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Social Media Lessons from Rage Against The Machine V X-Factorby Andrew Redfern @ 21st December 2009 6:45 pm Facebook
The recent internet campaign to get Rage Against the Machine to the Christmas number one in Britain has been described as a “protest against the X Factor monotony” and an attempt to break Simon Cowell’s stranglehold on the pop charts. What started out as a Facebook group rapidly became an online sensation, and eventually gathered enough support to successfully install the US rock band’s 1992 hit “Killing in The Name” at the top of the Christmas charts ahead of X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s debut “The Climb”. The campaign, dubbed “Rage Against the X Factor”, shows just how influential online media, particularly social media, can be in spreading your message to the masses. There are countless lessons that can be learned from this story and applied to your business’s marketing strategy. First and foremost, it is important to make your content interesting; people won’t interact with boring, generic messages. Make sure your content is engaging, and different to what has been seen previously. You should also encourage your message to be passed onto the masses. Word of mouth is one of the most effective methods of distribution, so you should proactively ask users to champion your message to others. An example of a recent success for Hit Search is our work with Secure Trust Bank. We released a video of the bank’s Chief Executive discussing current events in the banking industry. This video was distributed online during the height of the financial crisis, and portrayed a positive outlook of Secure Trust Bank, showing that not all banks had been acting frivolously. The video became a massive success, spreading the name of Secure Trust Bank throughout the online world. As well as the content, the timing of your social media campaign is absolutely crucial. Christmas can be somewhat of a slow news time for most, but Rage Against the X Factor began at just the right time for the story to gather momentum. Look at the big news stories of the day, are there any issues that are relevant to your campaign? A good marketing campaign can make use of a national news story to maximise its own coverage. Your campaign should be structured so that it is prepared for any unexpected developments within your business. For example, during Eurostar’s recent spell of cancellations and delays, its social media strategy changed from being an online marketing tool, to a method of providing updates to its customers on the escalating chaos. The power of social networking sites should not be underestimated when it comes to distributing your content. The Rage Against the X Factor campaign started life as a Facebook group, then spread rapidly around the web as it attracted more and more members. Before long the campaign had extended onto other networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace, and Bebo. The nature of these sites ensured that the campaign stretched not just across Britain, but right around the world. Utilising social media in this way can ensure maximum online exposure for your campaign. Lastly, it is important to remember that online mediums alone will not make for a successful campaign. The traditional press (newspapers, TV, radio, etc.) is just as important as the internet as a marketing medium, and is absolutely necessary if your campaign is to reach its full potential. Web Translation Engine for Facebook usersby Andrew Redfern @ 2nd October 2009 2:48 pm Facebook
If you are looking to translate your website into another language, Facebook has developed a free service called “Facebook Connect”. The Social Networking site has developed and used a similar application since January 2008, translating its original content into 65 different languages. Paid advertising on social media becoming more popularby Andrew Redfern @ 14th August 2009 12:50 pm Facebook
It has been highlighted recently how more and more big name brands are turning to social media outlets for their advertising. A report in today’s Financial Times reports that Facebook is now attracting input from global giants such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola. Facebook is an interesting case study because it allows companies to establish a presense on their site for free using it’s Pages funtction. This is complemented by a paid advertising system that displays targetted ads on the right hand side of the screen. As Facebook’s chief operating officer points out “If you look at people’s profile pages, you’ll see a lot of commercial activity even without advertising.”and this makes it an excellent medium for building up a promotional presence. The advantage inherent with social media sites like this is that the very nature of the sites makes it extremely easy to target ads at specific users. The advertising systems can cross-match the data contained in user profiles with the parameters selected by advertisers in order to get their ads showing to a very specific target audience. The problem social media advertising has is a question of user motivation. If someone is search on Google they are actively looking for something, generally users are not looking for products and services whilst on sites like Facebook. Therefore the types of promotion highlighted needs to change, the focus should generally be on informational content and event announcements. This is key to running a successfull social media advertising campaign with a tangible return on investment. It is essential to be providing something that will be of interest to a user rather than trying to meet a pre-existing demand as with systems like Google adWords. Also it is fair to say that currently the model for dedicated social media advertising is very much B to C, there is little evidence to suggest the benefits of a B to B campaign using Facebook. LinkedIn, which has a much more corporate model, is served by the Google Placement Network. So social media advertising with it’s targetting advantages is opening up a new avenue for companies wanting to advertise however it is not as simple as just picking your audience and running your ads. A report in today’s Telegraph highlights research that shows that despite it’s growing popularity social networking adverts fail to engage with over 90% of users. The article quotes Liane Dietrich, managing director of affiliate network company LinkShare
This shows how picking the right message and displaying it in the right way is vital to the success of a social media advertising campaign. They do however offer unparalled accuracy in reaching the exact audience advertising are hoping ot engage with and so, if the underlying message is engaging enough, offer outstanding value for money. Facebook Lite in Beta Testing - Is This The Twitter Killer?by Andrew Redfern @ 12th August 2009 4:52 pm Facebook
News broke today, that facebook has sent out thousands of invitations to its users who have been selected to test their new version of the Facebook website. Facebook lite as it will be known, is simply as it says, a lite version of facebook. Although a lot of people may think this is small news, facebook try to revamp by making it smaller. It may be big news as many people out there use more than one social network due to their own personal likes and dislikes. With an awful lot of people using both facebook and twitter to stay in touch with their friends and family. What is Facebook Lite like? If you consult the screen shot below then you will see that it does look a little bit like twitter updates.
