Tag Archives: social media

What do a raft in Wales, a lightswitch, KitKats and Indy Mogul have in common? Some lessons in causal marketing.

Posted on September 16, 2010 | Leave a comment

Another random story from the Swankie career vault. This week I have been thinking about when I built a raft on a team building course in Wales. It was cold. It was Wales. We were a bunch of bankers building a raft together in Wales, in the cold. When we finally got it afloat I got my bum wet because the seats weren’t exactly the sturdiest thing I have ever sat on. Plus, we were last team to make it to the other side of the river. But you know what, when we did we yelped with joy, hugged each other and felt so uncontrollably happy at what we had achieved together, it was immense and my happiest memory of Wales. The fact it was a bit tougher for us almost made the whole thing more rewarding, and we had all made a difference to make it happen.

I’m stating the obvious again, but doing stuff together makes us feel good as human beings. We also get happiness thrills from the pleasure of giving and contributing to causes. So my hunch? There must be more we can do with brands to create things people can do for good together, like the Pepsi Refresh project, that can also make us happier people. Maybe we will even like the brands more as a result and buy more of their stuff. A win for everyone, surely? Especially now the internet makes it so much easier to bring a bunch of people together in a community.

The danger? How do you avoid becoming yet another facebook page for a good cause, sponsored by a big brand chasing as many likes and status updates as we can, because I am a big hearted girl who wants to do her bit – but there is only so many times you can promote a good cause before you loose interest or it becomes boring for your friends and followers. Harsh, but I think it’s a fair call.

These were the questions I had in my mind when I went along to #smcsyd this week to hear John Johnson (@jjprojects) and Dae Levine (@daelevine) speak, I was curious to hear what they had to say about what made Earth Hour and the Nestle Killer campaign known for their global successes, mass following and tangible results.

Their presentations were good and insightful, and a few people have already beaten me to good analysis of the content they chatted through, so you can read about them here. From @erietta & from @HannahDeMilta

What I tried to take from the presentations were any key lessons are in building a groundswell around your cause for maximum success. Are there critical factors we need to consider to help achieve that pop culture status (and get Aston tweeting about you)? What are the lessons for any brands (or agencies representing brands) who are excited about the opportunity to do something like this? Do it well, as well as have the maximum chance to demonstrate to the finance director next year it was a sound investment for the company? I was hoping these two might have some answers for me.

So, if you are keen to start a little social revolution for a cause close to your heart, these are some pointers that I took away from the night that might help you out.

1. Make sure everyone can make a difference to your cause.

If everyone feels like their effort is important and appreciated they will become more involved in supporting and doing it. I personally am crap at tying rafts together – but my god, I knew my effort counted to us making it to the other side, so I gave it my all and it made my celebration in the ‘success’ I had helped create so much sweeter. I also liked the fact Greenpeace thanked everyone who helped them out, personally, where possible, by email.

2. Make it really simple.

Turn your lights off for an hour. Stop buying KitKats. Easy. Doing stuff can be scary for people. Make it something everyone can do if you want lots of people to do it.

3. Let people put their own stamp on it.

Make your content open and encourage people to play with it and adapt it for their own world. I was curious to hear both Dae and John talk about how they were just as proud of the offshoots and adaptations their campaigns had inspired.

4. Get people emotionally connected.

Greenpeace used imagery of a monkey for a reason. People get attached to human story and animals. Bring emotion into it wherever possible.

5. Define and aim for success

Even if it feels a bit pie in the sky, have a goal you would want to achieve and strive to make it happen.

I also found it interesting what they said also echoed what I learnt the week before from the guys at Indy Mogul about making great online videos while they were visiting Sydney on their Australian tour.

They call themselves the “first network for the YouTube generation” and they have over 10 million views a month. Their formula? Make programs with really simple genuine concepts, concepts easy for people to get involved in and do (see Backyard FX as reference, which is a show about how to create movie type special effects using household utensils) and enable community conversation around that on YouTube, so the community can help shape the channel and the program. They even thank a viewer in every show who has commented on the previous edition. Simple, but effective and spurs more people to leave comments in hope of being featured next time.

The Indy Mogul 4 Golden Rules

Be genuine
Be resourceful and creative, don’t be too slick
Be interactive and responsive
Keep it short

I took from these two events that whether you are making something for good, or just something to get the LOLs, it seems there some really quite simple things to remember that can help get the idea resonating with as many people as possible and producing warm and fuzzy feel good as a result.

