The Blog - Archive for media genius

8 Mar 2010
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Company Tweet – Free app for Multiple users and one Twitter account [product update]

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

The two main wishes for Twitter are managing multiple clients and letting multiple users manage a single account. All while knowing who’s posted what and when, and to which account.

We’ve created a FREE Twitter client for Media Genius (our social media toolbox) that lets anybody manage multiple Twitter accounts with multiple users and keep track of everything. Every company needs accountability when they are saying anything in public so we’ve built “Company Tweet” to do just that.

After creating your account with Media Genius, setting up a workspace, and installing the “Company Tweet” application you can start to see its power.

Writing a Tweet in Media Genius

On a basic level you can use Twitter’s essential functions; posting tweets, seeing replies and seeing the stream of tweets. It becomes really useful once you’ve added other people into Media Genius. You can do this for your company or even your clients companies.

Checking the activity

Twitter updates from people you follow

Any user will now have their name logged in Media Genius’s activity stream along with the message and the date and time. If you install “Company Tweet” into another workspace you can add another twitter account and manage that as well.

Writing a Tweet

Checking the activity

After installing into a clients’ workspaces you can give them access; giving you a centralised way to manage your clients’ Twitter usage…

There’s a lot of possibilities for anyone managing multiple Twitter accounts and multiple users.

See a video on Blip.tv for a quick introduction. Or go straight to Media Genius and get it for free.

Header image courtesy of www.hollyspringtradingco.com

3 Mar 2010
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Buy before you try [product update]

by Mark P. Filed under: Products

The payment process that we’ve implemented into Media Genius is really pretty clever; although there’s a simple problem that we’ve found by tracking user responses.  We are losing potential customers before they’ve had a proper play with the applications.

As soon as a user installs a paid application in Media Genius and they want the free trial, they have to put in their invoice and credit card details – FIRST. The problem with this is that most people won’t put in their credit card details online until they know exactly what it is that they’re getting…

So we’ve “fixed” it. In Media Genius now, a free trial has no barriers, no “buy before you try”. You install the app, play with it for as long as it states in its trial period and then if you want to continue using it, you need to enter your card details if you haven’t already (which you might have done when trialling a different app).

If you’re going to make a mistake, make it quickly, fess up and move on; which is probably a post all in its own.

26 Feb 2010
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The Four Pillars of a successful online campaign – Social or otherwise…

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies,Company

In the Autumn of 2009 Simpleweb did an online marketing campaign for Fat Face (the high street retailer). It was their most successful campaign ever, increasing their list by 1000% and the amount of “eyeballs” involved rivaled a TV ad. The concept was very simple – there’s a case study elsewhere on our site that will give you plenty more details.

When analysing the results it was the first time that I could truly see what was happening in real-time, allowing an insight that has eluded me from the previous campaigns that I’ve done.

The Four Pillars

Being the simple kind of person that I am, I distilled the results down into four basic building blocks:

The Four Pillars

A well balanced campaign uses all of The Four Pillars

If a campaign is deficient in one of these key areas then at least one of the other pillars must compensate for it. We’ll discuss this in a later post.

I’ll attempt to briefly examine each pillar with an example from the Fat Face competition and another (mobile) campaign I did in 2003 for Dizzee Rascal while at the now defunct YRmedia.

Emotional content

You need to understand your audience. Who are you communicating with and why? Once you know this you can create an emotional hook…

Fat Face: Winning a VW Campervan. Who doesn’t want a sparkling campervan? A hugely desirable item for many different generations of people. Astutely Fat Face knew who they wanted to attract and what would pull their strings. By offering up a campervan as a prize they tuned into their target demographic with a one off uber prize.

Dizzee Rascal: We gave away ringtones. Beggars knew their demographic were teenagers with little or no money so they needed something tangible and easily attainable. The ringtone was free and offered in all formats, no matter how good or bad your phone was it would work – to some degree.

Other examples to discuss include: Burger King’s Facebook friend culling, beext’s Haiti help.

The Fan Base

Some campaigns begin well. There’s already a large number of “fans” that support the centre of the campaign, whether it be a product, artist or brand. Fans can be created via traditional advertising but we have to decide if this is necessary based on the other pillars…

Fat Face: Fat Face already had a good sized mailing list and a lot of loyal customers. Their customers are quite amazing in their dedication to the brand.

Dizzee Rascal: Dizzee Rascal was up for the Mercury Music prize and was getting a lot of music press. With Beggars excellent team already creating awareness, the fan base while small, was vocal and loyal.

The Mechanic

How does the actual online system work? Is it a microsite, Facebook app, Twitter retweet campaign? Do they sign up, sign in, share their address, share with their mates? What is it that we are trying to achieve?

We need to know the primary business objective and then carefully craft a way to make that happen. If we plan it right we will see the benefits of secondary and tertiary objectives being met.

Fat Face: We built a very simple prize draw for Fat Face. A user enters the draw. They then get their own page that they’re encouraged to share with their friends through Facebook, Twitter and Email. Every one of their friends entering the draw gives the entrant three more entries into the competition. The entrant feels like they were “getting somewhere” the more they shared, the more they shared, the more they exposed the brand to new people (a secondary objective) and the more data was captured when new people entered the draw (primary objective).

