Ouidad, backstage with the curly models of NYC Fashion Week 2011
When your brand is well-known in your field, you have a story worth telling. But how do you find new audiences to share that story with?
You find something everyone has in common.
For example, it’s no secret that the fashion world has invested heavily in the social media market. Tools like Twitter and Facebook, which are built to fuel conversations, are a perfect match for an industry that thrives on opinion. And while not every brand is necessarily fashion-forward, a forward-thinking brand can always find ways to bridge that gap.
During this year’s Fashion Week in New York City, two of our Creative Concepts clients learned just how exhilarating the fashion world can be.
Ouidad (the best friend a curly girl could ever have) was live-tweeting backstage from several Fashion Week shows and shoots, sharing photos and channeling buzz as the fashion magic was happening. Why? Because, as a hair care expert who’s focused on empowerment and education, Ouidad knows that surrounding yourself with beauty is a key building block in your lifelong quest to feel fabulous!
Another of our clients, the eco-cleaning innovators Ecover, were thrilled to support Study, a sustainable fashion brand from Tara St. James that proves the fashion world sees “green” as more than just a color. And since Ecover and Study are each using social media to communicate their passion for a cleaner, greener world, Ecover’s sponsorship provided the perfect opportunity to give each brand a common talking point which they could share with their own audiences.
So, how can your brand find new ways to share its expertise and passion with a new audience that might be a step or two removed from your existing fanbase?
First, find common ground — or a common enemy. Then, reach out. Be valuable. Be interesting. Be supportive. Be worth knowing.
(And if you can do it while looking amazing in Armani or Burberry, there’s nothing wrong with that either!)
If you’ve ever hit balls at a driving range, swung a tennis racket or attempted a free throw, you’ve already learned one of the most basic tenets of sports: always follow through. A golf swing doesn’t end when you make contact with the ball; it ends when your body completes the action. Stopping short not only decreases the impact of your efforts, but it’s bad for your body.
Social media works the same way. Unfortunately, many social media practitioners don’t notice the resemblance. They see individual actions (a tweet, a Facebook message, a video, a campaign), but they don’t acknowledge that each action or engagement point is all part of a larger process.
Your social media efforts don’t end the moment you tweet about a new sale or reach 1,000 fans on Facebook. Like all marketing, the social side began before that tweet was sent, and it’ll continue long after that 1,000th fan has closed her browser and turned in for the night.
If you’re measuring your success by your actions, rather than by your process, you’re only seeing part of the picture.
David Murdico recently shared some excellent tongue-in-cheek “advice” in MediaPost, in which he offered five tips guaranteed to make sure no one will ever see your great new video. As amusing as his advice is, it’s frustrating to realize that hundreds of decision-makers could read that article tomorrow and pat themselves on the back because they’re already making these same mistakes every day.
Do you promote your sales and news across ALL your social media channels?
Let’s say that, until now, you’ve had one small team (or even one single person) be responsible for your company’s entire social media presence. And now that things are going well, you want to expand. Maybe that means involving more people. If so, consider this:
Your existing customers are used to what you’ve been doing. If they wake up tomorrow and find themselves talking to someone completely new — and if they can tell — you risk a disconnect that might jeopardize your customers’ trust and emotional investment in your brand.
Here at Creative Concepts, we have a variety of writers, researchers, content creators and account managers juggling dozens of different tasks every day. But no matter how many people are assisting our clients with their messaging, there’s one standard we must all adhere to:
We all have to be working from the same process, and toward the same goal.
That means we take steps to ensure that anyone who’s working on any aspect of a client’s communications is following the same rules, and staying apprised of the same topical developments, as everyone else. This includes…
Creating our own internal user manual for Twitter, with tips and suggestions for navigating various situations.
Tracking industry-specific client-related news that might need to be addressed in the future.
Assigning specific messaging tasks to the individuals best-suited for the nuances of each channel.
Multiple layers of editing, so every message is reviewed by as many eyes as possible.
Internal metric sharing, so each of us can analyze data and compare our individual conclusions.
etc.
Why do we do this?
Because it’s important that our clients be served by as many well-rounded service providers as possible. But it’s equally important to us that our clients’ customers feel as though their Twitter, blog, Facebook, YouTube and other branded social media experiences are all built with the same building blocks, rather than feeling like disparate voices are being smashed together around a common topic.
Whether your social media messaging is being piloted by 2 people or 200, consistency is key. No one trusts white noise.
How are you making sure the image of your brand is consistent in the minds of your customers?
Need some tips? You should follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
If you can’t tell, all your marketing is guesswork.
Social media usage may differ among age groups, but everyone from children to seniors has the ability to find and engage your brand online. If your marketing or your social media messaging follows a one-size-fits-all approach, you may be ignoring (or alienating) various audience segments — and you can be sure that one of your competitors will find a way to engage the very users you’re overlooking.
But how do you know who’s finding you online?
One obvious way is to glance at your social media community. Who’s following you on Twitter? Who’s subscribing to your YouTube channel? Who are your Facebook fans? Users of social media channels are publicly volunteering the kind of information you’d normally have to pay a research group to track down for you. In these cases, all you need is a little time and some demographic search tools.
Another way to learn who your customers really are?
To better understand your audience and your customers, you need to ask them a little about themselves. Online survey tools abound, or you can take the old-fashioned route and fire a few key questions at your email list.
Not everyone will respond to these requests, but the ones who do are the ones who are most likely to care about the quality of the information you’re providing to them. They either want you to improve or they want you to succeed. Either way, they’re providing you with extremely valuable information, so treat them well.
And then, once you have a better understanding of who you’re talking to online, you can craft better messages that deliver more relevant information to the people who need it most.
