Bounce Tries Building Buzz for Fabric Softener on Facebook

From Mashable:

Bounce, the fabric softener brand, suffers from the same problem a lot of brands in low-interest categories do: People don’t talk about it much.

In the social media age, that’s a problem, but the brand has a two-part solution. Phase one: Create a false controversy. Earlier this year, Bounce marketers began promoting the idea — among mommy bloggers — that you’re either a bar person or a sheet person.

Phase two is a lighthearted social media campaign seeking new uses for Bounce. The program will launch with a video that features two Bounce fanatics — one a sheet person, the other a bar fan — doing things like sticking a bar on someone’s back and persuading a cop to leave a bar instead of a parking ticket. This weekend, the Procter & Gamble brand will ask consumers to send in their ideas for new ways to use Bounce. The top ideas will be featured in a new video on the brand’s Facebook Page, though Bounce’s homepage already lists several.

Though social media marketing is a fairly new discipline, the first technique is becoming common. Earlier this year, Toyota got some mileage out of a campaign that mulled the plural of Prius and Kraft’s Miracle Whip pitted the brand’s lovers against its haters. As for new uses, the most prominent example is Diet Coke and Mentos’s geyser viral of 2006, which neither brand had originated.

Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of emerging media and brand strategy at 360i, says that the latter campaign “might be taking what would be an interesting wall post on Facebook and turn it into a campaign idea — which is interesting.”

Hofstetter says with categories like fabric softeners, the trick is to piggyback on “borrowed relevance” from related issues. For instance, Procter & Gamble successfully reinvented its Old Spice brand last year with a campaign centered on feeling clean and sexy rather than on specific product attributes. P&G’s latest work for its Pepto Bismol brand is more about overindulgence than stomach pain.

On the other hand, Bounce sees itself as a brand that transcends a somewhat prosaic category. A Bounce rep says that Bounce T-shirts (or “B-Shirts”) that will be given out during the Facebook campaign have been coveted items in the past. “It’s fun brand,” she says.

Online Form Builder Wufoo Acquired by SurveyMonkey

From Mashable:

Do-it-yourself survey company SurveyMonkey is acquiring Wufoo, a startup that lets users build online forms. Wufoo was one of the first companies to graduate from Y Cominbator’s accelerator program in the winter of 2006.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but TechCrunch cites a source who puts the purchase price at $35 million. The entire Wufoo team will be relocating to Palo Alto and become assimilated inside the SurveyMonkey organization.

“Wufoo is the market leader in online form creation and a perfect fit for SurveyMonkey,” SurveyMonkey Dave Goldberg says of the acquisition.

“You can actually expect it to be business as usual after today,” a Wufoo blog post on the news reads. “Just to be clear — SurveyMonkey is not interested in dismantling what we’ve built. Quite the contrary, actually. They want to nurture it and spread it as far and wide as possible.”

SurveyMonkey, founded in 1999, raised $100 million in debt financing in November of last year. The company said at the time that the money would be used to cover operating costs and debt, as well as position it to make strategic acquisitions like the one announced Monday.

Bic Set To Be The Biggest Social Media Campaign Of 2011?

From Simply Zesty:

You know a special social media campaign the second you see it and this one caught my eye today with a number of great interactive elements and some great engagement. You may remember the Youtube Tippex takeover where you had to shoot the bear last year and this new campaign comes from the same agency and doesn’t lack in brilliant interactive elements. We actually featured the video over on Simply Viral today but the video is only half the story when it comes to this interactive campaign. This has just launched in France as a tester but the campaign is set to hit the rest of Europe in May and I can see it becoming a bit of a smash in the same way that Tippex and The Old Spice Campaign were last year. Just have a look at some of the stunning parts of this interactive campaign from Bic…

Stunning Video

At the center of the campaign is the video ad which has been running on Youtube as a featured video, is starting to get lots of shares and features on blogs and is the hook that brings you in to the other parts of the campaign. It’s created by Cannes Lions winner Keith Schofield and tells the story of human curling and how you would of course need a smooth Bic razor to excel at that sport.

