WOM: it’s a marathon not a sprint

By Tom Messett

Well, kind of…

According to Mashable the recent Old Spice campaign (yes, we’ve all heard about it – Ed) has “set a standard marketing experts will admire and follow in the years to come”, the site also reports that Old Spice sales have since doubled. Very impressive indeed.

It has to be said, this was one hell of a campaign; well executed and very, very funny. However, I foresee a problem somewhere here…
In my opinion the Old Spice campaign is what I would describe as a sprint; a video that went viral plus a brilliant set of personal follow ups to create more conversation and positive word of mouth. The campaign ends, sales spike and awards roll in.

This has, of course, happened before. Let’s look at some other successful ‘sprints’ -

First,  the Evian ‘Babies’ video-

Second, the classic John West ‘Bear Fight’ -

Both great examples and both with millions of views and great short term success.
But what’s the long term impact?

To my mind this is not the standard that marketing professionals should be aspiring to. Yes, we should be creating great content,  innovating and delivering great campaign focussed work like Old Spice, Evian and John West, but we need to look at the other aspects of social and WOM as well.

Considerations such as -

  • Building long term relationships
  • Successful outreach programmes (that provide a consistent baseline of valuable WOM, feedback and UGC from those who are interested in your brand and industry)
  • Social presences that listen, deal with questions and concerns, get involved in the conversation and are human (not just pushing messages)

I mean: the hard yards, the marathons that create both business improvements and real advocates.

To give a good example, we all remember how great this was last year:

And the public reaction was great too:

But when I search for “t-mobile review”,  the first result I hit isn’t that promising -

– hmmm.

The thing is, the two types of efforts I’m talking about here (the marathons and the sprints), are completely intertwined. If you have a strong and well developed community outreach programme, great social presences and an RND team that listen and learn from that community then your “sprints” – the great viral videos – will have a much better chance of success.

What I’m really saying here is by all means LOVE the great campaigns and by all means, keep them coming. But don’t get blinded by trying to be the next Old Spice and in doing so, forget the awesome baseline programmes and activities that create long term social success.

Relationships for the win :)

Like this?

Brought into the world on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 and filed under 1000thoughts.

  • http://blog.ecairn.com Laurent Pfertzel

    Tom
    I agree and wrote something similar on the eCairn blog. The key is that social media is network (social) more than media (we know what that means). Those campaign are very media centric but not network centric. Being network centric means building relationship one at a time and one relationship doesn't happen overnight (and am not talking about twitter ghost follower here).
    Some companies have done that (Defunct Sun Micro, Microsoft…) because they've asked their people to go out there and talk/connect and so on. Those are great example of sustainable social media success in my mind. Of course they're not the shooting start kind.
    Laurent

  • http://blog.ecairn.com/2010/08/31/forbes-pick-the-best-social-idea-of-all-time/ Forbes pick the best social idea of all time « Influencers & Community Marketing

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