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When Good Buzz Goes Bad
A surprising study finds your brand's support of social movements might be hurting you. Also: Are you wasting your influencer marketing budget? And more!
When Brand Charity Goes Off the Rails
You’ve heard the advice before — make sure your brand is supporting some social causes, and talk about that support on your social media. Doing so is basically a "free pass" to better brand perception, right?
Take the recent Black Lives Matter movement.
Did your brand donate?
Did you put related hashtags on some tweets?
Maybe even turned your channel over to a Black influencer?
You should be good.
...Or should you?
What if the advice we’ve been given all this time about support for social causes has been wrong? So wrong, in fact, it’s actually been hurting your brand.
🧪 Bring In the Science!
Yang Wang is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He and his colleagues have just published some new research in the Journal of Marketing Science. His paper is called “How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media.”
I spoke with him recently and asked him to tell me what happened to brands’ Instagram accounts when they participated in the recent Blackout Tuesday movement.
⬇️ Dive Deeper
Our full conversation goes deep into detail on this topic, covering things like:
The surprising way that slactivism can actually HELP your brand
The difference between politically right-leaning and left-leaning consumers
What effect this has beyond social, like to sales numbers and stock price
And whether their findings could also apply to other social causes like LGBTQ or the abortion debate.
Our full conversation with the answers to all those questions and a lot more is coming tomorrow exclusively to the Premium Podcast feed, which — to celebrate our 700th episode — is on sale for $7 a month. That's a 30% discount.
That offer expires at the end of the weekend.
Tap the link in the show notes, or go to TodayInDigital.com/premiumfeed
The Premium Podcast — no ads, earlier release time, deep-dive weekend episodes, better audio quality, show notes with story links, and much more.
Why You’re (Probably) Wasting Money on Influencers
Are you wasting your money on influencer marketing?
If you're primarily using influencers to boost awareness organically, an interesting piece up at MediaPost today suggests you might be.
The article discusses three steps to getting the most out of influencer marketing:
Content creation
Amplification
The impact on sales
On content creation, quoting the piece:
Brands can take a strongly performing piece of influencer content and insert it into an ad unit, or put it on their website, and that content will outperform content that the brand creates for itself. Still, when brands just focus on awareness, they are not realizing the full value of that content and how it can impact sales.
📣 Amplifying content
The author reminds us that it's important to:
Negotiate rights to use the content.
Make it part of your media budget and push the content out.
The piece also notes that brands need to balance the influencer’s understanding of the audience with the company's objectives. The best influencers understand the brand's needs and how to portray them to their followers so that they can drive results.
💸 Impact of sales
Finally, brands are seeing more value in using influencers for ongoing campaigns rather than one-off campaigns.
Again, quoting MediaPost:
This can be even more effective when activating multiple influencers as part of the marketing mix, because they each have their own audience.
Conversations generated on social work in tandem with topline efforts to inspire action... Creating a groundswell of conversation helps support the brand message and leads to the third part of value: the impact on sales.
This strategy can take a brand from awareness to purchase in just one piece of content.
The article was written by Aliza Freud and you can find it at Mediapost.com — look for the article called How Brands are Wasting Their Influencer Marketing Budgets.
P&G Backs UID 2.0
In third-party cookie replacement news, a huge global advertiser has backed one company's replacement for the cookies, and it's not Google's version.
Yesterday, Procter & Gamble announced its support of Unified ID 2.0, the identity framework developed by The Trade Desk.
As cookieless environments, such as connected TV and mobile apps, become more prevalent, Unified ID is trying to become the framework of choice for marketers looking for interoperability.
The CPG giant joins a growing list of brands, agencies, streaming platforms, publishers, and ad tech companies supporting the identity framework, including:
Disney
Vox Media
Amazon Web Services
Amazon’s New Logistics Service
Amazon recently announced a new resource to help sellers with supply chain challenges.
The e-commerce giant's new service, called Amazon Warehousing & Distribution, lets third-party sellers use its distribution centers for long-term inventory storage.
With the service, sellers can use dedicated, "purpose-built facilities" for bulk inventory storage and automated distribution.
Amazon says storing inventory at distribution centers will let sellers “seamlessly replenish” their inventory in Amazon’s fulfilment network. They will also be able to consolidate their global inventory to manage on the Amazon Seller Central platform.
Currently, this service is available to "Fulfilment by Amazon" sellers, but it will be expanded in 2023 to include wholesale customers and brick-and-mortar stores.
Meta Moves Out of Neighborhoods
Another product is being sent to the Meta graveyard.
Today, the tech giant announced it's pulling the plug on Neighbourhoods, its clone of the Nextdoor app before most users even got to try it.
The community-based feature, which had been quietly tested in Canada and the United States since 2020, will be killed off on Oct. 1.
Neighbourhoods let users create special profiles that they could populate with custom bios and their interests. However, most users just opted to use Facebook Groups to post updates with their local community instead.
Now, the company has started notifying Neighbourhood groups that its test is coming to an end.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook said it originally invested in the project because it saw how popular local content was on its platform. But, Facebook realized the best way to move forward was to let people continue to use Facebook Groups as they had been.
Images: Facebook Matt Navarra via Twitter
Social Media Content Marketers Want
Marketers and brands continue to spend more on influencers, but when it comes to types of content, brands have options. So, what do brands ask creators to post?
According to a new study, the top content types marketers say they hire social media creators to produce are:
Educational content
Unboxing or reveal content
Testimonials
While the top content formats marketers partner with creators on varies by platform:
Story posts for Facebook and Instagram
Link in bio for TikTok
Branded shoutouts for YouTube
Branded tweets for Twitter
Where are creators posting brand partnership content?
For maximum reach, nearly half of brands have the creator post on their own account
Compared to about a third that post it in both
And a quarter that only post it on their brand pages/accounts
(Data has been provided by Sprout Social's survey of over 500 marketers)
Images: Sprout Social
Dirty Alexa SEO
If you're looking to capitalize through smart speakers, apparently all you need to do is record a brand jingle about poop and make it available for streaming.
BuzzFeed reports how a few search-savvy musicians figured out how to game smart speakers thanks to kids shouting the word "poop" into devices.
Several creators told BuzzFeed that their biggest source of revenue is Amazon Music, the default player for Alexa.
One group — the Toilet Bowl Cleaners — is from musician Matt Farley whose SEO-gaming song is called "Poop Poop Poop Poop Song.” He estimates it's been streamed 8 million times on Amazon music.
For many musicians, there's a very clear difference between the streams they get from Amazon versus other platforms.
Quoting Farley:
On Amazon Music, 80% of my earnings come from poop songs... Meanwhile, on Spotify, poop songs make up around 50% of my earnings.
Maybe I missed my calling.
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