We have been tackling the topic of social media this month, and I want to take it into the realm of integration for a bit…

So just how does social media fit in the grand scheme of things? Perfectly, in fact, as it compliments the majority of the interactive marketing we are already engaged in. From PPC to SEO, online contests to brand building, social media can be used in conjunction with other efforts to boost not only brand equity online but also conversions.

Several recent marketing endeavors for our clients have included social media as a component. Social media marketing has been used to further the conversation online with the ultimate goal of singling out brand advocates and planting the seeds they need to carry our brand message to their social web. From carrying on brand conversations in blogs and forums to establishing a brand’s presence in well established social networking arenas such as MySpace and Facebook, social media marketing is a natural extension of a user’s current online behavior. We have chosen to use social media in conjunction with more mainstream interactive efforts because we believe it places our message exactly where it needs to be found.

To this end, we may place display advertising on a site where conversations have been very positive and numerous in an effort to further the brand advocacy we have already enjoyed. We may divert PPC media to the same blog temporarily to bolster traffic and discussion about our brand.

Bottom line: Social media is not always a singular activity or marketing endeavor. It represents one of many arrows we keep in the proverbial quiver to help our brands truly achieve online brand dominance. While social media was not coined until recently, the platform has been around for years and choosing not to take advantage of its tremendous benefits is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand.

As Director of Creative Services here at LeapFrog Interactive, I’ve gotten the opportunity to work on several fun and exciting interactive contest campaigns for our clients over the years. In my experience, these kinds of promotions can net great results for businesses. One particular challenge that affects me and my team in Creative Services is maintaining brand compliance on an interactive contest campaign. It’s our responsibility to ensure that if we have to add images, audio or video content that doesn’t currently exist in the client’s digital asset library, those files are always 100% consistent with their brand style.

That’s where the brand personality approach really pays off. If you understand the brand as a three-dimensional persona, you have the depth of understanding to extend the digital assets as needed without going off-brand. Sometimes, you have to appeal to the consumer represented by that brand personality, rather than what the client’s personal preference would be, but if they agree that it fits the brand personality, then that’s the direction you take. It adds a more objective layer and guideline to the subjective design process.

User experience is another area for concern in interactive contest creative development. Any design element that causes friction or prevents the user from submitting their email address is a roadblock. In addition to interfering with building the consumer database, it also represents a gap in user experience. If the user didn’t complete the action we expected it means we need to look at the design again, figure out why, and determine what changes to make.

Finally, it’s important to know how far to push the overt brand elements on a contest site. Applying the brand style needs a certain level of subtlety and sophistication. If you push the direct branding too hard, it becomes intrusive to the user experience. But it needs to be obvious enough that users remember not just that it was a fun contest, but a contest presented by your client’s brand. Striking the right balance can be tough, but it’s important not to go overboard in either direction/

Join Mike and Alan as they discuss the creative and branding implications of interactive contest campaigns. 

 Alan on Interactive contests: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As we’ve recently discussed in our blog and the LeapCast, interactive contests can be a great way to promote your brand online. However, it’s important that you provide your interactive agency with adequate background data to properly plan and execute the promotion to hit your target goals. Answering these questions at the outset ensures a great result in th end.

What are your specific goals for the promotion? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you simply trying to promote your brand into a deeper penetration of your target market? Are you rebranding your business to an entirely new demographic? Are you pushing a new product line? Is building an email database the primary goal? Your agency needs this information to develop a powerful promotion that will work for you.

We also need to look at the overall existing online brand presence for the company. If your organization doesn’t have an established brand presence already, that makes the branding impact of the promotion that much more important.

A promotion can be a great way to motivate users to interact with your brand, so it’s particularly helpful when you are repositioning your brand in the market. In this regard, the more demographic and interest information you can provide to your agency regarding your target audience, the more focused and effective the promotion can be in reaching that audience.

Having clear goals in place prior to beginning an online contest promotion ensures that those goals are met and exceeded by the campaign. Providing your agency with comprehensive information about goals, target audience and your brand’s current position gets things off on the right foot.

Online contests have become a great way to drive traffic to your website, increase consumer databases and most importantly create connection for people with your brand. However, there are several things that must be taken into account when planning and implementing a contest for those reasons:

First: An online contest can oftentimes be the first introduction of a brand to a consumer. Ensuring that the brand persona is kept intact with any promotional contest is a top priority. What we want is an emotional connection with the brand. Having a mismatch in tone, imagery, content, usability, etc. creates an instant disconnect when the user ultimately lands on the main website only to find their introduction was merely a traffic generating farce. Consumers are bombarded daily with special offers and the last thing we can afford is to disappoint a consumer who then turns a blind eye to our brand - that’s if we’re lucky - the alternative is the consumer uses their online power to tell everyone in their network that the promotion is not worth the time!

