Not Cool, Cookie. It’s amazing what a simple, quick response can do.

A couple of weeks ago, Oreo posted a tweet asking fans if they sneak their cookies into a movie theatre.  They knew about the “No outside food/drink” policy that most theatre’s implement (since the tweet incorporated the hashtag #slicksnacker), but instead of making it sound as if they endorse rule-breaking, the tweet had a more playful tone to it.

Eight minutes after the original tweet from Oreo, the community manager for AMC Theatres responded in kind with a simple three-word comment about the original post.  Over 1,900 retweets and a feature in Ad Week later, the tweets are a fantastic case study in brand-to-brand Twitter interaction.

What made this so successful?  Did Oreo and AMC Theatres include this in their media plans and navigate through months of brand and legal approvals?  Was this part of some overarching campaign?  No.  This was rooted in brand trust.

As an agency, one of the primary goals you hope to achieve with your clients is brand trust.  You want your client to trust that you understand their business so well and have their best intentions in mind with every idea, message, tweet, post, etc.  You want them to feel that when you represent their brand, you already understand their voice and every red flag that the legal department would raise and have already successfully addressed these issues beforehand.  This could not be more important in social media.

The aforementioned tweet isn’t clever.  And like I said before, it wasn’t planned.  So why did it work?  Because it was posted so immediately. The community manager established enough trust with his brand and their legal department that he could confidently post the statement without their review.  It’s that sense of immediacy that people love about social media.  The same can be said about the Old Spice YouTube campaign (ever heard of it?).  These videos and posts weren’t reviewed by the brand, go through multiple revisions, or spend a week with the legal team.  Enough brand trust existed that a simple message could be posted, while keeping the company’s best interests in mind, in a matter of minutes.

According to SocialBakers, the average response time for brands on social media is 26 hours, and some brands take up to 8 days to respond.  Do you remember exactly what you told your friend about a brand 26 hours ago?  It’s safe to say your consumer probably doesn’t, but they would if the brand responded immediately in a fun, light-hearted way.  And they’d probably “Like” you for it.

You can read more from the community manager of AMC Theatres and the idea of brand trust on his blog: http://shanelife.com/2012/09/26/very-cool-cookie/

We’ve all been there. Your team creates some terrific content for your brand’s social media channels, sure to engage and delight your audience, and the client stops you cold with one question, “How is this going to get me more fans?”

It’s all part of a growing trend and debate – the “social media popularity contest” – that a brand’s success is marked by how many friends, fans, likes, or followers it’s acquired. There’s a couple of reasons why the assumption that success = likes is both flat-out wrong and why it’s missing the point altogether.

There’s a great dissection of this unhealthy obsession with fan count on MediaPost, which ultimately boils it down to one point, “Simply being liked is not really the point of branding.” The article names a number of true A-List brands whose success has hinged on not worrying about pleasing everybody, but rather speaking to a specific target without worrying what other people will think about them. (Think of that cool kid in high school who wasn’t worried about what everybody thought of him, and thus became enormously popular.) Harley Davidson, Apple, and Red Bull have 1 thing in common, besides enormous success in their categories: they know who they are and who they’re talking to, and they’re not worried about pleasing everybody.

While every brand might not have as strong of a persona as say, The Old Spice Guy, one question that they should be asking themselves is, “why do I want to have more likes?” There’s a lot of great answers to this question: To inspire curiosity and trial in my product, to find and reward my evangelists, to educate and persuade my audience… and there’s one wrong answer. “So I can have more fans than brand Y.”

Bottom line? Challenge your clients to take the question “how can I get more likes?” one step further to “Who should be liking my brand and why?”

In their latest effort to take over the world, Google launched “Google Drive” today. It’s a service combining Google Docs and Dropbox-like file transfer. Check it out:

All users will have 5GB storage free (a direct challenge to Dropbox’s standard 2GB), and can upload almost any file type to send to another user, download onto another device, or share for collaboration.

What do you think about Google’s latest offering – is it a logical next step after mass adoption of Gmail and Google Docs? Or is it the signs of an encroaching monopoly from an internet superpower?

(Thanks to Tyler R. for sending over the Google Drive info!)

Over the course of my career I’ve sat in thousands of brand briefs and background presentations for global brands. Each brief structures what the brand stands for and who its audience is while carefully breaking down its target demographic and what appeals to them. Insert a brand promise and the ‘reason to believe’ and, well, you get the start of a potential ‘agency brief’ to start developing ideas (I’m completely oversimplifying the process, but you get the drift).

A little skeleton that most won’t mention is that many brands struggle to articulate what their actual demographic breakdown is or to provide insights into the profile of brand x’s profile user which can make it difficult to build insight-driven ideas. In some instances, said company or brand’s budget is too small to conduct local market research which results in the brand relying on outdated consumer data, global e-reports and whatever else can be ‘googled’ leading up to plan development. And who can blame them?

An often overlooked approach for insightful ideas that can spur creative marketing concepts is the realm of active listening, or in some instances where a brand reacts almost instantly to user feedback, it’s called real-time marketing (yes, we’re a clever bunch of industry wordsmiths).

Here are 3 ways to tap into amazing insights that can fuel creative ideas and increase your campaign’s relevance for your end consumer. Note, I’ve purposely left out ‘Crowdsourcing’ because I think it’s an incredibly overused industry term that is often incorrectly represented.

              1. Leverage your customer care centre

As simple as it may seem, this is often overlooked. Your frontline customer care centre deals with the compliments and complaints that matter most. Recognizing patterns in feedback can yield tremendous ideas.

Example: Our client Halls noticed a pattern of users were giving positive feedback about the product’s effectiveness in relieving short-term allergy symptoms between the time allergy sufferers took their medicine and when it effectively kicked in. We conducted an influencer analysis to identify allergy sufferers across North American and then created an outreach campaign to educate them. In just three months, we were able to generate considerable awareness based on this insight to support their new product line.

1. 2. Have your digital community manager conduct real-time marketing

Example: As social media agency of record for the NHL, our community manager often catches interesting patterns that generate real-time marketing opportunities. Last October, our Facebook community posted a few pumpkins with team carvings on them. Within a few days, we built a campaign asking fans to submit their team-inspired pumpkins for a chance to win NHL gear. Aside from time invested, the creative efforts of community management resulted in a low-cost real-time marketing initiative that generated incredible ROI and community engagement metrics. It’s now being leveraged as a year-over-year initiative to drive fan engagement in social and .com.

           3. Use social media insights from one campaign to re-energize it the next year

Example: It’s rare that clients will run a similar campaign year-over-year, but it happens particularly often in the confectionary space where promotions can be huge sales drivers. Example: Tim Horton’s ‘Roll up the Rim’ or McDonald’s Monopoly.

We’re fortunate enough to be the social media AOR for Caramilk and worked on the highly successful Keys to the Secret Campaign. During last year’s campaign, we noticed that ‘key hunters’ were organically posting unbarring videos to social media channels. If you’ve seen this year’s campaign on Facebook or TV, you’ll notice the creative is all around ‘unbarring’. For the record, this year’s campaign is outperforming last year’s. It’s also more heavily based on real-time user insight.

In closing, we need to get better as an industry at listening and adapting to real-time insights that can fuel innovative ideas and make our creative executions stronger. The end result will be timely, relevant and highly effective campaigns that deliver better engagement and brand equity.

Have another great example you’ve done? Share below.