This SES Chicago recap will cover the last two sessions of Day 2.  This recap includes “Igniting Viral Campaigns” and a sponsored session named “Social Media Strategy”.

My recaps will include some useful tidbits that I picked up during day 2 of SES Chicago.  Tweets were made from @marketwire as well as my personal handle @shinng using the hashtag #seschi and #rt2eat.  So what is the meaning of the latter hashtag?  Well, the creative marketing team @marketwire wanted to give back for the holiday season so we decided to take advantage of the Marketwire presence.  For every ReTweet of our tweets that include the hashtags #seschi #rt2eat, Marketwire will be donating $1.00 per RT for a max contribution of $500 to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

SES Chicago Session – Igniting Viral Campaigns

Moderator:  Tessa Wegert (Enlighten)
Speakers:  Greg Finn (10e20), Denise Chudy (Google/YouTube), Jennifer Evans Laycock (SiteLogic)

This session was about how to leverage web 2.0 technologies (such as YouTube) to give companies the opportunity to stand out.

• Identifying and maximizing viral content
  • Humor
  • Educational resources
  • Comprehensive lists – not your typical top 10 lists, but full blown lists /Nick Shin – An actual example of a “comprehensive list” was not given, but my example would be the AdAge 150 list.
  • Breaking information – exclusives, leaks, etc.
  • Infographics
• What to do
  • Ensure proper formatting of your content
  • Make sure the content is easy to consume
  • Be sure the content is very visual
  • Look for a social tone, i.e., be human
• Viral mediums – utilize popular destinations such as FunnyorDie, Break, Ebaum’s World, YouTube, Flickr
• Social news and networking
  • Largest source for igniting viral campaigns
  • Be as non corporate as possible
  • Corporate and brand promotion is not the only angle
  • Helping the community is better than helping yourself.  You want to make sure you are part of the community before participating.
  • Digg – not just for video games and gadgets
  • StumbleUpon – a possibility for all viral content; user proper/niche categories
  • Reddit – use subreddits for best relevancy
  • Facebook – don’t only send your users to your “wall”. Make new tabs, add new apps.
    • Example: Overstock.com, Best Buy, and Radio Shack’’s default facebook landing page is a holiday promotion, not their “wall”
    • Make sure you have approval on promotions
    • Make content easy to share
    • Spend money on facebook by sending traffic to your page using Facebook ads and Facebook events
  • Twitter
    • Make it easy to tweet your content
    • Allow for easy RTs
    • Promote during peak hours
  • Entice others to ignite your campaigns using the “original social media” through blogger outreach and forums
  • Fanning the viral fire
    • Stagger approaches for optimum visibility
    • Provide alternative ways to share on social networks.  A good one is to use buttons (tweetmeme, digg, Facebook share) because people are lazy.
    • Cross promote to maximize exposure
  • Leverage viral mentions to continue momentum
  • Repeat underperforming campaigns with fresh “coverage content” by pointing to other people’s coverage.
    • The “Google Chrome OS” example: initial coverage of the Google Chrome OS YouTube video was weak.  It only received 4 diggs.  However, after bloggers began covering the new OS, they began submitting their own links to digg with the embedded YouTube video.  That article ended up receiving over 400 diggs and caused the video to receive over 1 million views.
    • 

• When doing viral campaigns, know your goal.
• Viral goals include: building the brand, driving sales, driving traffic/links
• Rosen Velocity Scale (V1 to V10): V1=extreme brand/emotion and V10=extreme direct/SHAM WOW!
• 

• V1: extreme brand represents brand awareness and is not about the offer.  Example: Dove Evolution

• • Between V3 and V4: Medium brand awareness + offer example is the OfficeMax’ “Back to School for Pennies” campaign

• • V6: Brand awareness + emotion + sales= Innocent drinks’  The Big Knit campaign.  Buying a “knitted” Innocent drink smoothie donates money and the knitting sparks interest.
  • V8: Uniqueness + sales message = Blendtec’s Will it Blend campaign.  If you have never seen or heard of “Will it Blend”, please come out from under that rock.
  • V10: Pure purchase driven immediacy.  Buy now = Shoebuy.com. When finishing the checkout process, they give you an option to give a $10 coupon to friends via different methods including social media.
• Viral is as simple as enabling the share of your message.
• 

• Building the brand leads to slower sales.  The break even occurs later with a lower velocity.
• Building the sale leads to slow brand.  Raising the velocity brings profit much sooner.

