Posts Tagged ‘monitoring social media’

Pepsi’s unveiled their new logo/look and is using social media to get the ball rolling. I invited my 22 year old son to weigh in on what and how Pepsi is doing this and here are his thoughts. Very insightful and on target.

If I were managing the roll out, I would not have blatantly announced I was “using social networking” to a bunch of Ad Bloggers. I would have used guerrilla marketing/micro advertising that treated the new logo as an obliteration of the old logo. In a year when “Change” is used as a slogan so much in politics, it is devastatingly clear how only one politician (Obama) has been able to actually appropriate it and manage it properly. He didn’t tell people they were going to start a social networking of barackobama.com, they just introduced and did it.

Furthermore, the Obama logo was perfect for destroying the stupid flag-and-name paradigm of political advertising. Shephard Farey’s propaganda posters (which I find very disturbing) also were daring enough to transform the campaign into a movement.

That’s what Pepsi should have done. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” except you are slowly infiltrating and upgrading your own brand. That’s what the Internet means today. It gives people the power to erode institutions through a multitude of voices– that’s how the Netroots beat the Clintons. In a wargame the US staged to prepare for a naval battle with Iran, a commander representing Iran chose to load all of Iran’s commercial, private, and military boats with dynamite and swarm the slow American dreadnaughts. He annihilated the US Navy in the simulation, so the Pentagon reset the war game and told him he couldn’t do that. That’s the power of small things versus large institutions.

Advertisers need to realize that social networking isn’t television. I don’t think they have. They still use it like a message-disseminating tool, not a message-shaping one. It’s not a megaphone. This generation distributes its own news, cuts up techno songs and puts rap lyrics over them, and designs its own t-shirts. User-generated content is the norm. I buy stuff, but I’m even more inclined to buy it if I think it was my idea.

And another thing kids hate: when big companies try to look cool by doing what the kids do, and making it obvious they are doing what the kids do. Like this campaign.

I do see that they are “inviting people to participate,” but coming from a corporation, that just sounds hollow. Especially because they already did a re-design and are stating this is “part of the new direction.”

So Pepsi should have made it appear like something new and better was taking over the brand instead of just saying, “This is what the new logo is now, look, it’s so effing cool because it’s not like those old logos it’s new and looks like an iPod and you guys like iPods, right? Because it looks like one and we’re using social networking to roll it out and you guys like that too, right?” See, Coke does redesigns, but I think it’s more comfortable with its status as “Classic.” This seems like the effort to get Generation After NeXt. Generation NeXt was a great campaign for the late 90s, by the way.

So what would the campaign look like? Probably the new logo everywhere, on subways, billboards, next to the old logo in stores, culminating with a You Tube of a solar eclipse. Then the blacked out sun becomes the new logo. Who knows if that would work. But I do think they missed the nuance of social networking and its importance to this generation.

At this week’s Charleston PRSA meeting, the subject of monitoring social media for reputation management came up. Several of us talked about how much there is to know and how to find, participate in and respond to issues of interest to our client’s industries and then, as needed respond to issues of concern.

One of my colleagues asked me what tools I am using to monitor my client’s presence in the media. It seemed like there are a number of people who are interested in these topics so I thought I’d create a list so that we can all benefit. Here are a few tools that I’ve used a bit. No doubt there are probably many more and I am open to all suggestions that you might have for any that you’ve used that you like and find work well.

I won’t attempt to rate these tools. You can use them and determine for yourself which ones work well for you and your clients.

Blogs:

Technorati

Nielsen Blog Pulse

Google Blogsearch

Microblogging:

Summize/Search Twitter

Forums:

Board Reader

Twing

You can also use tools that allow you to gauge your client’s level of readership through feeds. If you use FeedBurner, you can compare feeds using Feedcompare. Technorati allows you to get a feeling for what a blog’s “authority” is.

There are also subscriber services out there such as Radian6 which offer a dashboard to allow you to monitor topical trends and easily provide reports to your client (disclosure—I have not used this but it seems like a great solution). This is great when you are trying to monitor conversations regarding how consumers use your client’s products and services or monitor their talk about the problems your client’s products and services are designed to solve.

The most important thing about monitoring is that one needs to participate in the conversation. To understand how to do that, here is a great post from David Meerman Scott and also from a summary from Talkitup of a Twebinar that took place this week. Each emphasize the importance of finding the conversations pertinent to your client and participating in them as a regular member, not as a representative of the company so that you develop trust.

And trust is the bottom line in everything, from PR to marriage. Nothing prospers without it.