Nike makes grass roots investment count

Last week saw Nike's second burst of activity to support their #Makeitcount campaign. It was perfectly timed on Wednesday 29th February - an extra day to make it count.

Here's the wrap from the Metro...

 

I've already talked about why i rate this campaign here. Having set out a clear vision at the start of the year with Olympic hopefuls, this second burst starts to deliver a little more authenticity through grass roots organisations and allows Nike to benefit from some of the long term partnerships and initiatives it has invested in over the last few years. 

Take their running club for example, it has become a community in its own right (55,000 fans at the last count) lending real credibility (and genuine advocacy) to any broader Nike campaigns it's associated with such as this one. It doesn't just put the brand's belief into practice, it places the product at the centre of the experience with consumers undertaking an almost weekly pilgrimage to a Nike store itself to meet like minded runners, share stories, get advice and start the run. 

Press ad drives wannabe runners to the 55,000 strong Facebook community

The campaign drives further awareness
around Nike running clubs nationwide 

 

 

 

A partnership i hadn't come across before was The London Basketball School. The facebook page had 4,000 (fairly active) likes early on Wednesday morning and had a real grass roots community feel to it. Further investigation on the LSB website revealed Nike to be a founding partner along with the likes of Sport England, Mayor of London and GLL who own a number of leisure complexes in London and the South East. All of which are helping to create more opportunities for youngsters to play basketball.

Nike helped to launch this scheme in the Spring of 2010 and brought Kobe Bryant along especially (see film at the bottom of this post). It's a great example of Nike supporting grass roots sport through a long term partnership rather than simply badging an existing group. The payback on something like this is never going to be immediate, it's a long term investment, but the independent nature of this group doesn't just give the scheme more credibility, it gives Nike itself more credibility when it chooses to reference it in advertising and events as it did on the 29th.

The LSB featured on Nike's press advertising

An LSB 3on3 event takes place at the London Eye on the 29th,
players could apply the day before on the facebook page

This notion of grass roots training and opportunity for all is closely aligned with the original LOCOG vision of getting kids playing more sport again and as a non sponsor, it's a major coup for Nike to be working in collaboration with the Mayor's office in such an important year - another blow landed against adidas - and another generation of teenage Londoners growing up with a deeper emotional connection to the Nike brand.  

Here's the launch from a couple of years back...

Real life experiences in decline at #SMWLDN

After a week of suitably social get togethers at social media week, it's becoming clear that people are less and less interested in that most common of occurances - every day real life.

You couldn't move for Ipads and Iphones - videoing, instagraming, tweeting, and live streaming their way through the very seminar they had signed up for days earlier.

It's bad enough at gigs, but i reckon 75% of people at events i attended couldn't have told you what had just happened in the same room as them - which could be a reflection of the information overload age we live in, craving soundbytes over in depth discussion and thinking, or it could just be a reflection of the subject matter being discussed.

Either way, i thought i was in genuine danger of being thrown out for turning up with something as analogue as a pencil and paper... my battery didn't run out though.

My highly controversial note taking technique at London Social Media Week

Social Media Week

Social Media Week kicked off on Monday and here in London there are more seminars and events than you can shake a stick at. Once you've discounted the sales pitches your still left with a handful worth attending.

One such session was run by Ogilvy at the Design Council yesterday. It featured a panel including Amex (who recently launched the Link Like Love app), IBM and Ford (who launched the Explorer 2011 on facebook). The hour long discussion gave an interesting insight into how big businesses have adapted to the seismic shift in brand communications created by the rise of social.

Three things of particular interest...

1. Social was equally important internally - used in the right way it can galvanise the workforce internally and have a huge impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of internal process, even more so when different global offices are collaborating on projects

2. Culture eats strategy for lunch - coined by Jon Mell of IBM, i liked this phrase. We've all been there - it doesn't matter how good your strategy is, or your social team are, or even how switched on your marketing director is... if the culture throughout the business isn't right, the business is unlikely to accept change and in turn, is unlikely to embrace social. So that means getting buy in from the top down and engaging everyone within the organisation be it through the CEO using You Tube videos at Amex, employees writing the social media guidelines or reverse mentoring.

3. Measurement is still a challenge - this is turning into a real bug bear for me. Too many speakers and agencies are talking about social in a way that carefully sidesteps the golden question about proving return on investment. The client knows what they're getting when £200k goes into TV or into a sales promo, so it's only fair they understand what the return is if it goes into social. Ford's Alex Hultgren gave a well reasoned argument for taking the debate away from ROI and into long term employee and consumer value and the notion of 'calculated risk taking' and constantly working in Beta were interesting points that I'll return to in a post at a later date.