Second: One of the easily forgotten aspects of any online venture is usability. As creative minds work together, focusing on flow, speed, functionality, browsers, etc. becomes a paramount concern when the ultimate goal is pleasing the user. A great offer is not enough to keep attention when pages are slow to load, navigation makes no sense and paths are not clearly defined. Online, your brand has split seconds to grab the user’s attention and motivate them to continue on your designated conversion path – any break in that rhythm creates a roadblock. Just like in highway traffic, a certain percentage of drivers will simply turn around and take another path.

Third: As we begin to look for places to promote the online contest, it is important to target sites and media that foster the emotional connection with the brand. Placing your contest on a contest aggregator site leads to high amounts of traffic but little connection to the brand and ultimately results in a consumer database not interested in my brand offer but the next sweepstakes I happen to announce. The creative we place on the targeted sites, from text to image, must find a way to marry both the tone of the publisher’s site and the persona of the brand. We must be careful not to “blend in” with the existing creative too much, but failing to create a brand connection to the user already creates a roadblock for the online contest.

As an interactive marketer, I believe online contests are a powerful way to brand online, generate buzz and ultimately build databases. I also believe, if done poorly, they can be one of the most dangerous online brand activities imaginable.

I recently read a really nice article by Noah Elkin at iCrossing that covered his suggestions to clients who are considering moving their brand management into the social media landscape. On the whole, I agree with his suggestions, but one item really jumped out at me:

“Also, make sure your legal team is not writing any posts or deciding what’s getting written and how. Yes, legal should be involved in crafting and signing off on the policy, but no, legal should not be taking a hands-on role (unless for some reason you’re engaging with a legal community)…”

Let me just say, reading that was nearly a “spew coffee on the keyboard” moment for me. There are people who think they should have their legal department speaking for them in social media? Once I regained my composure, I realized that for most traditional corporate clients, that might actually, on the face of it, sound like a “safe” way to engage in social media.

So in case you’re a brand marketer considering moving your company into the social media space, let me just clear this up right now: unless you’d send your lawyer to represent you on a date (or even at an industry conference or social networking event), don’t send them to represent you in the social media sphere.

It also got me thinking about other tactics that brand marketers who aren’t really familiar with social media and web 2.0 might initially (mistakenly) embrace. So with that in mind, I present to you three foolproof, ironclad ways to ruin your chances of successfully introducing your brand to social media.

1. Try to “Do it Yourself.” If you’re an in-house marketing specialist, and aren’t currently participating in social media, such as industry forums, blogs, wikis, or podcasts, then it’s likely because you’re simply not comfortable with the medium–at least not yet. Again, let’s put this in a context you’re probably already familiar with. Let’s say you have a marketing coordinator who is an amazing administrator, kicks butt at achieving objectives and completing tasks–but would rather chew a roll of tin foil than do public speaking and is allergic to meeting strangers. Is she the best person to send to conduct a seminar on your company’s core competencies? Probably not. So why would you send a person who isn’t truly comfortable participating in social media to represent you in that arena? In many ways, the social media landscape is very much like an offline networking or public speaking venue. Except it has the benefit of being mostly written communication–meaning you have the opportunity to pause, review and revise that communication briefly before it goes out into the general public domain. Which brings us to…

2. Hyper-sanitize your social media communications. Social media is understandably a scary communications vehicle for traditional brand marketers, who were weened on the mantra “control the message, control the message, control the message.” The informality, two-way dialogue and transparency that give social media its appeal can be the most intimidating aspects to companies who are entering the medium for the first time. It can be tempting to simply copy and paste your static, one-way brand communications into the social media world and hope for the best. Or to edit the content crafted for social media until it’s indistinguishable from your one-way communications. Doing so would be similar to setting up your phone systems so that only outgoing calls were permitted. Yes, it would give you more control–it would also cost you most of the usefulness of having a phone system in the first place, namely making your company accessible.

3. Avoid social media altogether. Let me share a little story with you. I was doing a little competitive research for a client interested in SEO work, investigating their existing backlinks (links that lead to their site from other sites). I ran across a link from a hobbyist discussion forum related to their industry. It was a consumer, who stated that he was looking at their brand, among others, before making a large purchase. He wanted to get some feedback from other enthusiasts before committing to a purchase.

The entire thread was a conversation among people who passionately care about the client’s industry, and covered issues like quality control, differentiating product factors, and manufacturing processes. This was a site with tens of thousands of members, and hundreds actively reading and posting at any given point in time. If we’d been monitoring social media mentions for this client, we could have given them a heads-up, and gotten some great feedback to contribute to the conversation on their behalf. What potential brand value would you place on that conversation? Among three competitors, if even one of them participated in that conversation, gave thoughtful and helpful answers, what would you consider to be the value of that conversation? Compare that to the value of ad impressions, and the real potential impact on people who are most likely to buy their products. Now bear in mind that the particular forum in question has been online since 1999. Does waiting for this whole “social web” thing to blow over and go away still seem like the best idea? Are you beginning to see the value and power of social media brand management yet?

