Socialsama

One of the more interesting stories coming out of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (my favorite sporting event) is the story of a small Dutch brewing company, called (confusingly) Bavaria, who pulled a fast on on beer giant Anheuser-Busch. Basically, Bavaria recruited a group of young South African women to go to a match between The Netherlands and Denmark hiding bright orange mini dresses under their coats. At a certain point in the game, the ladies removed their coats, drawing attention to themselves simply by the fact that they were all wearing the same thing. Somehow or other, everyone who saw this was supposed to know that Bavaria was behind the stunt and buy their beer. However, FIFA and Anheuser-Busch were unhappy because of the millions paid to FIFA to secure exclusive beer promotion rights the the soccer tournament. Reuters provides a good summary of the event.

Ambush Marketing

The stunt is classic example of something called “ambush marketing.” The Wall Street Journal provides a very good definition and description of ambush marketing, but basically one brand will garner recognition at an event without paying, while another brand has paid for the rights to sponsor the event. There has been a long tradition of ambush marketing taking place at major sporting events. Abram Sauer provides a good history on www.brandchannel.com, saying, “As would be expected, along with increasing viewership and increasingly prohibitory sponsorship costs, ambush marketing has developed into an art form. FIFA says such tactics “lack decency and creativity.” Indecent? Maybe. Uncreative? Anything but. Highlights in ambush marketing history include:

• 1984 Olympics: Kodak sponsors TV broadcasts of the games as well as the US track team despite Fuji being the official sponsor. Fuji returns the favor in kind during the Seoul 1988 games of which Kodak is the official sponsor.
• At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics Nike sponsors press conferences with the US basketball team despite Reebok being the games’ official sponsor.
• In the greatest ambush marketing feat of all time Nike’s man Michael Jordan, Air Sponsorship himself, accepts the gold medal for basketball and covers up the Reebok logo on his kit.
• 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway: In response to official-sponsor Visa’s claims that American Express is not accepted at the Olympic Village, AmEx creates an ad campaign claiming (correctly) that Americans do not need “visas” to travel to Norway. The 1994 Visa-AmEx affair was a continuation of a scrap featuring the exact same campaigns from the 1992 Winter Olympics.
• 1998 World Cup, France: Nike again.
• 2000 Sydney Olympics: Qantas Airlines’ slogan “The Spirit of Australia” sounds strikingly similar to the games’ slogan “Share the Spirit.” Qantas claims it’s just a coincidence to the sound of official-sponsor Ansett Air helplessly banging its fists on the conference room table.
• 2002 Boston Marathon: Nike strikes again. As adidas-sponsored runners come off the course they are treated to spray-painted ‘swooshes’ honoring the day of the race, but not the race itself.

And where does the law stand in such cases of ambush marketing? Usually somewhere out of view.”

Wikipedia offers an even more current list, including the stunt by our Dutch friends.

Social Marketing or Simply Cheating?

Ambush Marketing strikes me as a beast that could be very similar to some social marketing practices. After all, social marketing often:

• Utilizes more public and and open events
• Leverages unofficial spokespeople
• Operates as less than official, at least at the beginning
• Has an element of the rogue to it

Consider the flash mob, which Wikipedia notes is considered to be something that is only really organized via social media, as version of ambush marketing light. Watch this video of a flash mob organized around a T-Mobile campaign.

Isn’t this really the same thing? Granted, no one else was paying for the rights to get people dancing in the Liverpool station, but that feels like the only difference to me.

As companies and organizations build more unofficial brand ambassadors via personal engagement, and drive the passion those people have for the brand or the mission to new heights, and as we are all more connected via social tools and mobile devices, who is to say that a tweet-up of iPhone lovers at an Android conference is or isn’t ambush marketing? Am I breaking the law by wearing my Dr. Pepper t-shirt to a restaurant that only serves Coke products? Can I wear my Adidas shoes into a Puma store?

No Answers

I don’t claim to have the answers. I’d like to hear your opinions and your ambush marketing stories. I do think that the world should prepare for more activity of this kind and the ownership and promotion of brands and missions moves out of the control of the marketing department in into the hands of passionate people.

Photo credit to TimS

Not sure what to say about the iLike deal by myspace.  From what I have read, they sold out for about ~$20M.  Venture money sounded like about $15-16M in; not sure whether the upside went to the vcs or the founders – for the founders sake, I hope they got paid out some.  But the employees should at least be safe.

In the techcrunch article on myspace and ilike, one commenter asks the $64M question (possibly more given how much $$ went in) – what does this valuation mean for Slide and RockYou?  I think it torpedoes them.  They should be looking to sell themselves yesterday.

Techcrunch has a number posts about deadpool companies today, though a few look like they were bought or their assets were at various times or perhaps even recently.  In today\’s environment, it is actually a little surprising that more start-ups haven\’t been getting hurt.  The latest numbers suggest that the recession has bottomed out, and the stock market seems to think that armageddon is not coming for awhile.  That said, I think we are in for some turbulence yet.

So how can companies cost effectively reach their audience?  I\’ll give you one guess.  Got it?  Ok, it is <a href=\”http://bit.ly/rwUHq\”>social media campaigns</a>.  Well, you knew I was going to say that, right?  I now sound like a hopeless shill.  But companies really can get a good bang for their buck; the services are inexpensive, they probably already have content either locked away or in the heads of their employees, and the upside is huge.  Not every campaigh will go viral, but one could.  And shooting the moon shouldn\’t be the first goal anyway – you should really focus on establishing/expanding the relationship with your stake holders anyway.

