socialmediocrity

Interesting to see a bit of hype about Kotex’s “campaign” on Pinterest. Their well produced video, showing what they did, explains it far better than I could, here

There’s a couple of very interesting points to this. Firstly, the campaign wasn’t actually “on” Pinterest at all, yet perhaps everyone wants to be associated with the latest network-du-jour that it is inevitable that some will claim this. The organisers simply used Pinterest to find the 50 recipients, but as they go on to point out, recipients not only posted on Pinterest, but also on Facebook and Twitter, and no doubt other less association-favourable networks too.

We also thought the results were interesting. 50 recipients were contacted, and of those an intriguingly “almost” 100% posted about their gift. From those posts, 2,284 Interactions were identified, presumably referring to likes, comments, etc. If we assume 50 users participated, and that they all used all three networks to post (Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter) and that they posted once each on each channel, that’s about 15 interactions per post on average. 694,853 impressions were also recorded, although given the variety of networks being monitored, that can mean a number of different things, but lets take that on face value.

On the face of it then, not exactly mind-blowing in terms of the impact it had. This perhaps provides some insight into the relative value of social channels,and the degree to which they are useful in marketing terms. The propagation of the content was actually quite limited, and although we don’t know what expectations were, this didn’t feel like a completely free campaign to execute. Shipping costs alone would have been a couple of hundred dollars.

So how do we establish the value? Short term, we can slightly crudely look at the facts. We have 50 users, generating 2,300 interactions and 695k impressions. Taking Facebook’s media costs as a guide, and even assuming these impressions are premium value impressions, that’s a media value of about $2,500. If all of those interactions were clicks to the brand, the value is probably about the same.

Of course, what we can’t place such a direct value on is the creation of “almost” 50 brand advocates, and perhaps this is the longer-term value building role of social marketing campaigns. But if we think that’s hard to place a value on, then it only gets harder when we introduce other variables, that will occur over the longer time frame we are referencing, such as fatigue rates of an individuals’ advocacy, or the increased risk of a poor experience. The long term value of this advocacy building will be lost if it is not supported by continued investment in the product or the service.

Hard to place a value on then, and given these results and multiples of interaction and impression, I wonder if the Kotex team, or more poignantly the MD, will be quite so enthusiastic to do it again, or to make it an even larger exercise to increase it’s impact. The returns don’t seem to justify it in the short term, but as part of a longer-term strategy, it could be just the beginning of the real understanding of the role and value of social in a marcomms strategy and it’s contribution towards the positive projection of the brand.