Making stuff happen together is a unquestionably a good thing, and as brands start kicking into planning for their 2011 campaigns I am getting excited about what we might all help create next year and the smiles that might bring in the future. Happy idea making!

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Tagged cause, happiness, marketing, people, social media

The Oxytocin we share

Posted on June 28, 2010 | 4 Comments

Apparently ‘Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love’, I smiled to myself when I saw this article pop up on my newsfeed last week from Heather Snodgrass – because it confirmed a thought I have had a feeling about for a while now that playing in social networks makes our brains release happy feelings.

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains

Social networking has the ability to give us the same kind of happy hormones that we get from the euphoric feeling of being in love. I.e. The social web can make us happier people. All because of a little hormone called Oxytocin.

I am a massive romantic, I gush over romantic movies and love nothing more than curling up with a good old chick lit novel. These are my single girl soppy indulgence, as I dream that one day I can too find the most amazing Mr Right who will chase me to the airport when I am about to leave in a heated moment of, what I believe to be unrequited passion, only to feel my heart flip as I see him at the top of the escalator waiting to declare his undying love. We’ll live happily ever after running a beautiful winery and have a dog called Dudley. A girl can always dream.

In real life though, love has its ups and downs, there isn’t always that feeling of ultimate high. Relationships require emotional investment on a whole layer of levels and sometimes that can be hard. The honeymoon period nirvana certainly doesn’t last forever. But do social networks provide us with an easier place to get the high? If it gets too hard with one person, doyou go find your happy hit from someone else? I thought about this idea in a bit more depth in Belonging and the Social Web.

Coincidently, the lovely Rachel Beaney also wrote a great post about this same article, pondering over the dangers of Internet Addiction and I just wonder is if the constant seeking of the next connection hit that’s driving that?

As someone who is a bit of an internet and social network addict I can sympathise with this because I kinda live it in all honesty. It’s always been something I have loved and probably invested too much of my time in since my early MySpace days which was the first time I reached out and made connections with new likeminded people who otherwise, were complete strangers. But, although our online relationships are great, they should never truly replace the real life moments we share (and I know I would definitely rather have Mr Right here in the flesh).

Overall, I am fascinated by this research and the thought there could be an interesting opportunity for brands to understand this scientific emotional benefit for people in the future.

As Zak and others deepen their study of oxytocin, we may better understand why people with friends live longer and get sick less, and why we are compelled to be social animals online and off. If these changes apply in the world of social media, the implications for business — for every brand, company, and marketer trying to understand the now intimately networked world — could be significant. Yes, there may be a dark side to all this: What if corporations come to understand human behavior and its root mechanisms so well that they can manipulate our biochemistry to trick us into buying more?

But whilst I think it’s interesting, the thought of a corporation messing with my Oxytocin levels does freak me out a bit, so while I curiously watch to see what will come of this research I echo Beaney’s thoughts to “keep it real”, and just make sure we aren’t just getting our only happiness fix from a virtual world.

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Tagged happiness, social media

The princesses of social and sharing

Posted on April 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

Before you read this post – I ask you girls in particular to cast your mind back to your teenage years. Specifically, think about that ‘group’ you wanted to be a part of so badly. I appreciate that may be cringeworthy for some and perhaps too painful for others, but hopefully my reason for taking you back there will start to become clear.

Recently, I have begun to notice a lot of similarities between what I experienced as a teenager to what might actually (strangely) be some guiding principles applicable to building communities in the social web. This may sound pretty bizarre, it kind of is, but let me explain 5 points I truly believe we can draw on from the behaviour of teenage girls to build desirable sharing, social communities.

1. They create exclusive groups you really want to be a part of.

Maybe its because as a teenage I was generally on the outskirts of the cool groups. If I did manage to crack into them I didn’t last very long. I get bored pretty quickly, I was never very good at complying with what was considered to be acceptable behaviour to be in their gang and as a result I was made an outkast on a number of occasions. This never stopped me wanting to be a part of them though. Those girls had social influence, they knew where all the best parties were and had all the cutest boys interested in them. Seeing a group whose members have something that you want makes it desirable. That coupled with the fact you have to prove your worth and influence your way into it makes it even more so.

2. They create stories and drama

For anything to successfully hold attention, it’s got to be interesting. Teenage girls have an ability to take the smallest of things and create it into a drama of epic proportions. They can be ‘creative’ with the truth and can turn any event in something worth talking about. This is a real skill, showing an aptitude for what will interest and resonate with their audience. It could be very powerful, applied in the right way.

