Posts Tagged ‘social’

21
Apr

Have You Talked About A Ford Lately?

   Posted by: Michael Carney    in automotive, social media

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

French Algerian author/philospher Albert Camus had a way with words — and coined a phrase that still resonates today, half a century after his death.

Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing at Ford Motor Co., echoed that sentiment last week when he told attendees at Advertising Age’s 2010 Digital Conference that the recession forced companies to find innovative ways to reach out to consumers, giving a big boost to digital and social marketing. “If the economy hadn’t dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did.”

The Ford marketing chief said the new paradigm that media owners and clients have to get used to involves spending a lot more money in post-launch with new partners. “Yes, we still need traditional media partners and integration will become more and more important,” Mr. Farley said. “But then post-launch we can’t just go away. We have to allocate [social and digital] resources because these different resources change the content and the dialogue of the product after the launch. It’s much more manageable, and it impacts how we build the product.”

Turning social may have been an unintended consequence of the recession for Ford and other marketers but it was also a sign of the times for other reasons — most especially, as consumers worldwide look to their peers for information about products and services they’re considering. The old ‘Interruption Marketing’ paradigm isn’t dead — it was never that healthy to begin with, but it was the only hammer in our toolbox — but it’s becoming less and less effective.

Digital and Social Media aren’t the new “one size fits all” solution, but they’re certainly turning out to be a useful new tool for marketers.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , , , ,

Comments Off
6
Nov

ABC Trying Too Hard?

   Posted by: Michael Carney    in social, television

ABC is introducing a new feature aimed at “encouraging viewers who stream their favorite shows online to make the experience more social”. Right, like we needed encouraging to talk amongst ourselves.

This Saturday, according to MediaWeek:

… the network will launch ABC Social: Episode Commentary on ABC.com. The new tool allows Web viewers to add their two cents by commenting on the show in an adjacent window to the left of the site’s video viewer. Users can log in to this feature using their Facebook accounts and can instantly share their personal commentary with their Facebook friend circles if they so choose.

ABC is using this week’s premiere of the sci-fi remake V to kick off ABC Social—as the show’s debut episode will be the first to incorporate the functionality starting this weekend. To make ABC Social more compelling—and to stoke the passion of sci-fi fans—the site will include commentary from V executive producers Scott Peters and Steve Pearlman. ABC plans to include such “insider” commentary alongside other shows down the road—potentially including commentary from actors, network executives and show staffers, journalists and even bloggers.

Executives at ABC see Social as a differentiator in an increasingly cluttered online video landscape, according to Alexis Rapo, vp, digital media, ABC Entertainment. “This definitely allows us to engage with a deeper, broader audience,” she said, comparing the experience to the “DVD extras” model. “It’s so wide ranging in terms of the commentary that might be available. We have lots of interesting ideas keep coming into play.”

Why bother?

ABC is testing inserted ads within the stream of comments within the ABC Social feed. “We think this is going to be a compelling opportunity for our advertisers,” Rapo said.

Ah yes, of course. The search for the mighty dollar.

The notion of providing extended commentary is appealing, especially for SciFi fans — the BBC has done a sterling job of catering to that community with its DR WHO CONFIDENTIAL companion series to the rebooted DR WHO, which takes fans behind the scenes. But we’re unconvinced that a social stream is needed, especially one with ads.

All very fashionable, we guess.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments Off
Back to top