A Killer Review – Social Networks as Critics
Will my friends kill Killers?
Recently I wrote about how input from my personal social network compelled me to go see a movie that critics had panned. Now, it seems, the critics are being bypassed by some of the movie studios.
A recent article in NorthJersey.com revealed that the movie studio Lionsgate was planning to launch the new movie Killers without the customary practice of screening it for critics. According to the article, Lionsgate would rather take their chances with reviewers on Facebook and Twitter — that is, people who are probably closer to their target audience.
Lionsgate marketers are, pardon the pun, hoping for a killer review of Killer on Twitter.
As the media continues to evolve with new technology, the opinion of your friends has much more impact and influence than some anonymous reviewer. Sure, there will always be certain reviewers that we know and trust, but they are a fading source for information.
Marketers at Lionsgate recognize this and hope to ride the wave of buzz. It’s an interesting experiment, typically reserved for genre films. They figured (probably correctly) that the reviewers would hate their genre flicks, but that it would appeal to the target audience.
Now, they’re going straight to the audience. It’s the ultimate in buzz and viral marketing. It’s a new media stunt that garnered buzz for a movie property that was probably struggling for attention.
As far as I am concerned, I am now more interested to check out Killers. Now, at least, I know that I can trust the critics, since they are my friends.
And if they trick me into going to see a movie that I hate, well, I guess I need new friends.
Buzz, Tweet, ShareThis
ShareThis Logo
With all this talk of Buzzing and Tweeting and Facebooking, it’s easy to overlook the true value of social networks, at least from the perspective of content marketing.
Content marketing can help you effectively articulate your brand story to allow customers to evangelize it. Lots of products rely on evangelists to share messages because a personal recommendation goes a long, long way.
Consider the following scenario: You’re thinking of going to the movies this weekend. So you check the movie listings, and every film is lavished with the typical hyperbole. “Brilliant!” or “Laugh out loud funny!” or “Triumphant!” (Whatever that means.)
You check out the movie reviews, but the reviewers can’t seem to agree on anything, except the names of the stars.
Suddenly your friend sends you a mobile message on Facebook that says, “dude, you have to go see this movie. Ignore the reviews. You will love it!”
Which matters to you most? Is it (a) the review in the newspaper, (b) the ad that proclaims this to be “triumphant!” or (c) the message you got on Facebook?
No big surprise, right? You’re going with the recommendation from your friend, because (theoretically) your friend has little to gain personally or financially from you going to that movie. You trust that your friend knows what you like. Sure, the message may appear in a Tweet or on Facebook or on Google Buzz or whatever, but that’s just the channel. The most important thing is the social context of the recommendation. Content is king, but context makes it relevant.
It’s this social context that makes brand evangelists (and social networks) so valuable to the health of a brand. A recent study revealed that Facebook drives 44% of social sharing.
So if you have a brand, be sure to include social sharing features on your website that allow people to easily evangelize your brand message. Remember, your brand can be something that people go out and purchase…or it can be your own personal self-branding effort (i.e., Brand You). Whatever it is, you need to make it easy for people to share.
Check out the bottom of this post. You’ll see a little widget from ShareThis that will allow you to share my blog. Go ahead and share it with family and friends
Especially if you want to proclaim it “triumphant!” (Whatever that means.)
LINKS – NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSEMENTS:
- Apple and Brand Evangelists
- Email and Social Sharing
- Sharing and ‘Socialgraphics’: Why Marketers Should Be Paying Attention
Book-o-Tweets
Give a TweetBookz for a gift. Or not.
Just when you thought you’d seen it all…there’s TweetBookz. Yes, now you can take your funniest, most compelling Twitter posts and bind them into a handsome coffee table book.
Roll that around for a moment: A. Book. Of. Tweets.
In a world of temporary ‘Net culture, it’s ironoclastic that you can now bind your Twitter posts into a book. New media now migrates back over to dead tree media.
Publish an ebook of your tweets? Nah, forget that. You deserve the slaying of a tree.
And you know what? Don’t even correct your bad grammar, misspellings, or emoticons. You need to be you. Be real.
Your every fleeting 140-character thought can now live on in a grand library, enshrined forever in print. Bill Shakespeare has nothing on you.
- Tired of standing online at K-Mart? Publish it.
- Feeling itchy and hungry at the same time? Get that in hardback.
- Feel like sharing an inside joke, retweet, or just an LOL? Wow, call Gutenberg and tell him to preflight the manuscript. You, my friend, were born to be published.
For extra irony points, include your your favorite rants about how old media and print are dying a slow death. You ironic icon, you.
Facebook Status Off Video
Y’know, sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself. This video captures the geeky goodness of our obsession with Facebook status updates.
Lots of us in this age online celebrity are obsessed with self-marketing and Brand You to the point of silliness. I’m certainly guilty of trying too hard to be entertaining in my posts.
