Experiment 2:

My second experiment involved messaging and how much interaction cans a personality or twitter brand can have with its followers. Yet again I decided to take a twitter alias(@socialmediabot2)  as I’m far from the average twitter user. Going to wefollow I decided to follow 50 people (close to the average of 69 )  and posted intermittently hoping perhaps for some interaction with who I’m following … a bit of a downfall of this experiment lack of true connection with people.

Afterwards, starting on the Monday morning I started posting messages from another account. 1 for every half hour for 7.5 hours for a total of 14 with the messages ( TEST #_ )  to see how this would be viewed on my feed. I wanted to see how the everyday  messaging from the people I followed would fit with the planned ‘corporate’ messaging and whether it would overload my feed and possibly cause me to want to unfollow the account

The Result:

Twitter Overload

As you can see there are portions of my feed where the messaging overlapped, for a casual user of twitter this may just be too much!  Especially for accounts with little customer interaction (  just sharing links, company news etc) a strong consideration will have to be  made regarding how many times to post daily will work to allow you to build and retain your audience.

Overall Takeaways:

Twitter is still a difficult area to get solid data from and you can’t just jump on twitter hoping for success in your campaigns or awareness.It takes planning and organization but even then trial and error is needed. I think something that is often missed with twitter  for heavy users like myself  is we forget that the vast majority of people don’t follow hundreds of people or have the equivalent # of followers .

They follow friends and organizations that they are close to and that needs to be considered when planning out a campaign. While heavy twitter users may be able to withstand messaging it probably would be seen as spam to these casual users. I think an excellent example of how to avoid this sort of twitter spam is from Best buy and their Twelpforce where they have once central account but many separate support accounts.

Have any questions/comments ? Contact me at kevin@kevrichard.com or send me a twitter message .

Experiment #1:

I think a lot of twitter users have come across the messages “Get more followers now” or ” Get X amount of followers today” and despite the general sentiment of  quality of followers over quantity I’m sure everyone even for a moment  where slightly tempted by this thinking that that more followers equals more people to get their messaging out to.  This is especially relevant  to  traditional marketing mediums as  more eyes =more marketing awareness= more customer action = money!  So I decided to put this to the test, can someone get tons of followers overnight using these follower programs.

The Scenario:

Starting off with an empty account ( @socialmediabot1) I joined the following  social media following programs:

• www.tweetswarm.com
• www.gatherfollowers.com
• http://www.getmoretwitterfollowers.info

Initially I started following 19 people and I noticed with all 3 of these programs that there were paid for premium options ( so basically paying for followers)  I also noticed that I almost immediately started sending out auto posts from these programs.  From there I left the account completely alone to let the followers come in, opting not to send out anything to not influence the result based on my content.

Result:

#FAIL

I started @socialmediabot1 on a Friday night, deciding to leave it  over the weekend. Checking it once I noticed that I was following over 100 people and had just 19 followers, no where close to the promised massive amounts of followers.  At the end of this experiment I come to above picture, no followers and 12 auto tweets and a suspended account.  I wasn’t completely surprised.

Conclusion:

I am by no means a great twitter user but my account certainly didn’t popup over night and I certainly didn’t expect this one to. A major marketing/branding implication of this is communities need to be built and  its not a matter of massively following people or hoping that  people  run to your brand. Relationships need to be formed  and this takes a lot of time and effort.

Often times I feel that platforms like twitter are advertised as a panacea for marketing and that suddenly you’ll see huge results. FALSE! Like all marketing efforts hard work needs to be invested and careful planning and organizing should be done.  Social Media is just another touch point to your customers, the only ‘magic’ there is the opportunity to have further communications with customers and the general public.

I’d like to hear  what you  think about twitter and  any of your thoughts on  best cases or usage scenarios for companies and organizations so please feel free to leave a comment, send me a twitter message or email me at kevin@kevrichard.com .

The even larger issue to this story is the internet footprint that this student criticism has left. Discussion (or destruction) of this logo can be found on blogs,  facebook, twitter ( #uwlogo, #pewpew, #uwlogogate) ,and even a mashup on youtube. Resulting from this there was also some negative news coverage .  With all of this ridicule and critism its hard to say if this logo is really usable anymore, it was supposed to have all of this meaning for the university but now its just well….

Image from Steve Sauve

Picture from Brad Bushell

This article from the Imprint (Waterloo’s student newspaper) hits the issue right on the head. While there was a lot of concern over making the university more visible for external audiences, they had completely left the students out of the process and as a result of  seeing this logo all at once instead of over time  the logo came  as a big shock. By not being consulted, students felt little connection to the logo and immediately felt negatively towards it. As a result of this negative sentiment Waterloo has had to work hard to do damage control.

I feel there are two lessons to be learned from this whole situation. Firstly stakeholders (customers, employees, shareholders etc) through social media are gaining a lot of power when it comes to public perception of an organization. Their complaints and criticisms are now becoming much more public and can often drown out the organization itself.

But also by not involving your stakeholders in organizational change, you will create a large reaction when it does get released whether planned or unplanned in this case. My alma mater Ryerson University is going through drastic changes as well but with a different approach. By involving the whole community in what it calls ‘The Master Plan’ stakeholders are buying in and while there may be detractors to some parts of the planning , overall members have been very open to discussion and working towards improvement.

