly digital.

Social Media not just for the Kids

It seems the bright young things have finally discovered an application suitable for older Internet users – although I’m not sure the founders of Twitter quite had that in mind when the idea was first scribbled on a notepad way back in 2000.

In New Zealand Twitter has grown from a base of 9,000 users in December last year to 151,000 in the latest June data released by ComScore. The growth in users is no surprise. News of the plane crash on the Hudson broken by tweets from people actually on the flight certainly had the wow factor. Then there was Obama’s presidential campaign, the race between Oprah and Ashton Kucher to see who could be first to gain 1 million followers and the news of Michael Jackson’s collapse - broken by TMZ using Twitter. So the attraction to Twitter is understandable.

What is surprising is the demographic profile of Twitter users. Since March this year, ComScore has reported over half of Twitter users in NZ are aged 35+. And since April this year there has been significant growth in the 55+ age bracket – from none in April to 21,000 in June. And this isn’t just a New Zealand trend.

We’ve seen growth across the entire social networking category in the older age groups. And while they may have only joined a social media network to spy on the kids, it seems they’ve not just crashed the party, they’ve started their own right upstairs and tweeted all their friends an invite.

So why are the older demographics so keen on Twitter? For a start, the technology is simple and easy to understand, and there’s no need to post personal information and family photos for the world to see. Then there’s the content which can actually be quite useful – serious news from reputable sources and industry news and views from key personalities. Indeed, for the majority of users the real value is in the content that can be received, not in the content that can be sent.

Whatever it is, it seems that what is attracting the older audiences is exactly what is repelling the younger ones, and if this is the case Twitter could very well have a goldmine so long as whoever figures out how to monetise it does it well.