Superficial Social Metrics: The Social Marketing Trap

Brands have fallen into the social marketing trap at one point or another. Pouring energy into

growing a social presence and posting the polls, pictures, and videos to entice fans into ‘Liking’ and retweeting their posts in sites i.e Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Linkedin etc. Then,

when they have reached their desired social following size, the rest of the team asks the inevitable questions – how do these numbers help the company? How does a large social presence drive the bottom line? What was our ROI on this campaign? This is where most social

media marketers flounder.

Social marketers are starting to look beyond the ‘Likes’ they relied on in 2013-201

On the plus side, brands have the confidence of influential analysts firms, including Gartner, who predicts that 50% of all web sales will come via social and mobile by 2015. They also have recent studies finding benefits like a 24% increase in overall sales among companies who include

Facebook in their media planning. The question, then, is how do they achieve and measure value in social? The answer is not by measuring ‘Likes’ or last-click attribution, but rather social

activation and careful measurement of each activation step.

Proven Social ROI via Social Activation

By placing an engaging social experience at the core of its business, Google (Android)

receives 25% of its total website traffic from social, and attributes up to a third of its sales to social media. Moreover, 50% of new Android customers now come from social, and socially

activated customers have doubled the lifetime value.

As a second example,Samsung claims that Facebook-connected users are twice as engaged on their official website.

Social Activation Explained

What led to success for Google (Android) and Samsung was not a simple last-click attribution,

which is often seen as the standard for online revenue generation, but rather a holistic view of

social value that includes brand awareness, user engagement, and a multiple touch-point approach to tie social’s effect into moving overall sales.

Social activation plays a central role because social media, and Facebook in particular, attracts brand fans interested in engaging with valuable brand content. Either individual to individual, or

company to individual, social success can only occur with engaging, valuable content that draws a user to interact with that content.

In fact, the two biggest mistakes digital marketers make when it comes to measuring social are

relying primarily on the “new” social metrics like ‘Likes’ and follows, or the “old” search advertising metric of last-click attribution – a collaborative Facebook/Datalogix study found that

campaigns focused on maximizing reach saw a 70% higher ROI than those focused on clicks. But to truly succeed in social media, challenge is to go beyond reach, clicks, and ‘Likes’ as goals, and instead focus on achieving and measuring the social activation of your customers,

which includes everything from Discovery, to Interactions, to Transactions, to Endorsements. Using DITE, you can improve all aspects of marketing, and ultimately, sales, while measuring

each step.

SONY STORY

Campaign Summary

Sony Mobile is the 10th most socially engaged brand in India, according to a Nielsen McKinsey

survey. This is due to the performance of the Sony Mobile India Facebook page, which gained

800,000 fans in eight months with consistently increasing engagement levels. Sony achieved this

through a series of campaigns, tightly integrated with Sony’s smartphone launch calendar. The

audience was carefully selected and targeted through contests appealing to specific groups.

Sony’s campaigns included crowdsourced phone reviews, theme-based photographs, dance

choreography and quizzes. Designed to be viral, each contest brought a large number of viewers

and fans to the page.

Sony Mobile India now has 1.3 million fans, second only to Samsung Mobile India.

Research and Insights

Desktop research and social media analysis, including listening to and monitoring communities

and conversations, gave the insights required to design our strategy. They found perceptions of

Sony as a youthful brand with music and sound quality being the unique selling points of its

smartphones amongst the target audience. It also revealed peer-to-peer recommendations as one

of the prime drivers of smartphone purchase decisions.

They also identified 13- to 25-year-olds as the key target for Sony smartphones based on our

analysis and started building SONY’s campaign on channels frequented by this audience. The

platforms we chose for Sony Mobile were Facebook and YouTube. The research also showed

sound quality and looks as the attributes most appealing to the target group.

Strategy

Drawing on our research, SONY crafted a strategy that reflected ‘vibrancy and youth’ and

focused on engaging audiences through an integrated programme that straddled social media, TV

commercials and product launches.

