I was watching TV on Saturday, and I noticed at the end of a VW commercial that, rather than their website, they had the URL to their facebook fan page. This reminded me of an experience in 1999, when I was in my first year of University and “the Internet” as we know it today was just becoming a reality. I finished a snickers bar, and noticed on the wrapper that they had their website printed on it. It got me asking ‘why on earth would someone go to snickers.com’ ? I mean sure, there would be nutritional information and stuff, but it seemed that basically you were subjecting yourself to more advertising and branding, I mean, you’d have to really like snickers.
Today, with facebook fan pages, users can interact with their favorite brands and companies, and discover other people that have similar interests. It makes sense that corporations and brands would want to partner with facebook – it’s so ubiquitous. What branding and marketing professional wouldn’t want influencers to self select to be a fan of their product, sharing this information with their entire friend network, just like they have for a government office, a type of food, or an actor?
It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and how companies will evolve in promoting their brands and products on facebook. So far, my friends at Involver have told me they’ve had the most success with their integrated facebook fan page platform through exclusive offers and valuable coupons.
Julie Supan, the senior director of marketing at youtube came and spoke at the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford last Thursday. It was a great discussion and interesting to hear her insights and experience about video, social media, and the tech industry.
Although she wouldn’t give us an exact ratio, she repeated a few times that far more people consume that create video on youtube. One challenge she said many companies continue to face is how to entice people – especially influencers – to create videos. She argued the goal should be to get people to collaborate, not create. She referenced a campaign launched by 1-800-Flowers that attempted to solicit user generated video that failed miserably as a career ender for the creative director. Her big insight was that clever, authentic, and entertaining content is key, and that literal doesn’t always translate. Implied messages often work better, and before embarking on creating anything, it’s important to think about goals. Who is your audience, and are you committed to engaging them? Leave the viewer wanting more, and keep in mind that word of mouth is still the most powerful and underrated distribution channel. At the end of the day, this is what most companies are trying to tap into.
Continuity and releasing videos incrementally are important, but repetition is key. I have seen the importance of repetition in our fundraising videos and messaging. It’s important to keep the story moving, and keep promoting the target behavior, even after “it” has “launched”. Spend time thinking about how your video will move through the entire ecosystem of your world, but more importantly, the world of your target audience. Tap into the zeitgeist and collective conscious. Remember that people seek fame.
Julie concluded by giving us some insight about the future of youtube – channel expansion and curator status are currently the big goals for the company.
We launched our first big email of Stanford’s class of 2009 Senior Gift Campaign late Thursday morning. This video, created by the boys over at Songline Media, is the best one I’ve used in my five year professional fundraising career. We used Involver’s player, embedded on our main page that is hosted on the Stanford server.
We sent a total of ~1,600 emails to current seniors. 81 had already donated and 1,498 had not. 47% of donors (38 seniors) and 46% of non-donors (689 seniors) opened the email.
Of those that opened the email, 3 donors (4%) and 235 non-donors (34%) clicked the jpeg image to start watching the video that was hosted on our main Senior Gift website. A total of 34 (14%) of seniors that watched the video ended up clicking the give now button and making a gift to the campaign, all in less than 4 days.
I recently wrote a guest blog post for Involver about what I do for a living – fundraising. The gist of this post is essentially that fundraisers need to tell a compelling story to be effective, mail/phone appeals are too costly and do not do a very good job at this, and that a combination of video and email is where fundraising professionals should be focusing their time and effort in order to inspire and educate donors. The Stanford Young Alumni and student campaigns I manage are going to be testing out some of the things we learned from previous campaigns over the next couple of months, and I’m very excited to see the results.