The distillery team is working from home - and like you, we’re figuring it out as we go. Read how our team across Europe and Asia-Pacific are making it work for them.
#PoweredbyPeople
We’ve been working with JustGiving on an exciting new campaign all about people power!
#PoweredbyPeople is all about how we as people encourage, support and power each other through challenges - like the London Marathon!
Social films featuring stories from JustGiving fundraisers urge everyone to share their own motivation stories on the hashtag #PoweredbyPeople across social networks.
The key message is that while every fundraiser is different, we all have one thing in common; we all have a support network of friends and family, and that one person who triggered the fundraising journey.
That's the heart of #PoweredbyPeople. Share your story by using the hashtag #PoweredbyPeople on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for yours...
5 Things To Think About When Introducing Snapchat To Your Brand
Today, Danielle Lauren shares her experience of using Snapchat for brands.
Danielle Lauren worked as a multi-platform creator and strategist for over 16 years. From traditional TV projects to innovative digital concepts. she has used her love of authentic storytelling, creative thinking and lateral problem solving to add her fingerprint to each project she works on. Her credentials include MTV, Sony, United Nations High Commission For Refugees, Sydney Opera House, Bacardi, Disney and Microsoft.
I recently completed the Social Media strategy and implementation for Sky’s first Asian Reality Drama Series Desi Rascals. Our narrative played across multiple social media platforms but one of our most successful was Snapchat. Every time we would release a SnapChat Story it would receive thousands of views, our audience loved it and it was by far our biggest growth area for Social Media Engagement. So the question is why?
Firstly, you need to think about what Snapchat is. For those still discovering this medium, Snapchat is a collection of short Snaps aka photos / videos / texts which are only live for a 24 hour period before they vanish into the internet ether. It’s immediacy makes it an alluring space to play in because if you don’t catch the feed early enough, you’ll miss it entirely. It’s particularly great if you’re working on a project that has daily updates or is based on an event that requires constant updating to be relevant. It’s an excellent social media tool but not every brand needs to use it. Depending where you are placed in the market will dictate whether or not you should be on Snapchat. Below are some things to think about when choosing to implement snapchat as part of your social strategy.
1. Know your demographic - Aim Low
Snapchat is not for everyone. According to TechInsider’s breakdown of Social Media Demographics, 45% of SnapChat users are aged between 18-24 in comparison to Facebook’s 16%.
What does this mean? Well SnapChat targets a younger audience. If you’re looking to get a tick of approval from teenagers and early twenties then you’ll most likely find them snapping away. If you’re representing a more sophisticated brand with an older skew, I’d recommend one of the other Social Networks.
Luckily for us, Sky 1 / Desi Rascals targeted families. Our ideal audience for Sky 1 were both parents and teenagers. What was wonderful about using Snapchat for our messaging, was that we knew there was a greater chance that the content we put out would most likely only be seen by our younger viewers, giving them a sense of exclusivity that they were slightly ahead of their parents when it came to Desi Rascals gossip. For teenagers who like to “know it all” it was a wonderful space to dabble because it provided them with an exclusive talking point with their friends where they could share with their parents content that wasn’t available anywhere else online.
2. Work with natural behaviour
When it comes to your brand, think honestly about whether it is a “natural” fit for SnapChat. What would be the daily stories? Why should people tune in? Are there already Snapchat users within your team who get the medium and can take advantage of it’s elements?
The majority of the Desi Rascals cast had their own Snapchat accounts before we started filming. Once we went to air, their Snapchat account followers sky rocketed significantly more than their Twitter and Instagram. It was becoming very clear that there was a natural audience who loved being able to access their instant stories. So we launched the “Desi Rascals Snapchat TakeOvers”. Instead of us curating the content, we allowed our show cast to “takeover” the accounts. We gave them the login details and guidelines and let them play. The by-product was our Snapchat accounts grew dramatically. Each time a fan tuned in for a story, they received a new cast member with an entirely new perspective. It was fun and intimate and paid dividends for us in terms of Social Media engagement. The best part was our cast didn’t need any training, they were naturals. We tried building the same level of engagement through Twitter and it wasn’t as successful because it wasn’t a space that felt “natural” for our cast to communicate on. Snapchat felt more intimate and private and allowed the Desi Rascals to feel they were opening up without as much public scrutiny as they would receive on Twitter. Of course this was an illusion but it worked well.
3. PLAY
On the day of our final episode we did a Snapchat free for all, where we gave all our cast members the Snapchat takeover and let them login whenever they wanted to upload stories. The results were fantastic. It was a “day in the life” of our Desi Rascals told by each of them chronologically throughout the day. It was a dynamic piece of Social Media which our fans LOVED that built significant amount of hype for our final episode. Social Media is meant to be fun, so I strongly suggest you play. One login does not equate to only one person holding the entire power over the account. Our most successful Snapchat days were when we handed over the keys to a group of people and let them use their creativity to tell their stories. It was profoundly brilliant as they drove the narrative and gave our audience a unique piece of content which they loved. This type of social media strategy would be particularly brilliant for an event as you could see all the elements come together on one timeline.
4. Cross Pollinate your messaging
On Desi Rascals we used our other platforms to promote our Snapchat. As our Snapchat methodology was “Snapchat Takeovers”, we would announce on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram who was taking over SnapChat for the day. This was useful because it guided our audience to tune in plus it encouraged a sense of missing out to those who weren’t already following us on Snapchat. Since our Desi Rascals community were highly engaged, they were very vocal about what they loved seeing and who was the best Snap Chatter. Nothing beats the personal marketing of your fans as their authenticity will resonate beyond any messaging you could provide. If you can win their approval you are set for success.
