Social Media: Got the Twitter bug?

Social media has transformed the way that brands communicate, with the likes of Facebook and YouTube frequently eclipsing TV, magazines and posters as effective advertising platforms. Belinda Archer explores the importance of reaching that critical mass of internet users and of understanding the audience.

Remember the world before Facebook? There were dinosaurs roaming the Earth and stuff and we all lived in caves. No, but really, remember what it was like when emails and YouTube didn’t exist, when Twitter was simply the noise your granny made and viral was just some nasty disease? How did we all manage?

Of course, not only have these social-media platforms been revolutionising our lives, but they have also been busily changing the way brands communicate with us. Increasingly, they have been eclipsing traditional media as their power has been harnessed more and more effectively and efficiently by digital specialists. Yes, we are now being told to forget telly and boring old ads in magazines.

Pah! to posters and radio. Social media is where the cool advertising cats are hanging out, and we ignore it at our peril.

But where and when did it all start? Where is it all leading? And what can social media really do for advertisers and their brands?

Tom Chapman, social-media strategist at Headstream, the social brand agency that mounted a soar-away successful social-media campaign for video game Call of Duty using Facebook, Twitter and USTREAM, believes that social media has been present since the early days of the internet.

Increased connectivity

“Forums, chat rooms and bulletin boards have been around since the mid-90s, well before the dot-com bubble burst,” he says, adding that things changed with increased connectivity. “With the advent of cheaper internet connectivity, more people are now able to connect.

The tools to self-publish have become widely available too, and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, now ubiquitous, enable people to connect, share, express and identify with others.”

Amy Kean, head of the social-media council of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which was set up in the UK in 1997, similarly states that the internet has been ‘social’ for a number of years.

“Social behaviour is nothing new, and we all know that sites such as Amazon and eBay have been built upon social behaviours for years,” she says. “However, it’s when it really hit the mainstream press and new sites emerged at such a fast pace that the public really sat up and paid attention.”

Crucially, ad agencies started to deploy these new media platforms as vehicles for their commercial messages because agencies “follow where the eyeballs are”, says Chapman. “[Because of] the number of users of social media, it now makes commercial sense for a brand to communicate and develop two-way relationships with an audience that are not achievable through traditional broadcast methods.”

Patrick Gardner, chief executive officer of Perfect Fools, a Swedish digital creative company that has executed pan-European social-media campaigns for clients ranging from H&M to Converse, tracks the history of advertising on these new platforms:

“Three to four years ago, a digital campaign would involve us setting up a specially created domain name and website for a brand and trying to pull in traffic. After a few months, we would pull it down, so there was a lot of wasted energy and we were throwing away what we had created.

“The shift has been to take the mountain to Mohammed and say: ‘People are at home interacting with each other on platforms such as Facebook and we can bring things to them.’ The move has been driven by efficiency. A lot less energy is involved in this than in setting something up from scratch and a lot less is thrown away.”

Gardner believes that Facebook triggered the coming of age of social media for advertisers because it has the necessary critical mass of users.

Today, a colossal half a billion people worldwide are members, with leading brands having their own Facebook pages and tens and thousands of ‘fans’.

Coca-Cola has almost 22 million Facebook fans, no less, and almost 7 million people are fans of the McDonald’s page. Skittles, the confectionery brand, has a colossal 14.8 million fans.

‘Dwell time’

The IAB’s Kean agrees that one thing the newer social properties have over the older properties is ‘dwell time’, which makes all the difference to advertisers.

“Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have found a way to get you to the site and keep you there for vast amounts of time, which is a quality that these older social platforms didn’t really boast,” she says.

Indeed, so appealing are the numbers of users and the dwell times that, today, 13 per cent of all online display is spent on social media, according to the IAB’s latest ad-spend study for 2010, and this only tells part of the story (i.e. it doesn’t include production, agency costs or ‘earned’ values; it is simply advertising spend).