In the meantime, if you fancy attending an event, they run until Friday night and most are free, just sign up here.

Return of the Tiger bread story

I received a few tweets last week that lead here. Bitter Wallet had picked up on a particularly friendly bit of customer service from Sainsbury’s who had received a letter from Lily (aged 3 and a half) who thought tiger bread ought to be renamed giraffe bread.

What’s interesting is that despite loads of coverage on Twitter and FB, the article and the whole incident, took place last June.  Only this January have we seen a second spike of activity which has been larger than the original viral effect last year.

This chap has looked at what made it spike again and it seems we can base the phenomenon on 4 factors.

Two obvious ones:

1. A great response from Sainsbury’s to spark the ‘story’

2. A key influencer posting the image on FB to a large number of active fans

And then more importantly:

3. Media blogs and key (media) individuals amplifying through their own personal networks

4. The ability to better share images on face book now (versus last summer)

All of that has culminated in a bigger second spike, resulting in national media coverage and Sainsbury’s changing the name of their bread yesterday.

Which they’re now promoting on Twitter…

A few things to think about:

1.   Images are less of a turn off, they are quicker, easier and  stand more chance of being shared than copy – even though this was an image of two letters!

2.   Old news isn’t necessarily old news, interesting content endures and doesn’t serve as a barrier if people have never seen the content before and trust the source

3.   The importance of connectors, in this case media industry individuals and a few ‘trend threads’ such as contagious, purely because of how interconnected and active (professionally and personally) most employees are on social networks, compared to the norm. This provided a tipping point in Jan that didn’t appear to materialise last year, and this increased noise has since propelled the story into mainstream media including The Sun and The Telegraph.

4.  Finally, nothing beats a good bit of customer service. It’s a mark of how thin on the ground it is when acts such as this garner such widespread interest. Many brands spend months discussing ideas that could ‘go viral’, when in truth, to get talked about all you really have to do is please your customer and they’ll do the rest.

The importance of on going dialogue

A recent study in the run up to Christmas in the states by Mr Youth has found that brands are only responding to just over half of brand page posts (61% on Twitter and 55% on Facebook to be exact). It highlights an on-going challenge for brands and their social media presence – once you’ve taken the plunge, how do you maintain it?

In reality, there is no better approach than a ‘community manager’ installed within the brand’s business itself. A third party manager can delay response times (while seeking approvals), feel less authentic and often lead to higher costs but that’s still better than the biggest crime of all - an unresponsive brand. This role can’t just be 10% of someone’s job, in fact it’s more than likely going to turn into a full time one, but direct interaction with the customer will usually prove to be extremely valuable not just in building a stronger relationship and reputation for the brand, but ultimately in driving a higher rate of sales conversion and loyalty.

Whether that’s through improving customer support services through Twitter like DELL, providing real time flight information when the weather has caused chaos like EasyJet or simply answering sales enquiries – indeed the same study found that those brands that did invest in on-going conversations with interested consumers benefited from an impressive conversion rate: 80% of users that received a response went on to purchase.

The future looks good for F-commerce

In 2006, Dr Robert Cialdini set out six universal  principles in order to understand the art of influence and persuasion.

Recent studies on the first F-commerce sites to launch worldwide highlights the natural advantage that social networks, particularly Facebook hold in being able to capitalise on these psychological traits. A full info graphic was developed by tabjuice and can be viewed here.

Social Proof: 81% of customers seek reassurance from friends and family members on social networking sites before purchasing products

Authority: 77% of online shoppers use reviews to make purchase decisions

Scarcity: 77% of people like getting exclusive offers that they can redeem via Facebook. We assign more value to products that are less available

Like: 50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on the recommendation of the people they follow (and like) on social networks. We follow those we like and do the things they do

Consistency: Purchases made from the brands we trust reinforce our future shopping patterns, 61% of online shoppers are more likely to be brand loyal

Reciprocity: We have an innate desire to repay favours in order to maintain social fairness, whether those favours are invited or not – and this is the very essence of Facebook, the connect and deals services will encourage this sharing behaviour yet further.

Do consumers really need to participate?

It’s been flavour of the month for a few years now but we’re still seeing brands use the misguided objective of consumer participation and ‘engagement’ within their communications and as a direct result of that, they continue to ask far too much of consumers themselves.

