Anyway I thought it may be worthwhile taking another quick look at how global brands like Pizza Hut could make better use of the potential of Social Media [So.Me] and in the process prehaps disrupt the plans of the biggest player in the So.Me today… Facebook.
As we discovered earlier in the month the leading Brands today are no longer in the business of chasing impressions. They are now in the business of chasing expressions. So, thanks largely to a total failure of the imagination, Brands now find themselves in the business of playing the game rather than being the game.
Yesterday we built brands that people aspired to own. Today we build brands that aspire to be liked.
So let’s ask the simple question: What would happen if Brands decided to reset the So.Me playing field by becoming the game? What would change and what would they be doing differently?
The easiest place to start is the ubiquitous “Share” or “Like” button.
At the moment the Share button in all its flavours (e.g. Twitter or Facebook) is designed to bring kudos and [hopefully] downstream traffic to the page. Get a share or a tweet and you may get a bump in traffic and if you are really lucky they may become regulars. Either way the pay off is more social and financial. The Tweet and the Share remain a badge of recognition from your peers.
Brands have the ability to both leverage and amplify that desire for peer group recognition.
To demonstrate how let’s think about what might happen if Pizza Hut launched its own “Share” or ”Slice” button.
All it would need is a simple So.Me campaign that allows every blogger to put a Pizza Hut “Pizza Slice” button on their posts. The objective of the “Slice” game is for the blogger to accumulate Pizza Slices rather than Tweets or Shares.
The payback for having a Pizza Slice button? If you get 100 “Pizza Slices” for your post you qualify for a Free Pizza Hut Pizza.
The slice figure may be higher it may be lower. But the campaign objective is to get the Pizza Hut Slice Button on every blog post across the net.
The cost of running the campaign? In real terms on a CPM basis? Negligible. The potential reach of the campaign? Global. The estimated number of bloggers out there? Just under 147 Million. How may are making no money from their efforts? At least 37%. How many would like a free slice of pizza? Who knows… but the chances are the potential number of “Pizza Slice” Bloggers will be a lot bigger than the one watching Desperate Housewives this week.
Of course the “Pizza Slice” button isn’t limited to just Pizza’s. You could do the same thing for McDonald’s, KFC, Red Bull… the list is probably endless. That’s not the point. Nor is the game limited to just branded share button. There are a lot of things happening with So.Me could be easily become very successful branded So.Me campaigns.
The point I am trying to make is just how one-dimensional the thinking in advertising and marketing circles is today. With Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and Mobile Apps advertisers are still in the business of building destinations in a marketplace where the real winners have always been in the business of creating signposts and then aggregating the traffic flows.
The message today? Stop playing the So.Me game and start thinking about how you can become the game.
Posted on April 26, 2011
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