How Agile Can Your Marketing Be?On Sunday, February 3, 2012, Super Bowl XLVII was brought to a screeching halt by a blackout during the third quarter. For a brief moment the television went black and the announcers were silent. My friends and I sat there wondering if our television broke.
Up until that point throughout the game we were already interacting with our smartphones and iPads to read game related tweets from friends, and watching our respective Facebook pages for other commentary. There is a growing phenomenon with how people use their mobile devices while sitting on the couch watching TV... It's referred to as the "second screen" when you use a single mobile device and a "third screen when you use both a smartphone and a tablet while watching TV.
I was just a casual Twitter and Facebook observer during the game, and I was enjoying the reactions that exploded on Twitter and Facebook only seconds after the blackout occurred. Little did anyone know that there was a strategic advertising team that was poised to react to the events of the game within 10 minutes, and they did...
The Oreo cookie brand has an amazing social media marketing plan and their Facebook page touts more than 32 million fans! It was their strategic marketing team that achieved amazingly agile social media marketing in less than 10 minutes into the 34 minute blackout.
Their ad showed a starkly lit Oreo cookie with the words "You can still dunk in the dark." They posted this to Twitter and Facebook with the additional caption "Power out? No problem."
Their creative agility took over Facebook and Twitter. Within minutes that Facebook post has more than 20,000 Likes and thousands of shares. Within 24 hours the Tweet had more than 5 million retweets and tones of press from around the world.
During interviews in the days after the game Oreo spokespersons admitted that they would not for several months if this success in agile marketing would financially benefit them or if it would simply further their brand awareness.
There are two types of "agile marketing" that I would like to describe for you.
The first type is clearly illustrated above, which is the immediate social media interaction where you can promote your services side by side in relation to a public event. You would have to create a sense of irony that you can capitalize on so you can position yourself as the solution to that public event (problem) or create a comical association.
The second type of agile marketing is actually more common than the first, but will attract far less attention, it won't build your brand, but it will defiantly increase your bottom line. You see, the idea of being agile comes from the new methods of marketing where you run short advertising campaigns, track results, measure success, and then change that advertising campaign a little bit before running it again.
Long gone are the days where you should run the same radio spot for a month or the same newspaper ad for 4 consecutive weeks. Long term saturation of ads to create brand awareness is a waste of money for a small retail business.
To quote W. Edwards Deming "In God we trust; all others must bring data." Which means you should always trust your own measured results and adjust accordingly.
So what are your results, and how do you find them? The two word answer is Google Analytics. The longer answer is to actually spend some time learning how to read your Google Analytics so you can achieve this type of agile marketing.
Getting back to the first type of agile marketing on social... There is a potential to create a social media marketing campaign during any non-life threatening event. The Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy awards are good examples of events where jewelers can capitalize on. Most jewelers waste their time by reposting photos from the Red Carpet to their Facebook walls with simple comments about the jewelry worn. During the next award show you should step up your game and provide a commentary of what jewelry would have looked good or better with what the stars were wearing. For those playing at home, that'll be the Tony Awards on June 9, 2013.
Back on November 16, 2012 Hostess Brands announced that it was closing. The Twinkie cake food, thought to have a 300 year shelf life, was about to die. While many people tweeted and shared the feelings about this event socially, Barnes Jewelers in Oconomowoc, WI reacted within a few hours with their own wit and irony to create a set of 12 Hostess-to-jewelry comparisons on their Facebook page.
I don't know how well their Facebook fans reacted to their creativity, but this certainly does take the cake in recent agile self-marketing by a independent retail jeweler.
Marketing methods have changed. Become agile. Even if that means using baking puns.
URL for the Barnes Jewelers Facebook Page:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151108097712167.427390.142693772166&type=3
URL for the Oreo Facebook post:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151421416859653&set=a.124804629652.101377.114998944652&type=1
