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.
Facebook Fan Pages Free and Fun
Facebook Fan Page Graph
The continued rise of Facebook means that all marketers — even those who have traditionally ignored social media tactics — are trying to figure out how to tap into this techno-social phenomenon.
One of the easier (and more affordable) ways to test the social waters is to set up a Facebook Fan Page. Plus, it’s free to get started.
I recently set up a fan page for my books (I’ve published three) and my CD-ROMs (again, three published). My books and CDs are resources that provide anatomy reference for comic book artists. Yeah, it’s a unique niche, I admit.
Setting up the “Photo Reference for Comic Artists Fan Page” was free and easy. If you were able to sign up for Facebook and set up a profile, you can figure out how to set up a fan page. For content, I uploaded sample photos from each of the books. It’s basically the same stuff that I have posted over in Flickr galleries and on my personal website.
Photo Reference for Comic Artists
So once you do that, you need to let people know about your page. Right now, I am promoting on the cheap. Basically, I shared the link with everyone in my Facebook Friends list who would be remotely interested in the page.
To my surprise, I got a dozen people on the first day, and then it quickly picked up from there. In less than two weeks, I had hit 200 fans. Not bad for word of mouth (WOM) promotion.
At that point, I had an audience. So I started uploading extra photos, like behind the scene shots that nobody has ever seen. As I posted pictures, people started giving it that thumbs-up “like,” which is a virtual endorsement. That resulted in more people signing up to be fans of the page. In the social marketing space, it’s all about relationships, so virtual approval is hugely important.
As a marketing channel, Facebook Fan Page is an free and easy way to begin spreading your brand message. Facebook even offers some rudimentary statistics and demographic information. It’s not very useful at this point, since my trends are just creating an initial baseline of information. At 10,000 fans you get access to more detailed analytics, but it’s unlikely that such a deep vertical like my books has that much of a broad-based appeal. But you never know.
Next month, I’ll try Facebook’s built-in advertising network to drive more awareness of the fan page. But for now, I am content recruiting fans organically, as they discover my page through their actual social network.
The next few weeks will be focused on posting new information and photos to get people engaged with the fan page. I’ll try running contest, just to see if people will participate. It will be at least six months before I get information about book sales, so I won’t know if this actually helps my long-term goal of selling books.
Stay tuned. More to come. Oh, and don’t forget to become a fan!
LINKS – NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSEMENTS:
- Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business?
- Facebook: Fan Page vs Group
- The Beginners Guide To Creating A Killer Facebook Fan Page
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
TV Apps Kickoff – 3 Things You Need to Know
The 2010 Superbowl officially kicked off the Age of TV Apps. The technology has been around for a few years and is already available to many people. But Vizio’s TV app Superbowl commercial was the kickoff heard ’round the world.
So what are TV apps? In a most basic sense, TV apps are like the applications you download for your iPhone. Small, limited-use software that allows you to personalize your hardware.
New stuff that was once only available for your computer — and then for your iPhone — is now available for your television. If you have Direct TV or Verizon FiOS, some of this is already baked into your cable box. Obviously you can get TV apps on the Vizio TV, but also on many Samsung and Sony televisions as well.
You can already use things like Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook on your TV.
Here are three things you should know about TV Apps
1. The technical field is relatively open.
Sure, there are some key players like Yahoo who have already set themselves as leaders, but that can change. Currently, Yahoo controls the application and administers the software development kit (SDK). Note: From our personal experience, Yahoo was somewhat slow in distributing the SDKs to developers. That’s unfortunate because that could irritate programmers who could create an open-source system that could render Yahoo’s TV Apps technology obsolete. If you have the desire to create apps (or even a completely new OS), the time is now. The tech is in place for you to build the next great widget, gadget, social network, or living room app.
2. TV apps will present design challenges.
Weather TV app available through DirectTV
TV apps will face several user interface challenges. The most notable is that most people don’t have a keyboard on their television remote control. Sure, you can pull one up on the screen, but as you can imagine, typing with a little remote-control button is a pretty poor user experience. If you’ve used a Wii remote to create a Mii character, you know how tedious it can be to type out a long name. Designers will clearly make the difference between apps that succeed or fail. The old design rules will need to evolve to take advantage and address the limitations of a 10-foot interface.
3. Content & marketing opportunities will need to evolve.
The iPhone and other smart phones forced content developers and marketers to rethink the way we package messages. Long-form had to give way to shorter, more relevant messages. If not for mobile communications limitations, Twitter would have never gained a foothold in society. Face it, a 140 character message fits better on a cell phone screen than, say, a PowerPoint presentation. People who mastered the Twitter format (including URL shorteners) emerged pretty quickly as masters of the medium. And the marketers quickly caught on with brand messages. That’s a long way of saying that the new language of TV apps is still in flux. If you want to create content or marketing messages for TV apps, try to figure out what works with this new interface.
If you’re already exploring TV apps, congratulations. You’re probably going to have a head start on this unique and exciting new communications channel. I look forward to seeing what you create.
LINKS, NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSEMENTS:
Too Socially Networked?
So this morning I checked my email and discovered that someone had subscribed to my FriendFeed. Huh? I have a FriendFeed account? Turns out, I do.
Started going through some of my bookmarks, which helped me remember some of the other sites where I’m registered.
