Ever since Old Spice stunned the marketing world with the success of its witty series of videos responding to people’s blogs, comments and Tweets, the marketing world has been bracing itself for a glut of copycats. After all, when a campaign generates 40 million interactions and skyrockets sales 107% in one month, it’s no wonder brands will be falling over themselves to rediscover its magic formula.

But whilst the Old Spice campaign might appear simple to replicate, the fact is that there’s a range of factors that contributed to its success. Miss any of these out and you risk your imitation campaign becoming a source of embarrassment rather than pride.

Cisco presents…Ted from Accounts Payable

Two weeks ago Cisco launched a campaign aping Old Spice, but with Ted from Accounts Payable answering questions instead of a chiselled ex-American Football player. The campaign consisted of a modest 18 videos, compared to Old Spice’s 180+, and attracted a similarly modest number of views.

Cisco’s in-house marketing team probably saw it as a fun, spur of the moment way of latching onto Old Spice’s success to generate interest in its brand. But based on the comments and feedback, people who’ve seen the videos appear to think otherwise.

Being the first brand to ‘do an Old Spice’ was always going to be risky. People have been waiting to see which brand will be first to try and jump on the bandwagon, and are eager to knock it off if they think the campaign is a ‘#fail’.

These are a few reasons why I think Cisco’s campaign annoyed people:

Parody doesn’t go far enough – Cisco made it clear that they were aping Old Spice, but they didn’t do anything that would encourage anybody to take notice. They didn’t add anything or take the parody far enough, leaving people scratching their heads and wondering ‘what’s the point?’

Lack of build up or promotion – Old Spice had been building momentum since screening their advert at the Super Bowl in February, whilst Cisco merely promoted their videos through their corporate blog and disparate Twitter feeds. The campaign might have been a spur of the moment idea, but it would have benefited from more planning and promotion before its execution.

The campaign didn’t resonate – People wanted to engage with the Old Spice campaign. They thought the ‘Old Spice Guy’ was witty, likeable and even celebrities clamoured for a brief share of his attention. Who cares what Ted from Accounts Payable thinks?

Who was the campaign aimed at? – Old Spice wanted to reposition a fuddy duddy brand as fun and trendy to a younger demographic. A sales increase of 100%+ would suggest that they succeeded. Cisco sells routers and computer networking devices to businesses. I’m not sure how Ted from Accounts answering questions in a towel will influence an IT manager’s buying decisions?

The lesson for any brand wishing to imitate Old Spice is that you need to think carefully about how you use social media. You need to consider which platforms your customers are using; how you can introduce your campaign to them and in a way that makes people want to engage with it. Posting witty videos on YouTube might have worked for Old Spice, but there are plenty of ways you can use social media to your marketing advantage.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. Award winners BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

There seems to be a growing feeling that us marketers have had our chance to ‘experiment’ with social media and now we need to start delivering real results. Customer service wants to know how those Tweets are making their jobs easier, whilst sales wants to know when they can start chasing all these Facebook fans you’ve been amassing.

Fuzzy claims about ‘engagement’ and stats on page impressions will no longer do. There’s too much cynicism around that social media isn’t the sales generating machine some of us marketers claim.

So it’s time that we started standing up to the naysayers with some stats proving that social media is worth persevering with and that it can deliver real results.

Metrics for gauging social media success

Before launching a social media campaign it’s sensible to note down all the various metrics you can use to gauge success. This includes qualitative engagements with customers (interactions, feedback and comments) and quantitative means of measurement, such as:

1. Mentions on Twitter and in Google
2. The number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, blob subscribers, etc
3. Website traffic
4. Backlinks pointing to your website
5. Latest sales figures

You can then combine both qualitative and quantitative measures to gain some insight on the impact of your social media campaign’s success.

How brand success from the World Cup has been gauged

Now the final whistle has blown, marketers have been pouring over the figures to gauge which brand benefited the most from their multi-million pound sponsorship deal.

Adidas got the most blog mentions, thanks to its controversial Jabulani ball, but it’s been Coca-Cola that’s been hailed as the clear winner after gaining 1.4 million social media fans during the tournament. This represents a 20% increase, with its YouTube competition to win match tickets being seen as a big part of its success. No mention of the impact of Bavaria beer’s orange dress attired ambush marketing stunt unfortunately.