Denise Chudy from YouTube was the last presenter and I’m particularly glad that she presented some nice stats along with the presentation.  The numbers certainly made it more interesting.

• Successful viral videos are: captivating, interesting, intriguing clever, exciting, creative, though provoking, compelling
• 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• By the end of the panel, 1500 hours or 62.5 full days of video content will have been uploaded to YouTube
• Get good videos discovered
  • Making them findable – YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine with 3.6B searches/month; use SEO techniques for organic results
  • Use offline to seed
  • Leverage existing networks
  • Leverage recognizable people – original placements account for only 40% of total engagement on YouTube.   Example: Kobe jumping over Aston Martin.  Original video= 5MM vews, 8MM views including copies, and 14MM views including derivatives
  • Use advertising; market your video – homepage exposure generates a 4.7x lift in action
  • 

SES Chicago Sponsored Session – Social Media Strategy

Serengeti Communications Speakers:  Nathan Linnell, Nan Dawkins, Liana Evans

The Serengeti group provided some useful information.  Did I learn anything new?  No, but it was a great refresher.

Social Media Strategy

• Applying marketing tactics in the absence of strategy is like doing nothing at all.
• Start thinking about engagement, ways to make friends, and how to serve.  People create the content and the community.
• There are no “cookie cutter solutions” when jumping into social media.  Understand the why and how and what your end goal is.  Do your research first and understand where your audience is, who your audience is, and what your target audience is doing.
• 

• What you do is just as important as where you do it.
  1. Start by finding the conversations
  2. Understand the conversations
  3. Use your monitoring data to understand who you want to reach and engage

Social Media Measurement

• Impact can be observed internally via corporate website, company blogs, sponsored communities, external online via social media, and external offline.
• Sources of data: internal web analytics – what to measure
  • Direct traffic
  • Brand searches
  • Visits referred by key social media sites
  • Social media referred visits attributed to company social media efforts
  • Conversions (not necessarily a sale) generated from social media sites
  • Engagement metrics
  • Blogs and communities – subscribers (views/clicks), comments/posts, incoming links, ReTweets of posts (via Twitter), unique visitors, members

• Sources of data: external online – social sites
  • Facebook – fans/active fans, media consumption, total interactions (likes, comments, wall posts)
  • Twitter – followers (unique/quality followers), retweets, mentions, brand mentions
  • YouTube – channel (page views, subscribers, friends, comments), videos (views, ratings, comments, favorites, video responses)

• Sources of data: external online – monitoring tools
  • Aggravated view of buzz across the web – volume of mentions (brand, competitor, topic, share of voice), share by social media type, top sources/locations, sentiment, influencers

• Sources of data: external offline – research
  • Surveys and focus groups – brand awareness, purchase intent
  • Viral video campaign example
    • Target=caregivers, campaign site with coupon, goals=branding and sales
    • Measurement of video views, video mentions (buzz), video submissions, engagement (votes, comments), coupon redemption, buzz volume/brand, share of voice/brand
    • Sources of data include social media monitoring, web analytics, YouTube, and sales data
• Building a measurement framework – implement what you can measure
  • Financial impact = revenue generated, cost savings, cost avoidance
  • Non financial impact = brand awareness, purchase intent, willing to recommend
  • Define what constitutes success – branding goals? direct sales or lead generation? both?
  • Think through the buying process
  • Map metrics to goals – quality not quantity
  • Do I have the right tools?
  •