If you want to catch a fish, go fishing
While Facebook has 300 million subscribers, brands need to consider their target audience and decide whether a Facebook-only campaign makes sense. For example, entertainment companies find great success on MySpace, since it's a common destination for movie and music news. To get authentic user-generated content for your campaign, make sure your reach is broad. Some of the best fans are found in the most unlikely places. At Sprout, we try to ensure that our campaigns can run anywhere -- on Facebook, MySpace, and our clients' websites as well.
... but fish in the right pond
Having said that, it is important to think carefully about which types of user-generated content to integrate into a campaign, and this goes for choosing your media and social networking channels too. Depending on your particular goals around quality and volume, it's important to get the right mix of quirkiness and unique marketable content with some sort of mass appeal.
The holy grail: The activity stream
It's true that if you want to catch a fish, you need to go fishing. But Facebook's activity stream is still the holy grail for brands attempting to get their campaign to go viral. It's important to make sure that if you're allowing users to create their own content via your campaign, they should be able to share that content with their friends on Facebook by publishing to their activity stream. Once published in their own activity stream, all of those users' friends will see it published in their activity streams too. Those friends should then be able to access your campaign right from the message in their activity streams. For an example of how this works, try Sprout's Holiday Matchmaker game.
The FTC and transparency
When dealing with user-generated content, it's important to ensure that your content contributors follow the rules. The FTC's new rules for bloggers state that any user or blogger who makes an endorsement for a product must disclose the connection he or she has with the seller of that product. The FTC can slap said users or bloggers with big fines if they don't. Note that the definitions are broad here -- the FTC rules basically state that any situation where anything of value is exchanged between company and advocate (blogger or user who's not part of the company) requires total transparency.
There's a lot to think about when you launch a social media campaign. But if you plan well and ensure a healthy balance between authenticity and moderation, UGC and branded content, and creation and sharing, you are off to a great start. I hope these seven best practices help to plan your next great campaign.
Carnet Williams is CEO at Sprout.
On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
<< Previous page
