Posts Tagged ‘myspace’
Engagement
Monday, March 30th, 2009Our Services
Social Engagement
and Campaigns
- Experienced “Social Media Marketing Engagement Leads” team.
- Social media outreach, content syndication, and marketing campaign social graph promotion.
- Personal, direct, conversational marketing to complement your existing media buying.
- Identification and outreach to key strategic communities.
Direct customer engagement programs, branded social media communities built and managed, and custom brand marketing campaigns driven through earned media, all designed and delivered by a team of Social media channel experts – We gather your creative marketing assets to syndicate and promote them around the web transparently as representatives of your brand. We design, build, manage, and maintain branded off-site communities in strategic social media locations of high value to your business and customers – typically in sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Ning, Twitter, Hi5, and Live Spaces. We identify relevant blog posts, forum threads, and community conversations in which your brand or products feature prominently and engage consumers in ways that are always transparent and ethical, add value, solve problems, and that simply help connect people to useful information and content via personalized posts. Our Interactive Creative Content Team can plan and/or develop everything from branded backgrounds to sites and apps integrated with Facebook and other social media marketing platforms.
Philosophy
Monday, March 16th, 2009About Us
Our Team | Press | Philosophy | Ethics | Partners | Associations | Jobs
Caveat Emptor: A bit of a treatise…
Social Media Marketing is now old enough for methodologies to have been developed, but new enough for rules to still be written. We have been involved in this process of trial/error/success/ data/analysis/learning/improvement/repeat from the start, and we are presently among the largest and most experienced marketing agencies on the west coast focused on this exciting and evolving online marketing field. We now boast a team of 25 Social Media brand analysts, marketing campaign leads, and outreach and engagement leads. While we’re small enough to be laser-focused on every client, scale does matter, and we’re large enough to cover the entire Social Media Web with ease. Each team member is skilled across the Social Media spectrum, as well as a subject matter expert in a few particular channels. So no matter what your brand engagement or marketing campaign requirements, we can build a customized Project Team matched to your analytics, strategy, or brand marketing campaign requirements.
While we work with a number of clients on a direct level, we also know that you have had long relationships with talented creative and advertising agencies. That’s why we’ve carved out our space as Social Media strategists and practitioners in a way that we can work and play well with your current agencies of record. We typically don’t develop our own creative, shoot videos, design print ads, buy media, or write code, which allows plenty of opportunities for your talented creative agencies to focus on these core competencies. We should add, however, that we can offer any and all of these capabilities through close sub-contract relationships we enjoy with a number of leading social media creative development agency partners. Feel free to learn more about them here. We are well accustomed to partnering with your existing creative agencies, PR firms, and design shops so that their work is being seen by more people – and more relevant people – in as many of the right nooks and crannies of the conversational, social, user-generated, crowd-sourced, networked, 2.0+ World Wide Web. Connect us, and we will all work together for a positive outcome. And in the event you don’t already have an agency partner who can bring a particular concept or creative content idea to life, we have some friends who can make it happen too.
We’re not here to simply build you a blog or a Facebook page and walk away. Nor do we want to – We don’t believe that makes sense for any business and brand looking to make a real commitment to connecting with their customers in social media. Just like everything in life, benefits require commitment – and commitment takes time and effort. Our scale allows us to license the strongest measurement and analytics tools available, so we can learn quickly where your brand is being discussed, where it’s strong, where it’s weak, and where we have some work to do in order to catch up to your key competitors in the key locations online. You may tell us, “I think I want a MySpace page”. But if what you mean is, “I think my customers and competitors are in this channel, I don’t think we’re where we need to be and doing what we could be doing best there, and I think I need some help,” well then, we want to help. We use powerful brand analytics tools and a data-driven methodology to determine which of the social media options are best suited for an efficient and effective campaign – specific to your brand. We’ll help design a Social Media Strategic Marketing Plan and Editorial Calendar for your business that makes sense – in the short run and the long run. We can provide a ready-to-go team of Engagement Leads deployed on your behalf to drive your marketing campaign content and brand outreach to relevant audiences across the social media Web. And then we’ll measure how well we (and you) are doing, and where we need to shift course or re-allocate our resources.
