Seeing and Believing, an Update!

After writing my post on how companies are leveraging social media, I wanted to follow up to see if I could find some cold hard results.

While I did find some statistics (largely high-level web numbers), what I really found was people beginning to embrace the unknown.

It’s clear that online marketing is the way of the future, but there is no successful business model as of yet. This is why it is taking a lot of firms a long time to wade in to online advertising. My point that online advertising has to be credible was backed in both articles. Below is a quote from a Knowledge @ Wharton piece:

“How do you make the Corolla seem irreverent? You can’t fake that; you actually have to be that way,” Jonah Berger, Wharton marketing professor

The Numbers:

• In February of 2008, New York-based eMarketer released survey findings that 53% of all Americans (154 million people) will watch video online in 2008.
• General Motors plans to spend half of its $3 billion ad budget through 2011 online and through one-on-one marketing.
• H& R Block’s Truman Greene has had over 560,000 views on YouTube and has 160 subscribers. He has 3500 MySpace friends.

Global Neighbourhoods had a really good interview with Paula Drum, H & R Block’s VP of marketing for digital tax solutions. She makes some interesting points on how they are working with social media, including:

• They see social media as something just getting under way and are committing to it long-term.
• They do a lot of mini-test and “micro-measurements”. Keeping the pieces small allows them to scrap bad ideas or change mediocre ones almost on-the-fly.
• While they had a broad roll-out of the campaign, what they found was that they should have gone even bigger, leveraging their content across even more communities.
• They were forthright about Truman Greene being a manufactured character, giving him the freedom to simply be amusing and engaging. As long as they were honest, people didn’t seem to mind.

But the best part was a quote Ms. Drum had towards the end of the article:

“Finally, it is important to have a level of sincerity about the community. Brands that are not sincere and transparent in their motives are going to receive a negative reaction.”

In viral advertising, as in life, honesty is the best policy!