Well, in other news, techcruch is still giving friendfeed <a href=\”http://bit.ly/3wAiNG\”>big slobbery kisses</a>.

So InsideFacebook and Allfacebook.com are continuing to tout facebook’s growth and in some cases the relative stability of monthly active users for social applications as evidence that the new redesign has only meant good things for app developers, facebook, and the world in general. However, as I have mentioned before, the only applications which have benefitted from these changes are the quiz apps which I guess were already making great use of the feed forms and LivingSocial which keeps making people fill out little lists (not actually all that different from the chain letter demanding 25 things about me). Great. Those apps are just wonderful.

Meanwhile, I have searched high and low for comment about app/widget developers Slide and RockYou and I haven’t seen anything since this latest redesign. The AllFacebook blog actually had a post that does mention that their apps have declined significantly in monthly active users (MAU), but then they go on to claim that since MAU across all apps are flat since the redesign, then the redesign didn’t really hurt app developers. But come on – how many more lists can I make on Facebook and give a damn? I’ll say it, since no one else seems to on the internets these days: Slide and RockYou are screwed. Kiss the $100M+ VC money in them good bye.

OK – I promised a facebook PAGES post, but something got stuck in my craw over the past couple days about Twitter.  I have been using the service more and more and trying to learn from the folks who seem to have had success with it.  Currently I am following about a dozen or so people, maybe twice that.  Of those, the ones I find useful breakdown into these categories:

1. A business relaying crucial information about their operations or special promotions (e.g. JetBlue)
2. A business providing useful information to me and presumably other followers which is tangential to their day-to-day ops but important to their field (e.g. thinkwell)
3. A shameless link sharer/relayer/marketer who doesn’t add much value in each post but does tons of them and every now and then it is useful – it is like someone has done some searching for me
4. My friends sharing actual interesting comments: nickbart and wellsoliver about some stuff they are reading, others updating what they are doing when
5. Complete and utter crap largely from some corp exec/gen y types who seem to think that I should care about their sushi dinner or scenery in Napa (I won’t name names here, I am just going to de-follow).  This garbage is about ½ -3/4 of the feed, once I subtract out the folks in (2)

These categories suggest to me at least that twitter could be used for marketing and customer communication and keeping in light touch with friends (I realize this is not earth shattering analysis).  It also suggests to me twitter usage will have to mature considerably, otherwise the noise ratio will just become too high.  To those folks in (5), please remember, you don’t REALLY have something to say to thousands of people multiple times per day.  In fact, you don’t have something to say to thousands of people.

In a recent (and very entertaining) interview with Stephen Colbert, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, says that Twitter is focused on building “value”.  He said that Twitter will be focusing on extending its real-time communication network worldwide and adding more features to its platform.  Biz stated that Twitter will be experimenting with a revenue model by the end of the year.  He compared Twitter’s business maturity with that of the Google.  The big difference that I see between Google and Twitter is that one can argue that the Twitter community is the vast majority of Twitter’s intrinsic value. For instance, more than 70% of the tweets come from a third-party application that leverages Twitter’s APIs. Google, on the other hand, did not have this reliance on an outside development community. One can also argue that this development community was the key driver of growth for Twitter. As one saw with the recent Facebook betrayal of their development community, trust is hard to win back. Facebook’s hyper-growth was a direct result for them opening their platform to a development community in May 2007.

Although, I still have a hard time truly understanding “Tweeting”, especially in the b-to-b sphere, I agree with their approach (since I can think of no others).  The users of social media are a fickle bunch and introducing the monies is the beginning of the end of <insert any Web 2.0 product here> to them — “The man just took over…this shit is toxic.” Wait till the Google buys them out…

So in the post below, you will see our first foray into the world of “Social Shows.”  This serialized drama is going out to all parts of the web world:

• The video is syndicated to YouTube, Yahoo, Revver, Crackle and a few more video sites
• A facebook app shows the video on that SN platform (http://apps.facebook.com/spiritstheseries/)
• A corresponding MySpace app will launch shortly
• And the shows are available at their own minisite at Spirits: The Series
• Advertised by a widget showing a summary episode

What we have here is a prime example of what we call 360 degree marketing; the makers of this show are reaching their customers in every way possible, while bringing them a content rich and exciting new experience.

Well, I think Ken has it really spot on here.  I think private label social networks indeed have their place (after all, I started a private label social networking company), but several steps lie between limited/no existing online community and full blown social networking.  Many of those steps are much, much more cost effective and far less time intensive than going whole hog into a private label social network.  In a related idea, I think people get too hung up on the tools as they think of social media and social networking.  An online community does not have to be whiz bang coolest new widgets with neat tricks you can do on your profile.  An online community can revolve around a variety of tools, from forums to Facebook groups.  The part that needs to be cohesive is the company direction about social media, not necessarily every system your company is using.

Now on to Lee. I thnk Lee’s point about superficiality deserves even more emphasis. Lee showed how the actual engagement with social media can be much more than mindlessly pinging that kid you knew in elementary school on Facebook. I think the abstraction you can take from his post is that there are very meaningful ways companies can use these existing tools and communities to effectively communicate with their customers, contacts, partners, and others. I guess what I am trying to say is, just as when television first came out, it probably wasn’t widely thought of as the communication tool it was to become – people had radios after all (as my grandfather famously said, no one is going to want one of those). Similarly, these social media tools offer a way to revolutionize the relationship companies and organizations have with their customers and members.