“When will NBC learn: the Internet is not Jay Leno’s friend.”
So ends the Gawker piece on the latest guerrilla skirmish between Team Conan and Team Leno. Basically, a moderator on the NBC forums created a thread for people to post things they want Jay Leno to see. Which was more or less a siren call for Conan O’Brien’s veritable Internet army to give it to Jay on the chin. Conan propaganda, photoshops, and just straight-up vulgarity appeared by the page.
Like any high school grad that had to read 1984, NBC was quick to remove the rapidly spiraling thread. But the Internet really is forever, and you can still see the fallout floating aroundas screencaps.
The New Late Night Wars dominated not just the shows in question, but the entire mediasphere, both online and offline. That’s not surprising, nor was its extreme virality, as exemplified by Jimmy Kimmel’s January offensive. What is amazing, however, is the difference in reaction between the online and offline audiences.
When Conan joined Twitter barely a week ago, the blogosphere went crazy. As of this morning, with just ten tweets to his name, Conan had amassed over 500,000 followers, decimating Jay Leno, who’s been kicking around for some time now. This along with his immense online grassroots support paints the picture that maybe NBC was in the wrong on this one.
Until you take a look at the numbers of Jay’s comeback show. “Leno Crushes Letterman in Return,” goes the headline, and the stats don’t lie. Despite all the hemming and hawing on the Internet, the liveblogged takedowns, and the Hulu tag commentary, NBC made the right business move. Go figure.
What the Tonight Show debacle speaks to is a much broader cultural issue on which the schism between real world and Internet world audiences touches. Businesses are increasingly dealing with generational differences that are not age-specific. Understanding of technology and early adoption mean that it’s not just the message but also the medium that has to cater to different demographics.
Can you afford to burn bridges with the vocal minority? In this case, playing to the network audience, older and more staid, with Leno’s everyman persona far outweighs the outcry from the highly active online Conan camp. But should something happen and the scales swing the other way, it’s unlikely that NBC could save face. By betting on a real world audience today, they may be sacrificing the online audience of tomorrow.
Regardless of industry type, this is an issue that is going to impact strategic and marketing decisions for all businesses. And if the meteoric rise in use—and valuation—of social media institutions shows us anything, it’s that online consumer tendencies will hold more weight than real world tendencies.
The influx of corporate interest in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and engineered virality is proof that most forward-thinking companies already see where they have to go in the future. But, as in the case of NBC, when it comes time to put their money with their mouth is, it becomes pretty clear that the main tenets of social media haven’t been fully integrated into how these companies operate. Something both admirers and detractors will be quick to point out.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering where my allegiances lie:
The other day, the Israeli army canceled a planned operation because a soldier posted a status update with details on the mission. He was relieved of duty, court-martialed, and sentenced to 10 days in prison. And now the military is cracking down on soldiers’ use of social networking sites.
An entire military operation was scrapped due to a post on Facebook.
Social networking sites like Facebook are often soldiers’ primary means of staying in touch with people back home. Security vulnerabilities are no doubt a major concern, but shouldn’t soldiers be able to stay in contact with family and friends?
While the soldier clearly didn’t exercise much discretion, or confidentiality, this action raises a powerful point: social networking sites empower every single community member to post virtually anything they choose. Doesn’t matter if you’re a PR flack or general in the army, you have the same abilities on social networking sites.
This “freedom” has gotten some high profile athletes in trouble. It’s commonplace now for entire stories to be written about what a player said (er, wrote) after a game. There’s been fines handed down by the NBA based on athletes’ tweets. Both the NBA and NFL have explicitly outlawed tweeting during games. A football player at the University of Oregon was even kicked off the team recently because of what he wrote on his Facebook account. Where before it only mattered what athletes said at a game or press conference, now they must be conscious of what they say off the field as well.
Similarly, a woman in Chicago was sued last summer by her realty firm for tweeting that her apartment was moldy. “The company claims her tweet was published ‘throughout the world’ and severely damaged its good name.” Yikes. No complaints, no grievances, better watch what you’re tweeting or you might end up with a lawsuit on your hands.
Where do you draw the line? Isn’t the point of social media to have a free flowing, unfiltered conversation among any number of participants? But not when that conversation jeopardizes a business or lives… It’s a fine line. Whatever the case, social networking sites are a public forum. People are easier to access. Messages are broadcast to a wide audience – everything is on the record. And the record is rolling 24/7. It’s a whole new ballgame. Better adapt.
