Let human impulse do the foot work for you

Impulse, intrigue, curiosity and a requirement to feel involved and involve others in what is effectively gossip is a powerful force in our human nature.

I've recently been involved in a on-line campaign for a brand that harnessed the power of this need and combined it with social media to great effect. It got a serious message out to many people, which in turn did a great job of raising the awareness of the brand in question and their expertise in this area.

Social media is the perfect transport for this kind of interest and traffic generating work. It uses the conversational element of the technology to feed peoples intrigue and interest and encouraging them to involve others and share their personal facts or perspective on an issue.

The commitment required to manage a social media campaign can be one of the biggest turn-off's for marketeers considering using tools such as Twitter to promote a message or a brand.

It doesn't however necessarily require a vast commitment of resources and carefully worded on-brand responses to utilise the power of social media to your brands benefit.

All it can require is the careful generation of a perspective or perhaps statistical data that an individual can associate with themselves and then the functionality to share this with their community.

Intrigue and other human impulses that occur to us naturally will do the rest of the foot work.

Developing the idea that creates the perspective or data that others might want to share is the hard bit. Keeping it on brand and in tune with a brands key messages, also making the idea creative and interesting enough to entice people to get involved are a tricky combination.

Once achieved though there shouldn't be any need to start managing Twitter accounts or allocating resources to manage Twitter accounts, simply provide visitors the facility to tweet the result and let them promote the message for you.

Social media is still being treated very warily by some, sometimes you just need to take a step back and see what other approaches there may be, other than the obvious one that's staring you in the face.


Related articles:

What makes us social and is social media a good thing? - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/09/what-makes-us-social-and-is-social.html

A digital evolution for all agencies - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/09/digital-evolution-for-all-media.html

Why bother with social media - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/06/why-bother-with-social-media.html

Brands on Friendfeed - A different proposition to Twitter - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/08/brands-on-friendfeed-different.html

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