FreshNetworks Blog

Image by ★ maize via Flickr

One of the real benefits of social media is that it means that it can now make good financial and business sense to engage just a relatively small group of people, either online or offline. Traditionally, brands often needed to reach a large audience to make a marketing or advertising campaign viable. The best campaigns would get advertising slots during the most popular prime time TV shows, or pay for space in the biggest circulation newspaper for their target market. Big was good. Reach was good and getting yourself in front of as many people as possible was good.

None of this has really changed. It’s still important to get your brand and your marketing in front of as possible, but now rather than getting  this reach with your original message you can get it from people sharing, responding to or embedding your content. And we know that people trust peers much more than brands or ‘experts’ so the impact of getting reach in this way should be significantly better.

All of this is good news for us. Why? Because it now means that it makes financial and business sense to do activities and campaigns that target a small group of people. And this explains exactly why T-Mobile has spent what must be a not inconsiderable amount of money on entertaining just a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square last week. For those people it was, no doubt, an incredible experience. A free performance and event put on just for them and made possible by them. Not just because they were the ones singing (and so creating the content) but also because they would all be instrumental in the distribution of the content. Telling their friends about what happened, taking photos and videos and uploading them to social networks and online communities. So this was crowd-sourced content and crowd-sourced distribution.

And what can we learn from this? Well there’s nothing wrong with engaging a small group of people or putting effort, time and money into doing so. In fact if you enable them to share and spread what they have experienced, then you will probably get a greater return on investment than if you had just tried to engage the large group in the first place.

And for those people who take part in the event or experience, it can be something very special and very rewarding. The key is to make sure they get value from what they do, that they enjoy it.

Some more reading

• T-Mobile: Social Media Superstar? (markevanstech.com)
• ‘Hey Jude’ Singalong (buzzfeed.com)
• New T-Mobile “flash mob” ad in Trafalgar Sqaure (ameliatorode.typepad.com)
• T-Mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke ‘Flash Mob’ (nickburcher.com)
• Everybody Sing Along! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Trafalgar Square T-Mobile Karaoke Flash Mob (viralblog.com)