The IAB has also been able to track the advertising agency adoption of social media via the IAB Creative Showcase Awards – a monthly celebration of digital creativity launched in 2003. Savvy agencies and their brands swiftly began playing in the social-media sandpit, knowing that otherwise they would lose competitor advantage. Today, they are unusual if they don’t have some kind of finger in the pie.

“Back in the early days, viral marketing was extremely popular and often controversial, while in the mid-noughties almost every digital campaign boasted an old MySpace page as an add-on to the main activity,” says Kean.

“Now, of course, creativity is far more varied and almost every campaign entered into our awards, from agencies across the industry, has a very definite ‘social’ element. Whether it’s a competition with a Facebook page at the heart, a mobile branded utility or a branded game with a social spin, agencies have very much realised that great digital creativity should be shared, and you need to give the consumers the tools with which to do so.”

So just how powerful are these social media as brand communication platforms? Winston Binch, partner and managing director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, one of the prime movers in the social media marketplace, with hugely successful campaigns for Best Buy and Burger King, says: “Social media is an insanely powerful and efficient marketing channel to create and sustain high-impact and relevant consumer conversations – unlike anything before it. It’s cheap, our audiences are there in ever-growing numbers and the reach and engagement is potentially infinite.”

Zaid Al-Zaidy, chief strategy officer at TBWALondon, which has created successful social media campaigns for Skittles, adds: “I think it’s a gift. For filtering out rubbish and lies. For giving wings to an advertising campaign.

For brands that are small and that no longer need the bullying, paid-for might of the big budget. For companies that are consumer-centric and place real value on consumer opinion and engagement. All clichés, but they are undeniably the already emerged and enduring values and characteristics of our marketing future.”



Online interaction

Gardner adds that these new platforms are simply an online version of reality, hence their power. “Group interaction is the driving element of human behaviour, so these platforms are extremely powerful. If you see a friend being interested in something online, it’s a key driver. Social networks such as Facebook are the pure, digital representation of group interaction. They are the online representation of how people interact in society and, given that brands are an important aspect of our daily lives, they are already there and it makes sense for them to be there.”

The shift from the past has been that there is now an ongoing online conversation about brands, whether companies like it or not. It is, in effect, happening without their input. “For big brands, they have to accept that and engage with it in an open, upbeat way,” says Gardner. “Now there is conversation all the time and we can’t ignore it. We’ve got to interact with it. Conversations [about brands and companies] used to happen around the dinner table. Now they spread much more quickly around the world.”

But James Hilton, chief creative officer and co-founder of AKQA, which has executed social media work for Halo Reach and the 221b game for the Sherlock Holmes film, warns: “Social media can be powerfully creative and powerfully destructive. Use it well and brands will reap the rewards. Misuse will bring an equal measure of ridicule. Brands are behaviours, not logos, so if a brand is to use social space it must conduct itself accordingly.”

Audience makeup

Kean adds: “Even though the executions may differ, advertising in social media needs to be approached in the same way as traditional online display planning, using industry-agreed tools. It’s essential to know the size and makeup of a platform’s audience before you establish a presence on any of them. Too often the draw of the ‘site du jour’ can pull brands in before the sufficient audience planning has taken place. Twitter in the UK, for example, has a disproportionate user base in London, with a large amount of its users working in media, advertising and IT.”

Furthermore, research conducted by YouTube in late 2010 on consumer behaviours on both YouTube and Facebook showed that an even greater understanding of the user is required in social media than in traditional media. Consumers respond strongly to the personality of social sites because the mindset is different during usage. For example, YouTube is seen as more ‘entertaining’, while Facebook is seen as more ‘social’. Brands that advertise on these sites were found to enjoy a ‘halo’ effect, based on the perceived positive characteristics of the platform.

So the learning seems to be that campaigns on social media platforms can work exceptionally well when the audience is understood and the creative or  editorial lends itself to the personality of the particular platform.

As Binch says: “Our success is related to how we approach the creative process. Regardless of the media, we start by focusing on the business challenge, identifying the product truths, getting an understanding of how the brand and the product are perceived in culture and developing strategic and media insights that help us to arrive at a creative idea that’s impossible to ignore. It’s then that we think about possible ways to distribute the content or experience.”



