1. 10 ESSENTIALS
FOR SOCIAL
MEDIA IN 2013
Monte Lutz,
EVP Social Strategy and Programming
@montelutz

2. MORE FRIENDS,
MORE FANS,
MORE BRANDS,
MORE STORIES.
More people are using social media than ever before – and
for longer, on an increasingly diverse array of devices.
As a result, newsfeeds are cluttered, and fans are more
distracted and discerning. In order to succeed, brands will
increasingly turn to real-time creative, analytics and paid
media to ensure that high-performing content reaches as
many people as possible, at the moment they are most
interested, to spark conversations and deepen customer
relationships. As media converges, brands will invest in
ways to complement original, visual content with fan-
sourced creative.
Promoting high-performing content that aligns with new
“real content” search drivers will become essential. Brands
will host epic social events to excite the base and invest in
tools that help them target and engage one-on-one more
efficiently. And brands will have a little fun in the process,
remembering that brandplay can go a long way to telling
their story. There are 10 social media essentials that can
help guide brands to achieve success in 2013. We explore
these essentials and case studies of brands in action.
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3. 1. Mobile First 3
2. Converged Media 4
3. Amplifying Sourced Content 6
4. Visual Storytelling Comes into Focus 7
5. Creative Newsroom 9
6. Many Lightweight Interactions Over Time 13
7. Social Events Drive Excitement 14
8. One-to-One Social Engagement 15
9. The Search Game Just Changed –Again 16
10. Brandplay 18
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4. 1. MOBILE FIRST 1. CONSIDER MOBILE FIRST
Mobile technology and
behavior is at the center
of the digital ecosystem,
including web, social and
search activities. 61%
of smartphone users
access social media on
their mobile devices, and
the number is growing. of smartphone users
According to eMarketer, access social media on
the use of social on their mobile device.
mobile is expected to
grow by 43% this year.
New research has shown
that nearly one-third
of all time spent on
smartphones is on social sites
and apps, compared to only 20% of time on PCs.
Mark Zuckerberg has insisted that every new feature for Facebook be developed for
mobile first. This makes sense: 69% of Facebook’s active user base will be accessing
Facebook on mobile this year. But it’s not just Facebook that is benefitting from the
surge in mobile social. You should be thinking the same way.
In 2013, companies should be thinking about how they are connecting to consumers
across content channels. 90% of people use multiple screens sequentially, starting
a task on a smartphone and then finishing the task on a PC or tablet. Second screen
behaviors are becoming normal for many consumers. eMarketer reports that 85%
of people use a second screen device while watching TV. Extending the experience
beyond the primary screen will drive deeper engagement with the original content and
the brand.
Brands such as Starbucks have purposefully placed
mobile at the heart of their experience, telling stories
through the apps that embody the brands character.
Whether it’s paying with your digital wallet, redeeming
your Starbucks Rewards or accessing the Starbucks
network to download a song or read the latest news,
the content, payment and social experience delivered
by Starbucks embodies the spirit of Starbucks as a
connected place.
As brands continue to focus on stories and experiences, not just ads and messaging,
they will continue to create opportunities for customers and fans to engage with them
intuitively through mobile. Are you?
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5. 2. CONVERGED MEDIA 2. LEVERAGE CONVERGED MEDIA
Fifty years ago, David Ogilvy asked: “Are your ads looking more like magazine spreads
yet?” He challenged ad men to design spreads that looked like editorial because he
understood that people read articles, not advertisements. The ad world listened,
introducing infomercials, advertorials, product placement, sponsored programming
and brand journalism as incarnations of this idea.
Today, the convergence of paid, owned and earned media has blurred the distinctions
between each. You don’t need to design ads that look like editorial content. Great
content is your most compelling advertisement.
Paid, owned and earned media have
converged, providing brands with
the opportunity to achieve earned Promoted
media at scale. The convergence ad PAID MEDIA Brand OWNED MEDIA
Traditional Ads Content Corporate Content
model recognizes that the content
is the ad. Instead of buying an ad
CONVERGED
in the right rail, Sponsored Posts MEDIA
boost the reach of editorial content
Sponsored Branded Content
within the newsfeed itself. The Customer That is Shared
“ad” isn’t distinct, pre-fabricated
creative. It is the content. Content
developed by the brand is shared EARNED MEDIA
organically by friends and fans to Organic
their own networks, and paid media
can boost the reach further.
