Hashtags – the little bookmarks of the internet are also one of the most exploited tools in social media campaigns. Brands use these all the time to promote themselves and get their campaigns trending. However, every once in a while, this strategy can backfire leading to really confusing situation for the brand as well as the brand’s followers. We have picked one such incident where two very different social media campaigns used the exact same hashtag for promotion leading to an ocean of confused fans and of course a few hearty laughs.
The hashtag in limelight for all the wrong reasons is Ice Challenge. It was chosen to promote two very different types of causes. The first one was used with the intention of creating awareness about breast cancer and the second one by Moet & Chandon was for their Sea & White photo contest – both of which used #icechallenge as their main hashtag. So you might imagine the plight of the marketers as well as fans when both the campaigns went live. Those searching for pictures of yachts and champagne ended up looking at hundreds of people taking pictures of themselves taking an ice cold shower.
Moet & Chandon
The campaign from Moet & Chandon was a typical social media photo contest where the fans were asked to share images that best illustrated their theme for the month of July which was Sea & White. Moet & Chandon asked their fans to share these images with #IceChallenge and this is where everything went wrong. The marketers failed to check and verify if the hashtag was already in use. As a result, a well planned campaign goes down the drain and the brand gets ridiculed for poor execution. Basically, the marketers at Moet & Chandon have to wade their way through a tsunami of online reputation management. This is perhaps the reason why they have also included #moeticechallenge as a hashtag to be used for the contest but not before vigorously promoting #IceChallenge.
Lessons to be learnt
Always do your homework before launching a social media campaign. It is always the finer details that make a huge difference (in this case the poor research and hashtag selection).
Double check your homework. Even if you have planned a campaign, it doesn\’t hurt to go over it once more before launching it does it?
Be quick to rectify your mistakes. Okay mistakes do happen we are after all just human. Not rectifying your mistake is something that is not forgivable especially when an impending disaster threatens to ruin you completely. So if you find yourself in a similar situation, be quick with the damage control. Nobody will hold an apology against you.
Cancer Awareness Drive
Driving awareness for the cause of cancer is a very noble cause. From giving away donations in exchange for motor boats from girls to dumping a bucket of icy cold water on yourself, the internet is not short of downright bizarre campaigns aimed at spreading awareness. The #IceChallenge is one of the many such bizarre awareness drives. It is hard to understand how dumping a buckets of icy cold water on yourself can help drive any form of awareness towards breast cancer which has resulted in the campaign being ridiculed widely on social media at its lack of sense.
you would think a campaign that focuses on cancer awareness and fundraising would actually mention cancer #IceChallenge
— Catherine Hume (@cathume83) July 15,2014
#IceChallenge just wasn’t complete until parents started getting their Toddlers & Infants to do it aye……Fux sakes…
— TheBlackSheep.com (@LivinOffTheGrid) July 10, 2014
When designing a campaign always make something meaningful. If it is about cancer, don\’t leave out cancer from the cause even if you think getting completely drenched in cold water is a lot of fun.
We often hear about tons of statistics both for and against Social Media Marketing. There are those that strongly advocate using social media for businesses and those that are adamant that social media is overrated. The argument has been raging on both the camps for quite some time now vastly owning to the fact that measuring the ROI of social media has not been made very clear. But, Pagemodo begs to differ. They have released an infographic that takes a look at the different opinions about the effectiveness of social media, some existing methods of measuring the ROI of social media and finally what Pagemodo calls a DIY way to measure the ROI of social media.
Attitude of Businesses Towards Social Media
The data suggests that 64% of the businesses still think that social media is promising and that it will produce ROI eventually. This is certainly not a key metric that marketers should concentrate on. It is the fact that only 20% of the businesses believe that social media is effective and produces an ROI is something that needs immediate attention.
How ROI Is Being Measured In Social Media
The reason for these poor statistics is explained in the next section which highlights some of the popular methods used to measure the ROI of social media. The section includes several outdated metrics such as number of followers, number of shares, retweets, brand awareness generated measured thorough surveys and so on.