Twitter, Facebook and Google In Botnet Attack- But Was It Really The Russian?by Andrew Redfern @ 7th August 2009 1:53 pm Facebook
Internet users around the globe yesterday were left reeling as several top sites suffered from Denial of Service or severely reduced performance. Sites including Google, Live Journal, Facebook and Twitter all suffered in what has been described as a “Massive and Sustained Attack”. Rumours are circulating throughout the internet as to the origination of the attack. Already the finger has been pointed at Russian in an added dimension to the Russian- Georgian conflict. The specific attack was aimed at a Pro Georgia blogger called Cyxymu who had accounts with all the sites targeted in the attack. Georgia and Russia had a “five day war” last year resulting in a stand-off between the two countries, tensions have remained high between the two ever since. Blogger site Live Journal, have claimed to have battled through the attack and was least affected. The nature of the attack was a “Denial of Service” attack, targeting the accounts of Cyxymu across several blog and social network sites. Typically this is achieved by hackers taking control of infected machines and in unison bombarding servers with requests for internet pages. If the group of infected machines (Botnet) is large enough, then they will succeed in overwhelming the server. Twitter have gone on record to say “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack.” Become visible in a changing world- HitSearch. Internet Marketing, Video & Facebook Marketing - Are You Missing Outby Andrew Redfern @ 6th July 2009 11:44 am Facebook
Internet marketing has taken a massive change in the past year or two. When everyone was just concerned about links from other sites and rankings in the natural search engines, then internet marketing was a whole lot easier to implement. Now we have a variety of ways to successfully market business’ online. Video marketing is becoming huge, with websites such as youtube where an average of 100 million videos are watched on a daily basis, its no wonder people turn to this as a way to market their product. Its probably easier to have a press release on youtube as a video presentation format to enable you to get your message across in a lighter way than just a text based article that people would very rarely finish. This is also fantastic for media companies who wish to use it as a way to get their dvds and films in the public eye. Facebook marketing and other social networking websites are also a great way to target a large number of people. As people love using these sites, then advertisements are never usually frowned upon as they sit within the context of the site and don’t over power, they do however, get placed in a way in which they will get seen by a huge number of the users. Facebook has grown so quickly to an extent where they have 200 million active users and more than 100 million log onto the site atleast once a day. With internet marketing having this new look, you could well be missing out on a huge number of visitors or sales every single day with a poorly manged and out of date marketing strategy. If you are interested in learning how Internet Marketing can work for your website and want more information then contact Hit Search, Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click experts, on 0845 643 9289. Google Iran and Facebook Iran?by Andrew Redfern @ 25th June 2009 9:17 am Facebook
If mass huiman rights violations, nuclear dreams and dubious elections weren’t enough for the Iranian public to put up with, it turns out that they have had to live without the life affirming Google and Facebook aswell. How have they survived I hear you ask? Well Google and Facebook have decided that enough is enough, as the bastions of all that is right and fair they have come to the rescue in this act of true publicity stunt…..I mean act of of true altruism. While western journalist have used the UK language of the sites to file stories, up until now there has been no Farsi language versions. But fear not as Google have ridden into town on their Google-Translate horse of victory. Farsi has been added to the Google translator widget allowing the Iranian public to translate their posts into English before blogging and tweeting to the world. Many western human rights organisations welcome the news that Iranians will now have access to non-censored news. Thats our gift from the west Iran.. use it wisely! If we find out that all you do is blog about Susan Boyle we’ll take it back!! Nathan Barker Other Related Stories That May Be Of Interest:
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