3. They attention seek

They want to be noticed, and will use their collective power and influence to do so across their networks. They will make sure they are at all the right events and parties, wearing the right clothes and talking to the right people about the right things. (Although there is always one member of the group who generally doesn’t get it quite right, who was usually me) They want to be spoken about and will figure out the best approach in any social situation to make sure get that limelight they crave.

4. They know their target.

To many girls, the success measure is getting the boy. Teenage girls know how to stalk. If there is a boy that she wants to get closer to, she will do everything in her power to find out about him, his life and everything he’s into. Back in pre-internet days that may have involved many cleverly planned conversations and research of school sports notice boards to gain this information. Now, it’s all there ready to be Googled or seeked out on Facebook or MySpace. Girls know where to find the information and will make sure they are well read and ready to use it whenever the opportunity comes.

5. They share

Teenage girls share everything. If you have any 16 year old nieces/cousins I invite you to look at their facebook stream (with their permission for obvious reasons) I guarantee you will be shocked by how much they put out there to the world. It’s not a new phenomenon, we’ve done it for years – we just relied on good old fashioned gossip before. If something is juicy – they will spread it, and they’re really good at it.

They also share resources and they learn from each other. Tools like clothes, music and make up, but also stories in order to analyse and every single element of each others’ social lives. They rely on their network for emotional support and shared knowledge. Although, the amount they share about each others’ relationships they should be experts by the time they are 21 – its never really that straightforward though, as every girl knows.

Now, I am having a bit of fun here – I know my analogy is not exactly the most robust. The irrational nature of teenage girls to fall out of friendship at an instant, steal a close friend’s boyfriend and be downright devious and untrustworthy is hardly a solid and reliable community base.

However, I do think that any group that command so much passion and attention from connected networks around them must have something we can learn from through observation.

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Tagged community, social media, teenage

Why someone else’s happy share can make you sad

Posted on March 19, 2010 | 7 Comments

Creating this blog was really for me to talk about interesting stuff that people share that makes them happy. But this week I was posed an interesting question.

“What happens when one person’s happy share makes another person sad?”

I undeniably love social networks. I have been obsessed since I went on yahoo chat rooms when I was 16, I lived the cliché of re-discovering an old flame on Friends Reunited, I had my fair share of MySpace dates back in the early naughties, I re-connected with old school mates on Bebo, got very excited when Facebook all got a bit mass and most recently Twitter has given me a way to stay up-to-date about things that interest me, within my limited time and attention span constraints plus its helped me make lots of new, like minded friends. There has undoubtedly been a lot of fun brought into my life through these networks, but to my friend’s question – there is a darker side to social media that is rarely talked about. Through what these networks allow us to see and know, they can actually hurt us.

In the last few weeks I have had to deal with 3 separate friends who have all suffered trauma by Facebook. Nights of tears and red wine because now we have the power to see things we once couldn’t.

Australia spends more time on social networks than anyone else in the world, but what are we really looking at and why are we looking?

Remember how strange it felt to have public conversations at first on each others’ walls? Now it’s an accepted norm to comment and chat on public view to all your friends. This behaviour of a desire to show off our own social habits has inadvertently also given us a way to find out more about the social circles of those we envy or are intrigued by.

It is a tribal instinct to compete against others in our social circles. This post from Frontal Cortex even questions if the nature of social networks is akin to primate dominance hierarchy, we are now able to numerically track and measure our popularity through follower numbers and responses to status updates.

We do want to know what other people are doing, because, in a strange kind of a way, we want to know if their lives look better than ours.

Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence”, said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from. “You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,” “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”

As humans we also natural voyeurs. Particularly women, who are psychologically wired to be interested in other people. Read any Jane Austen novel, celebrity magazine or even listen to a group of girls chatting. 99% of the time it will be about people and especially guys. Online, it is often joked about that we ‘Facebook stalk’ – but why do girls get so obsessed with guy’s online activity? One theory is hormones. Females in lust filled relationships are subjected to intense releases of dopamine and oxytocins hormones in our brains. These hormones are addictive. When they are taken away, we seek ways of trying to get the feeling back, or failing that, simply try to get closer to the person who gave it to us. Facebook can can give us the hit of him that we think we need, without anyone else knowing and then let us judge if our lives are better than his. While this may feel satisfying for a moment, it is ultimately where his happy shares will most probably become a sad thing for us.