That’s how TV and radio got their initial push. “Program X, brought to you by Company Y.”
Or, commercials featuring the stars of everyone’s favorite programs would be planned to run during those same shows. For example:
These days, we’re more used to hearing and seeing commercials segmented to run between the entertainment itself. But the advent of view-on-demand devices like TiVo (not to mention mobile devices and the Internet) have made it quite easy for viewers to circumvent (or block out) traditional ads.
Now, enter (or, more accurately, re-enter) sponsorships, under the guise of branded entertainment. In fact, web content creators are seeing increasingly robust payouts as advertisers begin to embrace video embedded ads and branded entertainment as a new opportunity for increased brand awareness.
And while the future of branded entertainment looks rosy, it also presents a new set of questions that your company should be investigating to find a good fit for your brand. For example…
Are your customers regular consumers of mobile entertainment?
Which content creators have a track record of generating serious buzz?
Which YouTube videos are most popular with your target demographic?
How easily could your existing messaging be converted to video-ready advertising?
Is your competition creating branded entertainment?
If so, is it successful? If it isn’t, why not?
Are certain types of content (comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, etc.) proper or improper fits for your company’s culture?
As laptops, iPads and cell phones continue to gain critical mass (and more eyeballs every day), your opportunities to connect with those same consumers will continue to grow just as quickly.
When our client Ecover celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2010, we at Creative Concepts helped them develop a related 30 Under 30 contest to celebrate the innovative ecological ideas from young people across the country. During their celebration, they asked everyone a question:
“Where do you think sustainability will be thirty years from now?”
After all, for a company who designs every aspect of their cleaning products with the environment in mind — from their ingredients to their facilities to their packaging — the future really is their business.
This question may have initially been asked of some of the country’s top eco-bloggers and entrepreneurs, but that’s was just the tip of the iceberg. Who Ecover really wants to hear from is you.
(Yes, you.)
They’ve opened the discussion to everyone, because they believe everyone has a stake in our planet’s future. And Ecover is listening — on Twitter, on Facebook, and on their blog. They want to know what you think about sustainability, and what concerns or suggestions you might have.
Because reaching a business milestone is certainly something to celebrate, but if there’s one lesson Ecover has learned in their thirty years of creating eco-minded cleaning products, it’s that tomorrow is what really counts.
Part of it is the vast number of tools we have at our disposal. Since most of them (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are free, it’s easy to start using each of them… but that makes maintaining your ever-growing web of communications more difficult.
Part of it is the conflict between personal (customers, individuals, community) and business (corporations, marketing, sales). Social media tools are designed to facilitate the exchange of information between consenting parties, but the limitless kinds of information being exchanged further complicate our conversations.
And then there’s the ongoing debate about which social media metrics matter most. Is it the size of your audience, or the quality of your engagement? Is it inciting action or increasing awareness?
Our advice?
Shrink your focus.
First, re-examine your goals and your needs. (Maybe you need a new social media strategy?)
Then, instead of aiming too wide, narrow your attention to a handful of channels — maybe even one — and maximize the impact you can create there (or the feedback you can obtain). Then, once you have a true understanding of how your brand is perceived within that channel, start applying those lessons to other channels, if it makes sense for you.
There’s a presumption that companies have to be involved in social media. And while we here at Creative Concepts are sure that social media can benefit almost any company, charity or brand, we’d never advise anyone to bite off more than they can chew.
So don’t waste an opportunity to connect with your customers by spreading yourself too thin, or your valuable feedback will be reduced to a stream of white noise.
Need some help simplifying your social media efforts? Check out these tips from Mashable.
Before you dive headfirst into your lengthy list of New Year’s resolutions, we here at Creative Concepts would like to offer a word of advice about setting goals for this (or any) new year:
Focus on results, not on numbers.
With 52 weeks ahead of you, it can be tempting to set goals for yourself that involve all kinds of numerical feats, like…
Improving your web traffic
Boosting your search results
Increasing your inbound links, or your number of media mentions
Doubling your number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers
… and so on.
And while each of these occurrences would be a boost to both your business and your brand’s reputation, they’re also merely the measurable by-product of a more important goal: doing your job well.
As 2011 approaches, you already have some personal and business goals in mind that you’d like to work toward. But what about your social media goals? (You do have social media goals, right?)
First, identify the obvious problems that are hampering your social media efforts:
While recounting the top stories around the web can be instructive, inspirational or (oops) cautionary, don’t forget to look back through your own year of social media ups and downs. Ask yourself:
Where did we succeed at the individual and the campaign level?
Where did we exceed (or fall short of) expectations? Do we know why?
What did we learn?
Who did we meet?
What lessons can we apply to future endeavors?
Identifying the year’s high and low points, understanding what worked and what didn’t, and taking a wide view of your successes and failures can be critical in improving your results in the coming year. (Plus, in this era of nonstop media input, if you don’t occasionally take a moment to reflect on what just happened, you may not have another chance anytime soon!)
Here at Creative Concepts, 2010 has been an exciting and surprising year! In this year, we began working with the US division of Ecover, which has blossomed in ways the original RFP never foresaw. We continued our fruitful partnerships with longtime clients like Bigelow Tea and Ouidad, delved into the world of HD video, found several new and talented employees, and rebuilt our website — all while navigating new services like FourSquare and the ever-changing Facebook.
Thanks to our clients, our employees, our friends and families, and everyone who helped to make Creative Concepts successful in 2010. We couldn’t have done it without you! Here’s to a deep appreciation of everything we learned and had the pleasure of sharing during this past year, and an even more spectacular 2011.
