Twitter Best Practices

I recently had a conversation with a senior executive at an NBA franchise that opened my eyes to how much corporate leaders distrust Twitter. There is a commonly-held view that Twitter is populated by ego-driven geeks who drone on about what they had for breakfast. While there is certainly some of this, brand managers should also be aware that Twitter is filled with millions of users who are talking right now about their needs, their likes & dislikes, and about your brand.

Hundreds of companies are using Twitter to successfully promote their brands and engage with customers. Here are six best practices for Twitter:

1. Provide customer care and feedback. This is the most talked about brand management tool available on Twitter. Ford, JetBlue, and ComCast all put tremendous effort into responding to customer complaints, praise, and questions. By using the search function on Twitter or more advanced listening tools, brands can immediately redirect frustrated customers toward the help they need, often turning a bad experience into a positive one.

2. Engage your audience. Customers want to feel like they have a voice. Starbucks asks its followers to come up with new ideas, EA asks its gamers what they’re playing now, and 10 Downing Street (Tweets from the Prime Minister’s office) asks followers to throw questions out via YouTube.

3. Start a conversation. Whether it’s Al Gore reflecting on the market for electric cars in China or John McCain lambasting the Wall Street bailout, Twitter is a public forum for conversation. Brand spokespeople can make use of this great feature, too, by authentically raising a concern or praising an achievement. It’s best if the achievement isn’t their own.

4. Learn about customer needs. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, encourages companies to use Twitter to answer key questions about their customers. What other things (besides my product) are customers interested in? What are the most important subjects being talked about by people who use my product? Who are the key influencers?

By learning and listening, companies have the opportunity to meet their customers at a point of need. Most people won’t open an email coming from a lawn-care company, but are happy to listen to a pitch right after they complain about their brown grass.

5. Advertise an event or promotion. AdidasRunning promotes running events around the world, Powell’s Books lets readers know when an author is coming to Portland, and Samsung pushes cell phone deals and giveaways. All these companies are taking advantage of their large voice that comes with thousands of followers, brand loyalists, and industry influencers.

6. Be creative. Ashton Kutcher is quickly becoming best known for his Twitter personality, thanks in part to the gauntlet he dropped at the feet of Larry King and CNN to see who could be the first with 1,000,000 followers. EA has taken advantage of the media hoopla to offer Ashton’s 1,000,000th follower 10 EA games, and a role in the Sims 3. EA’s individual titles also creatively use Twitter to engage customers. Battlefield Heroes, for example, holds Twitter trivia contests and gives away swag to the winners. Great publicity, and a model for Twitter best practices.

@SamBoush

adidas House Party

In late November adidas Originals launched a marketing campaign called “House Party,” designed to garner attention for the 60th anniversary of the brand. While the campaign includes live events, real house parties, commercials, and other media buys, House Party has enjoyed its largest successes in the digital sphere, where the campaign attracts viewers on YouTube, Facebook, and on the adidas corporate Web site.


In the House Party video—the focal point of the campaign—celebrities (Young Jeezy, David Beckham, Kevin Garnett, The Ting Tings, and others), as well as hundreds of good-looking young people, congregate at an urban house party where they skateboard inside, paint on the walls, and dive fully-clothed into a backyard pool—all-the-while conspicuously sporting the three stripes and adidas Originals logo.

Response to the campaign has been overwhelmingly positive. The YouTube video has 830,000 views to date, the adidas Originals Web site continues to hawk online spin-offs of the campaign (like The Ting Tings paint party), and the adidas Originals Facebook page (with more than 1.5 million fans) threw a house party for a lucky fan.

The important question to consider, though, is whether adidas loyalists have found the campaign authentic enough. While Adrants.com called House Party “an ego-fueled, self-indulgent, hipsteresque, celebu-fest,” most blogs have been on fire with praise for the campaign, and one TV station even created a knockoff of the ad to promote The Simpsons. It’s clear from a look at the online chatter over the campaign, that the vast majority of online creators, critics, and collectors agree with themusingsofondolady.blogspot.com that House Party’s use of skateboarders, hip hop, motorbikes, and graffiti all contribute to the authenticity of the campaign.