Anyway, watch this little viral video and have a laugh.
Of course, I’ll be posting this video to Twitter and Facebook.
Shorteners Getting Bigger
When smart companies all start doing the same thing, it’s probably a good idea to figure out what they know. If you haven’t quite noticed yet, there’s some sort of micro trend percolating in the biz of making web URLs shorter.
In the past few weeks, several important websites have created their own URL shorteners. You’ve seen shortened URLs, which make long web addresses much more manageable for sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Among the most popular services are Bit.ly and Tr.im.
For the most part, URL shorteners are just an interesting utility, but it’s clearly something more powerful than most people realize. That’s a bit like search engines. In the beginning, search engines were important, but nobody could have predicted the massive Google empire. (Except Google, of course.)
Now, URL shorteners are shaping up to be a very interesting micro trend. Consider the fact that several important sites have announced their own URL shorteners in the last few weeks, including:
Will this be a big trend? Not sure. From a publisher’s perspective, there are certainly some advantages to having people use your shorteners, particularly since it gives them interesting data about where people are linking.
Several experts are raising security issues around URL shorteners, so this micro trend may have serious industry repercussions. Yep, shorteners are definitely getting bigger.
Is the world ready for a shorter URL for me? Like Bud.dy or Scal.ra?
Jackson Dies. Fans Flock to…MySpace?
In terms of media, Michael Jackson’s death revealed some interesting insights in social networks. No, it’s not that people on social networks — like Facebook, Twitter , digg, etc — broke the news to their friends. Instant sharing is at the core of social networking.
The big surprise? MySpace became a serious destination for fan outpouring. Yes, MySpace, the site that some industry experts have declared dead. Yes, MySpace, the social networking pioneer that just laid off 30% of their workforce.
The King of Pop died suddenly on June 25, setting off a firestorm of news and reaction. Post-event analysis reveals that sites like Twitter and Google were hobbled by the surge in traffic. Google thought the surge in traffic was an organized attack on their site.
SIDE QUESTIONS: If Michael Jackson’s sudden death had this effect on the Intertubes, isn’t it time for the government to review the Net’s infrastructure? What would happen in a larger global event? Could the Net handle it? And is it ironic that television (that “old media”) works just fine during major surges? Debate, discuss.
Back to MySpace
As news raged, something weird happened at MySpace. People started to “friend” Michael Jackson’s MySpace Page at an astonishing rate. MediaWeek reported that “the official Michael Jackson MySpace profile was adding 100 new friends per minute.” Um, wow!
As of this writing, Jackson’s MySpace page has 567 thousand friends. That’s a lot of friends for a “dead” network.
And while Facebook is the current kind of social networks, MySpace is still considered the social network place for discovering music. MediaWeek also reported that “MySpace Music was streaming an average of 100,000 songs every ten minutes in the hours after Jackson’s death.”
It’s frustrating thing that they don’t offer a comparison. That is, how many friends was Michael Jackson getting per day before his death? Don’t know. And how many songs were they streaming every ten minutes before his death? Again, don’t know, so it’s hard to give a good comparison.
Post Mortem Suprises
Michael Jackson’s surprise death revealed a lot about the way people use the web and social networks. Based on the follow-up coverage, it’s clear that this Internet-thingy still holds a few surprises for us.
Yes, Facebook continues to be THE social networking juggernaut. But we knew that already.
The biggest surprise for many of the “experts” out there? MySpace isn’t dead.
Book Expo 2009 – A quick recap
Last weekend I went to the Book Expo of America 2009 in New York City. It’s a show that comes around every three years, so it’s not one that I want to miss. As the author of several books (and hopefully more in the future!), I attend the shows to network and connect with publishers.
Since last show, however, we’ve seen the launch of ebook readers, including the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle. Many publishers offered ebook versions of new releases, which seemed to draw little attention from media reporting on the event. And yet, neither Sony nor Amazon nor Google (which is now selling ebooks!) had any significant presence at the Expo, which is more or less a professional trade show.
As an author, I would have liked to have seen at least Sony and Amazon at the convention with big informational booths. Y’know, preaching the digital gospel and stuff. I even brought my Kindle with me, just in case Amazon was giving away free sample books or whatever. Sadly, there was nothing there but a little standing kiosk. Nothin’ fun for us early adopters.
Side note: One of the convention organizers said that the word “BEA” was one of the most Twittered words in the country that weekend. That’s kind of cool. And there were several digital-focused panels, including a couple on blogging and Twittering, which was interesting to see.
Despite the ups and downs of the recession, the show still seemed vibrant and alive. It felt a little less crowded than in previous years, but there were still a lot of publishers and interesting exhibitors. It’s a brightly lit Candyland of fun for people who love books. You can’t actually buy anything at Book Expo, but you can certainly plan some of things you’d like to see under the Christmas tree this year.