Are there risks involved in mishandling brand management in the social media web? Absolutely–but there are also risks involved in ignoring this powerful communications medium. The best solution is to engage professionals, who are experienced and comfortable with the medium, and have them work closely with your in-house marketing staff, exactly as you do for print, radio, television and offline public relations.

Join Katina and Mike as they discuss recent trends for big brands and the use of social media to take their brands to a more upscale position.

 LeapCast - LFI University: 10.9.07 - Big Brand Love: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It seems as though every week there is a new “hottest, fastest growing” channel for reaching customers.  Preroll for online video is exploding.  Mobile and short-code marketing is gaining steam fast.  Widgets and advergaming are two more advertising outlets that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist a few short years ago, but which are now getting line items on company advertising budgets. 

So which of these up-and-comers is the real “best channel” for a company’s advertising dollars?  Any business that is serious about reaching the ever-more-elusive target audience should probably be investigating and testing a mix of different channels.  The more important question is, “Has our brand message been developed to engage our target audience regardless of the channel it reaches them via?” 

As more consumers become active in remixing and redistributing corporate communications online through blogging, social networks, and other channels, it becomes crucial to brand the content itself.  A business cannot completely control what users decide to do with their messaging, content and other brand assets online.  What we can control is the quality of the original content. 

Similarly, a well-crafted brand message should work equally well, with minimal changes, across multiple channels or media.  While the delivery and execution of the message can (and should!) be honed to make the most of the particular media channel selected, the message itself should always remain consistent and on-brand. 

They should be grateful that at least it isn’t a disaster on-par with the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

And that’s about the best that can be said about the 2012 London Olympics logo.  Universally derided as a confusing mess, it’s hard to believe someone wrote a check for $796,000 for what may be the worst Olympic logo ever. Not just bad design, the logo is downright hazardous (and possibly seizure-inducing.)

Design can be abstract and effective, evoking a positive emotional response through color, movement, line and pattern.   But this clearly isn’t effective.  All it’s clearly trying to convey is the number 2012, and most viewers can’t even make that out.

Interactive advertising as we know it is almost obsolete.With the Web, mobile-phone advertising and all other forms of “digital delivery” of advertising, change will come not in the span of 10 or 50 years, but over the next few years.

The greatest present challenge is the growing disconnect between content and where it’s consumed. In the past, video was meant for TV and only played on TV. Audio was meant for radio and guess what, only played on the radio. Now, content in any media is continually remixed and rehashed across a wide spectrum of channels.  Content originally created for television is captured, repurposed as a humor piece and sent out on the Web as a Flash video, where the audio might be picked up by a local radio station looking for something to talk about during the morning show.  You cannot predict where someone will view or hear your message or advertising.

The whole term “interactive advertising” has itself changed, leaving some advertisers dazed and confused. Just as most major advertisers have finally come to accept interactive advertising in terms of the Web and search engines, the term changes to mean all these other channels as well.

Today, interactive advertising comprises any kind of two-way communication. It’s anyplace there’s collaboration, community – whether it be between consumers or between a consumer and your brand. The Web’s dominance in our lives has changed consumer behavior regarding the way they look for information or content. In retail, going to the mall or any other store isn’t about finding something anymore; the majority of people these days already know what they want (and where they’ll find it) by the time they get in the their car. Window shopping takes place online, eliminating physically traveling from store to store searching for what you want.  Even in entertainment, the way we seek content has changed.  We’re no longer limited to sitting and watching a television program in our own living room.  We can watch that same episode while commuting on the subway.

Customers have become Interactive Consumers. They don’t simply take your brand, product, message at face-value anymore.

They have a loud voice, well-versed in researching on the Web. They are increasingly influenced in their decisions by social media and more likely to actively post information themselves.

These consumers expect to have things on their terms – what they want and when they want it. If you can’t provide the information or content that they are looking for, they assume your competitor will.

What does all this mean?

Advertisers’ methods of reaching these people need to adjust to this behavior.  They need to first look at their website and turn it into their most profitable retail channel and their best communication tool. Put that content out there. Update it often. Provide the tools and content using methods that will work across multiple technology platforms so that it is available to the consumer whenever and where ever they want it.

Look to advertise and post on websites where people already go – iTunes, YouTube, Flickr, Google Video. Lead the charge in talking about your brand on the Web.  So few companies are even taking the step of effectively reacting to what’s being said about their brand online (for example, the recent Home Depot and Kohl’s incidents).  The truly great brands proactively initiate dialogue about their company, and engage the interactive consumer as a creative force, driving truly effective content.

There is a significant advantage that advertisers and business will realize when they truly take advantage of these new channels of communication and leverage that raw, unvarnished consumer opinion for their brand. There is access to instant data confirming (or refuting) return on investment enabling incredible, never-before-possible agility in terms of targeting and correcting your message for maximum effectiveness.

We’re in a time of unprecedented opportunity for those willing to embrace the changes that are occurring online.  These changes are exactly like the tides: if you get on top of them early, it’s possible to ride them out for incredible results.  If you don’t, there’s tremendous risk of being overwhelmed by them.