The same thinking has led to the recent surge in “native media,”
Who wants to
a new name for an old tactic – the advertorial. Sites such as
settle for the Buzzfeed and Crave are capitalizing on the opportunity to
right rail, when mobilize their lean but hungry editorial departments to create
you can be front paid content for brands that lives alongside the site’s original
content. Who wants to settle for the right rail, when you can be
and center?
front and center?
It works. According to a February 2013 eMarketer report, sponsored content displayed
in the newsfeed has 46 times the click-through rate of ads in the right-hand column.
Since the mobile Facebook experience is ONLY the newsfeed, sponsored content is
even more important in mobile. Engagement on mobile newsfeed ads is twice that of
newsfeed on PC.
In order to capitalize on these opportunities, brands should be focused first and
foremost on creating compelling content that is visual, relevant, tailored and
actionable. Aligning content and community management with real-time analytics
gives brands the ability to deliver real-time actionable insights based on performance
of content and behaviors of communities. Incorporating paid media in the mix turns
these insights about what is resonating with an audience into an opportunity to quickly
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6. boost this high-performing content with Promoted Posts and Tweets as well as
2. CONVERGED MEDIA Featured Videos, further increasing the likelihood that the best stories reach the most
people.
Edelman Digital has developed an approach for evaluating which content to boost
through paid media in real time, identifying “high-performing content” based on the
level of engagement, quality of sentiment, relevance of content to company priorities
and geographic priority (where appropriate). Additionally, we consider who we should
target the promoted content to, based on the topical relevance to specific audiences.
Recognizing the half-life of social content – even high-performing social content – is
limited, we apply a factor of content decay to determine whether content should
continue to be promoted or whether promotion should be focused on a different piece
of content.
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7. 3. AMPLIFYING SOURCED CONTENT 3. AMPLIFY SOURCED CONTENT
Telling your brand’s story day in and day out through social media isn’t easy.
Community managers and creative teams need to generate hundreds of original
stories per year. However, brands have learned that some of the best visual content
and most compelling stories about a company and its products come from fans and
enthusiasts who are sharing great stories about the brand each and every day.
Brands are increasingly supplementing engaging original content with compelling
content from fans, bloggers and influencers. Curation is an important part of brands’
content strategy. By actively monitoring online conversations, brands can identify
original fan-generated content that can be cross-posted on owned channels.
High-performing posts that resonate with the community can then be boosted
through promoted posts. Seeing the success of such efforts, the brand can further
develop a relationship with the author or creator and explore opportunities to work
together more formally. Each element is tracked for ROI from the paid, owned and
earned efforts.
It works for Volkswagen. VW regularly repins awesome fan pictures on Pinterest.
Those that generate the most love on Pinterest or Instagram are shared on to
the brand’s 1.5 million Facebook fans. VW even launched a website, Why VW, that
celebrates fan pictures and stories side-by-side original VW content, so that the
brands and enthusiasts share the love.
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8. 4. VISUAL STORYTELLING COMES INTO FOCUS 4. FOCUS ON VISUAL STORYTELLING
300 million photos are posted to Facebook
every day. 5 billion photos have been shared
on Instagram. Visual sites such as Tumblr
and Pinterest have surged in interest, with 23
million unique visitors per month.
Consumers aren’t just visiting visual sites,
they are interacting more with visual content.
According to Simply Measured, visual
content generates 5x more engagement than
non-visual content on Facebook. Since the
launch of Timeline in 2012, engagement with
visual content has increased 52%.
Brands are taking note. When Johnnie Walker launched on Instagram, they handed
the reins of their new channel to three established Instagram influencers who posted
their own Johnnie Walker inspired photos for the first month. Simlutaneously, Johnnie
Walker evolved its Facebook presence to tell a more visual story, featuring fan-
generated Instagram photos in its cover photo and posts. Interactions on Facebook
surged, and fans flocked to Instagram.
