What Walt Disney can teach us about Social Media

Image by KAZVorpal

‘Ouch’ cries Chicken Little after a large plank of wood falls on his head.

He can’t see that it was the wily fox on the other side of the farmyard enclosure that dropped the missile. All he can hear is the voice of doom through a hole in the fence. ‘The sky is falling. The world is going to end’. The fox has a plan to drive all the chickens into his den. As predicted, Chicken Little panics, he races up and down the farm shrieking his news: ‘The sky is falling on my head!’ All the other chickens are in an uproar – they must flee. Following Chicken Little they dash into the nearest cave where the fox traps them and tucks into a very large feast indeed.

Walt Disney produced this black cartoon as war propaganda in 1943 to warn citizens against panic and hasty action, which cost lives.

So where is Chicken Little in Social Media?

Well, have you ever felt the panic and the peer pressure to own the latest computer, to have a website, to have a Facebook page, to set up a Twitter account? Because, after all, according to our modern day foxes, those are the only ways you’ll get exposure to trillions of potential customers. Everyone’s doing it. It must be the right thing and if you don’t do it then crucial social media business opportunities will be missed.

Right? Wrong! Spend thousands on acquiring a social media profile for the sake of having one and, like that unwitting chicken, you’ll run straight into the jaws of the fox. Your product is not going to be looked at and talked about just because it’s there. No one is excited by brand for its own sake or the corporate message you deliver.  

Stop reacting to the panic in the farmyard and take a step back to look at social media from a marketing perspective, rather than allowing the techie foxes to dictate your marketing strategy.

Real social media is about harnessing passions to build online communities of people who will spread the news of your product by word of mouth. We see this work again and again in case studies – not just ours but other reputable examples too.

The Case of VS Hotels

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine a hotel company called VS Hotels (I made that up, with VS standing for very special). It offers a selection of luxury, boutique hotels across Europe.  Most are adequate and some are quite good but, like most businesses, the brand name is probably the most special part of the product.  Not exactly a purple cow!  They have a Facebook and a Twitter account with the normal number of “likes” and “fans” but between you and me, no one really cares because there is really nothing about their existence that deserves notice.

VS Hotels decide to create a specialty interest in gastronomy. They ask their customers to join in discussions about the food in their hotels. They highlight their best chefs and particularly good dishes. They invite some customers to dine for free at one of the hotels in exchange for some written thoughts about the experience. They invite a few notable chefs and local food celebrities from outside the hotel to hold a few special gastronomy evenings for this fledging community.  Gradually this becomes a community of food lovers around Europe - a real, not a virtual, community with a common passion, spreading the news of this chain of hotels through their interest in cuisine.  

After it reaches a certain number of members with a certain level of “activity”, it is then ready to be put online and the company can expect to see this begin to spread virally. That’s when Facebook and Twitter can be introduced - use the tools, don’t let the tools use you. Once you have the people and their passion and you get them talking about it with each other, then you have the building blocks for real community building, a real passion community, and the beginning of a successful sustainable and profitable social media campaign.

So when you’re in that farmyard, running around because the social media sky is falling on your head, take a breath and remember it’s very easy to out-fox that fox.

What Walt Disney can teach us about Social Media is a post from: SEO Blog by Lead Generators

In my last blog post, I revealed one of my favourite social media case studies – The Fiskateers! And how I loved the way they created a ‘passion’ group not around their product (scissors) but around a ‘passion’ that a large majority of the customers shared – crafting!
Now I am going to show how I, myself, have helped create a community using very similar ideas and tactics.

The Birth of a Voice

The client was a gap year company, specialising in gap year programs in South Africa.  Gap years themselves are not a passion, and trying to create a community around this product would have seemed far too ‘salesy’ and would surely have flopped.

So, donning our virtual lab coats, we conducted some extensive research looking into why people were interested in gap years.  We started by looking at which key phrases were generating the right traffic to our client’s site and which of those phrases actually generated good conversions.

The following phrases came up trumps:

conservation, animal rehabilitation, vet training, how to be a game ranger
We loved these results because each of them revealed a definite passion!

Calling All Animal Lovers…

So we decided to help these young people realise their dream and indulge in their passions by creating the Voice of Conservation and allowing them to ‘talk for the animals’!

Our idea was to create a community around a role that would be held by different young people for a period of 3 months at a time.  The idea was that each of the ‘Voice’s would enlarge the community using their own social networks and also by engaging new communities they joined and made friends with during their term as ‘The Voice of Conservation’

The Voice would have a job which would be twofold:

1: To Speak for the Animals

2: To promote the Voice of Conservation (and therefore the projects and gap years available by the company) using the online world of communities, blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook etc.

If animal conservation was their passion and social media their skill, then we wanted to hear from them.

What were we offering?

Up to three months FREE getting down and dirty in the different conservation projects the company was involved with in South Africa. They were given flights, bed and board, internet access, a camera, access to all the staff (vets, game rangers) for interviews and use of a jeep to get them around the reserves.