While we’re on a bit of a roll, a note on the “viral video” phenomenon… One thing we don’t do is “viral.” A virus is something that you catch by accident. No one tries to catch a cold – it just happens sometimes. Instead, we plan, analyze, and execute brand engagement campaigns that are purposeful, logical, and measurable – and designed for the long term. If you want to make a single video, push it up to YouTube, cross your fingers, throw salt over your shoulders, and hope it gets 22 million views, we’re probably not your guys. If you want to analyze the current state of your brand presence across the web and benchmark it relative to your key competitors, to design a thoughtful brand awareness and engagement campaign, and to invest in the social media channel in an efficient manner that’s focused on better understanding and addressing your customers needs, well then, that’s music to our ears.
On top of all this, we recognize that Social Media agencies are sprouting up all over the place. This is a dynamic, energetic field with new ideas and campaigns launching hourly. Sometimes, we may not be the right agency for you, and we’re happy to refer you to a better fit. But we’d love the chance to at least talk to you about how your organization can start to implement a Social Media philosophy into your culture. We’ve been doing this a while, and can help guide you down the right path from the beginning.
Finally, we have proven ourselves capable of scaling up to service an all encompassing, multi-channel campaign. We’re flexible, service-oriented, and our services pricing model was designed from inception to work to the advantage of our clients. So whether you want a deeper understanding of your brand presence and equity online, support in building and maintaining a trust-worthy 24/7 Social Media presence, or just a solid marketing plan for the channel which you can execute yourself… we want to help make any or all of these things a reality for your business.
Services
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Our Services
Social Intelligence
and Analytics
- Social media channel brand listening and monitoring tools. Deployment and analysis across the entire social media web.
- Brand frequency, sentiment, and ‘Share of Voice’ analysis and reporting.
- Key influencer/top domain indentification.
- Benchmarking reports and custom dashboards
Channel Guidance
and Strategy
- Your brand’s opportunity identification: Where you could – and should – invest in a managed brand presence across the social media web.
- Collaborative strategic marketing plan development.
- Resource, budget, channel strategy, marketing plan deliverables.
- Content. Technology and editorial plan development.
Social Engagement
and Campaigns
- Experienced “Social Media Marketing Engagement Leads” team.
- Social media outreach, content syndication, and marketing campaign social graph promotion.
- Personal, direct, conversational marketing to complement your existing media buying.
- Identification and outreach to key strategic communities.
SCG Was There: OMMA Social
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009Recently, some members of our Spring Creek Group team went down to San Francisco to mix and mingle with other like-minded social media pros, gain some insight into emerging social media trends, and learn more about what the future of this industry entails.
OMMA Social, a one day conference designed to help guide marketing and media professionals through the social media field, had an attendance of roughly 300 people. In a time when budgets tend to be tight, this impressive turnout shows the huge interest businesses and clients are taking in social media tools and new media channels.
The conference was emceed by Cathy Taylor from MediaPost, and included top name speakers in the online advertising and social media industry such as keynotes Angela Courtin, SVP Marketing, Entertainment & Content, MySpace and Chris Curtin, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Corporate Marketing, Hewlett-Packard Company.
A Case Study About Social Media and Controversial Uses of the Word “All”
Monday, November 10th, 2008At Spring Creek Group, we love case studies. They are the easiest way to explain to clients (and future clients) why social media is important and such an influential way to start actual online conversations. So imagine our pleasure when we were able to turn the case study microscope upon ourselves, after an unexpected opportunity was thrust upon us by someone we have never met.
The situation: As a leading Social Media agency, Spring Creek Group is sometimes asked to comment on industry events or trends. Our CEO, Clay McDaniel, is our appointed spokesperson. It’s usually a good opportunity for him to comment in an established media publication, part of the “mainstream media” if you will.
Clay’s recent post at DMNews included the phrase, “We’re all spending plenty of time in our social network accounts,” a fairly innocuous phrase that nevertheless set the social media wildfires ablaze. Over at Bly.com, professional copywriter Bob Bly took particular offense with the word “all” and provided the following response,
“I for one spend NO time on the social network sites — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn — where I have accounts. So Clay is wrong….There are very few instances where “all” — which in Clay’s statement is synonymous with “everyone” — can be safely used.”
Now Bob Bly is an established copywriter, and technically he is right. In a strictly literal sense, the use of extreme words such as “all,” “never,” or “no time” should rarely be used. But instead of arguing semantics, let’s follow the social media train, which is far much more interesting.