Recognizing the innovative campaign, Instagram took featured Johnnie Walker in its
own feed and on the Instagram blog. As with the Johnnie Walker example, brands who
build relationships with established influencers on a platform can build a base of fans
quickly and effectively.
Visual storytelling is also driving a surge in consumption of mobile video, with
significant increases in mobile video views. Over the last two years, the audience for
mobile video in the US has increased by 77% to 36 million people. This will continue
to increase as the smartphone revolution expands and tablet sales explode. We are
already seeing some client video campaigns generate 25-30% of all video views on
mobile devices.
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9. Twitter’s purchase of social video service Vine is driving a renewed interest in bite-
4. VISUAL STORYTELLING COMES INTO FOCUS sized video that is deeply integrated into social platforms. Look for brands, social
platforms, and startups to focus increasing attention on social video in the coming
year. Lessons from brand experiments with Tout, and early experiments with Vine, will
continue to draw attention.
McDonald’s. Skylanders and Toyota have each jumped in with games, fans and a stop
motion ad to start.
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10. 5. CREATIVE NEWSROOM 5. LAUNCH A CREATIVE NEWSROOM
There are 1 billion Facebook posts and 400 million tweets per day. There are 200
million emails 5.6 million texts and 2.1 million Google searches – every minute. The
amount of content we see grows exponentially, but our time to consume it stays the
same. In order to cope with this constant stream of information, people filter how they
consume content based on time, platform and medium.
First and foremost, people filter content based on time. They are either online or
not. This is critically important for brands to consider, because the half-life of social
content can be measured in hours. 90% of Facebook engagement happens in the first
three hours; 92% of retweets occur within the first hour. If you post when people are
paying attention, nobody will see it. If you talk about something after people have lost
interest, fewer people will share it.
of Facebook engage- retweets within the
ment in first 3 hours first hour
of post
People also filter content based on the medium. Visual content is far more engaging
than simple text content. Pictures are easier to identify and digest in the newsfeed.
They stand out and call for attention. As a result, Facebook posts that contain photos
have 5x more engagement than those that do not.
The platforms themselves – particularly Facebook – are also filtering the content
that you see. Over the last year, as the number of people actively using Facebook
has surpassed one billion, and as the number of brands who are actively posting on
Facebook continues to increase, Facebook has continued to update its algorithm to
better filter the exponential increase in content on the platform. As a result, brands
are seeing their content reach only 8 percent of their audience members on average.
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11. This is not an absolute number. Brands with higher engagement are rewarded with
5. CREATIVE NEWSROOM greater organic reach. Conversely, brands that post content that doesn’t resonate with
their fan base are seeing their reach continue to shrink.
These changes are leading to a real-time, creative content revolution for brands. In
order to break through the clutter, brands must be able to create engaging, visual
content that connects with consumers about the things they are thinking and talking
about in near real-time. Transforming a trending conversation into a brand-relevant
visual that resonates with your audience in hours instead of days is a radical shift in
marketing and communications.
Brands were put to the test recently when the
Superdome power outage caused half the stadium
to go dark and the world’s most watched TV event
come to a grinding halt. Oreo, Audi, Volkswagen
and Tide rose to the occasion, developing timely,
engaging, visual content that capturing audience
attention and changed the storyline about which
marketers won the Super Bowl.
Oreo was able to capitalize on the opportunity
because they had a creative newsroom process
already in place. In honor of OREO’s 100th
anniversary, the brand launched the Daily Twist,
featuring images of OREOs reimagined to reflect
breaking news, Hallmark holidays, milestones and
events. Even though the topics changed each day,
the cookie was the centerpiece of every image.
Other brands have begun to experimenting with
the real-time creative as well. Captain Morgan
uses custom meme-style cards to tell topical
brand-themed stories daily. For example, when
Prince Harry was photographed in the buff, they
had a little fun, making sure that they royal
family knew it wasn’t the Captain’s fault.
Similarly, Volkswagen, Adobe and Microsoft
employed these principles to generate conversation
around the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final flight.
