Virgin Active jumps on the Wimpy bandwagon
This week saw the fast food lovers in South Africa ablaze with Wimpy’s promotional offer of a free breakfast. The offer simply put was that Wimpy restaurants were offering their streaky bacon breakfasts for free between 7am and 8am on the 19th of January, 2012.
This however is not what I want to write about; I would rather like to talk about the stroke of guerrilla marketing mastery from Virgin Active.
Their offer broke on Twitter :
This tweet was sent out short ly after breakfast and encouraged non-Virgin Active clients the opportunity to take advantage of a free workout at any Virgin Active (bar Classic Clubs) and work off the extra calories they just took in with the free breakfast.
This is sheer brilliance because of the following :
- It cost Virgin Active NOTHING.
- When non-members go to a Virgin Active club, they need to sign in and give their phone and email details – thus making a FREE list to which Virgin Active can market.
- It piggy backed on a lot of FREE exposure that Wimpy had paved the way for. There was a lot of buzz about the free breakfast and Virgin Active slid in right on top of that.
The only criticism that I have is that Virgin Active could have used this opportunity far more than they did. The Virgin Active tweet went out on the 19th of January – the same day as the Wimpy special. Wimpy started making noise about their special a few days before the special and had a few media punting it. (This memeburn article highlights which media they used.)
I feel that Virgin Active ran their response as a quick fire way to jump on the bandwagon and failed to realise how powerful it could have been for them.
I would be really interested to hear from Virgin Active if they have any Online Mention tracking in place to see how far their tweet went and then further to that see how many receipts were handed in from the free Wimpy breakfast!
Social media for Entrepreneurs who want to be seen as experts online!
Entrepreneurs are arguably the lifeblood of a thriving economy. They are idea people; innovators; inventors and are driven by results (with a bit of cash thrown in for good measure. What an entrepreneur is not (by and large) is a marketer! The way that the internet has grown and developed has made “socal media” the biggest and greatest buzzword in marketing since the advent of the slice of bread. Entrepreneurs need a little guidance as to how to position themselves online, particularly if they are their brand.
How Do I become an Expert?
The name of the game here is “personal branding”. Simply put this means that the entrepreneur needs to understand what they stand for and ensure that everything they are pushing out via their social media profiles adheres to this philosophy.
A good friend of mine, Douglas Kruger, has crafted a motivational keynote presentation which highlights the basic “rules of engagement” when looking at how to position yourself as an Expert in your industry. Now the theory is simple and Douglas packages it with these 4 bullet points :
- Craft a struggle story
- Gain and maintain high visibility in the key outlets affecting your industry
- Distinguish yourself with a unique voice and philosophy
- Craft messages and outgoing Comms using the “expert positioning” model
LinkedIn – the professional network
LinkedIn is not a “social network” by design; it is quite literally a professional network and therefore should only be used when you are publishing professional content! It is not the place to upload photo’s and asinine comments. LinkedIn is the ultimate place to position yourself as an expert to people who are looking at your with their business hats on, not their clown (read: social) ones.
Facebook – where good friends meet (or people you’ve never met before)
Facebook is the grandfather of the social media networks; but it is not showing its age just yet; unless you have been converted to Google Plus! This is the social network where you are allowed to be as outrageous and obscure in your messages and postings as you want to be. This is traditionally where you connect with people who you know incredibly well; your closest friends and family. They know you well enough not to misinterpret your last update to literally mean that you want to move to Siberia for the rest of your life!
Facebook does however allow you to profile and ring fence (not circle, that’s another network) your “friends” so that you can control to a degree what they have access to on your profile. In other words, you can allow potential clients to be your friends on Facebook, just be sure that you have a specific permission level setup so that they can’t see the stupid stuff you get up to!
Google has recently entered the foray into Social Media Marketing with their Google Plus offering. Google’s social media platform is in direct competition to Facebook and will probably see a lot of unhappy Facebook users migrate to this new platform. At the moment, Google has recommended that businesses don’t claim a profile on Google Plus, so that can only mean that there is something extra special in the works for businesses on Google Plus.
The take out from all of this is that you cannot use your various social media profiles with a spray-and-pray, one-size-fits-all approach. Each network has specific audiences and mechanisms for connecting people. Understanding these and using them to your advantage will ensure that you get the most out of your social media platforms and your networks!
Context and Content within Social Media
I was at the Heavy Chef Session at Deloitte last night and I was privileged enough to listen to Rich Mulholland speak on the misnomer that is ‘Social Media’. What follows here is my interpretation of his talk, as well as a hypothesis of my own, and some problems that we may encounter in the future with this “social” world that we live in.
What went down!
Rich was talking about the lack of context int he social media world; about how there is a lot of content being generated about any topic that you can think of, but if you take a break from being online and interacting in social media networks like Rich did for a week you will quickly realise at least 2 things : (I am paraphrasing a bit here)
- You will not miss the conversation
- The conversation will not miss you
Now this epiphany is rather ground breaking; especially if you are lucky (read popular) enough to have a couple of hundred odd followers; these people that hang on your every word for a drip of wisdom to fall from your lips (erm… fingers)!
But there is the kicker! These followers don’t know you; they “know you”, but they don’t really know you. They follow you because you ,at some stage, had something of value to say and they were, at that moment, impressed enough to take action on what you said and clicked on the all powerful Follow Button!
Where am I going with this?
What this boils down to is context! There was context between what you were saying and what they were looking for. A correlation between a supply and a demand at that moment in time. Sadly though this was, in most cases, a fleeting meeting of minds, likes and dislikes. There is no relevant or credible reason as to why this person who follows you would now be interested in your choice of deserts, holiday destinations or advice on which car to buy. All that they will now be getting from you, when following you, is a lot of content that is not in the slightest bit relevant to you.
So does this mean that we should only follow people that we know really well and would have more than one small thing in common with?
No.
Our social media networks need to converge to give the world a holistic image of ourselves and not an image fragmented by space and time with different algorithms scratching and pasting together bits of info about us.
Perhaps the answer is not within social networking; but rather in context networking. A network that (borrowing from Richard again) underpins the wide range of networks we are currently a part of and gives us true value by showing us information from sources who know us for more than a fleeting second because we both happened to think an orange sofa was hideous!
Context is key and context is, for my money, the future of media – and not just the social kind!