Note: The cost to our client was really tiny.  They already had beds and food for the volunteers on site, so all they had to pay for was the cost of a flight!

Their job was to foster a community and then sustain and enlarge it by using great content from the front line!  Videos, blog posts, interviews, photos and anything else they could think off.

First Time Around

This was the first attempt and we had around 20 entries from which we chose Karra

Look at how excited she was!.  That that is the type of passion that you simply cannot buy!

She went on to produce video content and start our burgeoning conservation community.

Second Time Around

The second time around we had about 120 entries (this time including entries from the US, Canada, Australia and Africa!) and as you can see, not only had the competition got greater, but the quality of entry had increased and it become a lot more competitive

The winner was an American, Katherine Alex, who wasted no time creating a community and content.  Unlike the first winner who only stayed in Shamwari, Katherine Alex moved around between conservation projects and got a much broader view of what types of exciting conservation projects are out there such as the ORCA foundation and Kariega.

http://www.facebook.com/voiceofconservation?sk=wall

She managed to widen the scope of the communities that knew about The Voice of Conservation, and placed blog posts on many difference conservation and wildlife blogs as a guest blogger, thus making their readership aware of the Voice of Conservation and aware of the amazing gap programs on offer.

The Result

This social media campaign shows the signs of being a brilliant example of building a passion group – and I would like to focus on the word ‘building’.  This is not an overnight solution, it is a long term solution and, as you can see from one competition to the next, it started to slowly grow and grow.  If the competition were to run again, we anticipate around 500 entries, all clamouring to be the new Voice of Conservation.

So I urge you to re-evaluate your social media campaigns – choose a passion and then run with it!!!


Other Blog Posts in this social media case studies series:
Fiskateering: A Passion for Scissors
Social Media Case Studies: How to Make Scissors Sexy

I Spoke for the Animals! is a post from: SEO Blog by Lead Generators

My goodness what has happened to my Facebook profile!!

A Timeline!!

Facebook says ‘hello’ to 2012 with the advent of the new ‘Timeline’ feature, which I have to say on a personal level I love.

But the question that I know everyone using Facebook for business is dying for me to answer is: 

Will it do for business Helen?

Well, at the moment Facebook has made the Timeline a personal profile feature only, and although they have not given an exact date, they have strongly hinted at a possible future where this may used for the business pages too!   If this happens, what are the pluses and minuses of brands/companies having a timeline instead of the current Facebook page layout?

Is This A Good Thing?

Well on one level things will not have changed, Facebook still relies heavily on human interaction.  You can create the best brand page possible, but that doesn’t mean people are going to automatically ‘like’ your page.  You need to interact and encourage interaction between your customers.

To me, the Timeline feels more personal than the previous version.  People can look    through my life and see what I was up to in 2009.  Before I accepted this feature into my life, any mistakes I may have made on a social media level (insane, drunk updates, trying-to-be-arty profile pictures, and other such embarrassing memories) were hidden after a few weeks - people forgot and someone else became the subject of their ridicule. However, with this new timeline feature, people can simply click on 2009 and be taken in a speedily manner towards any social media indiscretions that I may have, in my naivety, partaken in.  It is feels a bit like that moment when your mum takes out the old family album and regales your partner with your embarrassing stories, while showing them pictures of you, butt-naked, on a fur throw!

Hmmmm - Sometimes things are better left in the realms of the forgotten past.


Tabs

Something that may annoy some businesses is the fact that the left hand navigation has disappeared and so have any tabs that you might have lovingly created.  Those businesses that tend to rely on the tabs to create interesting and brand heavy tab pages will have to find new ways to market to their customers, but how can they do that?

Cover art

One way in which this could be achieved is through my favourite feature on the timeline – the cover image! 

This is a 840 x 310 pixel image at the top most prominent part of your page.  I love it on my personal page, as it allows me the individuality that I have been craving from Facebook, and missed after swapping allegiances from MySpace.

This is a place to show people who you are through images, or to market something about you or your company.  Authors can place their book covers here, holiday companies can add a stunning photo of a destination that they want to sell that month and food businesses could reveal mouth watering treats for customers to salivate over.  Or people can reveal their love of Picasso, Bob Dylan or Banksy

Although timelines are not yet on the business pages, there might be other crafty ways to utilise this feature in the meantime.  Two ways in which we can maybe achieve this.

1: Try to cajole your employees to have your company’s logo/name, or product somewhere in their own image on their profile page.  That is a lot of eyeballs, even for small business with only a handful of people working for them. Of course the question here is, how to make your employees get on board with this idea   I will leave that one up to you, I can only do so much.

2: You could create amazing, interesting and fun looking cover art using your company name/logo/product, as brands like coca cola have:

Be inventive and exciting:

This will have to be a job for your designers and creative types.  Let them go a bit crazy, as the more appealing your cover art, the more people will want to use it.

