Social Media Experiences

A good social media campaign is has two components. You need a strong KPI based strategy that balances business goals, customer service needs and advertising/marketing objectives in an organized and quantifiable way. There’s also the intangible component that drives the emotional way in which we all interact through social media.

Two social media campaigns, or call them stunts, last week illustrated the value and power of experience in a social media campaign. They’re both well planned, well thought out, and well monitored and well engineered to be social. One draws people into an experience, one creates unique shareable experiences.

1: Funny or Die + Karaoke + Jewel: Ok, yes, II said Jewel. But watch the video.

What makes this video good, sharable, watchable, isn’t the celebrity, it isn’t even the concept, it’s the way the execution focused on personal experience. Audience members tell about what they saw and share their emotional response. We see Jewel’s real reaction to the experience, and like any good story, we’re drawn into it. Compare it to The Best Gig Ever Stunt from Improv Anywhere a group who creates unique experiences for their own sake. No celebrities, but a great emotional experience.

Granted, nothing is for sale here except the content that drives the sponsorships and advertisements that run on the Funny or Die site. But by focusing on the experience, in this case, they sell it very well.

2: The Old Spice Guy: Yeah, the half naked charming dude who’s manly smell women crave and men covet. What’s cool about the latest campaign isn’t that it’s clever and funny, it’s that it customizes the content to individual users in novel ways that results in a cool experience. Check it out:

It’s not just a retweet, or a comment, or general social media interaction which we know makes people feel good and leads to increasing levels of the hormone Oxytocin, it’s a fully customized, scripted video response with a paid actor! The experience of getting one of these responses, and the process of sharing it with friends and interacting around it has got to be very rewarding from a psychological standpoint. The assumption is that the reward is attributed to Old Spice and translated into a good opinion of the brand. Whether that makes you like the scent, I can’t say. I would like to know what kind of chemical brain response is produced when experiencing Old Spice…

When crafting a social media campaign, the experience and emotion connect it with the audience and make it successful, and the strategy, goals, objectives and analytics connect the campaign, it’s value and its success to your brand. Without the former it won’t work for your audience, and without the latter it won’t work for your business.