The campaign was focused on showcasing specific phone attributes – sound quality, waterproof,

camera quality and stylish looks .SONY used a series of contests, quizzes and crowdsourced

content to generate widespread awareness and engagement on social platforms. SONY

collaborated with Shiamak Davar, India’s best-known choreographer and youth icon, for a dance

contest and are now extending the association to a college-level ground activation and many

other events like Audi Photography. .

HOW DO SONY DO IT ?

SONY had the capabilities to seamlessly execute campaigns in tandem with new product launches on

multiple social platforms. Our intelligence tools measured up Sony’s competitors and we planted the roots

for a 360 degree Social Customer Relationship Management and a capability for social commerce

SONY first created a Facebook app that asked users for written and video reviews of Sony Mobile

smartphones. This showcased the recommendations of technology enthusiasts so that actionable changes

to the product marketing and design teams, straight from the fans, could be made.

Second campaign, was for Sony Mobile’s Arclight smartphone, which embodies superior design, feel

and look. SONY launched a Sony Mobile Arclight ‘LookBook’ competition for Facebook fans and asked

them to send stylish images of themselves to feature in an official album to be launched on Facebook.

Third campaign, for the Live With Walkman smartphone, ideal for music lovers, began with featuring an

upcoming TV commercial featuring a celebrity. The TVC featured the facebook page, making it a truly

cross-media promotion. It resulted in a second competition – one of the largest online dance video

contests, ‘Go Thump! Live With Walkman’. Users were asked to upload videos of dances to be judged by

Shiamak. Contestants were asked to dance to the music of the commercial for their video, and an app on

Facebook populated a specially-created YouTube channel for Sony Ericsson in India.

For the flagship Sony Mobile Xperia S launch, sony livestreamed all three launch events on Facebook,

bringing hundreds more to the launch virtually.

The next campaign, ‘Get Shorty’, is currently running for the Xperia U smartphone, which allows users to

change the colour and appearance of the lower portion of the phone. This campaign asks users to upload

photos showcasing their true colours, following which an app analyses the pictures to give the person’s

true colour. SONY alos coupled this campaign with a Spiderman Trivia quiz, timed to coincide with the

release of ‘Spiderman-3’, and gave away Xperia U smartphones to winners along with Spiderman

merchandise.

Some Highlights from the campaign include -

• Xperia S sales targets were met within three days.

• The number of fans for Sony Mobile India quadrupled from over 500,000 to over 2 million

within twelve months of managing the Facebook page.

• Sony Mobile was recognised as the 10th most popular brand on social media in India by NM

Incite, a joint venture by Nielsen and McKinsey & Co.

• We delivered 95 million+ impressions and reached 35 million users within the first eight months

of managing the Facebook page.

• We engaged 600,000 non-fans, and added 2,000+ fans every day with over 10,000 stories created

around posts each day.

• The viral effect of more than 1,000 dance videos brought more than 1,300 people every day to

the Sony Mobile India Facebook page and subscribers to the associated YouTube channel.

The Spiderman quiz had 5,000 registrations and more than 26,000 answers in the four

days it was open.

APPLE

Campaign Brief: Challenges and Objectives

The Indian smartphone market is crowded and competitive; Apple Iphone competes with

Samsung, HTC and Sony. Apple’s brief was simple: raise awareness of their products through

their outstanding design and up-to-date technology in terms of quality parameters i.e

performance and realiability and apple concentrated on brand as a whole making it an added

advantage for their products , be it iphone, ipad etc. And this is what that gives competitive edge

to apple apart from their diffenent operating system.

Apple’s objective evolved to become tactical in supporting brand activation through emphasising

on their environmental & social responsibility.

Apple changed the previous notion of “I’ll take what you give”, the mindset is changing to “give

me what I need”. Apple has very well harnessed the power of social media through their active

media as well as social participation especially at time of product launch and realized their

responsibility towards environment.

After Apple unveils the iPhone 6 today, you’ll hear about it just about everywhere — on TV, on

news websites, and relentlessly on Twitter and Facebook. Just about the only places you won’t

hear about it are on Apple’s official corporate social media channels, because they basically

don’t exist.

