How to drive a successful social media campaign

There are a lot of companies trying to get traction in the social arena these days – and most will fall short. Stanford GSB professor Jennifer Aaker, in this Entrepreneur Thought Leader Lecture, given at Stanford University, discusses some ways you can stand above the crowd, using the methods of Team Sameer — a successful social media campaign to find a bone marrow donor for a man with leukemia – as an example.

The steps:

Focus: Hand pick small audiences that will have a positive emotional reaction to the campaign you’re pushing.

Grab attention: The more you remove barriers for the audience to help you, the better your chances. Breaking those down, in fact, is possibly more important than encouraging action on their behalf.

Engagement: Humans aren’t set up to understand logic. They’re set up to understand stories. Want to hook an audience? Talk to it, not at it.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

(Can’t see the video? Click here)

  • http://twitter.com/ikoniqueOS ikonique OS

    So sad to see that manipulation of the public has come so far that people distrust the genuine messages.Her solution. Take the deception to yet another level.God help us all if this is what professors are teaching their students at Stanford these days.Just listen to the gibberish she utters when the video starts. What the hell does 'bag-out' mean?

  • http://twitter.com/designdamage vbcontributor

    Jennifer's key points are basically leveraging direct response marketing tactics but using social network and digital media as the vehicle to carry out the campaign strategy. ikonique OS, Marketing is a skill that can be learn unfortunately some people have used it n unethical ways. I think she is teaching a concept here not encouraging people to use misleading messages otherwise she wouldn't point it out.

  • sherryheyl

    The beginning is very much like the Tipping Point. It is not about reaching the masses as much as it is about reaching the right people.

  • http://brianaford.info Briana Ford

    There's so many companies focused on the numbers (hundreds or thousands of fans & followers) but want to know why no one is interacting. Go for an extremely targeted / more loyal group and see success in numbers that way.

  • http://profiles.google.com/shafiq.hamid Shafiq Hamid

    Sorry but she talking absolute rubbish – hope the students were asleep!

  • http://www.dragonflyeffect.com/blog/dragonfly-round-up-ii-2/ Dragonfly Round-Up II | The Dragonfly Effect

    […] VentureBeat wrote about how to drive a successful social media campaign using the Dragonfly […]

blog comments powered by Disqus