Interactive Youtube Takeover

This is the genius part of the campaign because when you click through to the link you’ll see that you can have your own interactive game of human curling. Not only do you get to control the curlers who feature in the human curling videos but you also get to add yourself in to the mix using your webcam. The real genius part is that you have to brush the ice by waving your hands in to the webcam. You do end up looking like a complete and utter idiot and I strongly advise you don’t do this when others are around but in terms of being immersed in to an advert I have never seen anything like it. Pure genius.

Facebook

There has clearly been a lot of thought put in to this campaign because even the Facebook page (which is at the very start of it’s life cycle and will no doubt start to reveal more goodies as the campaign spreads). The campaign will have a dedicated Facebook page that defaults to your local country and users will be able to download vouchers to get money off the disposable razors which adds a great metric to the campaign and could drive cold hard sales.

Audi Has the Most Engaged Fans on Facebook

From Mashable:

A new study shows that Audi has the most engaged fans on Facebook, even besting the likes of pop stars Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, among others. In addition, most status updates by brands get 50% of their “Likes” within the first hour and 20 minutes of being published.

Visibli analyzed more than 200 million Facebook users in February and March and tracked their engagement across various Fan Pages. Looking at the data, Audi was found to have the most-engaged fans out there — at least among pages with more than 100,000 “Likes.” For each status update, the automaker got more than 225 “Likes” per 100,000 fans, which bested even Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

It’s not clear why Audi’s Page scored so high although the brand is currently Like-gating a video and may have Like-gated other media to increase such engagement. Saif Ajani, CEO and co-founder of Visibli, says he doesn’t know why Audi came off so well. “We’re trying to find out ourselves,” he says. An Audi rep says he hasn’t seen the study and is declining comment for the moment. The only other brand on the list was American Airlines. (See chart below.)

The study also revealed that, for brands and media companies, more fans leads to less overall engagement, but for artists, the opposite is true. On average, artists get 92 “Likes” per post, which is almost twice what brands and media companies get. On the other hand, media organizations get more comments per post (43 is the average) than artists (17) or brands (9). Ajani speculates that fans of artists might be more likely to have friends who are into similar music. “If you like John Legend and I see that, I might jump on [to the conversation] as well,” Ajani says. “If you like a CNN article, I might be less inclined.”

Finally, the study found shelf-life of a status update seems to be about a day. Within the first seven hours, a Facebook post gets about 80% of all the “Likes” it’s going to get. By 22 hours, it’s gotten 95% of all its “Likes.” That, at least, is better than the lifespan of a tweet. According to a recent study by Sysomos, 96.9% of replies to a tweet happen in the first hour.

Visibili’s report comes after Buddy Media recently looked at best practices in Facebook staus updates and discovered that posts on Thursdays and Fridays performed best, and posts of 80 characters or less got 27% more engagement than those that were more than 80 characters.

Does Twitter advertising work? A look at the new Coachella campaign

From Simply Zesty:

In an interesting approach to a socially integrated campaign, Wrigley have invested in a hefty Twitter promotion to drive users to their livestream content of the Coachella Festival. The Festival is being sponsored by the Wrigley brand 5 Gum, with live content available through their customised Youtube channel. What’s innovative about this campaign is that they have invested so heavily in one social platform to then take people to a completely different social platform – with no attempt at referral site traffic or even data capture to build a communication base for future promotions. This demonstrates a new approach to social campaigns and also is a good example of a high profile Twitter ad campaign, showing whether this really does work or not.

Is Twitter Driving the Traffic?