The DIY approach maps out a clear path to actually measure the ROI of any particular social media for a business using metrics such as conversion rates, leads and traffic.
The only part that Pagemodo gets right is perhaps the fact that 64% of the businesses are waiting for ROI and 20% believe that they have achieved the desired ROI from social media. The second section highlighting the methods of measuring ROI has been collected from surveys conducted in 2011. A lot has changed since 2011 and it also includes how marketers measure ROI from social media.
Importance Of Evaluating The Success Of Social Media
The DIY roadmap highlighted by Pagemodo is also not something completely new. The idea has been floating around since at least a year and many marketers have even endorsed new techniques of tracking the traffic to the conversion rates. So, I’d say the infographic has a lot to offer to a novice but to a seasoned veteran of the social media world this doesn’t provide much value.
The only purpose this infographic may achieve when presented to the peers in the industry is stress the fact that to measure the ROI of any social media it is imperative to determine how the traffic on your social media pages is behaving.
August 2007, and the Twitter account @MrMessina have played an important role in shaping the internet as we know it today. Yes I’m talking about the very first use of hashtags on the internet. Ever since then, these tiny little markers of the internet have spread like wildfire across almost every single social platform and play a massive role in helping social media marketers to analyze and plan campaigns that go viral and begin trending instantly.
After exploring 5 Best Vines and 5 Best Instagram campaigns, we decided to shift our focus on Twitter campaigns. This list explores some of the most creative and highly engaging campaigns on Twitter over the past 1 year and what we can take away from each campaign.
#ShareTheSofa – Heineken
Being one of the major sponsors of club soccer\’s greatest league – the UEFA Champions League, Heineken decide they need to make the most of this opportunity even on Twitter by launching the #ShareTheSofa campaign. Beer and sofas are two of the most common things you could perhaps associate a soccer fan with. Heineken made use of this opportunity and helped soccer fans interact with some of the greatest soccer champions.
@Heineken What do you think would have been Ancelotti\’s half time message? #ShareTheSofa
The month long campaign included interviews from several soccer stars and Heineken even gave select fans an opportunity to literally share a sofa with the legends of the soccer world. It is a well known fact that over 70% of the soccer fans watch the matches alone with their smart devices and UEFA is among the top 3 most tweeted sporting events in the world. Despite this, most brands haven\’t been able to leverage the statistics in their campaigns until #ShareTheSofa.
#LetsEatTogether – CocaCola
Live tweets can be a boon as well as a bane at the same time. As a result, marketers usually try to avoid live tweets in their campaigns as much as possible. However, CocaCola is not one among those brands. CocaCola has been responsible for some of the most amazing ad campaigns and they have proved it again with their #LetsEatTogether campaign that began in Romania.
The campaign focused over he fact that over 60% of the Romanians eat alone in front of the TV or while staring at their mobile devices. This gave way to one of the most creative Twitter and TV ad campaigns. CocaCola asked Romanians to invite people over to dinner with their tweets. During the commercial, CocaCola would feature some of these tweets after editing them. The result was that people actually started waiting for the commercial to come on. Now how often does one get to see that happen? If this wasn\’t enough, many of the local celebrities, started tweeting, a chef came on board and the ad was even featured on news giving CocaCola a lifetimes coverage.
Subsequently, the campaign was spread to other parts of the world as well!
When anyone talks about social media campaigns, you simply can’t leave out Oreo. The sandwich cookie maker is by far one of the most innovative brands online. Their campaigns are quite creative and very original.
The SuperBowl is one of the most watched event across the U.S. As a result, every brand demonstrates their best and the most creative ads during the commercial. The contest is so intense that everyone wait eagerly even for the commercials. However, the last SuperBowl witnessed a blackout. Something most brands would scoff at but not Oreo. They decided to make the best of the situation and the result is a tweet that was talked about long after the event. They not only got the creative up in minutes but were able to capitalize on something like the blackout despite having a powerful strategy in place.
