Social media has certainly come into its own over the last year. Whether you log more hours online than you do sleeping or are the type that only turns your computer on every couple of days — gasp — there is a good chance that you have some familiarity with social media, even if you didn't know that's what it was.
Maybe you get a chuckle every now and then from a video on YouTube, upload photos to Flickr for friends and family to see, ask and answer questions on Yahoo Answers, do a little networking and reconnecting with old classmates and work colleagues on LinkedIn, keep track of popular news on Reddit, jot notes on your mates' walls in Facebook, or have carved out your own little corner of the web with a MySpace page. If you have a username and login at even half of those sites, then you know all to well the impact of social media. And for many, that list is but a mere sampling of their social circle.
But what happens when social media collides with daily life? Good, bad, or otherwise, most of us live extremely busy lives. We've found that all of the great tools that have been developed to simplify our lives and allow us more time, often just allow us to do more with the time we have. Is that a bad thing? After all, it is our life and if we are doing the things we want to do and that are important to us, wasn't that the ultimate goal to begin with? If you are expecting answers to those questions, sorry, they aren't coming.
The problem, or at least the challenge, with social media for individuals is simply one of mass. There is only so much time during the day and night that any one of us can put toward the social media venues. At some point, most of us will probably gravitate to a few key sites. Will this gravitation be a slow fade, or cold turkey? Will it be individually, or a revolt of mass proportions? Only time will tell of course.
But hold that thought. The story for businesses is a little different. Social media provides a powerful channel to reach out and interact with the community. While things in business rarely come without a cost, social media can be an extremely cost effective extension of nearly everything a company does. Even as social venues shift in popularity or come and go, businesses can introduce themselves and interact with those who share the same interests. As marketing channels go, the ability to connect with highly targeted, highly interested individuals at a personal level, is pretty hard to beat.
So while the future and popularity of individual social media venues may as yet be undetermined, and individual users' levels of interaction may vary, social media is here to stay. There's so much more that could be said, but I have to go check my Facebook page.
Blendtec's Will It Blend?
(Credit: YouTube.com)Apparently, blenders aren't just for smoothies and margaritas anymore.
Ever try blending golf balls? Light bulbs? Cell phones? A rake handle? An iPod? I bet not, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you have watched Tom Dickson from Blendtec blend some of these things on YouTube.
A few months ago, I used the "Will It Blend?" campaign for an article on Marketing Profs.
Since then, the campaign has continued on (Tom blended an iPhone this summer, for instance) and is now arguably one of the best examples of YouTube-based social-media marketing (SMM) to date.
The YouTube-based promotion is the brainchild of George Wright, marketing director at Blendtec, along with Tom Dickson, Blendtec's founder and CEO. Various common objects are successfully run through a Blendtec blender without breaking it--even marbles. These videos are funny, addictive and brilliantly adept at demonstrating the power of Blendtec blenders.
The results for Blendtec were almost instantaneous. For their initial investment of less than $100 on the first videos in the series, the company drove more than 6 million visitors to its WillItBlend.com Web site in less than a week. It is the stuff of marketing legend, like Apple's "1984 Macintosh" campaign or Wendy's "Where's The Beef?" advertisements.
But the game is a little different now than it was in the television-dominated world of previous decades; YouTube is now more popular than all the sites of the TV networks combined.
YouTube offers brand visibility when the campaign is well-executed, but it offers more than that. Marketers must also know how to take advantage of the other parameters of social media. Here are three things to consider:
Links
YouTube and other social-media platforms can provide links to a company's corporate or home Web site. The key is to associate your video or other media with that site, both by using textual links and by branding the media.
Blendtec, for example, has watermarked its Willitblend.com domain in the lower-left corner of every video, from beginning to end. Even if someone takes a screen capture of the video, the site is represented.
The more interesting your content is, the more likely that people are to link to it. But they have to know where to link.
Branding and online reputation
Social media is more than just traffic and links. It works as well or better than any medium to create both online reputation and, through that, brand awareness. The fastest way to a popular and respected Web site is some combination of interaction and entertainment, and social media is both.
The Blendtec videos have made their blenders hip--and they may very well be the only hip blenders out there. Not only have the videos brought their brand to the forefront of many minds, through which thoughts of blenders might never have passed, but it's even been added our modern speak.
References are now made to "will it blend?" to denote the question of whether something will be successful, much like "will it fly?" or "is it a go?" Every time someone utters that phrase - at least for the moment - they will also think of Blendtec.
Sales
This one's basic: sales of Blendtec blenders were up 43 percent in 2006. They continue to be up in 2007. On top of that, companies using Blendtec blenders are paying thousands of dollars to have Blendtec promotions, and ads at the end of Blendtec videos are earning the company tens of thousands of dollars a year.
The avenue for this sort of promotion, SMM, is wide open. I wonder who the next Blendtec will be. If a company doing something as seemingly boring manufacturing blenders can pull it off, surely some sexier companies can too. For example, imagine what the celebrity-watching fashionistas at SeenOn could do with a bit of YouTube-driven SMM. This is surely a space to watch.
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