And, yes, a little reassurance that (despite the digital revolution) there are still people out there who plan to buy books. At least for a little while.
LINKS – NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSEMENTS
Thank God It’s Thursday: Book Expo ’09
Book Expo America 2009 – A Summary
Twitter for Marketers – A Brief Intro
As Twitter has grown in popularity, questions about how, why, and when to use it have skyrocketed. In advertising/marketing agencies, there is a responsibility (and pressure) to use new technology for branding.
According to Nielsen, Twitter is growing really, really, really, really fast. So, if you’re a marketer, you’re probably trying to figure out how to grab the tail of this comet.
For starters, you need to have something to say. I’m not kidding here. If you have nothing to say on a regular basis, don’t try to jump into the conversation.
Twitter is all about content. Messages, words, and insights. It’s fast, short, and fresh. If you or your brand doesn’t have something to share daily, you may want to sit out the Twitter craze. (Then again, most brands and categories have SOME industry news, so talk to your staff writer about info opportunities.)
Twitter content is legendarily short. Each message can run as long as 140 characters. Yes, you read that right, Tweets (a cute name for a Twitter post) are only 140 characters or less, including spaces, URLs, and line breaks.
(That paragraph actually ran 187 characters. Too much for a Tweet!)
There are plenty of tips and tricks for working within the constraints, community, and technology supporting Twitter. It’s a fun challenge for marketers, especially as the new opinion leaders begin to carve out their turf in this brave new technical world.
Future blogs will touch on how to leverage Twitter and some good examples of people who self promote using this “micro blogging” technology.
In the meantime, check out how I use my Twitter account to share ideas about content, marketing and technology at Marketing Buddy.
Presented at Marketing Conference
As a marketer, you have to get out there sometimes and interact at events. I was fortunate to be invited to be a faculty speaker at ExL Pharma’s “The 3rd Pharmaceutical Search Engine Marketing Strategies Conference: Best Practices for Integrating SEM into a New Media Mix.” The conference was held in Princeton, NJ, which is a really inspiring location.
This was a smaller, more intimate conference, which was nice because you really got to engage with the speakers. In a larger room, you can sometimes get overlooked in the conversation. But here, we could really ask questions, get involved, and interact.
During my part of the conference, I discussed interactive content and how it affects search engine optimization and some of the latest SEO techniques. Of course, it was a pharma marketing discussion, so everything I presented was customized to the needs of the audience.
Here’s the actual description of what they had me present:
Demonstrating What Skills are Essential for Building a User-Friendly, Search-Friendly, and Persuasive Site
- How To bring consumers to your site and convert them into customers
- Significant changes/shifts in SEM for Pharma over the past 12 months: What is new right now?
- Competitive SEM research: Search engine marketing does not occur in a vacuum of just your company. Learn what competitive data is out there and how to best leverage the information prior to launching your campaign or to optimize on an existing campaign
During my presentation, I really tried to engage the audience and invited them to participate. I used one of the core decks our agency uses to pitch new SEM business, but modified to to be more educational and less sales oriented. It was a good deal more colorful with larger pictures and fewer words.
There were several really impressive SEM/SEO presentations over those two days. And even though I do this full time, I found myself discovering new techniques and perspectives that helped me improve at my job. That alone was worth the price of admission.
Plus, it was really interesting to see how several micro-bloggers used Twitter to cover the convention for people who could not attend.
I need to offer special thanks to Jason Youner and Shawn O’Hagan for inviting me to participate at their event.
Here’s my bio from the ExL Pharma event. Kind of cool to be called “faculty.” I like that. Makes me wish I had gotten an MBA or something so I could teach at the college level.
Converging on Convergence
As interesting new web technologies become available, I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of sites I need to visit….just to keep them fresh. (There are some feeds and whatnot to streamline these services, but that just becomes another site to visit.)
Recently, I’ve been trying to leverage these services by incorporating features into my personal website. As web technologies pendulate toward the middle, I am one step closer to converging on convergence.
My goal is to make my personal website a little more compelling for people who come to check it out.
Examples:
- This weekend, I added my Twitter feed to my personal website. It’s just a little piece of Flash code that I was able to drop right into my web template. Very easy and elegant. (Note: I tried to use the Javascript code, but it just kept breaking.)
- I also added a Facebook “badge” to my homepage. It’s really basic, but it looks kind of nice.
- Then I synched my Facebook with my Twitter. Sort of sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Anyway, now, when I post to Twitter, it automatically feeds into my Facebook “current status.” Nice.
You can check out my handiwork at: http://www.buddyscalera.com. Feel free to look at the code and see how it’s done. Very simple and easy to do, even for an HTML novice.
Eventually this blog will probably migrate over to my website too. I really like blogging here on WordPress, but I get frustrated when I can’t control my widgets or outbound links better. So, we’ll see.
Now, I am off to find new convergence tricks.
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