Old Spice sets the benchmark

If you haven’t heard, the marketing world is swooning over P&G’s Old Spice campaign, hailed for transforming a fuddy duddy brand into the internet’s hottest topic. The campaign’s 200+ videos, responding to Tweets and blog posts (and thriving off user participation in the process), have so far clocked up:

• 16.3 million video views
• 1000% increase in YouTube subscribers
• 400% increase in Twitter followers
• 28,000 RT of terms ‘oldspice’ and ‘old spice’

Old Spice’s campaign has been hailed as the new textbook way of using social media, so expect a flood of clones in the coming months. However, one statistic that has yet to be reported is the increase in sales.

Blendtec is reported to have increased sales five fold thanks to its ‘Will it Blend’ series of videos. This may well be an exceptional example – for now – but we believe that more and more increases in sales will be able to be directly attributable to social media engagement campaigns.

Social media is brilliant for enabling businesses to listen to their customers, provide outstanding customer service, and engender positive word-of-mouth recommendations. But ultimately it will be its impact on the bottom line which will propel it into mainstream adoption as the central hub around which marketing campaigns revolve.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It’s not uncommon to feel embarrassed about asking customers for referrals. It’s normal to hope that they will occur naturally if you continue providing a high quality service. But referrals are worth encouraging because they can be marketing gold.

Having your customers tell their friends and colleagues about your business can generate leads that are already sold on your expertise. After all, who do you trust more? The helpful advice of someone you know or the sales pitch of a corporate enterprise?

Referral marketing tips

1. Ask – It sounds simple, but just asking customers to pass on your details is a straightforward way of creating leads. You don’t have to do this in person, but can add it into your after sales process. In your email or letter, thanking them for their purchase, you can politely suggest passing on your details to anyone who might be interested in your product. Hopefully, they’ll do this for free as a gesture of appreciation, but you can always offer them an incentive…

2. Coupons and affiliate schemes – In the ideal world, customers would refer you because they value your product and think it will interest their friends. But it can help to motivate them with a discount or free gift in exchange for leads that convert into sales. This type of marketing is rife on the internet in the form of affiliate schemes for eBooks and other digital products.

3. Form alliances – This is an underutilised tactic, but one that can be highly effective if your service crosses over with other non-competing service providers. For example, if you sell potted plants you could form an alliance with a local gardener in which you both agree to promote each other to customers. This can simply mean passing on their contact details or handing out each other’s leaflets. You could also sweeten the deal by offering each other a cut from the extra profits your alliance generates.

4. Harness social networking – People are constantly recommending products and services to their friends on Facebook and Twitter. With messages potentially being shared and forwarded amongst 1000s of people, encouraging customers to post positive Tweets and Facebook updates can generate significant exposure. Consider emailing customers and subtly ask them to Tweet about your product if they found it useful.

Hopefully these tips have got you thinking about how you can integrate referral marketing into your marketing strategy and harness the power of the best salespeople around – your customers.

Measuring customer loyalty

If you wanted to gauge customer satisfaction, and the likelihood of them recommending you, then you can try calculating your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a simple metric calculated by asking customers to gauge out of 10 the likelihood of recommending you. You then simply deduct the percentage of those scoring 6 or less from the percentage scoring 9 or 10.

(Disclaimer notice – One of our clients is Satmetrix which supplies software around the NPS concept)

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

It’s tough for graduates out there: we’ve just come out of a torrid recession, 1000s of public sector jobs are to be axed and there are 70 of you competing for every role.

It’s certainly a challenging time to be looking for work. But you can boost your chances of getting an interview by using the internet to promote your personal brand to employers.

Blogs, Facebook and Twitter give you the tools you need to project the image of a proactive, passionate and enthusiastic up and coming professional that employers should be fighting over to get in their organisation.

How to build your personal brand

Facebook – It’s no secret that employers now use Facebook to screen candidates. But before you rush off to lock your profile from prying eyes, Facebook can be used to your advantage. Update your public details to give employers a positive impression, such as information on your work experience, hobbies, interests and qualifications. In the ‘About me’ section write a positive, inspiring branding statement that reflects why employers should give you an interview. Replacing your profile photo of you wearing a traffic cone with one in which you look smart, responsible and sober is also a good idea.

LinkedIn – Your old school and university friends are a good starting point for building your professional network. In particular, connect with those who graduated in previous years and are already active in the workplace. You never know who’ll be able to point you towards a job opening or can put in a good word for you. Join discussion groups related to the industries you’re interested to get some insight into the hot topics and to ask astute questions – you never know who might have an opening for a proactive graduate.

