суслик Meerkat

Editor's Notes

• #2: I am here today because of a small, rather furry friend of mine Aleksandr. You might know him.
• #3: So with that in mind, I want to give you VCCP's or rather Aleksaandr’s 4 Simples Rules of Social Media Marketing (I wanted to have 3 but then thought of another one which made 4, tried to think of a good 5th and failed so its 4 Simples Rules)
• #4: Let's talk about some of the topline numbers: Millions of people have seen the TV and heard the radio ads Half a million people are active fans on Facebook - this is the most popular UK branded Fan site on Facebook. Closest competitors are cadburys and Marmite with around 200,000 Fans. We have almost 1000 meerkat photos uploaded; each post that Aleksandr leaves has on average almost 300 comments and is "Liked" by about 2000. He has had **** offers of marriage, *** offers of adoption (what do people think that he is, a child???) and many pleas for him to run either as an MP or to simple take the mantra of Prime Minister. More than Cheryl and Wayne SHOW SCREEN GRAB OF FACEBOOK PAGE
• #5: 1. "It's an as well as not an instead of..." SHOW TRIANGLE SLIDE Without television I don't think that we would be here today talking about the Social Media campaign of the year. Television set up the campaign idea, developed the character of Aleksandr and was the catalyst for everything else. In our experience Social Media seems to work better when its a part of something bigger.
• #6: On Twitter where he is the UK's most successful advertising campaign, he has almost 20,000 followers. On average about 100 new people follow Aleksandr Orlov every day. And you can too. SHOW SCREEN GRAB OF ALEKSANDR'S TWITTER PAGE Aleksandr tries to talk to as many of his fans as possible. It takes a lot of time. We try to automate as much as possible but the beauty of Aleksandr Orlov is that he is as real as possible, so it can't feel false. At the start of the campaign we were engaging in real-time with Fans, it is simply not possible at the moment. There are too many people and too many questions being asked! More influential than Boris Johnson and Hillary Clinton! According to Marketing magazine!
• #7: 2. One central idea - multiple connected social media platforms The second simples rule is really lifted from the Obama campaign which considering that it won the Titanium/Integrated prize at Cannes over the weekend I am proud to admit. At the heart of this campaign was a person and a core thought - Change. What Obama did so brilliantly, amongst many other things, was to adhere to this rule. Don't expect people to come and seek our your message, go to where they are and develop content and functionality in the places where they already are.
• #8: This was our Social Media architecture for Meerkat: SHOW SLIDE WITH THE CIRCLE. Some of these aspects will be brought on board later in the campaign, some of these you will have already seen. And just to show the level of planning that has gone into this campaign
• #9: 3. "Its a conversation - what are your chatalysts..." This is our third simples rule. And this really is very very simples. If Social Media is a conversation then you have to think about what you are giving people to talk about! Chat catalysts, or as people in my team hate, Chat-a-lysts. ATL starts the conversation, but if it had just been a TV ad then I don't think that we would have over half a million people actively engaged with Aleksandr Orlov and Compare The Meerkat in Social Media. Its the "chatalysts" that we have developed on an on-going basis as the campaign has developed which have added to the momentum and been the spark for the hundreds of thousands of people engaging with Aleksandr and Sergei in the Social Web. What do I mean by a Chatalyst? Well Sergei the new character in the TV ads was a chatalyst  - we introduced him via Twitter about 3 weeks before his TV spot was launched. Aleksandr tweets about the April Fools Joke that he played with a rotting fish and Sergei's keypad. This started a whole chain of conversations about Sergei. Who was he? Why did he merit a fish? How did he take the joke? As the weeks went by Aleksandr revealed more and more about Sergei so that when the TV ad was previewed online, the website was so inundated that (ironically) the servers almost crashed!   Aleksandr's pictures of his ancient meerkat family were chatalysts and prompted people to start uploading their own. Like the one of Aleksandr and Stephen Fry stuck in a lift together . Or even the fact that Aleksandr responded to petitions asking for ringtones and produced them in the second iteration of his website. The other thing that we have realised in developing this campaign is that the essense of a good conversation is about timeliness.  While we have a loose narrative structure we develop weekly content chatalyts on an on-going basis. Topical. Funny. Engaging. Participative
• #10: Someone from another agency, who shall remain nameless, suggested that there wasn't anything that we did for this campaign. We just set up the Social Media platforms and then sat back and waited for success to happen. This could not be further from the truth.
• #11: We use each platform in different ways and then weave the narrative together. For example - on the Social Web Aleksandr asked the question, "I am looking to expand my meerkat database..." SHOW SLIDE OF THIS FACEBOOK POST We have had about 2000 suggestions of new types of meerkats - their size, their hobbies, their location. Then what we did was we took the suggestions from the Social Web and fed them into our Digital thinking. Comparethemeerkat.com 2.0 were filled with hundreds of new meerkats (ranging from *** to ***) You really do need to spend some time on the site to fully appreciate quite how much love has gone into it! We also targeted Aleksandr's most ardent fans and asked them if they would like to feature on his official website. If you look now, you will see the Testimonial page. We will be updating this regularly with new fans. Its a great way of sparking buzz and excitement. But this is where I think it gets really interesting, we then feed this thought into the creative team and they write a script which is all to do with the new servers that Aleksandr and Sergei have had to install to cope with the demand and all this extra traffic. Its a seamless piece of brand narrative that spans and integrates multiple digital platforms.
• #12: 4. "ears to mouth ratio" Lots of people talk about talking when it comes to Social Media. Less people seem to talk about listening. There is a 2:1 ratio for a reason apparently. We worked hard to listen properly and respond where necessary.
• #13: This is blank deliberately. Its up to you. Where do you want to play?
• #14: Some outstanding results!
• #16: Impact of the campaign clearly visible: Quote volumes up 80%. Cost per visit down 73%