More than a decade after the creation of Facebook and more than eight years after the founding

of Twitter, the world’s most valuable company and second-most valuable brand is an

increasingly lonely social media holdout. Though it maintains accounts for iTunes and the App

Store, Apple doesn’t have an official corporate Facebook page or Twitter profile. Nor does it

have one on Instagram, Google+ or Pinterest. The CIA may feel like it can’t afford not to tweet,

but Apple is a little more careful with its communications.

Following several campaigns (for example, Green my Apple), Apple has made their

products greener. Recently, the new iphone 6 removed many toxins and improved the products

battery life and recharge cycles. In advance of Earth Day, Apple overhauled its Environmental

Responsibility website with new content that reconfirms the company's dedication to operate its

business in a way that is best for the environment. They say, “WE WANT TO LEAVE THE

WORLD BETTER THAN WE FOUND IT”. They strive to create products that are beautiful,

easy to use, and powerful without harming the environment.

Apple is second in terms of Brand value worldwide. It’s world largest smart phone seller.

In order to keep up to its reputation and brand value apple launched the ‘Better’ Environmental

campaign along with Tim Cook on 21st April 2014. Apple wanted to create the awareness in the

society and tell them the measures taken by them and how they care for the environment as a

whole big family.

SIMILARITES & DIFFERENCES IN THE MARKETING ACTIVITES

Similarities

Both the campaigns focused on the target group, cut across the technology adoption spectrum – from

early adopters to laggards. The ability of both the brands to showcase specific elements of each phone

and tie them back to the core campaign plan allowed the community to identify with all the difference.

Their individual transmedia campaigns, while addressing product-specific target groups, combined to

activate, engage and grow the fan base as a seamless social media story.

Difference

The major diff in both above discussed brands is that Apple as a brand does not support

social activities instead does its brand activation through various social, environment and

awareness messages & programs. Whereas Sony Xperia follows social activites for

brand activated through cross-media promotion.

Apple has signed the CERES Climate Declaration and cares for the environment on the

other hand sony has not undertaken any of such activity.

APPLE leveraged existing APPLE’s relationships, using popular products like macbooks,

ipods etc and sound accessories, as rewards while SONY’s strategy was to co-create

maximum content through fans using contests. They ensured high levels of participation

and engagement by sharing examples of what we were looking for, be it photo or video

contests.

The other major difference is that SONY communicate to people about its products and

their feature like camera quality , sound quality etc while APPLE uses its brand value to

reach the customers

Suggesion for the brands

Although there are many things both Sony and apple can do but here 5 Best Practices for

Social Media Activation at Big Events i.e launch shows etc.

Create a short, easy event hashtag. Be fun, relevant and clever when coming up with the

hashtag. (Example: #MLKDay2013)

Showcase @handles and #hashtags prominently throughout the event on all printed materials,

signage, screens, etc. This will make it easy for people to talk about your event on social

media.

Create stations such as “photo moments” booths where the messaging, handles and hashtags

are pre-programmed so that all guests need to do is take their photo and it will automatically

be titled (so they don’t need to worry about typing it all in correctly, mis-spelling sponsor

names, etc.) Again, you want the social integration to be easy for guests and flow seamlessly

throughout the event.

Create multiple, fun, branded ways for guests to amplify socially within the event. For

example, create easy opportunities for attendees to share when checking in or voting and give

them the opportunity to create custom photos, insta-prints, etc.

Have dedicated “brand ambassadors” responsible for event host/brand instagramming,

pinning, posting and tweeting. Make sure to train and prep your team about how to handle

and respond to @replies and mentions. With social, interaction is critical. It’s not enough just

to get followers–you want to encourage authentic connection.

CONCLUSION

This document is an analysis to understand where APPLE stands compared to

SONY and identify the trends between the two brands in terms of social marketing activation.

The product categories which we are looking at are smart-phones. Among the many players in

the market, SONY is known for its high-end innovations and designs, which seem to have

inspired APPLE in many ways during its early days. But in the present context, it is facing a

huge challenge to keep up with innovations and market trends. In terms of Benchmarking,

APPLE is way above SONY and SONY is closely associated with NOKIA. The recent rise of

Google android (operating system) has given APPLE a tough time, simply beats every corner of

the market.