Like any objective, ‘engagement’ needs to be measurable – what exactly do we mean by engaging somebody? And to what degree? Getting a ‘like’ on Facebook is not going to tick that box as the widely circulated example from Futurelab illustrates…

Futurelab’s analysis of the 20 most-fanned celebrities on Facebook reveals that the number of “core fans” is significantly lower than the actual fan count. To compute the core fan count, the number of times each fan has commented on the page was calculated, and then the average taken - any fan whose comment count is higher than the average was classified as a “core fan”.

As of 12 May 2011, Eminem had over 41 million fans and Lady Gaga over 39 million fans. But the  average number of posts per fan for Eminem’s fan page was 1.17 while the average number of posts per fan for Lady Gaga was 1.82.

Eminem’s core fan count (i.e. fan whose comment count is higher than the average) is a paltry 575 and Lady Gaga core fan count is just 1,231. That’s just 0.001% and 0.003% of their overall fan numbers.

The lack of engagement doesn’t stop there. Because of the way content from fan pages syndicates into Facebook users’ news feeds. Unless someone has actively interacted with your page, they won’t receive your updates.  So the content is unlikely to be amplified and spread amongst fans and their own networks.

Brands need to recognise that a great idea can achieve active participation amongst the few, the challenge is how to best amplify this idea and participation in a way that will connect with the broader audience, often through mass communications that use the idea to reflect on the business as a whole. There are parallels with sponsorship – it’s often quoted that you need to be spending twice as much on the activation of your sponsorship as the contract cost itself. I touched upon O2’s use of their ‘priority’ service last week and after reading an excellent post Martin Weigel’s blog “The Enduring Power Of Stuff That Isn’t Useful And Why ‘Utility’ Will Not Overthrow Magic”, I thought these two further examples from Best Buy and Nike were also particularly pertinent given how well known both examples are, and how they are often cited for their successful participatory nature.

By 2010, Best Buy’s Twelpforce had responded to over 29,000 questions and accumulated 26,837 followers on Twitter. But consider this, it was the largest electronic retailer in the country - it takes a lot of shoppers to generate revenues of $4.4 billion in the month of December 2010. Consider too the sheer breadth of its offering, and that there are 245,267,292 people aged 15 years and over in the United States many of whom will presumably be in the market for some kind of electrical goods. And remember that the service was promoted through TV advertising as well as in-store-messaging. Suddenly it begins to feel as if that utility was actually delivered to and experienced directly by a relatively small population.

The Twelpforce had a much wider role than helping specific users, the mere availability of this service worked to elevate the brand’s reputation as being knowledgeable and responsive amongst a much broader population, even though they never took advantage of the service.

Another example is that of Nike+

According to data from the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, in 2010 no less than 46,002,000 Americans ran or jogged 50+ days a year. Set against this, Nikeplus.com has a total global membership of close to 2,000,000. So given that the vast majority of the world’s runners clearly have not adopted Nike+, again one has to ask - does the big contribution of Nike+ lie in delivering an undoubtedly brilliant piece of utility to a few millions of committed, serious runners? Or does it lie in what that innovation communicates to the broader market for running gear? And what it does to sustain and bolster Nike’s running credentials - the roots of the company?

So rather than judging participatory ideas on immediate ROI or expecting mass participation and widespread ‘engagement’, brands need to instead consider the potential wider impact that a relatively small participation base could achieve.

Poppy appeal: the social opportunity

The poppy appeal has swung into action this week with even more opportunities to get involved and show your support. While there's huge amounts of content online it does strike me that it's the same supporters seeking out this online content who support it tirelessly offline.

There's nothing wrong with that, they are a great (and significant) group of influencers, but the poppy is such a symbolic emblem with widespread relevance to all, that it feels like a great opportunity to reach out to a younger audience through social media, rather than relying on existing supporters to visit the brand site. Here's an example we produced for Beatbullying that took the message to people rather than expecting them to come and find it on the charity's dotcom site. In this instance we had to raise awareness in order to try and affect Governemnt policy.

So in regard to the Poppy appeal, why for instance can't i donate through Facebook to recieve a virtual poppy on my face book profile for the next 11 days? And in so doing alert my network to the fact that i'm wearing my poppy?

I found this twitterpoppy app built by a 3rd party that does just that on Twitter. Hopefully it gains enough traction this year to be delivered in an official capacity next year and hopefully monetised to ensure that the Royal British Legion can continue to offer support to all of those that need it.