Social Video - engaging the online video audience

The traditional way of building brand awareness & affinity was to run a cool tv ad that people actually liked. Classic metrics for a broadcast ad campaign are reach, frequency and recall. In social media, success is measured by the social audience - number of viewers that voluntarily download your video. Now anyone with a camera phone can produce a video and post it on-line. There are twenty hours of video being uploaded every hour, every day and some user generated videos like The Evolution of Dance build audiences of over 172 million viewers. While barriers to broadcast are low in social media, the degree of difficulty to breakthrough the clutter is high. For a brand to be remembered, it becomes very difficult indeed.

The pay-off for brands in social media can be huge. A viral hit can reignite a brand’s cache like it did for both Cadbury and Evian in a way that advertising cannot.


On-line, the consumer becomes part of the brand’s storytelling by tapping into the social tendency to share things - sharing the video, sharing comments with friends who pass it on to other friends. A great viral video can create immense separation from competition as did T-Mobile UK Dance and the Samsung HD camera phone. Viewership for a successful viral hit can be stunning, reaching over 10 million views each week for over a 14 week period. Others on the other hand, may reach 1 million viewers and then stall out. Why is that?

What is working?
According to Visible Measures, key success factors for the top viral videos are:

1. they are whimsical, fun, don’t take themselves too seriously
2. they challenge the audience and make room for conversations to happen amongst viewers (how did they do that??)
3. the first week is critical – they need to burst on the scene and get at least a million viewers
   
4. they are supported by a broader awareness campaign - offline & on-line - PR, purchased media, social outreach, etc
5. after the initial burst, they have a sustained marketing effort

What trends are we seeing?

1. music-video/video-tainment (i.e. Smirnoff Partay, BK Spongebob)
2. interactive video/how did they do that (T-Mobile Dance, Samsung HD camera trick)
3. stunts (Nike hyper-dunk , Microsoft's megawoosh )
4. darn good storytelling (Samsung LED -sheep - my favorite!! Johnnie Walker's Walk)

Do they work?
Ultimately, the question for brands is – can you link these viral hits to business results. According to Visible Measures, the seminal piece of research still needs to be published but brands that do participate in this medium believe viral ads can create greater value because it feels more authentic if their product is promoted by fans.

United Breaks Guitars - UA's PR Gaff

You can run but you cannot hide when it comes to PR blunders. This week, United certainly received a tough lesson in customer relations and how not to manage a PR crisis. All brand managers take note - social media can be your friend, or in this case, your worst nightmare.

In the spring of 2008, Canadian singer songwriter Dave Carroll was traveling with his band Sons of Maxwell to Nebraska for a one-week tour and witnessed his Taylor guitar being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. He later discovered that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. While United didn’t deny the experience occurred, United employees kept passing the buck from person to person, refusing to deal with his issue. After nine months, United finally said they would do nothing to compensate Dave for his loss.

Frustrated, Dave decided to go viral with his complaint in the best way he knew how - he wrote a song and produced a video which he launched on YouTube. The story was picked up by CNN and other news channels and within days Dave became a hero; an overnight sensation. United responded to the video by agreeing to reimburse Dave, but the damage to their reputation was already done. As I write, over 2 million people have played Dave's video and it has prompted a viral outpouring of empathy.

This is another great case study to add to the annals of social media and brand crisis management (along with Motrin and Dominos), where companies learn the hard lesson in today's digital world, that every customer's voice counts and that the tenor of that voice can be echoed a million times in a matter of days. But the real issue for United goes much deeper. You've got to believe that there is an aspect of the culture at the airline that enabled this crisis - a culture where employees are limited by rulebooks rather than empowered to do what's right for the customer. In brand building every consumer touch-point counts, and as we've seen in so many other companies whether they be Southwest, Starbucks or Zappos, employees at every level can make or break a brand experience.

Maybe this crisis will make United start to think a little differently about managing the brand experience.