How Hits Happen or, What Was The Tipping Point? Dan Calladine

How Hits Happenor, What Was The Tipping Point?Dan Calladine

How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point?

/ The eternal question/ Yes, you know it generated sales and hit the targets/ But how did it happen?

How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point?

/ Advertising campaigns always start big/ Social media campaigns are less easy to control/ Often a story or idea will take a few days or weeks to take

off/ Different metrics are needed – mentions, authority

and pass alongs, not impressions & clicks

How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point?

/ New tracking tools let us record these metrics/ These tools show us how stories, promotions and ideas

spread/ To measure tipping points I’ve looked at two stories and a

sales promotion/ I’ve used the buzz tracking tool Radian 6 to trace the spark

that ignited the story and took it to a wider audience/ (Other buzz tracking tools are available)

How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point?

/ With big stories there is too much clutter to work through/ Too many simultaneous promotions to identify the key

spark/ I’ve looked at stories that did not become hits until they

had been in the public domain for a few days/ 3 Stories

/ Spotify & Universal Music/ Guinness is Good For You/ Catch a Choo promotional campaign

1 – Spotify & Universal Music

/ Universal Music announced on 10th August that they made more revenue in Sweden from Spotify than iTunes

Why did the story take 2 weeks to become a hit?

/ Only 25 mentions the day after the original story, including 22 on twitter

Original story

Search on ‘Spotify’ + ‘Universal’

Example of a tweet on 11th August

/ This user had 2,000 followers

/ Yet the story then ran out of steam

What happened on the 24th August?What happened?

Search on ‘Spotify’ + ‘Universal’

Mainstream media happened!

/ The Daily Telegraph featured the stat in a larger story about Spotify

The follow up

/ This was then featured in other large traffic blogs and by multiple tweeters

/ Many referred to the Daily Telegraph as their source

Lessons

/ A story or idea can disappear even it it’s strong/ It a story about your brand has disappeared, try to make it

part of a future news story or comment/ Mainstream media is still very important as a source/ When using twitter it’s not enough to have one person

tweeting once – try to orchestrate a campaign across multiple users

2 – Guinness is good for you

/ In November 2003 some American academics wrote a research paper, arguing that Guinness genuinely was good for you

/ This suddenly became one of the most-viewed stories on the BBC Website in July 2009 – why?

What happened to make this popular in 2009?

Search on ‘Guinness’ + ‘Good For You’

What happened?

High Traffic Sites

/ The influential financial site Motley Fool featured the story on it’s UK site on 27th July, as an intro to a story on Diageo’s profit figures

The link was then posted onto the Fodor’s Travel Forum

/ Hetismij, the poster, is a very well respected community member

/ He has started over 100 forum topics

The link was then tweeted

/ In all there were 126 mentions of the story on 29th July, making the story one of the most-read on the BBC site

Lessons

/ Something from the past can come back to haunt you or boost you

/ Stories spread well on sites with high authority/ Similarly, active community members with high levels of

respect and trust can spread stories well

3 – Jimmy Choo’s Trainer Hunt

/ On 9th April Jimmy Choo started a real-life game using twitter and Foursquare to launch a new pair of trainers

/ A representative moved around London, announcing when she entered a venue

/ If you caught her, you won the trainers

But why did it only become a hit on the 27th April?

Search on ‘Jimmy Choo’ +Foursquare

What happened?

In early – mid April it was featured in multiple fashion blogs

Plus some tweets from fashion & marketing people

But it was a post on Mashable that ignited the campaign

Mashable created…

/ 1883 re-tweets/ 1146 shares on Facebook/ 1146 ‘Likes’/ Multiple subsequent blog posts/ The story went mainstream

The story also went offline – the ‘hit’ is now the story

(She eventually got caught)

Lessons

/ Seed story to relevant target markets/ Also seed to larger media who may have interest in story/ High traffic sources can yield the best response/ Once it’s a hit, make that the story/ Learn, and repeat

Where to find me

/ [email protected]/ http://twitter.com/dancall/ http://digital-examples.blogspot.com/ http://digital-stats.blogspot.com