Using Social Media with Product Launch Campaigns

According to the Page One blog companies are getting 1,000 to 4,000 percent jumps in their corporate web site traffic after implementing social media campaigns. Our new web site will make equally bold claims, showcasing work that we did for Google, Cisco, and Sourceforge that illustrate big gains of over 100% for key metrics such as registrations, media coverage or show attendance.

How much of this is hype and how much of it is real? I wrote much of the content for the site. I'll give you the inside scoop.

The numbers are actual, not exaggerated. However, after reading through our blog posts, I realized that readers may come away with the misunderstanding that social media was the only driving force behind the results.

This is not true. Social media is a component of an integrated marketing strategy. It is almost a magnifying glass that brings good content into clearer focus for a wider audience.

However, without good content, social media is an empty pipe.

The most common marketing campaign in Silicon Valley is the product launch campaign. I don't think people have a choice of choosing between a traditional marketing and PR launch or a social media launch. People have to do both. I know, at first it seems more costly. However, in the harsh reality of today's economy, it's not. The reality is that companies are scaling back on advertising, direct marketing and public relations. They're not giving up on these proven techniques. They're streamlining the process. Let's face it, if there are less publications now days, there's going to be less work to manage the advertising campaign.

When I do a social media launch of a product, it's actually an integrated public relations and social media launch. The elements must work together. I've worked on a number of integrated social media and PR campaigns in the last few months - Cloudera, Appcelerator, Zend. All the campaigns generated between 10x and 30x increases in web site traffic. That's 1,000 to 3,000 percent increases!

Here's a simplified step by step process of how it works.

Message Grid - develop high level message buckets for each target audience.

Press Release - write a traditional press release and put it to the wire on the launch day. It doesn't make a big difference what wire service you use or what format the press release is in. Doing a social media press release instead of a standard format press release will not have a big impact on your campaign results. Adding SEO techniques to a single press release will also not alter the organic or PPC search results that much. After experimenting with different formats, I've settled back to the traditional press release. Focus on the basics, writing a press release that is accurate, easy to understand and contains your main message points. Keep in mind that the value of any press release is now diminished. There are other channels that you must use in parallel to get the messages out.

Media List - Create a traditional media list that includes print, online, and bloggers. After experimenting with Cision and many other services, we've started to use Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs again. In my opinion, the days of automating a mailing list of contacts is over. Spreadsheets are a pretty basic and easy tool to use effectively. Ultimately, I don't think it matters too much what you use to manage your media list.

Vision Video - produce a 3 minute video of the top two executives that explain the product. Script out the video ahead of time using the message matrix to cover all the major buckets. You must provide direction for the video. The content of the video will have a big impact on the number of views for the video. Here are two examples that I worked on, one for Appcelerator and one for Cloudera.

Product Video - produce multiple videos of the product. The length of the video can vary between 15 seconds and 5 minutes. The basic product video in Silicon Valley is a 5 minute screencast made with Telestream ScreenFlow on the Mac or Camtasia on Windows. The voice of the engineer that built the product is usually used for audio.

Promote Videos - there are a number of techniques that we use to distribute and promote the videos. We've been continually developing different promotion techniques. Two general rules are to launch all content on the day of the launch and to cross-promote all the content in different channels. Obviously, there's a lot more strategy behind content promotion.

Corporate Blog - produce two different blog posts for the corporate blog, one with technical details and vision of the product. The other blog post, usually by the CEO or head of the business unit for the product, talks about the business benefits of the product to customer. Include links from the blog posts to all the different content - videos, Twitter feed, product demos. Save blog posts for the day of launch.

Twitter Management - Build up the Twitter following on the day of the launch. It is important that you define the voice of your Twitter feed in your internal planning document. The Twitter feed should have the personality of a single persona or person. Push out valuable content that other people will want to retweet. Remember, if you're not getting any retweets, then what you have to say on Twitter is not interesting. Sorry, but these are the harsh realities of social media. I'm not suggesting that every Tweet should be retweeted by someone. However, if you don't get any retweets at all in a day, then you need to change your strategy.

Direct Email - Time direct email campaigns with the press release and include all relevant links to social media content and channels. Use the direct email to drive followers to Twitter and viewers to the blog. If the email list is of your existing community of customers, then provide special information or special privileges such as access to special videos before the general public.

Other Progams - Depending on the company, you could may implement strategies for Facebook, LinkedIn, IRC, and message forums. The work required to update a Facebook page is usually minimal. We generally don't use Facebook applications in our campaigns, primarily due to the cost and complexity of producing a Facebook application. Since we're primarily a PR firm, it's easier for us to produce text and videos.

The key to getting results in a social media campaign is that all the different components must be used together, linking to each other, and using a common set of messages.

I do agree with many of my colleagues that social media is a little over-hyped now days. Sure, I know that it is definitely the future and gets great results today. However, it is not the silver bullet that will cure all problems. Traditional media channels are still very much alive and must be managed effectively. However, if that is all you are doing, it is definitely not enough.

If the work to manage all the channels seems daunting, take a step back and focus on streamlining the process for traditional channels. Social media is not something that can be ignored. I can guarantee you that your competition is either implementing a social media strategy today or is planning to launch one tomorrow.

Social Media Sabre Award

My colleague Jenna Boller recently wrote about a social media campaign she ran for our client. The campaign is a finalist in the SABRE awards software category. The campaign was called Who's the Next Open Source Idol? and involved videos of open source mascots dancing and encouraging the public to dance on video. We're competing for the award against A&R Edelman for Adobe, Access Communications for Intuit, and Waggener Edstrom for Microsoft.

We ran the campaign in August of 2008 at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. This was one of the first social media campaigns we did at Page One. It's also one of the few campaigns where we tried to focus on humor to get the content to go viral.

Humorous videos are generally high-risk. They often take a lot more time than planned and can fall flat. In order to deliver more value to our clients, Page One has started to focus on more conservative video concepts such as vision videos and screen casts. These are lower risk and easier to produce within a fixed budget.

I was pleased that SABRE award made me remember that sometimes people take big risks with campaigns and produce great results.

This campaign was also unique because the video was produced by a social media team that wasn't on the account. This social media team was created just for the project by combining people from different accounts. Since this campaign, we've moved to a process where the account team is also responsible for social media.

The process to generate the idea for the campaign was also unique. For this campaign, multiple people developed ideas for the campaign. We had a meeting where different ideas were brought up by different people. We selected the best idea. We've now moved closer to a formulaic approach to content creation based on a handful of templates.

The notice that we're a finalist for the SABRE award caused me to reflect back on the old campaign and the management process for the campaign.

I feel that we've made the social media campaign process more efficient in the last few months and the campaigns are easier to manage from a business perspective. However, I think that we should take another look at our campaign development process and question whether or not we're creating an environment to foster maximum creativity and enthusiasm from everyone.

In particular, I would like to try to form temporary teams of people from different accounts to come up with different ideas for a campaign. Instead of developing the ideas during the meeting, each person would come to the meeting and briefly present their idea. We could then decide on the best idea, either as a group or a combination of group and manager.