The objective, Dyke says, is to overlay the corporation’s identity with the notion of having fun. In other words, pulling consumers to the brand, rather than pushing them to buy a particular product. “Through the social media, we’re starting the conversation about what is going to the max,” she says. “The specific events were all about getting your friends together and rolling down a hill in a giant plastic sphere. This is part of a long-term strategy. We’re hoping to do this year after year.”
ALC deployed a similar tactic in its $1.1-million sponsorship of the Charlottetown Canada Games in August. It sent a team from its public affairs department to cover the event as “citizen reporters”. Says Dyke: “They blogged and twittered and took photos to post online. Initially, we thought maybe only our gang at the company would follow all of this. But we wound up with more than 200 followers on Twitter during that two-week period. By the time it was over, we had registered between 5,000 and 6,000 hits on our blog.” It’s too soon to declare unequivocal success, but the overall strategy seems to be gaining traction. For one thing, ALC’s Facebook page shows dozens of sturdy new fans. “You have to remember that this is an audience that doesn’t want to be sold,” Dyke says. “And we’ve learned a few things. You can’t overdose people. You can only put so many tweets out there before you get blocked. We’re trying to start a momentum – a groundswell – and let people catch on and share it with friends.”
In fact, nothing reveals the inherent flexibility of social media marketing better than its tendency to light fires under specific, clearly articulated ideas. Lori Cox is the president of Halifax-based Sconestone.com, a networking site and non-profit organization that promotes humanitarianism around the world. “Sculpted by Nova Scotia artist Warren MacLeod, the Sconestone, itself, is travelling the world on a journey of kindness,” she says. “It is designed to be an inspiration to all who touch it, to make the world a better place.”
The website is the virtual meeting place that both tracks the stone’s progress and provides an online forum for people to share their experiences and report their random acts of “pay-itforward” kindness. “Right now, the global community is starting to come together around this,” Cox says. “We have visitors from all over the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States…. Social media has 100 per cent facilitated this campaign. The challenge now is that we’re growing faster than we were prepared.”
Indeed, since the campaign’s launch last April, the website has been averaging between 30,000 and 60,000 views a month, and Sconestone’s Facebook page has welcomed more than 200 friends.
OBSERVERS POINT OUT that one of the biggest difficulties in ascertaining the commercial value of social media marketing is the youthfulness of the very platforms on which it depends.MySpace launched in 2003. Facebook, founded by a gaggle of roommates at Harvard and whose name derives from the sobriquet given to orientation publications that university administrations distribute to students at the start of the academic year, took its first breath in 2004. Twitter, established in 2006, is a squalling infant. And every year, more sites dramatically appear, seemingly out of thin air.
All of which explains why many businesses remain suspicious, even fearful, of social media. There’s been no time to truly understand it. And what can’t be understood can’t be controlled. After all, it’s one thing to fail in the real world where ads can be pulled and damage control is ably assisted by the rubric ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ It’s quite another to bomb online where fixing mistakes is a little like removing urine from a swimming pool.
It tends to explain why traditional advertising agencies and marketing communications firms, which are struggling to augment their own capabilities as they gingerly escort their clients up the eversteepening learning curve, are reticent to reveal much in the way of numbers, particularly revenue generated for themselves or their clients through social media. Recent clues suggest that all may not be entirely well for at least some of Atlantic Canada’s leading men and women.
