Concept Company

by Tina Hutzelman

In his book, “Social Media Marketing, an Hour a Day,” Dave Evans begins Chapter 1 with a simple, yet profound, observation.

He states, “Building on the personal empowerment and liberation that the Internet offers, consumers are actively connecting with each other and talking about everything from cars to health to scrapbooking techniques to pool chemicals. In the process, they are either reinforcing marketing efforts or beating marketers at their own game by directly sharing their own experiences and thoughts on the Social Web.”

How exciting……..and scary to think that something out of your control can propel you toward either fame or infamy.

For those who haven’t heard the following two stories, here’s what fame and infamy can look like in a new media world.

Fame
Blendtec sells blenders for both commercial and home use. In 2007, they posted a series of infomercials to YouTube that answered one simple question “Will it Blend?” After blending everything from cell phones to matches to cubic zirconia they became a viral marketing sensation. By June 2009, they enjoyed over 83 million views.

When interviewed, Blendtec founder, Tom Dickson was quoted as saying “the videos were placed on the internet in early November. Within just a few short days, we had millions of views. The campaign took off almost instantly. We have definitely felt an impact in sales. ‘Will it Blend?’ has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.”

Link to "Will It Blend? Hockey Pucks" on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxa_64EOmFI

Link to "Will It Blend? Rubik’s Cube" on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqHHBibRvs

Infamy
United Airlines made what many consider to be a huge PR blunder when they broke Dave Carroll’s expensive Taylor guitar – then failed to reimburse him for damages. For months, Dave tried to negotiate a settlement with United to no avail. Dave then promised to produce a series of internet music videos retelling his experience.

To simply say “the word got out” would be an understatement. Within ten days of the first video’s release, Visible Measures, an independent firm that measures the consumption and distribution of Internet video, identified more than 30 unique placements totaling 3.2 million views.

Chris Ayres, columnist from The Times Online in the UK, wrote that, “within four days of the song going online, the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 percent, costing shareholders $180 million. Which, incidentally, would have bought Carroll more than 51,000 replacement guitars.”

Was the drop in stock really associated with the release of the song? Who knows. But some might view the timing as more than a coincidence.

Link to United Breaks Guitars on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Link to the background story from Dave’s website
http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story/united-breaks-guitars

Link to CBSNewsOnline on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ophSWaRSQ

Which direction is your company headed?
Fame or infamy – how do you know where you’re headed? Before anything else, you need to figure out what’s being said about your company.

While the Internet has easy-to-use venues for those with a story to tell, it also has easy-to-use techniques for those who want to listen. Besides the well-known search engines like Google and Yahoo, there are some other great tools for those who want to keep their ear to the ground.

Just to name a few…

Whostalkin.com lets you search for conversations about topics that interest you. This tool searches blogs, news, networks, videos, images, forums, and tags. If you want to narrow your search and only look at specific social services (for example, only blogs), Whostalkin allows you to do this as well.

Socialmention.com also lets you track and measure what people are saying about topics. This tool monitors over 100 social media properties. A nice feature of Socialmention is its quick view into the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach surrounding a particular subject. Strength indicates the likelihood that a subject is being discussed in the social media realm. Sentiment compares the number of positive mentions to the number of negative mentions. Passion measures the likelihood that a subject will be talked about repeatedly. And reach measures the number of unique authors talking about a subject.

There are many tools that let you search for the information that matters to you. Whostalkin and Socialmention are just a couple I’ve found useful. If anyone knows of other tools that they’d like to share, please post them as a comment. Thank you.

Tags: Marketing Strategy, social media, social media for b2b marketing, strategic marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Tactical elements of marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.