Brand bombardment

But does it not strike a jarring note to infiltrate commercial messages into such environments? Don’t we have enough brand bombardment in our lives as it is?

Gardner responds: “Brands are already there because that is the way people live their lives, not because the networks are being advertising platforms. It’s an information environment. We have the tools to connect people with what they are interested in. It is especially good and effective if we can make things relevant to them. Old-fashioned advertising was all about throwing thousands of messages at people in the hope that they would stick to some of them. But with social media campaigns, we are of value; we are offering a service, as opposed to just creating a noise. That is the real strength of digital – you can make a direct connection, as opposed to a broadcast message. It is a positive thing, not an interruption. People are actively choosing, as opposed to sitting on a sofa being bombarded with messages.”

Hilton reaffirms the idea that relevance is key: “The strength of an idea is measured by its relevance to its audience; the more relevant, the better the idea and the more likely it is to succeed. Halo Reach and Warner Brothers’ 221b for Sherlock Holmes used Facebook not because it was cool, or because it would make us look painfully ‘now’, but for the simple, clear reason that the ideas would naturally inhabit that environment.”

So brands must concentrate on providing information, offering relevant advice on products that people want and adding real value. People, after all, like and need brands and are happy to spend time with them.

As for the future, many observers believe we are just at the beginning.

Al-Zaidy, for instance, says: “Social media has incredible power now. The key question is: as technology [and therefore the shape of social media] continues to advance more quickly than companies are able to adapt, how do we avoid looking stupid? And how do we harness the huge potential of social media?”

Chapman agrees: “Social media is already powerful: take WikiLeaks, for example, and how it can disrupt governments; YouTube videos of employees tampering with pizzas that require the company CEO to personally address the crisis to a global audience; huge brand communities that exist on Facebook, e.g. Starbucks and the potential to crowdsource ideas that outstrip traditional primary market research; Twitter updates from citizen journalists to report on the crisis in Iran; and brands such as Gap changing their logos based on consumer backlash. It has already arrived and it is not only disrupting the advertising industry.”



Creating value

Binch adds: “We’re still at the starting line. The potential still isn’t fully understood. Many brands are doing a better and better job of engaging consumers through Facebook, the blogosphere and other social networks.
But it’s one thing to get someone to ‘like’ your brand and another for them to purchase. It’s not as simple as just talking and listening to your consumers.

You actually have to change and constantly create value.” Apart from anything else, there is still huge potential for further growth in the number of users of the sites. Not everyone is yet on a digital social network, but it is becoming more mainstream all the time. As Gardner says, “It is difficult not to be a member of Facebook these days. It has become an antisocial position to take.”

Kean adds: “The reason why social will be so very powerful in the years to come is because it can touch all areas of business. Customer service is gradually becoming more social, while using social research for product and business insights is slowly becoming invaluable. Gradually, the bulk of brands will realise that using social media is much more than a page on a networking website, and this is when the true ‘power’ will be revealed.”



Hit campaigns

The campaigns executed to date have certainly been wildly successful. Call of Duty, for example, has been declared the most successful entertainment launch of all time. Activision, its publisher, sold 5.6 million copies of the game in the first 24 hours after launch in the UK and the US. The live UK event pulled in more than 182,000 viewers.

Followers on Facebook and USTREAM accumulated almost 30,000 viewer hours in total, which equates to three straight years of footage for one person to sit through. “To say the least, we were very happy with the results,” says Chapman.

Hugh Phillips, executive producer of Mind’s Eye, a full service film and digital production company that mounted a social media campaign for Lynx Twist, adds: “These platforms allow genuinely deep engagement opportunities between audience and brand. With the Lynx Twist social media campaign, the average dwell time was 19 minutes per user. You just can’t get that with a 30-second TV spot.”

Binch believes the truth is that “we’ve all just scratched the surface”. “Social and mobile commerce are going to present a lot of opportunities to help move the industry forward and create new utility and entertainment possibilities for consumers,” he says. “There’s still much to learn; much to invent.”