Cerebra

If you have ever cyber-stalked a stranger’s wedding photos, screen-grabbed a hairstyle of someone you have never met or posted a gym workout to Facebook just to prove you went – then this post is for you.

Hello. My name is Kate, and I am a social stalker.

The Internet loves us for this exact reason – everything we do online is a form of stalking: from re-pinning, re-posting and re-tweeting. I can honestly say I have learned more skills by browsing content online than I did during my twelve years of school. I know the best Facebook pages to go to for fitness advice, the best Twitter handles to follow for fashion and beauty advice and the best boards to follow on Pinterest for décor and gardening tips.

It’s no surprise that your event attendees are using social media for everything from complaining about the coffee, to sharing sound bites from their favourite speakers and everything in-between. So why aren’t you?

The conversation is happening so why not participate, engage, develop relationships, build communities and not only facilitate, but drive the discussion?

Here’s an idea: “take this product and send this to some online influencers and get them to tweet about it.” Yes, that is a common brief to an agency, and no, you should not simply go ahead and get that done. Unless you’re the Reserve Bank and your product is money, simply sending stuff to an influencer is unlikely to achieve the campaign success you had hoped for.

Media strategists are slowly starting to understand digital as both the client and the agency demand a more holistic approach, but what about social media?

For many, the environment is daunting as it goes against what most media strategists are trained to investigate (such as reach, frequency and Gross Rating Points). Social media means consumers have the voice to talk back, but for many, it doesn’t even feature as a blip on the radar as a channel because it’s foreign to traditional media strategy which is all about broadcast.

To me, social media fits in the media mix just as much as TV, radio or print. However, the current agency briefing model doesn’t lend itself to this type of thinking. A few different approaches I’ve seen are:

Preamble:
No doubt that you’ve heard of Myspace, even if it was something like, “Hey, remember that thing before Facebook? What was it called? Oh yeah, Myspace!”

I actually still have a Myspace account. Admittedly, I haven’t logged in, in about four years, but it’s still there, with my rubbish photos and ridiculous wall posts. The nice thing about Myspace, at least in the days of yore, was that your profile was completely customisable, from background, to the fonts, the box shapes and sizes, their placement, content and other plugins. I hosted videos and games on my profile, come for the laughs, stay for the games.