Dizzee Rascal: For Dizzee’s campaign it was even simpler. We developed a way for users to enter their details into a website in exchange for a free ringtone (Fix up look sharp) sent directly to their mobile. Users were only allowed to get one ringtone to restrict abuse. We used to call this the “viral bribe” where both parties were happy with the result of their transaction and then told others. The primary objective of building a highly targeted database of fans was achieved as well as creating a feeling of giving back to the community, brand awareness (I can’t tell you how many times I heard that ringtone in public) and website traffic.

Engagement

This is the least tangible of the pillars. You could argue that the other pillars combined constitute the “engagement rating”. Personally I think it can have a pillar of its own…

How does a customer/user/reader/client engage with the campaign? The mechanic facilitates the engagement. We’ve somehow got somebody to “engage” with us, now what? We know what we want them to do, but how do we actually get them to do that? This is where your psychologists and old school advertisers come into their own. Imagery, copy, branding, usability, anything that appears to be subjective can all be put at the engagement pillar.

Fat Face: A campervan, cool people, desirability and the use of personal recommendation combined to create a compelling engagement that even got people to re-word the messages that were Facebooked or Tweeted by the “mechanic”.

The buy-in by the user was so high that they began to modify the message to target their friends. We would never have known this if we were not monitoring Twitter and Friendfeed. A more powerful engagement process I am yet to see and we will definitely explore it further.

Dizzee Rascal: Dizzee’s was a whole different story. Kids were getting something for free AND cool. Most truetones at the time were £4.50 when the actual cost was very low. Fans felt like they were getting something of true value for nothing… All they had to do was give their mobile number, email address, musical taste, etc… Why would they share it “illegally” when they could go and get it easily and for free from the website?

Round things roll off uneven tables…

As you can see in the Fat Face and Dizzee Rascal examples given, these two campaigns have roughly an equal share of the pillars. If just one of the pillars is disproportionately deficient then the others need to make up the “height”.

Three Strong Pillars

Three Strong Pillars - needs to compensate...

For example if you have a small initial fan base you will need a stronger mechanism, higher emotional content and a deeper engagement level. Or, one super boost in one area, such as a really strong emotional pull such as beext.org and the Haiti people matching service.

Thanks for reading this far, I’m not sure how this post ended up being this long. I’ll find a couple of imbalanced campaigns to run through for another post.

24 Feb 2010
5 Comments

Fat Face, Campervans and business objectives

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies

“…the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this…” – Ali Shears, Direct Marketing Manager at Fat Face.

To say we were pleased with the result is an understatement.

When Fat Face told us that they wanted to give away a VW Campervan we knew that we had to come up with something awesome to make sure that as many people as possible would get a chance to win it.

The objective was to increase the size of the mailing list, the offline mailing list and as a secondary objective, to build brand awareness.

We came up with a very simple online mechanism. Basically a prize draw – with a twist.

The landing page (click to view larger)

A user visited the site that we created, entered their details and they were then given their own page to share with their friends. Every friend that entered the competition gave the user three more chances to win.

We then encouraged the user to share their page in as many places as possible with Twitter, Facebook, email sharing and various social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Google Bookmarks.

The sharing page (click to view larger)

The Quote…

Here’s a full quote from Alison Shears, direct marketing manager at Fat Face,

“To increase awareness of the competition we wanted to implement the Media Genius’ competition application.  The ease of sharing information via social networks combined with the referral mechanic really drove the viral element of this – making it the biggest in Fat Face history.

The competition was great for brand awareness – the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this.  Data capture enabled us to see the demographics of those entering, generating useful information for future marketing.  It was also great to see the volume of people who opted in for Fat Face information.  Obviously the incentive was well aligned with our brand!

It was amazing watching the buzz our campaign generated across social networks like Twitter and Facebook.  It’s easy to use with everything in one place making it simple to pull out all the information you need to evaluate campaigns.”

Eyeballs everywhere

Interestingly we noticed that even though email was used over three times as much for sharing; Facebook by far sent the most traffic. The average share ratio on Facebook is one to one hundred and fifty, whereas email is only one to one. That’s a lot of pairs of eyes looking at the brand and a lot of potential people that we can get to engage with it. Twitter has an even higher ratio but still has nowhere near the momentum of Facebook in everyday culture.

Evangelists replace street teams

Once the users were engaged, we were amazed at the lengths some of them would go to market their page. One enterprising entrant had over two thousand entries, this person had become an evangelist of great value to the Fat Face brand. Not so long ago we’d have paid a lot of money to so called “street teams” to do this for us, basically hiring key influencers and enabling brute force awareness creation in blogs and forums…

Peer to peer marketing

An unexpected, yet fascinating and incredibly powerful engagement observation was the way the entrants would modify the message that they were sending to their friends. The default message “Check out the Fat Face – WIN a classic VW camper at winacamper.fatface.com” started to become targeted with language that their peers would respond to. Entrants were starting to become a peer to peer marketing machine, tailoring the message for their own purpose. This totally blew us away and we will being exploring this in further campaigns…

Increasing the Fan Base

Every user that opted in had their details directly imported into Fat Face’s mailing list manager via its API. I can’t tell you the numbers, but, I can tell you that they already had a good sized list and it was increased by over one thousand percent… The take up for receiving the “snail mail” catalogue was also astounding, this is as much a testament to Fat Face’s very loyal initial fanbase.

This campaign used Simpleweb’s Media Genius set of tools for social monitoring and the actual prize draw application itself. Please contact us to see if we can help you.