When developing proactive campaigns, brand mentions in the right places remain the most important thing to our clients, not necessarily how we incorporate social media in to existing plans. The core for all those in the communications industry is still about identifying the target audience before building a campaign which is relevant and interesting to the target audience; the appropriate medium – whether that includes social media or not – should always remain secondary.
What print journalists write (or indeed blog about) will always be important to brands - no question. However, a social media comment on a client’s story or brand mention is much more personal, which may well exceed the reach and power of a newspaper mention. Understanding and being able to evaluate this for a client is imperative.
With every client, we instill Brazil’s philosophy of adopting a proactive social media strategy for the right reasons, rather than simply as a ‘me too’ exercise. This approach allows us to measure exactly what we set out to do, which our clients clearly appreciate.
Brazil’s recent swiftcover.com campaign to reach mid-to-late ‘20 somethings’ about the dangers of drunk passengers in the run up to Christmas is a classic example. We prioritised social media activity alongside targeting major online news channels such as MSN and Yahoo! as well as the national newspaper websites such as the Mirror, Guardian and Daily Star – all of which we gained coverage in. The knock-on effect and planned seeding of the story resulted in thousands of tweets not necessarily mentioning the brand but each and every one linking to the coverage, which mentioned swiftcover.com throughout. A hugely successful campaign based through an online strategy – and we got significant articles in a few national newspapers too, which is always welcome!
See our thoughts on this in prmoment, or, for more information, get in touch!