The stats for this campaign are pretty compelling. Wrigley are rumoured to be spending approximately $120,000 per day on the homepage Twitter advertising, throughout the weekend of the Coachella festival. This is a huge investment for the brand (though this figure hasn’t been confirmed) and although other digital channels have also been employed, Twitter appears to be the main investment here. And at first glance it seems to be working. The latest stats on the channel show that so far there has been over 942,000 views. This is an impressive figure and suggests that Twitter advertising, providing it’s relevant, may just work for brands even when taking them off Twitter. But if you look at the promoted bit.ly link that Wrigely are using in their Twitter ads and add the ‘+’ symbol to see the actual number of clickthroughs, it tells a different story :

Looking at it in this way suggests that while the Twitter ad campaign may certainly be driving awareness for the Youtube channel, it’s not necessarily working so hard to encourage clickthroughs. Now this is often the case for social advertising, where you would see a much lower CTR than compared to Google Ads for example, but this figure is still small compared to the likely investment in the ad campaign by Wrigley. So did they take the right approach here?

An integrated social campaign

When considering the success of this campaign through Twitter, the ads are obviously only one side of it. The conversation on Twitter around the festival overall, with different referral links is significant. Running a search on Twitter for ‘coachella youtube’ returns between 10-20 new results every minute (at the time of writing), showing a high awareness rate. What’s difficult to measure of course, is whether this interest and awareness started with the Twitter ads, or whether it’s simply ended up on Twitter through other digital advertising efforts.

What’s most interesting about this campaign, particularly with the investment made, is the decision to direct such a significant amount of ad spend on one social channel, to drive to another. When you look at the final number of views on the channel, it shows that they are taking the right approach overall and have also taken a risk by putting a relatively small amount of branding on the Youtube channel, providing an entirely ambient experience of the brand.

So has Twitter advertising worked for Wrigley in this instance? Overall the answer is yes, as proven in the viewing figures. The direct traffic may not be there from Twitter though, and I think think the site still has a long way to go before proving itself to advertisers.

2011 Trending Topic: Social Media ROI

From Social Media Explorer:

Did you get a larger social media budget for 2011? Are you being pressured to deliver ROI from your new budget? As the buzz around social media finally made it to executive’s ears their willingness to open the proverbial purse strings loosened, but it came at a price that many marketers were unprepared for … accountability.

If you ask me, social media has finally made it … BIG TIME! The fact that marketers are being told that they MUST measure social media and its impact on the business are great signs that executive teams are close to understanding where social media fits within the marketing organization. The bad news is there is no silver bullet that is going to suddenly be able to measure the ROI of your social media strategy. As marketers grapple to figure out how to measure ROI it is critical that they start to transform the mindset of their executive team and set proper expectations now.

As a marketer who has successfully measured social media ROI there are some things I recommend you be prepared for.

#1 Measuring Social Media ROI is Rocket Surgery

53% of Marketers said their social media budgets increased in 2011

That’s not a typo. It’s more complicated than Rocket Science and Brain Surgery combined! If anyone tells you that measuring social media ROI is an easy feat, they’ve never done it. To do it effectively you must navigate through some complex technical systems and find a way to interject the social equation. As a marketer you will need to immerse yourself into geek speak with technical systems or you may never be able to connect the dots. And you will need to have a really SMART software engineer as your best friend to truly make it happen.

#2 What You Need to Measure Social Media ROI is NOT Social Media Software

This one probably won’t win me any friends amongst the social media software industry, but I believe this down to my core. There are a lot of great social media software companies out there that are doing a lot of really great things, but they are merely adding data points into the ROI measurement process they can’t deliver the number themselves. To measure social media ROI you need to figure out how to pass data between your web analytics software, your customer relationship management (CRM) software, your online marketing software, your social media engagement platform and your company’s reporting system/data warehouse. That sounds really scary, but you probably have 85% of the pieces in place today and are actively using them to measure the results of other online marketing activities. The key is to know where to look, what you are looking for, and a few creative solutions to get around the complexity of dealing with multiple systems and platforms.

#3 It IS Possible

Just because you can’t buy a pretty box of software to measure social media ROI, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. It absolutely is and depending on your systems it can be done with a relatively low level of effort. To put it in perspective, I was able to do it with 12 software development hours. But while you are working on getting it done, I highly recommend you also make sure you can also measure the 8 social media metrics listed in this article too. They will help you make the case for social media after you understand #4 below.