Each channel approached the same story in a
unique manner, befitting its brand and community.
Transforming a trending conversation
into a brand-relevant visual that
resonates with your audience in hours
instead of days is a radical shift in
marketing and communications.
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12. Volkswagen imagined that the 747 could just
5. CREATIVE NEWSROOM as easily be transporting a “VW Shuttlebug,”
so they substituted a Beetle convertible in
place of Endeavour.
Adobe Lightroom chose to tell its story though
stunning, original photography taken by the
team as the Endeavour flew near its offices in
the Bay Area.
Microsoft’s social team channeled the classic
Clippie helper to ask if the 747 pilot needed a
helping hand to guide the Shuttle home.
As a result, each brand saw a 400-600%
increase in engagement, compared to other
visual content on the pages.
These campaigns have each been successful.
But the real-time creative process doesn’t
happen by accident. It is a purposeful, and
challenging, undertaking. In order to be
successful, brands must be able to align
community management, analytics, creative,
and paid media in real time. Community
managers and trendspotters actively monitor
the conversation for opportunities. Aligning
analytics with community management
delivers real-time actionable insights based
on behaviors of communities and the social
conversation at large.
Using a mix of proprietary resources and social trending tools, they sort through potential
opportunities to identify the ones that would resonate the most with the particular
community based on demographic, psychographic and behavioral insights about the
community.
Teams coordinate with a newsroom editor and studio designers to turn the idea into
creative reality within a few hours. Analysts also provide real-time performance metrics
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13. 5. CREATIVE NEWSROOM to adjust the creative approach and content selection, as well as to determine whether
high-performing content should be promoted in order to reach more people.
Edelman has developed a real-time creative process to help brands incorporate the
Creative Newsroom into their campaigns. There are a number of models for how the
Creative Newsroom can work for a brand.
Trendspotter programs are designed to help brands be more
interesting and more relevant in the newsfeed. The Creative
Newsroom team actively monitors the online conversation for stories
and trends that have reached a tipping point and are relevant to the
brand’s audience. We pick the best and create original, real-time
content to keep your community engaged.
Newsroom Campaign is your opportunity to turn a launch into a
cultural milestone. The Campaign approach helps to ensure that
conversation about launches and milestones don’t end with your
announcement. The Newsroom Campaign extends the conversation
about you by demonstrating relevance to the trends and topics that
people are already talking about. For example, OREOs Daily Twist
turned the 100th anniversary of the brand into a 100-day celebration
made newly relevant to the news of the day.
The Daily Desk is the most ambitious offering. The Daily Desk is
designed to ensure that a brand isn’t just catching trends, but
defining them, as a trendmaker. While the conversation changes
every day, with new stories, new trends and new ideas, the Daily
Desk helps companies spot and jump on them quickly – every day.
Each morning, the Newsroom team meets to debate the stories of
the day and pick the surging conversations that are most relevant to the brand. Within
hours, the team has developed a creative response that helps to demonstrate that you
are the most relevant brand in the feed by connecting with your audience about the
things they’re talking about today, or the fascinating things they have yet to discover.
It is designed to help you spot a trend, create a meme, and become the next cultural
guidepost.
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14. 6. MANY LIGHTWEIGHT INTERACTIONS OVER TIME 6. NSPIRE MANY LIGHTWEIGHT
I
INTERACTIONS OVER TIME
Most social interactions are lightweight. They are quick and snackable. We glance
at a picture, scroll through a post or dive into a video, and then move on. These are
small, but important engagement activities. The interaction refreshes connections with
friends or deepens affinities for brands, through simple interactions.
Paul Adams, the Global Head of Brand Design for Facebook, has articulated his insights
about his process into a phrase: “many lightweight interactions over time.” Witnessing
the best (and worst) practices on Facebook, Adams has discovered that the companies
who invest in deepening relationships with fans one interaction at a time are far more
effective than overwhelming fans with overly-promotional asks that require deep
commitment and investment from the outset.
