Social Media Branding

HP (Hewlett Packard) launched the You On You Project last Friday, an innovative social media branding campaign that challenges people to express themselves creatively through video for a chance to win $300,000 in prizes. HP's social media campaign is a great example of social media contests, combining a branded online community, user generated content and interactive video remixing technology, with the lure of big prizes and a shot at Internet fame.

YouTube Channel Sponsorship
The campaign resides on HP's sponsored YouTube channel and taps into YouTube's huge consumer reach and network. Smart move on both ends - HP working one of the largest social networks and YouTube acting as agency, providing sponsored channel promotions. Could this be the highly sought and viable monetization strategy for YouTube? Only time will tell.

Dissecting the Campaign
In the meantime, I think this is one cool social media promotion. One that I would actually consider entering myself. It's got the big name, big prizes and the cache of 15 seconds of Internet fame. Let's quickly dissect what's cool from a social media geek's standpoint (yes that's us):

• The HP YouTube channel acts as a contest microsite, housing a fully-branded online community where users have access to popular social networking features like view entries, vote for favorites, subscribe, rate, comment, and share videos with friends.
   
• The format of the promotion - UGC video contest - is highly relevant and accessible to the YouTube audience and gives users an incentive to participate. In other words, the contest makes total sense for the people it's trying to target.
   
• The contest site directly ties into HP's consumer ad campaign for PCs and notebooks, per their press release, with broadcast ad buys and other supporting media.
   
• It dabbles into eCommerce by pitching HP products in several areas of the site and giving you immediate purchase options through direct links to HP and Best Buy. That's potential direct revenue right there.
   
• Barriers to entry are decreased by giving users three different, easy ways to participate: 
  1) Get fully creative with your own video recording device (camcorder, iPhone, editing tools, whatever)
  2) Show off your remixing skills using the integrated Adobe Premiere Express online video editor
  3) Go low-tech and easy by capturing yourself on webcam
   
• It's truly a global contest with translation options into 11 different languages.
   
• The site encourages viral distribution of content and increases contest awareness by making it easy to self-promote your submission through a "Promote Your Video" link or through YouTube's built-in sharing functions in the video player.
   
• Cool "HP laptop" site design ensures you never forget who the contest sponsor is.

So How's It Doing?
Momentum looks positive so far. According to the channel, over 300 entries have been submitted in the last 3 days. There are over 2,300 subscribers and the channel's gotten over 430,00 page views. The 300 comments posted are overall positive and approving of the contest and HP.

I don't know what HP's goals or success metrics are, but given the momentum above, the You On You Project looks like it could be a huge success in driving branding and product marketing. It's also interesting to note how HP is (and isn't) marketing the social media contest itself and what the ambient noise is on the Web. Here's what I found at a glance:

• TV commercials and celebrities help drive awareness and traffic to the site
   
• YouTube's Facebook Page announced the contest. There's 3.1 million touches right there. Free.
   
• I just checked HP's Facebook Page. No mention there. With over 15,000 Facebook fans, you'd think it'd be an easy way to spread word about the contest to loyal customers.
   
• Twitter is showing way over 500 tweets (I stopped counting) already on the contest, with a lot of users promoting their own video entries. Interestingly, the HP News Twitter handle doesn't mention the contest at all.
   
• Viral traffic, courtesy of users and fans spreading word about the contest and promoting their own entries, is doing the rest.

Conclusions
Congratulations HP! From what I can see, I think you've done your homework and created a great social media campaign overall. The promotion is relevant to your target audience, uses the latest interactive social media technology, is well-branded, and it's captured a bit of cool factor. Bravo.

Questions
What do you think of HP's You On You Project?

Is this type of branded contest/promotion replicable for other brands?

What other brands have been successful with social media campaigns and why? 


If you're interested in a branded social media campaign or a video remix contest, Reality Digital provides the Adobe Premiere Express online video editor as a service. Contact us for more information.

If you were to ask me what three things small businesses should know about social media branding, off the top of my head, here are my thoughts:

1. Social media branding doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg
   While the big brands are spending tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on new social media advertising campaigns, you don't need to. These large campaigns usually consists of multiple, complex components and ad buys. The audience you're trying to reach is probably a much smaller or more local demographic and you just simply won't spend as much per eyeball. You can keep yours simpler.
   