Blogging – Blogs are great for expressing your passion and interest in the profession you’d like to get into. You can also use it as an online resume, with pages on your employment history and interests. There are plenty of sites where you can start a blog for free (e.g. Wordpress.com) which enable you to be up and blogging in minutes.

Twitter – Sharing links to your blog, reTweeting experts in your industry and posting links to relevant news stories will help to build your exposure amongst professionals in your targeted industry. Following experts in your field to get you an insight into the key trends and if they follow you back, you never know, it might lead to a job opportunity.

Whether you’re a graduate, school leaver or have recently been made redundant, finding a job at the moment isn’t going to be easy. But social media can give you a platform to demonstrate the enthusiasm, passion and proactive attitude that will tick all the right boxes with employers and push you further to the front of the queue.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Foursquare can be a lot of fun, but try not to get lost

People have been predicting big things for location based social networking site Foursquare for some time. And it looks as though those predictions could be coming true after it received $20 million in funding and ramped up its marketing by sending out 1000s of ‘Clings’ (stickers to you and me) to businesses to slap on their windows.

With Facebook and Twitter already on the ‘to do’ list, is messing around with yet another social media site worth the hassle? Does Foursquare have any real marketing value to offer? Or is it just a creative use of GPRS for people who like playing games?

Big brands are experimenting

Foursquare might have a modest 2 million users compared to Facebook’s mahoosive 400 mill, but it’s already attracting the attention of big name brands.

It’s not unusual for brands to want a share of the spotlight when a trendy new ‘craze’ comes along. In this instance, Star Bucks, Bravo TV and the Financial Times have all been attaching their names to Foursquare’s rapid rise by offering rewards to users for ‘checking in’ at specific locations.

At the moment it might be a ‘niche’ service compared to FB and Twitter. But as more phones become GPRS enabled and awareness spreads, brands know it’s a safe bet that Foursquare’s 2 mill users will grow. The site also has great potential for evolving into a valuable source of local product and service information provided by real people, and being more than just a ‘game’.

How to promote your business on Foursquare

You can add your business to Foursquare by completing their ‘Add this Place’ form. Make sure you complete it fully to give users as much information as possible. You can also add ‘tips’ to your location, such as where people can park , whether you offer home delivery or product recommendations.

Perhaps the greatest marketing value comes from offering Foursquare users rewards for visiting your business. This could include a special discount or a prize to the most frequent visitor (known as ‘Mayors’ in Foursquare speak). In exchange Foursquare can provide you with stats on your visitors, their frequency and a histogram of check-in days.

Should your business join?

So is Foursquare worth bothering with? Should you get an official Foursquare ‘Cling’ for your business and show your part of the internet’s latest hip new trend? Well, it only takes a few minutes to ‘claim your place’ and then add it to the Foursquare community. And with a cool $20 million to play around with, who knows how many people will be using Foursquare in a year’s time?

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Despite all the fuss over Facebook and Twitter, email remains a marketer’s favourite tool: it’s cost effective, measurable and great for one-to-one relationship building. But social media still has plenty to offer, particularly when it comes to spreading your messages virally. So it makes sense to try and combine the two.

You’d have thought retailers, with their regular offers and product announcements, would be leading the way in persuading people to share emails on Facebook and Twitter. Not so, it seems.

According to dotMailer’s annual ‘Hitting the Mark’ study UK retailers are still behind the times in understanding how people are using the web and where their customers are spending most of their online time.

From assessing emails of 36 UK retailers, dotMailer found that:

• Only 17% included a ‘share on social network’ link
• Half failed to include a ‘forward to a friend’ link
• Only 4 out of 36 had a link to their blog
• Only 3 used a personalised salutation (which is proven to improve open and click through rates)
• Only 4 used other data they’d collected to personalise their email content (personalisation makes emails more relevant and improves response rates and reduces the numbers unsubscribing)

Social media can expand email into an ongoing conversation

If your customers are using Facebook and Twitter (who isn’t these days?) then adding links to them in your emails should be a no-brainer. At the click of a button your email recipients can share your offer with 100s of their friends in seconds, and at no extra cost to you.

