Wathcing the Olympics brought up something that I’d been thinking about for a while now. We keep hearing clients ask us how to make campaigns viral – which as we all know you can’t “make” something viral, but you can provide the tools to help people share what they see on the web or elsewhere.
However in my opinion, I think “social media” has really evolved this whole concept of sharing and taken it one step further, Case in point the 2008 Oympics.
My husband and I were out for dinner one night recently and discussing how much I had enjoyed watching the Oympics while I worked – from my computer. I was one of those who streamed it live from CBC (approximately 300,000 streams per day though final figures aren’t in) and then “tweeted” what was happening as it happened.
Another case in point is the 2008 US Presidential election and what live tweeting for example is doing to spread the word about these things. For example I have to thank my fellow tweeters @conniecrosby and@typeamom for keeping me posted so I could kick my hubby off the tv in time to hear the Republician VP candidate speak tonight.
It’s things like this that have made me realize how much things have changed and yet how they’ve stayed the same. If you have something that is worth talking about or worthy of being shared – it will be – that’s never going to change. What has changed now is the scale and the pace of how fast it can be shared and your or your client’s ability to react to how fast something does get picked up.
This is why it’s vitally important to make sure you have someone in your company monitoring all of of these tools and sharing devices – you need to know in hurry if something went well or didn’t go well. What is the public saying? I guarantee you tonight that Palin campaign folks are keeping track of what is being said on Facebook and Twitter and I’ll bet already have the speech writers retorting certain points that have been brought up.
No longer does anyone have the luxury of just putting something out there and seeing where it goes. You no longer need to pound the pavement to know if people are talking about it. Open your eyes and turn on your computer you’ll find out if you’re being talked about…. I mean just think about Youtube and what ends up there on a daily basis.
Photo Credit: svilen001/www.sxc.hu
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available