Get this. I’m registered at Facebook and Flickr and Picasa and Twitter and MySpace and Yahoo and AOL and Mahalo and Google and YouTube and Shelfari and Amazon and eBay and CNet and New York Times and Technorati and Eons and Wikipedia and LinkedIn. And…and…and…hoo boy.
And that’s just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head! I’d forgotten about FriendFeed up until today. Last week Squidoo emailed me that they updated their site. Great. Um, do I have an account there? Oh yeah, I do. Thanks for reminding me.
Turns out, I am registered to everything under the sun. (Well, except actually at Sun.com.)
It’s not like it makes me cool or special or smarter, since it’s free to register at all of these sites. In a way, it’s a little…weird and slightly addictive. And since I rarely check most of them anymore, a bit of a waste.
Is there a social network for people who register for too many things? Is that Posterous? I may have to join that. Nevermind, I just did.
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.
Facebook Privacy Settings
Have you updated your Facebook privacy settings? No, go ahead and do it now. I’ll wait.
I’ll wait, but the identity thieves and hackers aren’t waiting. They’re out there collecting all kinds of personal information about you.
Consider all of the personal information that you post to message boards and profiles. With some time and effort, people can gather some pretty significant data on you.
Think about it for a moment. If you fully populate your profile, they may already have:
- Your full name, including middle name
- Your maiden name (if you’re a married & changed your last name)
- Your birth date
- Your hometown and current town
- Your school and educational history
- Your spouse’s information (or significant other)
- Your employment history
- Your religious and personal views
- The names of your children and pets
- Photos of yourself and many of your family and friends
Add this to the stuff you’ve posted online about yourself in comments and Wall-to-Wall posts….and you’re looking at a LOT of personal information on Facebook alone. This is more stuff than some famous people have published about themselves. And at least they get the side benefit of being famous (and sometimes rich!).
Let’s just remember that “mother’s maiden name” is sometimes a security question for financial institutions. As are offbeat questions about your personal life that, theoretically, only you should know.
If you want to make it even more creepy, go to Google Maps or Google Earth. Type in your home address. If you’re looking at an aerial photo of your house, then everyone knows where you live. And if you post when you’re on vacation on your Facebook status, you may be telling everyone when your house will be vacant.They’ll even provide directions for burglars.
So, yeah. Go update that Facebook profile and keep some of your personal life private.
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.
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.
Verticals within Verticals
We were at a team meeting with several people I hadn’t really worked with yet. It was a typical white-board brainstorm meeting about how we could provide digital tactics against traditional-media channels.
If you’re in digital, you know how these meetings can be. Sometimes it’s great, especially if the traditional team is new-media savvy. In this case, we were lucky, since most of the team was somehow personally involved in social or new media. We had a couple of bloggers, several people who listened to podcasts, and just about everyone was on Facebook or MySpace. In short, they all got it. Perfect.
We talked websites, mobile media, interactive video, downloadables, mashups, social media, user generated content. Good stuff.
That’s what made it especially strange when one of the account leaders said something to the effect of “we want a really big tactic, something that will hit a really big, broad audience.”
Huh? Weren’t we just all on the same whiteboard here with new media?
New media is all about narrow audience. The idea that you can get a big demographic on a brand message is sort of an old media concept. Essentially a hold over from traditional broadcast television and commercial spots.
Aside from major television events like the Superbowl, the Sopranos, or a major news event, even television is fragmented into much more narrower audiences. (Note: The one big exception…bad news travels fast on all mediums.)
Yes, there are still several broad-based communication platforms online, most notably portals and central news sites. Destinations. But those are hard to control and not typically easily or cheaply influenced by brand marketers. Then again, if you have a large marketing budget or a really cool brand, you can get prettymuch anywhere. For the rest of us, we have to find alternate channels.
Alternate channels basically mean verticals. And in most cases, verticals within verticals.
If you’re promoting a specific brand, you just want to talk to your target audience. (Except around the holidays, if the brand is something that can be gifted.)
Why talk to teenage boys if your product is for middle-age moms? It makes more sense to spend your dollars to hit the mom market. If you can narrow it to the income, race, regional, or other demographic, you can target your message to make it relevant to their personal experiences.
So you may be looking at women (v1), middle age (v2), moms (v3), high income (v4), living near a major city (v5)…and that’s just for one campaign. Your second campaign may change to target women of middle or low income, which will change the positioning of your value proposition.
The best part of the verticals within verticals is the way you can time and manipulate your out of pocket expenditures and messaging. There’s flexibility in all mediums from magazines to television to radio, but nothing that gives you the hypertargeting that you can get in new media.
Which brings me back to that brainstorm meeting.
After an hour of brainstorming, it was deflating to hear someone start talking about broad-based marketing on new media channels. We finally have the kind of communications structure that marketers dream about, and some of us are trying to get it to act like an old media channel.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen new media struggle in obscurity, stumble toward credibility, and now stagger to mass media acceptance. But for those of us who remember 1200 baud dial ups, this is an exciting time. The promise of new media communications has finally reached a level of maturity that allows us to truly share a brand message….one that gets people motivated to action.
The ability to create targeted, deep-vertical messages is the biggest, broadest appeal of new media marketing. Let’s use it to create messages that are relevant, motivating, and exciting to the deepest verticals that we can identify.
It’s a vertical world created by users…and perfect for marketers.
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