With marketing supposed to be a ‘conversation’ these days (rather than a steady bombardment of one way messages), social media offers a great way of expanding your static email into an ongoing dialogue.

Sending people an avalanche of emails every time you have something to say is bad practice: it annoys people and has them looking for the unsubscribe button. Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are great for providing a steady stream of updates, links and special offers.

So, for example, if you’re lunching a new product or running a special event you could use email as the introduction and social media for providing up to the minute news and customers’ reactions.

Combining email with social media offers enormous possibilities for marketers. So don’t wait for the big name retailers to get their act together, start experimenting today!

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Marketing is often at its most creative and edgy when it plugs into a hot topic or trend on what people are thinking. In the case of Pringles’ ‘The Oversharers’ campaign it’s annoyance at dull updates on Facebook, irrelevant Tweets and people sharing things that are ‘totally ridiculous’ online.

In terms of reflecting a popular trend, the campaign certainly appears to hit the proverbial nail. But in asking people to expose their friends’ boring updates publicly, does it go too far?

People can engage with the campaign in a variety of ways, such as posting their friends’ Tweets (e.g. ‘long sleeves make my arms itch’ and ‘LOL!! A pigeon!’) and downloading a Facebook app for flagging offending updates. It even has an online store where people can buy personalised T-shirts and mugs which they can send to ‘oversharing’ friends as ‘a friendly reminder of the tripe they write’.

Whilst the campaign is aimed at promoting Pringles’ crisps as something that’s ‘really worth sharing’, you have to wonder whether this campaign will backfire.

Pringles likes to portray itself as a fun, friendly brand that helps bring people together. But I’m not sure this will be people’s impression when they receive a message from Pringles telling them that their updates are boring? I fear this campaign could leave a trail of broken Facebook friendships in its wake.

Viral marketing with Twitter

On the plus side, Pringles’ campaign does show how Twitter can be used as part of a viral marketing strategy. With user engagement now a key component of online campaigns, persuading people to Tweet about your brand is an excellent way of encouraging people to engage and get involved.

Persuading people to Tweet about your campaign achieves two main objectives:

• It enables you to collect together Tweets about your campaign which you can post to a wall on your campaign website. This helps build a sense of community and user involvement in your campaign
• It helps to spread your campaign virally – when people see the topic appearing in their Twitter feed they’ll (hopefully) be intrigued to find out what the fuss is about and visit your campaign website before Tweeting about it themselves

Often the excitement of seeing your Tweet appear on the campaign’s website can be incentive enough (as shown on our Cobol.com anniversary website) for people to get involved. Running competitions and offering prizes for inventive Tweets can be a greater incentive.

One thing to remember is that Twitter is a social medium, with people’s messages exposed to friends and followers. So it’s sensible to run Twitter campaigns that encourage positive messages and engagement that brings people together, rather than pushes them apart.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Click to download a pdf of this chart, recently published on CMO.com

Social media is often clumped together and shoved into the same pigeon hole. But the two main sites, Facebook and Twitter, are actually very different. All they have in common is that they enable people to connect, interact and share content, and there the similarities end.

So which is best for marketing? Well, it depends on your target audience and the type of marketing you want to deliver…

Marketing on Twitter

Twitter is a lot more news driven than Facebook. People are constantly posting links, Retweeting and commenting on the latest topics in a constant stream of discussion. It’s why it’s often compared to a cocktail party. This makes it ideal for pushing out links to press releases, blog posts and industry news. Just remember that nobody likes a bore who only talks about themselves, so interact and don’t focus too much on trying to impress people.

Another difference with Facebook is their audiences. Facebook is seen as being populated by a fun loving under 30s crowd, whereas Twitter has an older, more professional audience. Twitter users are more interested in connecting with other people in their industry than playing Farmville, which makes it a more suitable place for posting business related news.

Perhaps Twitter’s biggest appeal for marketers is its ability to spread news virally. Thanks to keyword search tools and #hashtags, your Tweets can get picked up by relevant Twitter users and spread amongst 100s or 1000s of users in a matter of hours. Third party monitoring tools (such as Hootsuite, TwitJump and TweetBeep) also make it easy to track the success of your marketing efforts and gauge how to improve them.

Marketing on Facebook

With 400 million active users compared to Twitter’s 75 million, Facebook’s massive user base gives it the edge when you’re looking to attract as many people as possible to your brand. Facebook ‘Fan page’ feature makes it quick and easy to build your own minisites, in which you can add photos, videos and post updates.