Brands have 50 A little math tells us why. On average, fans will see 50
posts and 50 tweets per year from a brand (based on
chances to make 1-2 Facebook posts per day with a 8-10% attention rate
an impression with on Facebook and 4-5 tweets per day with a 3% attention
each fan each year. rate). In other words, brands have 50 chances to make an
impression with each fan each year.
If the first five times you talk to a fan, you ask them to BUY, BUY, BUY or DOWNLOAD,
INSTALL, MARRY ME, fans will be turned off and turned away. You need to earn their
trust over time, by mixing lightweight content about the issues they care about with
brand and product-specific information. That way, when you go for the big ask, they are
ready to say YES!
As engagement with the brand increases over
time and attention, the depth of the emotional
engagement increases as well. As you take fans
through the social sales funnel, from awareness
through mass media to engagement in social
media, through consideration and to purchase,
this approach will help to ensure that more people
stay engaged, becoming not just customers, but
advocates for the brand.
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15. 7. SOCIAL EVENTS DRIVE EXCITEMENT 7. RIVE EXCITEMENT THROUGH
D
SOCIAL EVENTS
While lightweight interactions help build a community over time, brands have the
opportunity to offer unique, socially-powered events to their fans in order to a
surge in attention and engagement that serves as both a reward for participation in
the community and an opportunity for fans to evangelize what is awesome about
developing a relationship with the brand.
These epic events transcend space, time and media. The combination of breaking
news, exclusive access and competition is a winning formula driving excitement,
attention and conversation.
Few brands have been able to build their own epic
memes better than Red Bull. Red Bull doesn’t
just put up a banner at the X Games, they built
a snow ramp for Shaun White. They don’t just
sponsor a music festival, they launched a record
label. And when that’s not enough, they break a
world record by helping someone sky dive from
space. RedBull Stratos was an epic marketing
win. 8 million people watched the Livestream;
seven million people engaged in social. And Red
Bull was everywhere.
For the month following the space jump, anytime
someone talked about space, the conversation
invariably included a mention of Red Bull. The
brand jumped on the association, engaging people
and brands that were doing cool things that were
space-related.
For example, when a dad launched his son’s
Skylanders Tree Rex figure into space onboard
a high altitude balloon, @SkylandersGame
celebrated the epic achievement by a Skylanders
fan on the Skylander social channels. Red Bull also
jumped into the conversation. @RedBullStratos
spotted the conversation on Twitter and joined in
the celebration, tweeting that “Tree Rex needs his
wings too.” Red Bull owned space, and didn’t let it go.
Syncing social events with TV and IRL activations drives a surge in conversation around
each. For the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Activision and Treyarch partnered
with Spike’s GTTV for a live midnight launch show, featuring tweets, photos and
stories from fans around the world. All in all, there were nearly 2 million tweets, posts,
photos and videos about Black Ops II on launch day. Call of Duty was a global trend on
Twitter more than 9 times.
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16. 8. ONE-TO-ONE SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT 8. OSTER ONE-TO-ONE
F
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
One of the stories being written in the analysis of digital and social media of 2012
focuses on the role of Big Data in the latest presidential campaign. Best use of Big
Data helped the Obama campaign segment, target, mobilize and turn out supporters
more effectively than the Romney campaign.
But the most important part of the Big Data story isn’t about data, it’s about people.
By combining databases and overlaying social profiles against such data, brands (and
campaigns) are able to connect with people as people, not unique identifiers. Knowing
who they really are enables brands to turn the data into prescriptive actions, syncing
online with people in the real world. Brands are moving beyond simple demographic
and psychographic data to ever-more sophisticated ways to understand, target and
engage customers.
Service providers such as Adobe and Salesforce are helping brands better merge,
align and act based on data drawn from all of their available digital, CRM, social,
psychographic, behavioral, partner and customer databases. Similarly, tools offered
by companies such as Micro Strategy, as well as native and rapidly evolving Facebook
targeting tools, allow you to develop significantly more sophisticated clusters based
on brand affinities drawn from millions of data profile inputs.
As Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms continue to improve tracking and
conversion and metrics, brands will be able to better and uniquely understand the
engagement and purchase cycles through social. Look for increasing requirements on
the marketing and operational sides of the business this year.
