Establishing an agency viewpoint on social media has only led us back to a core fundamental of great advertising: you are going to be more successful if you utilize media in concert with an idea or concept that engages, entertains, provokes or generally creates an emotional connection.
Most advertising isn’t liked because it doesn’t give the consumer credit for having intelligence. This goes for traditional media and nontraditional media. Being on the radio to simply be on the radio is okay. Being on Twitter to simply be on Twitter is okay too. To be successful, you’ve got to bring an idea to the table.
For Zea Restaurants’ latest campaign, our creative is simple: their take-out is so good, you’ll find any excuse to order. So on Twitter we’ve created a feed that offers humorous, daily excuses not to cook. You can read and follow it here. Rather than reeling off menu items and prices (Zea’s food is a great value), we’ve chosen to entertain and deliver the value message implicitly. And who doesn’t have the daily, mental tug-of-war over cooking or not cooking?
The bottom line is social media is still media. It’s another channel to your consumer, albeit a two-way (or multi-way) conversational channel to your consumer. You don’t like having conversations with boring people or salesmen, do you? Then don’t talk like that in your advertising, traditional or otherwise. Instead, treat your consumers like people. Entertain them, enlighten them, emotionally connect with them, and they’ll become more than your consumers. They’ll become fans.
By Rich Sullivan
Tags: latest work, media, New media
Nice post and very true. With all the hype (deserved and undeserved) surrounding social media, it tends to get lost that, as you say, social media is still media. It’s another channel.
I’m curious, do you just piggyback the Twitter link on other advertising? What other ways could you attract people to follow the tweets, that wouldn’t be just tagging a “follow us” on traditional advertising media? In other words, how do get people to follow who aren’t already looking at or listening to existing Zea adverts?
I’m also wondering who is going to sign up for the feed who isn’t already a fan of Zea’s food. I know, for my own part, that the few companies’ tweets I follow are companies I already patronize.
This is a great question. We do piggyback the Twitter link on the traditional advertising in some cases, when the concept fits. In the case of the Zea campaign, we openly ask the public to follow http://twitter.com/ZeaToGo for daily excuses they can put to use. So you can attract followers that way.
The other way we have begun attracting followers is by simply following or replying to anyone who mentions “Zea” on their Twitter feeds. 99.99% of the time it’s a positive comment and the person is a “fan” of the restaurant, so they are likely to follow @ZeaToGo. We also follow people who live in areas where there is a Zea restaurant using sites like http://localtweeps.com.
So if I’m understanding correctly, the Twitter feed works better as a customer retention tool than a traffic-building promotion; repeat customers vs. new customers?
It works as both. You are more likely to have success with prior patrons, but it certainly can attract new fans/customers.