What we’ve learned about running social media campaigns

Categories: news

Thirty things we’ve learned over the last year:

1: Content is more important than channels: as long as people look at the content it really doesn’t matter if they’re on the brand website, Facebook or YouTube.

2: If it’s worth creating a social media campaign, it’s worth booking some online media spend to support it.

3: Consumer-generated content is more powerful than brand-created content.

4: Managing conversations and communities in social media campaigns requires skill and experience (it’s not a job for the intern…).

5: Be current and be quick.

6: Go to where your consumers hang out; don’t force them to come to you.

7: The more arb the better.

8: The starting point for any campaign should be; what can we give the consumer of value that they can’t get elsewhere.

9: Flash sucks (most of the time)

10: “Virals” do too (as this is causing some debate, it’s worth clarifying that whilst i think getting content to go viral is great, creating a ridiculously expensive, flash-heavy piece of programming that relies on going viral to be successful, is asking for trouble. I think Sturgeons Law that “90% of everything is crud” certainly applies to the grubby genre of viral marketing – Dan).

11: We’re competing with everything else on the internet, our work better be pretty damn relevant and entertaining.

12: Social media campaigns aren’t a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, job.

13: Bloggers are harder to pitch stories to than journalists (they work out of passion; journalists often don’t sadly).

14: There is a free app for everything.

15: Don’t get caught in a fight about whether WordPress or Tank is the best platform.

16: Don’t take trolls personally.

17: The best campaigns adapt and learn as they grow.

18: We are telling stories with our campaigns. They need mystery, sub-plots and panache.

19: Tweet-to-win competitions give social media marketing a bad name. Just say no.

20: Don’t talk like an ad, people will hate you for it.

21: Don’t drive traffic to a web campaign with print, billboards, TV or radio. It’s pointless.

22: Persuade clients to allow us to post social media content without having to sign everything off – they’ll just have to trust us to get it right (this is one of the reasons the Steri Stumpie campaign in particular really works)

23: Delete things that go wrong quickly…

24: Don’t pretend to be something you’re not, someone will notice.

25: The first question clients ask us is “how do we measure this?”

26: Clients love Google and Facebook Analytics.

27: You still need a good idea.

28: Things need to happen in the real world to talk about online.

29: Actually there is no such thing as a good social media campaign, only good integrated campaigns (everything else sucks).

30: Don’t ask consumers to upload videos of themselves; they can’t be bothered.