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17. 9. THE SEARCH GAME JUST CHANGED – AGAIN 9. KEEP UP WITH THE CHANGING
SEARCH GAME
Since its Penguin release, Google has made it clear that traditional SEO methods
will decline in efficacy, giving way to quality content as the paramount route to
discoverability. The “rise of real content” means that brands can no longer seek quick
SEO fixes to drive organic traffic to their owned properties. They must create real
content that drives actual engagement in order to earn the Google juice. Google is
also using social signals and context from content and engagement on Google+ to
determine quality of content and AuthorRank as signals for which content to display.
Similarly, Bing Social Search is now deeply integrated with Facebook. When you are
logged into Facebook, your searches will also generate social context – displaying
content, context and information from your Facebook friends in the right rail, next to
organic search results. Social serves as a signal for context, delivering content that is
most likely to resonate with you.
As a result of these changes, social media and social for search are increasingly,
mutually beneficial and essential elements of any integrated campaign. Social
media content drives initial scale and engagement. Engagement triggers serve as
a signal that boosts organic search results. Additionally, a robust and rich content
strategy drives search results. If developed correctly, the content designed for search
optimization also integrates with and amplifies social. Each drives click-throughs
that can be tracked and optimized. Both content and search strategies should adjust
accordingly.
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18. 9. THE SEARCH GAME JUST CHANGED – AGAIN
Brands are adjusting the balance of their content, developing a spectrum of content,
from short-form content optimized for social, to long-form content optimized for
search.
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19. 10. BRANDPLAY 10. JOIN THE BRANDPLAY
People may start following a brand because they like the product; but they continue
to follow because they enjoy the conversation. For all of the serious insights and
recommendations about social media essentials, we cannot forget to have a little fun.
After all, according to Edelman’s 8095 survey, 8 in 10 millennials expect brands
to entertain them. In fact, the 2012 Brand Engagement in the Era of Social
Entertainment study found that people think social networking sites have the highest
value as an entertainment source; higher than films, music and even TV. Social media
is serious business. But it’s also personal and engaging.
Taco Bell and Old Spice have learned the value of having a little fun with the brand in
social. This has played out in popular campaigns such as the Old Spice Man, but the
same attitude is also displayed in their daily interactions with fans and other brands.
When @OldSpice asked @TacoBell “Why is it that “fire” sauce isn’t made with any real
fire? Seems like false advertising,” @TacoBell responded with a quick retort, tweeting:
“@OldSpice Is your deodorant made with really old spices?” Not to be outdone, @
OldSpice came back with a tweet of its own: “@TacoBell Depends. Do you consider
volcanos, tanks and freedom to be spices?” The exchange generated hundreds of
retweets and even some good ol’ fashioned media coverage.
Not to be outdone by Taco Bell and Old Spice, OREO wanted to have a little fun by
tweeting “Ever bring your own Oreo cookies to the movie theatre? #slicksnacker”. But
the social media manager at @AMCTheatres was none too amused. He replied “NOT
COOL, COOKIE.” Four hundred retweets later, @AMCTheatres had the last laugh, and
a fair amount of respect.
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20. 10. BRANDPLAY
Brandplay isn’t just for
consumer brands. Juniper, a B2B
networking solutions provider,
isn’t afraid to have a little fun
with its Facebook fans. From
IT-friendly ecards, to valentines
and haikus embedded in lines of
code, the brand is engaging its
fans using the language, devices
and humor that they enjoy. Sure,
there are plenty of pictures
of servers and certification
quizzes, but there’s also good old
fashioned, server fun.
It works. The engagement rate
on Juniper’s Facebook page is
higher than Intel,
Citrix, Zappos, Old Spice,
Lady Gaga and Starbucks.
Full disclosure: Starbucks, Activision (Call of Duty, Skylanders), Volkswagen, Microsoft, Adobe, Captain Morgan, Taco Bell, Juniper
and Johnnie Walker are Edelman clients. While not clients, this post was fueled by an overconsumption of Oreos and Red Bull.
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