@Tweetacoffee – Starbucks
Last holiday, Starbucks came up with a brilliant campaign in line with the spirit of giving that would soon give them a massive ROI. Last October, Starcucks launched the Tweetacoffee campaign that allowed users to buy their friends coffee by linking their credit cards to the Starbucks account and the Starbucks account to their Twitter account. Once you have done this, all you need to do is mention @Tweetacoffee and your friends Twitter handle on the same tweet. Starbucks would then give your friend a free coffee from you.
Now sharing the gift of @Starbucks is as easy as sending a Tweet.
According to Keyhole, an independent research firm, the whole campaign generated as much as $180,000 in revenue to Starbucks which is quite a huge sum considering that the investment behind the campaign was very minimal. This study also revealed that about 32% of the coffees were purchased on the first day of the campaign and as many as 34% of Starbucks followers on Twitter used the service to buy coffee.
#SFBatKid – Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation
While sharing a sofa with a celebrity, eating with your family or even sending coffee to your friends is sweet, what takes the icing on the cake when it comes to the best Twitter campaign so far is possible #SFBatKid. The campaign was initiated by the Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation in November 2013. The campaign has won the Shorty Awards for the best Twitter campaign and is considered to be one of the best campaigns ever created not only because it went viral soon after it was launched but also because of the fact that the whole campaign was created and executed in less than 24 hours. The whole promotion began only a week before the actual event took place and yet it was a global phenomenon.
The #SFBatKid became a massive success thanks to the clever narrative and story telling that backed the campaign.
To end with, the most important lesson we could perhaps learn from some of the best Twitter campaigns is perhaps the fact that these campaigns did not become a massive success on their own. In many cases, it was cross channeling of media that really worked for the brands. At the same time, these brands make sure that they time their campaigns to perfection and nothing explains this better than the “Dunk in the Dark” tweet from Oreo. At times even a single tweet could propel your brand to the heights of glory but what everyone needs to take away from here is the fact that timing and cross channeling are certainly something that every brand needs to endorse a lot more in 2014.
About: Kapost is a content marketing tool that helps brands grow revenue with their content. Kapost simplifies, the creation, distribution and analysis of content on a single platform giving content marketers an edge with their marketing efforts.
Usage: Kapost allows marketing teams of all sizes to easily collaborate, manage and organize their content, marketing assets and campaigns in an efficient environment.
Highlight: Kapost helps brands and businesses understand and learn what type of content best fits their needs through content score. The Content Scoring technology allows marketers to move prospects easily through the marketing funnel leading to increased sales and revenue.
How does your content fare?
Lead scoring and lead nurturing are two of the words that are being thrown around a lot these days in the content marketing circles. Lead scoring allows you to determine if you are targeting prospects that are genuinely interested in your products. Lead nurturing on the other hand gives marketers with a systematic approach to follow up with leads and nurture them all the while moving them further down in the marketing funnel and leading to a successful conversion eventually. However, content plays a major role here. As a marketer, you will need to evaluate your content too and provide your leads with the right kind of content at the right time for marketing success. Kapost is a tool that tries to fill this gap quite impressively through their Content Scoring technology.
To shed some more light into Kapost, we managed to have a brief chat with Stanton Champion, Director of Product Marketing at Kapost and here is what he had to say.
On Content Scoring and the future of content marketing:
With Content Scoring, a marketer can quickly tell which pieces of content help move prospects down a buying funnel. With this information, marketers can ultimately nurture their prospects with the right content at the right time, progressively improving their prospects’ lead scores, encouraging more sales conversations, and ultimately driving more revenue. Prior to content scoring, marketers had to rely on what we call “vanity metrics” which show how much a piece of content was consumed. But this did not tell the marketer how valuable that content was in driving results, including revenue. With content scoring, marketers now have a tool that tells them the real business results of every piece of content at every stage of the buying funnel, helping them make the best decisions possible about nurturing prospects and driving revenue.
