There’s been much chitter-chatter recently about the Viral Ad Network #icecreamcrawl and last week the eagerly anticipated delivery van hit agencies in London and Bristol, spreading icecream love among the masses.

One of the first questions people asked us was, why ice cream? We say, why not? (And also, don’t question a good thing, sometimes life is just nice to you!) We love to share joy and smiles and who doesn’t like treats? Well, as it turned out, it seems that our friends love ice cream as much as we do, with over 1,000 delicious cones of joy handed out!

First of all we have to say a big thank you to all the lovely folk in Bristol on Friday. It was great to have so many people come out to join us, (even though a few individuals got a bit over excited by it all and tried to lick our poor ice cream boys face!) Especially since the weather was less than kind and there was a lot of umbrella action – all the more reason for ice cream we think!

To see where we went on Friday check out the Bristol Map of Joy and of course not forgetting all the awesome London agencies, have a peek at the London #Icecreamcrawl Round Up to see what we got up to on Thursday!

One more thing… we know that there was a lot of disappointed tweeting coming from the agencies that weren’t lucky enough to make it onto the Map of Joy, so we would like to say sorry for any sad faces inflicted upon you. The good news is that we have many more fun activities in the pipelines and your tweets have been noted. If you want to keep up to date with goings on at VAN head quarters sign up to Van Viral Scoop and be the first to get in on the action next time!

Check out our Flickr gallery for the full album of pictures from the day!

So you have a following of people who have engaged with your brand and are happy to listen to what you are saying and enter conversation. The next step is to try and develop these relationships to sales. How to nudge your brands digital following (e.g. Facebook fans, Twitter followers) from friends to customers is currently the million dollar question in social media.

The best approach depends a lot on the sort of brand you are, and the purchase frequency of your customers. For example, for luxury brands, such as car firms, even committed customers may very rarely be in a position to actually buy your product. In this case, you can either try and increase the frequency of purchase or make sure you are front of mind when people are looking to buy.

- How can you increase purchase frequency?

Much like sending out an email newsletter, adding prompts to your Facebook page is one way of increasing purchase frequency. For example, Crooked Tongues (an online trainer store) will announce each new product that comes in, tempting their fans to increase their purchase frequency (trust me, my empty wallet proves this works!). They also do this on Twitter, mixing industry news with their own shop launches.

- How do you stay front of mind

A good way to stay front of mind is to keep creating interesting content for your fans. Try to not make all of your communication sales based – mix it up with entertainment like viral videos, alongside opinion and discussion on your industry. This will enable you to connect more with your followers as it shows more of a passion for your industry and not just for your sales.

There are also other ways of bridging the gap between Friendship and purchase, for example Easyjet now let you buy flights straight from their Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/easyJet), cutting down the number of steps between Facebook (a space for friendship) and point of sale.

A good rule is, make it as easy as you can for your friends to become your customers – keep them entertained so they remain your friends, then make it easy to purchase your product/service and easy to justify that purchase.

I’d like to show how social media can complement Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing strategy. I’ll break it into the same four stages of:

1. Making friends
2. Changing your friends to customers
3. Maintaining customers
4. Changing customers to brand ambassadors

image by TracerBullet999 on Flickr

Part 1 – Making Friends

At the Viral Ad Network, we often find ourselves helping brands try to make friends. Making friends can be quite literal and measurable (i.e. adding to a brand’s Twitter / Facebook following) or can be a more abstract objective to develop a willingness in someone to engage with a brand’s content and conversation.

Much like in real (offline) life you need a reason to engage with people you don’t know. But first you need to decide who you are trying to reach?

You should research and determine what groups and niches are valuable to your brand. Where do you want to interact with them? Do they have any awareness or preconceptions that you need to consider? You can monitor the buzz around your brand using online tools.

Next, you must consider what is it that you want from this group?

You are (at this stage) just trying to make friends with your target audience, however you must think about your long term relationship. How do you intend to change these new friends to customers? What sort of voice is your brand going to use with these friends? There’s no use in approaching people on a comical, lighthearted level, only to ditch that as soon as you have their attention and ‘friendship’.

So, what does your marketing offer them?

You need to have a reason for people to listen or participate in your social marketing campaign. Your brilliantly shot and well edited infomercial may sum up your brand perfectly but if people don’t want to seek out this info, it will not be of interest to them. For them to engage with you there needs to be some benefit to them for listening. This can be in many forms:

- You can entertain them (for example, creating a viral video) ;
- You can solve a problem they have (for example the excellent myskystatus.com); or,
- You can offer them something of value (like Groupon).

You should also consider how will you quantify success of your campaign? Are you after a number of views on YouTube, Twitter followers, Facebook likes or another metric?

]]> http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2011/how-can-social-media-be-a-part-of-your-permission-marketing-pt-1-making-friends/feed/ 2 http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2010/our-alternative-to-superbowl-ads/ http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/2010/our-alternative-to-superbowl-ads/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:50:20 +0000 Ally Stuart http://www.viraladnetwork.net/blog/?p=1303 Disappointed to have missed Match of the Day on Sunday evening, I thought I’d give the Superbowl a try to quench my thirst for football.

I thought I quite enjoyed American football; it is violent and exciting enough to keep my attention! However, I was soon fed up with the stop and start nature of the show. I think my mistake was watching it on the BBC where most of the program was pundits explaining the basics of the game and desperately trying to fill the time.

In the US, these gaps would have been ad breaks. The Superbowl is famous for its ads, so maybe this was what I was missing! With CBS charging about $2,700,000 for a 30 second ad, I was expecting the ads to be pretty high quality. Here’s a couple of my favourites…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

$2.7m is a lot of money for an ad space. However, the Superbowl has an estimated 100 million viewers, so it works out at $0.03 a viewer – Pretty good value?

Perhaps on the surface, but are these viewers all engaging with the content? These viewers could be making tea, paying the pizza delivery guy, or if they are female, completely disengaged by the huge number of male-orientated ads!

To counter this drain of U.S. ad spend, here at the Viral Ad Network we are running a special offer. For February only, we are doing a deal on U.S. targeted campaigns. We’re giving 2500 away views for free when you spend $999 on 5000 views through the network.

Check out our offer here

Click here to view the embedded video.

(by Del Campo, Nazca Saatchi and Saatchi via Adverblog)

Largely the show was geared up for large companies with marketing departments, who wish to explore and learn new ideas. That’s not to say there were not nuggets of interest and new things to learn.