Applying this to a business or another organization,  it’s much more manageable and probably a more positive experience to keep your stakeholders involved in the process of major organizational change rather than keeping them in the dark. As much as organizations would like to control the message  its impossible without having all those involved on side and to have that it can’t be forced it has to be earned.

The Campaign:

Coming in Spring of this year Nissan Canada is looking to release the Nissan Cube, an entry level vehicle positioned to compete with the likes of the Scion xB and the Kia Soul among others. These cars are targeted towards a younger audience  but follow along the same shape,size and price so a large portion of how these cars will be competing is on personality and emotional connection with the car( personalization options, community etc).

Rather than go for the traditional route of placing advertisements which have little interaction and communication with the customer, Nissan through agency Capital C has opted to release the Cube differently and has decided to rely entirely on Social media to get its message out. The campaign called Hypercube which started in March relies on users of  social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter  to get people talking about Nissan’s new product  before it launches and build connection and strong interest among a potential customer base.

The Hypercube portal

How did they do this?

By setting up landing pages on Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace a competition was started where Canada’s creative  population (considered influencers in this car’s segment) compete for the opportunity of owning one of 50 Nissan Cubes. Starting as a  free for all ‘audition’ people would register through a main portal (hypercube.ca)  where they are then whittled down through the use of audition profiles to 500 users who then must vie not only for the daily votes of their peers through whichever creative means possible, but impress a panel of judges who will in turn give away 50 of the little Cubes. Each of the 500 participants are provided with a ‘canvas’ where  they may direct votes and be as creative as possible with. After the cars have been awarded winners are then obligated to post online about how they  use and customize their newly won cars to demonstrate the usability and personality of this product.

Canvas of Hypercube contestant Michel Savoie

Outside of this contest Hypercube’s fans are not forgotten. People still interested in this contest/car still  remain engaged in this campaign. Not only are the encouraged to check out each participants canvas and vote but  through the social network Twitter  they are interacted with and encouraged to build community. With posts in French and English @thehypercube interacts and gives mention to people who create content  or ask questions about the  Hypercube  and the campaign, and more recently has even directly interacted with  fans through the formation of Hypercube meetups.

Hypercubist Rannie Turingan :

Having consistently received Twitter messages, group requests and hearing about it in my interactions with him I figured by mentioning him in this blog post he might leave me alone! I kid! I feel he’s done a very good job in interacting with and building upon his social networks and with his success deserves the mention.

Using his Twitter nickname @photojunkie Rannie posses the question: ” Where should PhotoJunkie go in his Nissan Hyper Cube in Toronto?” Within his canvas Rannie uses his talents as a freelance photographer and takes panorama photographs at  many known and unknown locales in Toronto demonstrating to people a new side of where they live ( many of his followers reside in Toronto).

Rannie's HyperCube Canvas

But I think this is only half of why he is currently at #18 of 500 participants. A very important part of his run for the car is the fact that he engages his network and makes them feel that they play a direct role in his success.  Yes there is the constant posts and messages received by him asking “have you voted for me today”  but its also  like he’s bringing fans with him on these Panorama’s (in some cases actually doing so). Including a counter of photos’ distance traveled and total campaign stats he lets people know of his progress.

Roy Thompson Hall Panorama

Another important aspect of his Hypercube campaign is that he also directly involves his fans in the creation of these pictures, on a consistent basis  he asks for suggestions of new photo locations as well as encourages people to tag along and be part of the locale itself.  In this regard Rannie has harnessed what social media and word of mouth marketing aims to do and that is having people feel like they are part of the story and an active participant  rather than having a message blasted in their face. By voting for him participants feel like they are part of his winning, almost like they are winning themselves.

Along with hearing some of the insights from  members of this elite ( or L33T) group, the theme of the night was ‘The Kickass Green Event’ talking about green business, and the Canadian environment. All in all really good speakers:

-Leslie Domenico from Green Enterprise Toronto spoke about sustainable and green business within Toronto ( big focus on local sourcing and equitable business) 

-Linda Mortsch from Environment Canada gave an intense wake up call about the state of global warming and how its going to affect our planet.

-Andy Thomson blew me away twice, first with his amazing presentation skills ( when you can tear 50+ business people from conversation to pay attention to you, thats what I call having  presence!) and after with his presentation on green homes with  the interesting idea of a green trailer park which was less trailer trash and more loft living in a forest. 

I unfortunately had to dash to another meeting I had, but  afterwards there was a presentation from Bikes without Borders which probably rocked as well, they sound like an inovative not for profit organization which I look forward to reading more about, perhaps getting involved sometime in the future(Linkage).

Overall, it was a good night even despite having to cut it short. I’m really exited to  become more involved in the LOKBP ( for more about what they are  check out here! )  this is definitely a group  that while making me feel insignificant because I’m not fully kick ass (yet!)  it also makes me want to learn and expand  myself  and  bring myself to that level.

 If you perhaps are a kick as business person who just happened to stumble upon my blog twitter @SeanMoffitt as not only is he the ‘big kahuna’ of the group , I’m sure he’d be happy to have you aboard.   The next  LOKBP event  Kick ass Design, will be happening March 4th ( so far away!) and  Sean is also begining to get together a group of Under 30 years  KBP group as well!  Pretty exciting stuff.                                          

Thats it for me, back to my chill friday night! Got any  Questions/Comments? Contact me at kevin.richard@ryerson.ca or send me a twitter message.