You may have been asking yourself, "Sure, a blog is great for my knitting friends and Twitter seems to work for my neighbour who has a small bike-repair business –…
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This week I was lucky enough to attend the Canadian launch of Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2008 – Edelman’s ninth annual survey on trust and credibility.
The survey looked at the trust patterns of “opinion elites” in 18 countries – defined as people who:
- Are college-educated
- Report a household income in the top quartile of their country
- Are interested and engaged with the media, business news, and policy affairs.
For the purpose of this post I’ll just refer to “people,” as the term “opinion elites” makes my stomach turn. That’s who I mean, though.
The event was fascinating and gave me a great insight into the report. At the same time I enjoyed some great conversations around my lunch table, including a substantial discussion on social media. Most people only seemed familiar with the buzzwords (they threw the term “blog strategy” around with alarming frequency) so I took the opportunity to do a little social media 101 education.
One notable addition to this year’s survey was the addition of 25-to-34-year-olds for the first time, alongside the usual 35-to-64-year-old group. This gave them a great opportunity to explore how much younger people trust modern online tools like blogs and social networks.
Social Media Take-Aways
A few interesting Internet-related points from the survey:
1 CommentSomeone needs to tell the folks at Glad: Unless your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, don’t build an online community around your brand. That’s rule #1 in marketing with social media — and reason #1 for instead taking an approach we call reflected glory marketing. In reflected glory marketing you create a web site that resonates with your brand, but focuses on something your customer cares passionately about. Think of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, or Amex’s Members Project. Or think of some of the projects we’ve launched in-house: BC Hydro’s Green Gifts application for Facebook, or Vancity’s Change Everything.
In my keynotes and presentations about marketing with social media, I often make this point by referring to an over-the-top scenario: a company that tries to build an online community about plastic wrap. It seems obvious that people just aren’t that passionate about plastic wrap…..but it wasn’t obvious to the folks at Glad, who launched the 1000 Uses site in 2006 to promote their Press ‘N Seal product.
The site solicits tips on all the different ways you can use plastic wrap, organized by room. It’s got a very swishy interface that lets you click on different rooms in a house to see the fantastic things you can do there with plastic wrap. And it aims to incentivize user contributions with a chance to win $1000 each month by submitting a tip.
That’s a pretty generous prize, and it succeeded in eliciting well over 1000 tips between the site’s launch in October 2006, and the beginning of August 2007. At that point the site appeared to go into….hibernation. That’s right, not a single tip posted between August 2, and December 10.
Well, not a single tip published.
In an obsessive quest to plumb the psychological and managerial depths of the 1000 Uses team, I spent a rather enjoyable evening in early November coming up with tips that I hoped would give me a sense of the Glad team’s tolerance for creativity:
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