-Stanton Champion, Director of Product Marketing
Content scoring is something that is sure to help marketers a lot in the days to come especially with the rise in popularity of new strategies and tools that focus towards lead nurturing as well as lead scoring.
How can Kapost help a modern brand?
Making sure that the right form of content reaches your prospects at the right time is the most crucial aspect of content marketing as a vast majority of the modern buying cycles take place online. Many of the prospective customers prefer to conduct extensive online research before reaching out to the brand. As a result, marketers need to place sufficient information for the prospective customers in a ways the customers can easily find. This content also needs to be highly relevant as well as engaging and this is one of the areas where most brands fail. When asked how Kapost can help with this situation, Stanton responded saying
We believe that content is critical to modern businesses and that it’s the most effective way to reach customers in the always on internet and social media worlds. Kapost solves this problem by helping companies build a content operation – a repeatable and scalable process that makes it possible to create a steady stream of content that drives results. We do this with a combination of a content marketing platform that enables companies to adopt the right best practices to create their content, including providing team alignment, accountability, and insights into success. We also do this with our expert services offering, making it easy for companies to see results from content, even if they’re just starting out. Lastly, our partner ecosystem helps companies find the right tools and platforms to create the highest quality content possible, even if they lack the resources internally.
-Stanton Champion, Director of Product Marketing
What to expect from Kapost in the days to come?
While Kapost certainly seems to have some really powerful features, there certainly is some scope for innovation. Also, we had a lot of fun trying out their platform that we couldn’t resist but ask Stanton if they were planning on reinforcing Kapost with more features and he was kind enough to let us peak under the hood for a bit.
Our content scoring algorithm is just the start, and we intend to improve it further to give marketers even better information about which pieces of content drive business results.
-Stanton Champion, Director of Product Marketing
Stanton also went on to say that Kapost was keen on developing three additional features to Kapost existing environment. Stanton said that they are currently working on growing the partner ecosystem that already includes several content creation partners such as Scripted, Ebyline, Getty, Smartshoot and many others.
Providing quality content to internal stakeholders is another area that has been nagging content marketers for a very long time and according to Stanton, Kapost might just come up with a solution soon. Finally Stanton also revealed that auditing existing content is something that is quite hard for brands and businesses to undertake and that Kapost has plans to roll our features that could simplify this process in the near future.
Key features of Kapost
1. Editorial Calendar
Kapost provides one of the most advanced editorial calendars with features that are sure to help boost your productivity as a content marketing team. There are plenty of predefined filters and options to include custom filters giving you an unlimited number of ways to organize your content in the editorial calendar. You can filter the calendar by region, author, campaign, buying stage, buyer persona and a host of other filters.
2. Analytics
Kapost measures and analyzes different types of metrics including production analytics, engagement analytics, performance analytics, content scores and alows you to generate customized reports as per your needs. These key metrics could help you make sure that your entire team is working towards a unified goal.
3. Easy Communication
Content marketing efforts usually require a massive team and this could easily lead to massive confusions within the team. To simplify this, Kapost has a powerful dashboard to manage your team. In addition to this, you could also assign tasks and converse with other members of your team with a simple @Mention like Twitter.
4. Editing and duplication
Kapost makes editing content a breeze on it\’s platform. The platform supports innovative features such as collaborative editing much like Google Docs. In fact, if you prefer Google Docs, you can edit all of your content at Google Docs and Kapost will keep a copy of all the revisions so you can conveniently choose the best of the lot for the final version.
Kapost also has an additional feature to duplicate content. The ability to duplicate content can help those who manage international content marketing efforts greatly. For example, if you need a particular blog post translated to different languages, you need not have to rewrite the whole copy several times. Instead, you can simply duplicate the initial copy and translate it into as many languages as you like, and reduce all the additional work.
Alternatives
While we are very much satisfied with what Kapost has to offer, there are a handful of competitors but only 2 of them come close to Kapost. One of them being Compendium and the other being CoSchedule.
