But for Fiat, it only took a mere five to six weeks to put together a social media campaign built around its Super Bowl ad. Coca-Cola’s social campaign for Coke Zero, “Make It Possible,” took about six months to create. Meanwhile, Ford‘s “Doug” spokespuppet campaign took about a year from inception to the bitter end.
How did it happen? Fiat went to its social media agency, Ignite, asked it to come up with ideas and then picked the best one. Ford also relied on its agency, Team Detroit, for ideation. But the idea for Coke Zero’s campaign came together when Jonathan Mildenhall, VP of global content excellence at Coca-Cola, had a chance encounter with choreographer Jon Chu at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
As the three anecdotes suggest, there is no standard procedure for putting together a social media campaign. “It can vary tremendously,” says Nate Elliott, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “You can put up a Twitter account in minutes, but setting up a social community for fans can take years.”
Planning a Campaign
Whatever the case, a campaign always starts by figuring out a strategy. In Coke’s case, the strategy was simply to experiment: “We would describe this project as more of a ‘social experiment’ that sought to test and prove what we suspected to be true — that iconic content can originate with consumers’ conversations,” a Coke rep says.
Smaller brands often outsource their strategy, but big brands usually formulate one on their own and then solicit ideas from agencies. Elliott says that there’s a land grab going on for such work.
“Everyone’s trying to do this,” he says. “Every agency thinks they’re a natural home for social media, and a lot of them are right.”
In Fiat’s case, the brand solicited many ideas from Ignite and then decided within two or three days that they liked the “Score a Scorpion” concept.
Getting it Off the Ground
After deciding on an idea, the next phase of a social media campaign is the execution. As mentioned, a very simple campaign can start very quickly — you can set up a Twitter account or a Facebook Brand Page in a few minutes. However, a more ambitious effort can take weeks or months. With Fiat, one of the hurdles was getting all the “terms and conditions” paperwork routinely involved in a sweepstakes through the legal department. That, and actually building the campaign on Facebook, took about four weeks, says Jim Tobin, president at Ignite. “It was a tight timeline,” he says, “but the Super Bowl doesn’t move. It has a very clear end date.”
In the old days, you would let a campaign loose and that would be that. But Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign in 2010 upped the ante with videos that responded to fans’ questions and comments. Brian McClary, social and emerging media analyst at Ford, recalls that the team was “constantly shooting content” for weeks for the “Doug” campaign. “We were monitoring what people were saying on Twitter and Facebook while we were shooting.”
Another complexity that social media has added is real-time metrics. Facebook, in particular, has been a proponent of such measurements, which offer marketers the insights that could inspire ROI-driven tweaks on the fly. For instance, if a promotion seems to be taking off, you can double down on ads for the promotion.
McClary, however, says he mainly gathered data through weekly and monthly reports about the campaign’s progress. Elliott says that’s probably the correct approach. “Many [marketers] are terrible at measuring results,” says Elliott. While marketers like McClary see such data weekly and monthly, community managers are looking at it minute-by-minute. Meanwhile, since many campaigns are designed to boost the brand, the results that really matter can take months, if not years, to calculate. “The problem is, social media sites throw out so many metrics that we often can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Conclusion
In sum, it’s clear that there’s no consensus on how to run a social media campaign. That and the flood of would-be experts in social media make the process needlessly complicated. For all the trouble, though, there’s still not nearly as much money in social media as there is in traditional TV. For instance, General Motors‘ entire budget for Facebook marketing is now $30 million — about 7% of its overall $4.3 billion ad spend.
Despite the hassles, the lure of social media is strong, and a marketer in 2012 has no choice but to embrace it. “This is an always-on conversation,” the Coke rep says. “We continue to track results to this day and have no plans to stop.”
Source: How Big Brands Create Social Media Campaigns
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