While the most successful attribute of the campaign is authenticity to the brand and to brand loyalists, the campaign didn’t take full advantage of the Web’s most fascinating feature: user-generated content. House Party is hugely successful in a Web 1.0 world, where adidas has pushed excellent content on the consumer. On the adidas Originals Web site, viewers can even get more in-depth in the house party by choosing a room they’d like to see more of—the living room, for example—and can witness more footage of people drinking, dancing, playing poker, and painting on the living room walls.

However, nothing put forward by the campaign allows users to interact on a more personal level, or create their own content. Wouldn’t it be a more successful campaign if users were uploading their own house party videos, using social network to create a virtual house party, or pulling content onto their own sites?

Moving forward, adidas might consider revising their campaign to make full use of the following online tools:

1. Twitter. Adidas Originals has 108 followers of their Twitter profile. So few because there are zero Tweets coming from adidas Originals. Adidas could quickly start a conversation (and, more importantly, be a part of a conversation) by updating their fans and asking questions of the roughly 8 million people who use Twitter. It’s a small number, relative to Facebook, but Twitter caters to early adopters, young people, and those who like to be on the cutting edge: just the demographics adidas Originals would like to target.

2. Content sharing on the corporate Web site. Adidas should encourage their fans to use House Party to create something original of their own. To do this, adidas could allow fans to download:

• Art assets including concept art & hi-res logos
• Site design elements including borders, backgrounds, fonts, and stylesheets
• Exclusive content: Forum avatars / Messenger images

3. Ning. Why not create an online House Party? Ning allows users to create their own social networking site, which would be the perfect tool for adidas to create an invite-only virtual gathering, where invitees could invite friends, who could invite friends, who could invite friends… just like a real house party.

Interested in learning more about sports business? You might be interested in The Business of Sports, Second Edition.

Hulu Hoops (and more)

Founded last August and debuting last month, Hulu might just be the future of TV on the Internet. A joint venture between Fox (News Corp) and NBC (GE), this little site with big backers bills itself as “a single source of free, on-demand programming from some of the most popular studios and online networks, helping viewers quickly and easily find and enjoy the premium content they are looking for.”

Hulu just added its first sports content this week, with content from the NBA and the NHL. Sure, the pickings are slim right now (there are only two NBA games up, they’re both months old, and they’re both Lakers games) but the site is just getting off the ground. The potential for this to be a sports hot spot is there.

Hulu now offers these sports features, free to everyone:

NBA
- 2 full-length games (including Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game)
- Daily Recaps
- Highlight reel: NBA 5-star plays
- Top 10 highlights

NHL
- NHL Best of The Week - Season 2007-08 (highlights the week's best assists, goals, saves, and hits)
- NHL Classics
- NHL Player Profiles 2007-08
- NHL Regular Season 2007-08

Action Sports
- Firsthand
- The 808 from Fuel TV

College Football
- The Boise State-Oklahoma battle in the 2007 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl

There’s no doubt that by the next time I log into Hulu there will be significantly more content. The real question is how NBC, Fox and their partners will transition these sports events from TV to online distribution. The current advertising model relies on short commercial breaks (with ads from Intel, Priceline, Direct TV etc), banner ads, overlays (promotional graphics that roll over the bottom of the screen) and maybe extra sponsorship dollars from events sponsors. Some games also offer a choice to viewers: to watch the game with commercials, or watch a two-minute advertisement at the beginning. (The Wizards/Lakers game is currently being shown with a preview for “Baby Mama.”)

The main obstacle for Hulu, going forward, will be whether it can attract other major content providers like CBS and ESPN. If Hulu can expand its broadcasting capabilities then it will be bigger than YouTube, bigger than social networking, maybe bigger than Google.


Notes:

NBC Sports broadcasts the Olympic Games (through 2012), the NFL, the NHL, Notre Dame Football, the PGA Tour, the USGA Championships, Wimbledon, the French Open, RCA Tennis Championships, the Dew Action Sports Tour, and more.

Fox Sports has broadcast rights to NFL games, MLB (1996–present), college football's Cotton Bowl, most of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS National Championship Game, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Sugar Bowl), and NASCAR. ‎

YouTube Sports Channels

Consumers of sports programming are seeking out online video for a number of reasons. Whether they’re looking for Web gems, using videos to find a community, or sharing tastes, these consumers are more likely to visit YouTube than any other online video-sharing site, as shown by the graph below. (YouTube accounts for more than 96% of all videos shown by Google.)