This post from the Urban Detective brings this scenario to life and it leads me back to the need for red wine when we self inflict ourselves to content, that of course will inevitably fill us with envy or jealously.

So, are social networks making us sadder people?

There have been a number of studies conducted on Facebook’s effect on human behaviour – and even the evolution of our behaviour questioned from the effects of having larger social networks and access to more information. But is there really such a thing as Facebook depression? This article which said “Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have found that too much Facebook usage can leave you more prone to anxiety and depression.”, was quick to caveat that it could actually be any form of communication that aids anxiety – particularly in the case of teenage girls who ‘can talk themselves to tears’. Would they do it anyway without the help of Facebook?

We absolutely do have more access to information about people now than before. I think it’s true having the ability to look can pro-long some fascinations with people, prevent us from moving on and essentially, it can make us feel bad when we see someone has something (or someone) better than us. But, at the end of the day the social network is not the creator – it is simply allows us to access the information. It is up to us to recognise when our behaviour on these networks is hurting us. Remember, the block button is not always a bad thing.

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Tagged facebook, happiness, relationships, social media

The happiness of sharing

Posted on February 22, 2010 | 6 Comments

I have just started playing ‘Words with Friends’ on my iPhone. My first opponent is an old colleague from London who is currently whipping my arse at wordplay whilst feeding her twin girls through the night in Brighton, England. I like it. It’s nice we can share a game together after not seeing each other for years and living on the other side of the world, chatting about the fact that ‘taxi’ was a lazy word choice. It is one of those cool little things make me love even more what technology has enabled us to do. We can now share so much more of our lives and our experiences than ever before. I think that is a good thing.

When I was 19 I went to New York. I had wanted to go as long as I could remember. I was like an excited child on the plane with the anticipation of seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. The mistake I made, as I so often have, was I went on my own and when I saw her I felt sad – because it was such a big moment for me and there was no-one to tell. I realised right then that experiences are just never as good without someone to share them with. If I’d had my iPhone back then, I could have tweeted/facebooked my sighting and had comments back from all other the world in an instant. (Time zone dependant) I could have shared my story, and then had a conversation with people who were interested all over the world.

Sharing stuff feels good, it makes you feel like you have something to say, and it feels even better when someone appreciates and converses with you on the thing you have shared, because that might just mean they find you a little bit interesting!

A few weeks ago I was trying to find some golden gem of research that would prove a point to one of my clients that creating and generating content was king. However, in trying to answer that question Lauren Cassar sent me a link to a blog that made me re-think my approach.

‘Conversation is king.’

In my mind – he is right, it is conversation and the connection to others that is special – to share something with another makes us happy and now we can share, even when we are alone. But it is the conversation that is key, that’s where we get the real hit of self actualization through our interaction with others.

So, bearing that in mind, could there be a science to being successfully social, even with your own friends? Are there some people who are simply better at it than others? I have recently watched which of my friends stimulate the most conversation with their posts. on facebook and twitter

More often than not – the things that generate the most appeal is the happy stuff. Where the creator has told a good story in words, pictures or video, asked an interesting question or shared something awesome or funny. Something people can get involved in or have an opinion seems to be an extra special magic ingredient. (Because that means they get to share too).

What I also find interesting is that elements of real life socialising that come through, and that they have a similar effect as they do in real life. The people who share too much and the stuff that is quite frankly, just a bit dull or whiney. I am not interested – yes it is fantastic that we all have an audience out there to talk to – but think about what you’re saying. Because you might just find no-one talks back when you ‘share’ your thyroid problems endlessly. (Although I did have a sick fascination with following that girl’s profile for a while…)

This idea that conversing about stuff we share makes us happy seems to be backed up by this article I read online recently from the NYT – they handily have some smart science to back up what I had a hunch about. People like sharing positive stuff.

So… Is there a science to being social? Is there a secret formula?

‘<sharing inspiring positive link> + <asking direct involving question> = <many replies and attention> ∴ = <social success>.’

Who knows? It is something I would like to think about more and I wonder about is if brands can learn from simply watching and monitoring socially successful people?

For now – I do believe that for brands to live credibly in this space they have to create something that will become conversation for people, ideally something that will bring happiness through sharing it. Whether that happiness be a literal smile at receiving it, or a just a feeling you are just a little bit cooler in the perception of your friend because you found it first.

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Tagged conversation, happiness, people, relationships, sharing, social media

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