Unlike a read-only advertisement, this conversation doesn’t end with Bly’s criticism on his blog. And if there’s any form of online media more conversational than the actual blog post, it’s the post’s comment thread, where Clay gets criticized once again, from a poster named Brian who complains,
“That’s the general problem with the Social Networking crowd. They surround themselves with each other, so it appears to them that everyone is doing it. And once you think that everyone is doing something that thing suddenly seems to be really important.”
The complainer has taken Bly’s specific technical argument and taken a broader brush to slam social media professionals in general. This is the fear of big corporations, who are scared of social media because of what a random blogger or commenter might say about their product. Advertising is positive, while social media invites criticism. And that rightly frightens people who are managing marketing campaigns for lousy products. But marketers sometimes forget that when someone who doesn’t fully understand your product criticizes it, you are just as likely to have an evangelist come to defend you with a much stronger and relevant argument.
Such is the case here, where a champion of Social Media pops up and politely criticizes Bob Bly for being out of touch with today’s environment. Michael Foreman writes on his blog (which includes a trackback to Bly.com),
…If you follow (Bly’s) blog, you know he hails from a time before web 2.0. He’s skeptical of social media trends…So why have accounts on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn if you never check them?… I think a little old school bias shows through his statement. Even big business and law enforcement are turning to sites like Twitter for feedback and communications. And the last election demonstrates the raw power of social networking. (See MoveOn.org, and more recently Change.gov, Obama’s new transition site.) No, you don’t need to be plugged-in 24/7, or get a Facebook account because it’s ‘cool’ as one comment on the post suggested. But we live in an age of paperless newspapers, iPhone apps, viral marketing, cloud computing and an increasingly mobile workforce. It’s good to log in every now and then.”
So let’s track this:
- Clay McDaniel contributes to an article on DMNews.com.
- Bob Bly criticizes the article and writes disparagingly about Clay Daniel (sic).
- Clay is then both attacked and defended by Bly.com readers.
- A thoughtful response is posted at ByMichaelForeman.com, who judging by his blog, may be the most interesting read out of all of us.
- And then of course the story comes full circle back to the Spring Creek Group blog.
The Conclusion: We think this is a pretty interesting example of how social media really is a conversation that leads to other conversations, and much more powerful than a “read-only” piece that you view once and then forget. We can’t put an ROI number on it, but at least eight people engaged in the conversation, across at least four pieces of online real estate, and many more people had opinions that they didn’t bother to write down. Can you say the same thing about a brochure?
Epilogue: For the record, Clay McDaniel apologizes for his use of the word “ALL,” and to prove his apology is genuine, refuses to say it will “NEVER” happen again.
Back from Federated Media Summit
Friday, October 17th, 2008The Spring Creek Group returned today from the Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit. We’ll try to punch out a few posts commenting on specific news and insights we heard, but the general takeway is that people are desperate for some way to track the success or failure of Social Media campaigns.So far, the only thing everyone can agree upon is that there is no right formula yet. How much is it worth to have someone watch a YouTube Video? Or to create a new one? In fact, the value of User Generated Content seems to be a slippery crocodile for big agencies to grapple with. What is the incentive for “Big Agency X” to launch a campaign designed to get 25,000 people to create their own ads? While Agency Creative teams are desperately trying to control the message (and the work), there are tons of people with a camera, a laptop, an idea, and now a giant platform to talk from.
All of this makes the ROI argument more relevant. An agency needs to be able to justify why spending $xx,000 to have their NYU Art School guys build a MySpace page or YouTube video is better than the company giving a couple of film school kids a handycam and a credit card. And since there is no way to value the return yet, it’s hard to quantitatively make any kind of argument.
What does this mean for firms who specialize in Social Media? Well quite simply, it means the industry is growing up. People don’t care about ROI on having a salesperson buy someone coffee. But they care if they are going to send her to New York for 4 day conference. ROI only matters when you identify a place you want to spend a lot of “I” in. When that “I” was a few hours of an intern’s time to build a Facebook page or write a blog post, no one cared. But the fact that ROI is becoming so important indicates Social Media is becoming a real line item on the Marketing Budget, not part of the “Other Channels” bucket. And no matter what, that is good for everyone in the space.
MySpace Advertising CPM rates dropping
Friday, March 14th, 2008Interesting article in BrandWeek about MySpace’s low low advertising rates. Perhaps an indication of efficacy, perhaps an indication of more inventory, perhaps just an effort to attract more types and lower-spend advertisers into their enormous walled garden of users.