   There are free social media solutions like setting up a Facebook Page (formerly known as a Facebook Fan Page), a Twitter account to microblog updates about your company and its products, and a company blog using one of the many free blog platforms out there. If you're looking for something more sophisticated that combines many of the more popular features in online social networking sites, for a reasonable cost, you can check out a self-service, white-label social media platform like Reality Digital's Harmony product.
   
   Costs you may incur include manpower and time to manage these initiatives. But even then, you aren't seeing the massive traffic that a big consumer brand like Pepsi might see, so an hour a day or every week could very well suffice, depending on your goals.
    
2. There are multiple ways to implement social media branding
   Facebook. Twitter. Corporate blog. Online community. Social media contest. Where do you start and which ones do you implement? The answer is different for every small business. What you should be concerned with is determining what tools are relevant to your audience and how they will help you achieve your business goals. If you implement one and it fails, try something different. Consider a multi-program approach. Social media is not a magic bullet (at least not yet) and it takes time and patience to see results, as does all your other marketing activities. Try and try again.
    
3. Identify WHY you want social media
   Above all, you must know why you're implementing social media into your marketing mix and how it maps back to your business goals. You wouldn't invest in a piece of new equipment if you didn't know why you needed it, would you? It's not just the cool factor. Social media branding should serve a purpose, whether that's to listen more closely to customers and provide a forum for dialogue, build awareness for your company and product, increase product sales, improve site traffic or countless other reasons. Once you know why you want social media, you'll have a much easier time justifying its cost, if any, and integrating it into your business.

I'm sure there are plenty of other things small businesses should be aware of when considering social media. What would you add to this list?

I attended this years’ NAB or National Association of Broadcasters this week, which I have been doing for many years.  From what I’m told, there were approximately 86,000 people in attendance this year, which is certainly a drop off from previous years but none the less, quite a big crowd given the state of the economy.  More importantly, there were a lot of compelling products and thought leadership coming out of this important event and way too much information to share here, so I would encourage you to visit: www.nab.org.

I believe it’s very clear to everyone that there is a proliferation of devices and kids today are carrying multiple devices to capture and send content, while always connected to their friends.  This is true community and social media at work, but how do you create business media strategy and social media branding for these ever changing new media landscapes. For traditional broadcasters they often say they are changing dollars in the living room for pennies online.  Not only has it been hard to sometimes monetize online offerings but it has been a moving target that needs very specific and targeted approach that is much different from traditional advertising.  Furthermore, User Generated Content is now sometimes blurring the lines of what we consider professionally produced content.

Jim Guerard of Adobe was speaking about a conversation he had with Bud Alberts, CTO of Disney and he was saying how more people access ESPN online Sunday afternoon over mobile than they do online.  This is a clear example of how viewer patterns are not only changing and are a moving target but they demand access when, where and how they want it.  This requires, technology companies, brands, advertisers and digital content strategies to be researched thoroughly in order to find monetization models for businesses that work.  Companies like Adobe and many others across the online and mobile technology landscape are putting serious resources behind how they can better enable business models and monetization across these devices.

In addition to finding monetization models for professional content, the barrier of entry into producing content has changed and now niche user generated content, semi-pro and amateur content finds audiences as well.  Online Social Networks certainly help expose some of these content creators and there are more professional devices available at the consumer level for any person with business sense and motivation to monetize and reach consumers. This has opened the doors for all sorts of content that previously wouldn't be made available through traditional channels.

Here's a good example of a consumer tools that are providing powerful user-friendly tools for would be journalists.  The product is called Poddio and was demonstrated at the show, where anyone can record and edit audio right from their iPhone by simply plugging in a microphone which allows for better recording.  The interface is drag and drop editing that makes for a pro-consumer experience with iphone friendly tools.

We are seeing many more devices such as these roll out all the time, so does this put the power to create monetizable content in consumers hands or is content creation and monetization better left to the pros?  We might have to wait and see but it sure makes for an interesting media landscape...