5. Leak your Snapchat
If a particularly brilliant piece of content was created for Snapchat, we would leak it onto YouTube and Facebook so that fans could see what they were missing out on. This should only be done occasionally if you want to get people tuning into Snapchat but it’s a brilliant way to maximise your content and its impact.
In conclusion
If you’re looking to implement Snapchat, set some time aside to explore the medium. Follow stories which resonate with your brand and borrow methods which will service your objectives. Most importantly have fun. Snapchat is a creative space to play and experiment so take the time to let your creative juices flow and get snapping.
#YOULOOKDISGUSTING
You might have seen this film circulating the internet, and for good reason.
We were lucky enough to meet Em at YouTube Space London recently, and now she’s started a huge social discussion on the topic of beauty standards online and in real-life.
We get loads of comments on the content we produce here at The Distillery, and we love reading (and responding to) all of them as it’s such a good way to really bring a community and a discussion to life.
We love that Em has built this piece of content around the comments she received. Bringing the audience right into the content creation has pushed them straight into the centre of the discussion.
Another great example of building content around community discussion is the Cyber Grand Prix winner at Cannes Lions 2015: The Droga5 campaign for Under Armour.
Comments can be an extremely powerful way to connect with your audience. You just have to be listening.
Building an Effective Online Video Strategy #DigitalSense
We've held Content workshops and strategy workshops for companies such as Google, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), JustGiving, Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), and Camden Council to name a few.
We also teach Online Video Strategy at University of the Arts London.
Don't just take our word for how important it is for your brand to get right, here's an expert, Jerry Daykin (Global Digital Director at Carat)
There's an increasingly clear argument that investing at least some part of your ad budgets into online video (OLV) simply makes good media sense - adopting a screen neutral & people focussed approach to TV planning should support moving 10-20% of your AV spend online simply to maximise reach, frequency & effectiveness. Furthermore as a range of digital platforms open up to video it's often the simplest way of having great content to run through your various online media pipes, but there's much more to OLV than just putting a TV ad on a new channel.
Understanding that you should be embracing online video and being clear on the best way to do that are quite different things. YouTube has for a while advocated a 'Hero, Hub, Hygiene (or Help)' approach and it remains a powerful framework for marketers looking to build an effective online video strategy – however it’s often talked about just as a content approach and it’s important to understand the full media implications too.
Hero Content
Occasional flagship pieces of content designed to really maximise the number of people you're reaching, put yourself at the heart of culture & conversation and in some ways to flag that you're a brand worth following. There are well known standout examples like Volvo's Epic Splits & Dove Sketches which deliver through powerful creative, though make no mistake their sheer scale and ultimate success is heavily driven by the paid media budgets behind them.
To this day it's a common mistake for marketers to place too much faith in the virality and earned media of their content, but however powerful your message it cannot drive business impact if people don't see it. Brands used to supporting TV ads with millions of dollars must realise that maximising the online video opportunity still means spending at least hundreds of thousands, not just their loose change. If you pay for a lot of people to see your hero content, and you make it really good, then don't be surprised if they share it on to millions more.
There's no firm rule on how long an online video can be, and powerful storytelling can draw people in for several minutes. Remember the importance of the first few seconds though, partly to draw people in to watch more and partly because on skippable adverts you want to make sure that the 80% of people who only watch a few seconds are still reminded of your brand.
Hub/Continuity Content
This is where you stop behaving like a traditional advertiser and start acting more like a content publisher, producing regular ongoing content throughout the year. Doing so can help you build up your own audience of subscribers but it's also a powerful way of extending your media continuity to be front of mind to potential consumers outside of your traditional campaign spikes.
This sort of 'always on' approach is again not just about putting lots of content out there, it's also making sure an impactful number of people see it - best practice is to set a meaningful threshold of the total audience you want to reach. As with Hero content it's easy to get lost in the noise so as well as extending your approach to content you need to find ways to stretch out campaign media investments too. Pepsi Max in the UK has shown the power of this approach, driving millions of views behind the #Unbelievable videos it produces almost every month – we often forget that Volvo Trucks was just one of a whole series of similar videos too.
Partnering with YouTube super users is an interesting opportunity both to affordably scale your production but also to tap into their inherent audiences and drive scale that way instead. Retargeting might not sound creatively exciting but it's a way in to telling truly sequential stories to the same person over a series of weeks or even months and is well worth considering.
Help/Personal Content
This has often been called 'hygiene', but it's hard to get truly excited about cleanliness, and a lot of OLV hygiene is more about channel management, platform setup and SEO anyway (thoughts for another day!). From a content perspective this is the opportunity to help your consumers out when they most need it, and answer some of their burning questions about the brand. Unilever's cross-brand 'All Things Hair' is one of the best examples of really living out this approach.
A good place to start is to look at the searches people are already making about your category & the topics you want to own and then creating content related to those, though be sure to stay true to what you ultimately want to communicate when broaching topics you wouldn't touch on in traditional comms. This needn't be an entirely passive approach either, feel free to create content around wider key interest areas and to use both SEO and paid search to make sure it's your content that shows up when people look.
This approach gets really exciting when you start exploring 'Personalised Marketing at Scale', building up a bank of content and then using programmatic media opportunities to serve that to people exactly as/when it’s most relevant to them. That might mean creating a range of different executions about different themes, tweaking aspects of a copy to stress a different message or even programmatic ways of altering the content itself.
Whatever approach you ultimately adopt it must start from (and ultimately be measured against) a clear brief focussed on business objectives. Views, impressions & shares may be indicators that you are moving in the right direction but you must keep reverting to a clear objective/change that you are aiming to achieve for your brand to be able to sense check your approach.
Read more about #DigitalSense here
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