Last post I reviewed a campaign where for every Facebook fan the brand gave out some donation to an NGO. A mix of CSR and marketing for the company. This campaign I found to be a bit lacking. Just a few days ago I came across a similar campaign by a fitness brand, Equinox. They are donating $1 for every Facebook fan.

I actually liked what they are doing on their social media. There are certain reasons why I find the Equinox campaign thought provoking and interesting..

1. Equinox has a lot going on in their social media. So their marketing is not solely dependant on the donations given to NGO.

2. Equinox is already a very popular brand on social media. Their endorsing this NGO not only brings the NGO money but also publicity which is very important for any non-profit.

3. They are donating to Cycle for Limbs which is connected to Fitness. So there is a brand sync. This is important because it allows the community to rally around it in a way that is harmonious to the brands content strategy.

Most Importantly,

4. They are donating $1 for every fan. If they put Facebook ads they would be spending less than $1 for every fan. So they are actually donating more to the NGO than they would if they did the usual marketing!

That is why I feel at the end of the day the NGO really gains from this association and it adds a good touch to the whole Equinox social media campaign. It is a cool idea where part of the marketing budgets of corporates flows into non-profits.

Have compiled a series of analytical articles of kid brands using social media to engage with their target audience. Its very interesting to see how they have activities that are directed at the younger audience even though officially kids cannot have a Facebook profile until they are 13 years of age.

You can read the case-studies here!

It covers brands like McDonalds, Lego, Toys R Us amongst others. All of them have a different take on their target audience, look and feel, activities, sales generation. It was good fun and insightful taking a closer look at these campaigns!

Despite what the T&C says, kids are hugely active on social networks. Most of us know a lot of kids who are friends with us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus too. Yet, its sort of a dilemma for a marketeer to target them via these social networks because technically by the rule book, they are not supposed to be there :p

Curious about actual numbers related to the kids demographic I compiled a presentation of my finds. Its quite interesting.

What would you say to kids using social media, considering the stream of frequent adult content that is shared there?

Number of times the first things potential clients ask me is “Will it improve Google Ranking”.. I don’t want to say yes because I don’t want to sell social media as a search engine optimizer tool! Its a whole lot more. Building communities, interacting with them, generating feedback and a whole lot more…

After all these more prominent benefits of social media are covered, it does infact improve Google search results! If you have a social network brand presence you will see that it displays very high on the search engine results! Blogs, popular updates on these networks also soar very quickly to some of the top search engine results! We have not even gotten into ‘Social Search’! So this is just one of the reasons to have a robust social media presence for your brand!

Companies often get scared of negetive feedback they would face on social media, the thing is that the reason I thought of writing this post is exactly due to negetive feedback – My somewhat negetive feedback blog post for Priyadarshini Cab services. I was planning on calling their car yesterday for some traveling within the city and in order to get their number I did an online search as would a large number of people. I scrolled down to find their official website – it turns out none was listed! They only have profiles on quikr, justdial and such but no official presence. I was surprised to find my blog on my bad experience with their cars was showing up on the first Google page! Not just that, I had another bad experience yesterday with their car and I can add that blog as ‘Part 2′ ;p

I am sure if they had a website and social media profiles it would have taken up the first 3-4 links and then the profiles on justdial and such. So atleast blog posts like mine wouldn’t appear on Google first page. So if clients avoid social media due to -ve feedback, it will just come back and bite their ass.

Social media is a really happening field. Almost every marketing person has it on their agenda, so when they meet me they always want to know more. If the meeting is a business one then they want to know how to catapault their brand into fame and glory in the social arena! Everytime I just try to spruce their ideas and guide the topic towards building a more structured setup from where they can start of with some sustained activities which can then become the platform for more dynamic stuff.

One of the common thoughts I have come across is that they don’t want the usual run of the mill stuff – they want their social media to be true to their brand, they want something different, a class apart from the rest, yadi yadi yada…. and typically with these brands, I find that for months their enthusiastically created Facebook Pages are just langhuishing around. No new content, barely any fan activity. Even typical is some month old odd update from the brand thats either too ‘brand technical’ and not appealing to general fans.

For any of this to really get off the table there are somethings that I feel are crucial behind-the-scenes before something exciting actually happens for the brand on social media,

A for strAtegy

Structure & Sustainability
Like I have said so many times before, a sound strategy is necessary to start out with. It would also ensure that the activities are aligned to the larger brand image being put out and not ad hoc. It would ensure that they can be sustained over months, allowing fans to warm up to it and spike interactions. This would include an executive structure for the activity – who is going to do the work? Where is the top administration going to get involved? Very often pages langhuish cause they are looking for the right person or agency to execute their strategy.

Depending on the industry, the top management might need to have some solid presence like a Twitter channel or a Blog. They then need to be commited from the start rather than later not doing their bit and the whole strategy crumbling. I have written a more in-depth article on strategy here.

b for bUDGET

Show me the Money!
Probably one of the main reasons why campaigns are cut off mid way or they never take off at all would be that while the company can talk a lot about what it wants, the money they are willing to put in is quite little! They are more used to one-time traditional campaigns where the money is splurged and marketing is done. Social media needs a longterm outlook, so paying a good amount monthly is something they are too frisky about. Shelling out bucks for a two-three month campaign is what they typically end up doing and as a result once the campaign is over they come back to square zero with no basic presence on social media. The reason they come back to square 0 is also because they hire some goofers who start a brand page called ‘brandso-socampaign’ – this campaign can’t be run again and as a result the page is a dud after the campaign. If they had started a normal brand page then atleast they would have this page with high number of fans for next time.

C for the honCho!

Top management involvement
This is another big hurdle. Traditional campaigns just need to be approved and then its off their table, but social media can have new developments daily! The top management would like to get involved but they don’t have the time, but they still want everything to be in their control and so the campaign remains fettered in a big way. The brand hardly interacts with fans because the right people don’t shell out the time. This is ofcourse not a simple matter because wrong responses from the executive person can really back fire! There are number of reasons for this – sometimes the top guy is technologically dumb! or he gets even less about social media than his marketing team!
Again the solution I feel would lie in the initial strategy and structure – here the right mix of executive team and top folks needs to be made to ensure that the brands activities have the right man power behind them to grow! In the strategy the brand image and content strategy need to be drilled in so as to reduce risks of the wrong message going out. This risk can never really be eleminated as has been seen in examples from top marketing company goof ups like the Chrysler incident where the executive sent out a swear word into a tweet! Along with this some 101 on how to manage a social media crisis would be good too!

A lot of Indian companies seem to hire a college intern to manage their Facebook page, is just not done! I recently came across someone who used to supervise the content going up on a corporate brand page but she herself doesn’t have any technical knowledge about page working – she is now interning with another media agency! What really works is when brands start having a senior digital marketeer position in their management. It will also be great for us companies to talk to these guys, cause they know the field better.

So while the social media industry is interesting there is a just a lot random stuff being done. Just the other day met a person who was very excited about a website idea he had, which was plain old web 1.0! In the age of Twitter & blogs he was talking about websites. Its tough to understand when there is so much info available online, so many international brand case-studies keep coming up, why do so many Indian companies look lost? And then from somewhere we come across an NGO like Pratham having put out an exciting social media usage case-study!