The static nature of Facebook also makes it much better for interactivity. People can post comments and engage with your brand on an ongoing basis, with messages remaining visible to other users for days or weeks afterwards.

Facebook’s instant messaging feature also gives it the edge over Twitter’s direct messaging function for enabling one-to-one communication with your company.

So which is best?

If you had to choose, my advice would be Twitter for targeting a professional, news hungry B2B audience whereas Facebook is more suitable for B2C. Twitter is great for giving your business a voice and getting your industry related content to interested followers. Facebook’s Fan pages and interactivity makes it better for engagement on an ongoing basis.

However, both are free, quick and easy to use, so why not give both a try? Just don’t expect results overnight and be prepared to experiment to find out what works best for you.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With over 90% of the world’s emails classified as spam, it’s inevitable that scammers will try to infiltrate the latest technology to fill their pockets. Social media services are under increasing attack, with phishers desperate to snare people’s login details.

Last month, Twitter was subjected to a series of outbreaks of phishing emails and direct messages sent to its members. High profile victims included Ed Miliband MP and First Direct, whose hacked accounts were used to advertise dodgy knock-off pills and post links to scammy websites.

This video explains the outbreak in more depth:

Since the outbreak, Twitter’s technicians have been busy in their lab devising a solution. This week they emerged to announce that Twitter would now be screening all links in direct messages and emails to make sure they didn’t send people to fake phishing websites or anywhere else a little iffy.

Twitter has yet to confirm whether it will also start screening links in Tweets as well. But maybe it should – according to a recent study 10% of Twitter traffic is already junk, and it’s only going to rise…

Four Twitter Spam tactics

If you’re a Twitter user you might recognise a few of these by now:

1. Profile picture of a pretty girl and endless, moronic Tweets pitching products. The aim of these accounts is to follow as many people as possible so that when users check to see who’s following them they see the spammy messages
2. The hijacking of hashtags and popular topics by adding keywords to promotional messages. Habitat faced a PR disaster after it used interest in the Iranian election as an opportunity to flog its latest in-store discounts
3. Auto posting Tweets with scraped content to direct people to spammy websites filled with Adsense ads and affiliate links
4. Although this isn’t strictly spam, it’s still annoying – accounts with autoresponder messages which ask you to download their eBook or signup for their webinar the moment you start following them

MySpace has already been ruined, for many people, by its abundance of fake accounts and ‘friend’ requests from spammers.

Let’s hope Twitter doesn’t go the same way and steps up its efforts to combat spam. Otherwise it risks the user experience becoming ruined and having to watch its chances of making money fly out of the window.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

David Mitchell wrote in The Guardian this week about a company that gives teenagers vouchers in exchange for mentioning ‘key campaign messages to friends, both on and offline.’ Essentially, they’re being paid to spread advertising propaganda and, as a parent, I can understand why David is concerned.

But this type of word of mouth marketing is nothing new.

In the last decade Procter & Gamble (through its Tremor and Vocalpoint campaigns) has recruited millions of teenagers and mothers to hand out coupons and drop brand names into everyday conversations.

Should we be worried about this cynical approach to word of mouth? Or is there a more authentic way of integrating brands into daily conversations?

Viral marketing is difficult to fake

Many marketers hoped that social networking would make it easy to spread their campaign messages. But creating content in the marketing lab that people want to share is easier said than done.

Often, it happens by chance. People are now suspicious of videos featuring brands, and faked ‘viral’ videos can soon get exposed. You then face a potential backlash and damaged trust because people hate it when they’ve been tricked by a cynical marketer.

Instead, consider giving people an incentive to create authentic viral content for you…

Ford’s Fiesta Movement Campaign

Last year, in the US Ford gave 100 people Fiesta cars to borrow for 6 months.

The catch? They had to complete a series of monthly missions, such as delivering gifts to the National Guard or finding celebrity lookalikes. They then had to upload their adventures onto social networking sites.

The result? 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for car information and increased brand awareness at relatively small cost.

The Fiesta Movement campaign succeeded because it offered authentic videos of real life experiences. It wasn’t contrived simply to force the brand into people’s conversations.

So when creating social marketing campaigns give your customers an incentive to create content for you, even if it means your brand taking a backseat. Bribing people to talk about you will soon be exposed, leading to people losing trust in your brand and each other.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.