This would be easy for holiday companies for example.  Get your designers to format images of the beautiful locations that you sell: A sunset over the Caribbean, a crisp winter view across the Swiss Alps.  Then incorporated into the image, perhaps a small company logo in the corner???



Social Apps

As I stated earlier, it is more than likely that the timeline will affect any Facebook apps you may have created for your customers, such as booking engines and entering competitions.  It is clear that Facebook will have to think about the transition to Timeline for businesses very carefully, and take into account the difference between the features that are important to businesses, as opposed to the features that people like on their personal profiles.  The way people want their friend to interact with their profile is very different from the way a business would want its customers to interact with its page.

But while Facebook is possibly/possibly not bringing out Timeline for businesses, there is a way to take advantage of Timeline being on people’s personal profiles.  If you are one of those productive companies that has a social sharing app or your whole website within Facebook, then you will like the way this new feature shares your visitors’ activity on their profile.

If a person clicks links on your page or likes your page for example, then this activity will show up in two places. 

1: There is a feed that is in the top right hand corner of a person’s profile.  It reveals what your friends are doing, and if they click or interact with your business page in any way, it will be revealed here for all their friends to see and possibly go and take a look too.

2: It also shows up in a very prominent place on your Timeline page. The activity box is at the top of your page on the right hand side, and usually does not require any scrolling to find it, meaning that anyone looking at a friend’s page will be able to clearly see if they had been interacting with your app or page.


At first glance I like the Timeline, I like the way it looks, and I love the new cover art I can change and edit.  I enjoy going to see other people’s cover art and how imaginative they have been.  I like the fun way of rocking through my timeline and remembering those crazy days in uni, or my cousin’s wedding… though perhaps I don’t enjoy the fact that other people have this ability!!! With every new thing it takes a while to get used to and, while I normally hate the changes that Facebook comes up with, this time I am going to give it a thumbs up. 

I am interested to see what they develop for the business side of things, but without them giving a definite ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on the whether this is in the pipeline or not, we can only speculate as to whether it will be useful to businesses and whether they will change it suit businesses purposes.

I say embrace the change – you are only young once!

New Timeline – Using Facebook for Business is a post from: SEO Blog by Lead Generators

If you have a love of the English language and get a thrill manipulating words then you might have what it takes to work in this leading and innovative Online Marketing Agency based in west London.

We need a special kind of writer: one who can not only adapt to the individual needs of our diverse clients but who can also manage a bevy of internal and external writers. You will be expected to produce your own copy in the form of articles, blogs posts, community development and a host of online material. At the same time you should be able to edit and proof-read the work of the writers under your management.
As a team leader, you will be responsible for learning the business, how we work and how we achieve great results for our clients.  Armed with this knowledge, you will develop close relationships with our clients, for whom you will be the main point of contact.  In addition, you will also lead and manage your team in order to improve and enhance productivity and achievements for our clients.

The successful candidate will have a degree in a humanities subject and demonstrable superb written and oral communication skills. To achieve the standards we expect in your texts, English should be your mother tongue. You should also have past team leader or management experience.  Applicants who can demonstrate involvement in an online community or passion group will be favourably considered.

Main Responsibilities

•    Writing blog posts, articles and website copy
•    Proof-reading and editing
•    Managing freelance writers and internal staff
•    Preparing monthly reports
•    Providing main point of contact with clients
•    Managing and optimising workflow
•    Managing social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Main Requirements

•    Educated to degree level, preferably in a humanities subject from an English speaking university
•    Possess highly developed writing and verbal communication skills
•    Have experience in editorial and proof-reading work

To Apply:

To apply for this role, please send a CV and covering letter to Frank Orman @ LeadGenerators and include any relevant examples of your writing such as articles or blog posts.   If you are not able to attached samples of your writing, please add them to the bottom on your convering letter or at the bottom of your CV. 

Please quote “Team Leader LGBlog Jan12” in the heading of your covering letter.

Considerations:

•    Candidates should live within easy commuting distance from our offices.  If you live outside of London, please relate to this in your covering letter.
•    Candidates should be able to demonstrate a very high level of English, over and beyond normal mother tongue level.  We suggest using your covering letter for this purpose.
•    Only candidates with the right to work in the UK will be considered.  If you are a foreign national, please state in your cover letter, that you have the right to work or we will assume that you do not and will delete your application.

PLEASE NO RECRUITMENT OR OUTSOURCING AGENCIES

.

We’re Hiring: WRITING TEAM LEADER is a post from: SEO Blog by Lead Generators

301-redirects

For search engines, 301 redirects are a clear and SEO-friendly message that www.yourwebsite.com/catid=7 has been replaced with www.yourwebsite.com/holidays-in-england.  Any SEO assets attached to the old URL – such as Page 1 rankings – will be transferred to the new one, so that it does not have to start from scratch.

It is for this reason that 301 redirects are so important.  Do not forget to do them!

301 Redirects: Why Are They So Important? is a post from: SEO Blog by Lead Generators