The social media campaign we just completed for the SAP Open Tennis match was especially challenging since we only had a month to get 22 million impressions for their Twitter content on a brand new feed. Starting from zero, we got 3,500 Twitter followers, a 30 percent engagement rate on the feed, and more than 500 visits from the feed to the Ticketmaster site for online purchase of tennis tickets.
Many of the activities involved leveraging existing tennis communities, including fans of the Australian Open which took place a few weeks prior to the SAP Open.
This is a great example of how social media can be used to acquire new customers.
In 2009, most of our experience was with social media campaigns designed for customer retention or customer engagement. For example, the @CiscoGeeks Twitter feed engages existing customers of Cisco routers and switches. Right now, we’re running fun contests for existing Cisco customers to share pictures of networking equipment with each other.
Typical social campaigns are based on self-publishing models that push out product information, discounts and prizes from central places like a Twitter feed or Facebook Fan Page. For example, we’re in the early stages of a campaign with VMware to manage content and interaction on Twitter, Facebook and the corporate blog. Since most customers of VMware’s vCloud Express product are still in beta, initial efforts have focused on publishing information to people that are either using the beta product or a related VMware product.
Some social media campaigns are similar to opt-in email marketing campaigns where the target audience is already familiar with the product.
However, new types of social media campaigns are targeting new “green field” customers. The SAP Open Tennis campaign is a good example of the new type of social media campaign designed for new customer acquisition.
Some of the techniques we used included:
* leveraging existing tennis communities and engaging with people interested in related topics like the Australian Open;
* joining discussions around famous people like Andy Roddick who won the SAP Open Tennis tournament in 2009;
* managing contests, including one with a prize of a signed Andy Roddick tennis racket;
* getting people that were going to the tennis tournament to pass the word on to their friends that weren’t going to the tournament.
The last technique is the key to success of any social media campaign designed for customer acquisition. We’re tracking message distribution by counting the number of ReTweets and hashtag use on Twitter. On Facebook, we’re focusing more on measuring user-generated content.
Although I think that the majority of social media campaigns in 2010 will still be focused on customer retention and engagement, I’m really excited about the opportunities to work on more customer acquisition campaigns as well. I’ve already started developing a new campaign for a secret client to acquire new customers from a competitor’s base.
Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast
Some people feel that Twitter marketing is effective when integrated into email marketing campaigns. Today, ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, validated this perspective by acquiring CoTweet, developers of one of the most popular Twitter clients used by large enterprises to manage marketing campaigns.
ExactTarget has raised $140 million, including a $75 million boost in December of 2009.
This acquisition could be a milestone early flag that social media marketing is developing into a mature industry with companies that generate revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even from my limited perspective in Silicon Valley, I can see huge changes to the PR and marketing industries. Although Page One started off as a public relations firm, our service offering has changed radically in the past year to adapt to the changing ways the public is consuming media. It seems like email marketing and advertising companies are in full throttle evolution mode as well.
For the past year and a half, Page One’s social media team has been rapidly expanding. While this translates into a lot of great new business opportunities, it also means we’ve been doing a lot of hiring. A common question I run into every time we start a new round is “what am I actually looking for?”. What does the ideal social media candidate look like? After thousands of resumes and interviews, here are the top 5 traits I look for when adding someone to my team:
Driven. The social media world is at the height of “start-up mode” right now, which means although there is some process coming together it’s still pretty much crazy and chaotic. I hate to be so dramatic, but really only the strong and scrappy will survive.
Ability to go with the flow. In the morning you’re running Cisco’s Twitter feed, in the afternoon you’re developing a video script for VMware, tomorrow you’re coming up with a Facebook campaign for SAP…who knows what tomorrow evening holds in store. The ability to go with the flow and take on any challenge with a positive attitude will get you far.
Brilliant. No, not just your average smart cookie, we’re talking brilliant. You have to be able to take those smarts one step further though – it’s the ability to translate brilliance into innovative, cutting edge campaign ideas that will help the team in the long run.
Organized. At the end of the day, it’s all about metrics and ROI and if you can’t keep an organized excel sheet or Google Doc, you will get left behind (and probably frustrate your manager and the client).
Ability to deal with uncomfortable situations. The Twitter feed got suspended. The client smiled and nodded when you said quality is more important than quantity, but they still want 10,000 Twitter followers by tomorrow morning. It’s the night before the big pitch and your managers are still arguing over what angle to take. You get the point. Being able to trouble shoot, not give up and frankly have the “I need to fight to live another day” attitude helps.
Social media is by no means a perfect science, making hiring for a social media position even more tricky, but have faith hiring managers! I’ve tested these criteria over the past year and have found some extraordinary and very talented team members.
Great post by 
