To a brand manager “viral” represents the effortless thrill of a no-strings lover calling your name. And she/he has tickets to that thing you love. But can’t we do better than the lottery promise of viral? Shouldn’t we deliver more than a transient experience, one that is an extension of the brand?
We can and we should. To do this we look to the one and only Cosmo Kramer. Well, not just Kramer, but the whole cast. And not really the cast, rather it’s just a couple of guys who love the show.
Introducing @SeinfeldToday
With over 498,000 followers at the time of this writing, @SeinfeldToday (or, “Modern Seinfeld” as it calls itself) is a Twitter feed that communicates on a daily / near-daily / spontaneous basis what a Seinfeld plotline might be today, given current events and popular memes. More than a Twitter feed, it is the embodiment of brand engagement that has been released completely to the brand advocates. The work of writers Jack Moore (@BuzzFeedJack) and Josh Gondelman (@JoshGondelman), Modern Seinfeld is everything a brand manager could want: Dedicated effort by consumers at maintaining the brand’s voice on behalf of the brand. Since the content isn’t the work of the brand itself, these freeform efforts have the effect of extending the lifespan and freshness of the brand beyond reruns. Or, in the parlance of product marketing, line extensions.
This stuff really could be woven into a new season of Seinfeld. Through @SeinfeldToday the show lives on not as a memory of a different decade with different hairstyles, but as a vital, relevant, modern version of Seinfeld. Or, as Jerry might have said, “It’s a MODERN SEINFELD!!”
This approach is definitely not right for every company. For a non-media brand without the eternal quotability of Seinfeld, how could this work? Stick to the basic concept of allowing constituents to own your brand, and execution becomes a little easier to envision. For instance:
- Dedicate a visible part of product ideation to customer input.
- Start a Tumblr blog dedicated to letting the audience have its way (in a lightly moderated way) with the company’s IP.
- Engage a service like Bazaarvoice to integrate consumer reviews and feedback directly into your web properties.
- Run a secondary Twitter feed that is guest-curated by a celebrity with edgy, comic timing to react to specific happenings connected with major events. This feels like what Oreo Cookies did with the Superbowl, but instead of delivering company-created content, the comments are closer to the consumer and less about the brand. Just like the impressionist, it’s what we wish the brand would say.
Without question, your corporate counsel will lose his/her mind when she/he sees this. For all I know, the purveyors of @SeinfeldToday have had to stare down Cease and Desist letters. But denying the efforts of a dedicated brand fan base is like King Canute trying to command the tides: short-lived at best, and ultimately futile. The technology needed to make your brand belong to its biggest fans is not only available, it is easy to deploy and is largely free. It’s time to consider new ways to put it to work in the service of your audience so they can be in the service of your brand.
4 Comments
Great in-depth explanation!! guess the difference between strategies and tactics can be compared to the difference between a mission and vision statement in PR (at least thats what I’ve learned in school?)
Regarding your last point about brands trying to capture real events like Super Bowl/Oscars to create and build content and send it out ASAP – I feel like as more brands start doing it, time will become the defining factor rather than content. Marketers will rush to push out products, almost like how many media outlets focus more on being the first ones to break the news rather than wait and create quality reporting. Do you see that trend too?
Immediacy has always been the driving force in media. That’s why we had correspondents such as Ernie Pyle and others reporting live from battle zones over the radio, even before there was television per se.
I agree that speed almost always poses a significant challenge to quality. Interestingly for this conversation, I think many times the big winner in the wake of a really “cool” media stunt (such as Oreo Cookies and the Super Bowl) is the ad agency itself among its peers, and not so much the brand among consumers.
This is why the @SeinfeldToday example struck me as so powerful: It isn’t being driven by an agency, but rather is the equivalent of the audience crowd-surfing the brand into continued relevancy and vitality.
Thanks for the excellent questions and observations.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for connecting on Twitter. You had mentioned strategies being imp for creating long-term marketing. But now that we are shifting to digital/real-time marketing – when do brands have time to strategize? Please share your insight – thanks!
You ask a very good question that has a multi-part answer. The communications and marketing strategies for brands and the organizations behind them need to be founded on the true essence of the brand and the organization behind it. Thus when a company “rebrands” it’s because the organization feels it has evolved beyond the values and promises on which it was originally founded.
Keeping this in mind, you can see that a brand needs to strategize less frequently, but adjust its tactics more often. In communications the strategy is almost always the statement of the desired end result: “We need to increase our active Facebook community by 50%.” The tactics are therefore what need to shape-shift in response to the activity of the brand’s stakeholders. This explains what Oreo has been up to during the Super Bowl and the Oscars.
It’s probably fair to say that the Seinfeld brand ostensibly wants to stay as top-of-mind as possible to keep the flow of revenue from repeats coming. The presence of @SeinfeldToday helps the Seinfeld franchise stay relevant to those who (believe it or not) might never have actually watched the show. The fact that this @SeinfeldToday relevance machine wasn’t a tactic that came from the owners of the franchise is the main point of the blog post: Mobile digital communications provides fertile ground for stakeholder interest to become brand ownership because the abilities to release content, observe propagation, and respond to feedback (and other outside inputs) is so immediate.
The velocity of strategic shifts for brands used to be governed by the relative sloth of the media needed to communicate the program, since all forms of advertising have lead times. With social media the lead time is measured as the time it takes to build content, and then hit “send” on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or any of the other embassies. Thus the velocity of strategic shifts is still governed, but in a way that is 180-degrees away from how it used to be.
Thanks for writing!