#4 Your Social Media ROI is Negative

Sorry, there just isn’t any easy way to say it. Most companies haven’t been doing social media long enough to truly show a positive return yet. That doesn’t mean the return isn’t valuable, but if your executive team is looking for a nice shiny picture of positive ROI they are going to be disappointed. You will need to start level-setting their expectations now so they understand that with any new marketing endeavor it takes time to build audience, to engage the audience, and then finally to see conversions from that audience. Right now you are at the early stages of measuring the ROI of something equivalent to what advertising did for brands in the 70’s. It is a long term brand building strategy that will deliver value and ROI to the company by enhancing the brand, however in isolation the effects may be difficult to correlate. If Coke measured the ROI of each commercial or advertisement they did in the 70’s it would probably show a negative return from the data that was available back then. But today we know that those early branding initiatives drove it to be one of the leading brands in the world. If they had stopped then because the “numbers” didn’t show positive ROI, they would likely never be who they are today.

#5 Social Media ROI is Only ONE Piece of its Return

As a recovering measurement junkie, no one loves to measure the ROI of activities more than I do. And I truly believe that social media will show positive ROI in the next couple of years. But I think there are other factors you can look at today that show where it is adding value to the organization and why it should continue.

Here’s an exercise that may help you frame the discussion.

1. Take a look at all of your marketing activities
2. Determine what metrics are used to evaluate its success
3. Divide those metrics by the cost it takes to deliver those results
4. Apply the same metrics to social media
5. Divide those metrics by the cost it takes to deliver those results
6. Smile

Eyeball for eyeball social media delivers more cost-effective impressions, clicks, and site visits than any commercial, pay-per-click ad, or news article. Bank on that!

Groupon Could Take Out Foursquare with Pelago Acquisition

From ReadWriteWeb:

All Things Digital reports that Groupon has acquired Pelago, the company behind location-based check-in service Whrrl, for an undisclosed amount. Whrrl allows users to check in to locations and discover new businesses nearby, while the Groupon iOS app simply shows nearby deals.

Could Groupon - the leader and pioneer in the deals space - overshadow efforts by other LBS services to bring deals to check-ins, by bringing check-ins to deals?

According to All Things Digital's Tricia Duryee, Pelago founder Jeff Holden will oversee Groupon's product development as part of the acquisition, which was just announced on Groupon's blog. GroupOn CEO Andrew Mason made the announcement:

We've always liked CEO Jeff Holden, the Whrrl team and the technology they've developed. Their obsession with real-world serendipitous discovery, or "Anti-Search," is core to Groupon's mission. It's about discovering what you didn't know you didn't know, right in your own backyard. Jeff intimately gets consumer buying behavior and the importance of a great user experience, and his team is this awesome combination of data-driven creatives...the people who create smart products that are really fun to use.

According to the blog post, Whrrl will be "retiring" on April 30, 2011. Holden goes on to describe why the marriage of the two companies is "non-strange" on the Pelago blog.

You might think at first that this is strange... But it actually makes a ton of sense. Many people think of Groupon as one thing: the inventor of the daily deal. But as it often is in such cases, there is an amazing vision behind the company that goes far beyond what is visible on the surface today. Whrrl's mission has always been to increase the possibility of adventure in our daily real-world lives, and to that end, we invented an idea economy (with Whrrlbot as its inexhaustible champion!) It turns out that Groupon has a very similar mission, except they approached it by creating a new kind of deal economy.

We expect this to mean that, soon enough, the mobile Groupon app will go far beyond simply identifying nearby deals and pointing to them on a map. As Holden notes out, "Groupon's massive adoption and meteoric growth" made the deal a "no-brainer" and should also put companies like Foursquare on notice. Foursquare asks users to check in for the possibility of serendipitous encounters, points, tips, and possibly, just maybe, a deal. Groupon holds deals at the core and may just use them to convince users to check in.