Among sports properties, there is no clear winner in the battle for online video supremacy. Last month, I wrote about Nike and adidas in the online video world, but these aren’t the major sports properties on YouTube. On the contrary, while the Nike Soccer channel boasts 286,000 views and adidas “It Takes 5ive” channel can claim 413,000 views, the NBA channel on YouTube leads the pack with 2.7 million views.

I’ve created a chart with a sampling of sports properties and their respective rankings on YouTube. Some sports properties have no official presence on YouTube, such as Major League Baseball and NASCAR, while some (like the NFL) have made a disappointing effort.

A YouTube channel is a centralized location where other users can see a user’s videos, favorites, bulletins, comments, subscribers and video log. In the case of these sports properties, a YouTube channel is similar to a Web site or a social networking profile page. The sports properties use these landing pages to direct viewers back to their official homepages (“Visit NBA.com for over 15,000 videos”) and to help promote a campaign (“Help decide which NFL player story should be made into a Super Bowl commercial”).

And while the skeptic might point out that none of the 2008 Super Bowl ads pointed to their social media presences on YouTube, the number of Americans viewing online video is encouraging (research indicates that 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com in January). In a market where grabbing a consumer’s attention seems ever more difficult, these numbers are worth a second look.

Online Video Marketing Campaigns

A 30-second spot in last year’s Superbowl cost advertisers $2.6M (it was $2.7M this year) plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in production costs. But for Five Point Productions, the winner of the 2007 Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, the production cost for their ad, “Live the Flavor” cost only $12.79. Though the story is inspirational (USA Today ranked the ad 4th out of the 62 ads that were aired), the implications of this sports marketing triumph went beyond the Frito-Lay accomplishment. The larger picture is that the Doritos ad campaign from the 2007 Superbowl affected the norms of sports marketing video content: how it’s assembled, where it’s distributed, and how much it costs.

In the last year, sport marketers seem to have boosted their online presences with fancier Web sites, integrated Flash applications, Social Networking profiles, and more. But of all the improvements these companies have made online, perhaps the most effective (after a Web site) has been the use of innovative video techniques.

One of the best videos, shot with an amateur camera, features the Brazilian soccer star, Ronaldinho, as he meticulously straps on a pair of Nike soccer shoes, juggles the ball for a minute, then fires four consecutive shots off the top of the goal post without letting the ball touch the ground. The video, posted by Nikesoccer.com, has been viewed more than 21 million times as of this posting. To put that in perspective, this is roughly a quarter of the global viewership of an average Superbowl. Not bad when you consider that the clip is 2 minutes and 44 seconds, and that viewers were likely paying more attention to the video they had chosen to see than they would to a Superbowl commercial.

With the majority of online video viewers saying that they find new videos through friends’ recommendations, it’s helpful to note that the Ronaldinho video was selected as a favorite (“favorited”) by 48,740 different viewers. Youtube, like other social participation sites, allows users to tag, comment, rate, and embed the videos as well as add them to a favorites list. In the near future participants should also expect to be able to personalize, edit, an add in-video comments.

“It Takes 5ive” is the adidas basketball campaign based on the idea of believing in the team. The campaign has put together a presence on YouTube with clips of Dwight Howard, Jerry Stackhouse, Adam Morrison, TJ Ford, and other celebrity ball players. Their most viewed clip, “adidas 5ive on 5ive,” has just over a million views, and is part of a campaign that includes at least 14 other short videos. Though not as successful as the Nike soccer video campaign, adidas finishes the video with a call to action, urging viewers to see all the action by visiting their video site. Adidas’ video is a jumping off place for the basketball enthusiast to see more related videos and the accompanying marketing messages.

Digital marketing can help maximize the impact of production budgets (the Ronaldinho video would have cost more than $10M to air on the Superbowl because of its length), it can act as a gateway to a longer piece that allows for a deeper and more interactive experience, and it can work without the formal constraints of time (both in the sense of 30 second spots and the sense of ads appearing only after the 5 o’clock news). Digital marketing doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is irrelevant, but it has become enough of a force that media campaigns should have an Internet component. Moreover, traditional media should take a lesson from the 2007 Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” contest and learn how to integrate this new format with their own.