From the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of summer 2014, comes 5 powerful social media marketing lessons for anyone planning a marketing campaign in 2015
For those of you who may have missed it this summer, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge saw celebrities – from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - and individuals pouring buckets of ice over their heads for the sake of the ALS charity and then nominating others via social media to take up the challenge.
Facebook analysed how the Challenge went viral and calculated that between June 1 and August 17, over 28 million people joined the conversation and 2.4 million videos were shared on the social networking site alone related to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Within a matter of days, the phenomenon had gone global, with challenges witnessed in many other countries.
A Textbook Case
The campaign was intended to raise awareness of Amyothrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is otherwise known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” – a little-known disease that causes the deterioration of nerve cells, leading to paralysis and death.
'Little-known', that is, until now - marketing textbooks are probably currently being written, or even re-written, with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge as a case study in the successful use of cause-related social media marketing campaign, but why has it been so successful and what can we learn from it?
"Emotion, challenge and social currency"
Wharton University's Professor of Marketing, Jonah Berger, has suggested that,
[w]ith its combination of emotion, challenge and social currency, the campaign has become something of a marketing phenomenon.”
Berger is an expert on social media and he has written extensively on why things go viral and the effects of word-of-mouth - he also described the Challenge as a form of social contagion,
[p]eople don’t want to be left out. Anytime you’re at a cocktail party and someone is talking about something, whether it’s a brand or a new band, … you don’t want to be the only person in the group who has no idea what they’re talking about.”
This taps into a basic human emotion and need for belonging. It also succeeded because it represented a worthy cause, so there is little that people can object to in terms of its message and call to action.
5 Social Media Marketing Lessons from the Ice Bucket Challenge
What are the five lessons that we can take from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge?
#1: Timing
It came during the summer months, meaning that people had time to participate and lighter evenings enabled them to take part, whereas the nature of the challenge would have precluded participation during the cold winter months. Thus the planning and execution of the campaign was vital to ensure that the timetable allowed it to spread virally from early spring into summer.
#2: Simple
There was no requirement for complicated equipment, instead it could be attempted by nothing more than someone with a bucket, some cold water, and a smartphone and friend in order to record the event for posting on social media.
#3: Social
It passed amongst friends and relatives in a genuinely word-of-mouth style, precisely because it was so personal. We associated with the people doing it and we also connected with their often personal reasons for doing it, both serious and frivolous - this is the 'social currency' that Berger is talking about.
#4: Celebrity
The Challenge has also passed amongst a number of high-profile celebrities, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and this always helps to give a social media campaign velocity, particularly when they start spreading the challenge socially themselves, as was the case here.
#5: Challenge
It also tapped into the desire to have credibility in the eyes of your peers, but also the need to avoid shame, if you were not seen to take up the baton and take part when you had been nominated. People embraced the sense of challenge inherent in it.
Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter andFacebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net
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Picture Credits: (1) https://flic.kr/p/2cxjDq The Sights of Summer... by Karen Brazier; (2) https://flic.kr/p/oaPqux Dear Liza (RE: My Bucket) by Dave Lawler; (3)https://flic.kr/p/2cxjDq Social by JD Hancock; (4) https://flic.kr/p/aAYpoP Mark Zuckerberg by Wired Photostream; (5) https://flic.kr/p/oZp6pZ Veronica's Ice Bucket Challenge by Kyle Nishioka
It is almost fitting that this selfie-taking in Sydney became a news story in itself, because, as 2014 draws to a close, this has definitely been the year of the selfie. From the Elen DeGeneres selfie at the Oscars, which became the most retweeted picture on Twitter, to the 'so my plane just crashed' selfie of an unsmiling passenger chronicling the wreckage of an airliner(left).
While all the rest of us are struggling to get to the gym or realising that the membership fee has now become a 'guilt tax' for how unfit we are, there are always those friends on social media who are willing to share the number of miles they ran today or the amount of calories they've lost. If you want the quickest route to annoy your contacts, there is no better way to do it than by posting how far you've jogged or cycled!
I am definitely guilty of this, whether it's posting the pictures of that fabulous meal you have just been treated to by a grateful client or the full breakfast that you are enjoying as a rare treat. This is another habit that can consume your social media contacts with envy and have them contemplating how best to 'un-friend' you and your gluttonous ways!
"Someone knows I never eat muffins" or "That's the last time and I'm not saying why!" Such updates tend to suggest a neediness and desire for attention that just manages to unsettle us as 'over-sharing'. It's often a result of blurring the boundaries between the friends that know us well and our virtual companions.
Repeat invites to Candy Crush or Farm Heroes Saga, when you have ignored the previous fifty! This can be a source of annoyance and it's probably best to be a bit more selective in your choice of playmates, rather than hit the send button to all of your contacts and turn them into 'angry birds'!
OK, so this is not so much the joyful announcement of the arrival of a new baby. Rather this is the endless stream of trivial accomplishments that are wonderful landmarks in the youngster's development, but really only of interest to close family and other friends with kids of a similar age. Probably likely to alienate the singletons or other friends without kids.
"The colonoscopy went OK, but I'm a little sore this morning" or "Can anyone recommend a good haemorrhoid cream?" Definitely comes under the category of 'too much information' and guaranteed to make your contacts feel queasy and probably more likely to reach for the sick bag than the 'like' button.
"I am at an airport on my way to somewhere exotic" or "I'm in the Club Class lounge enjoying a G&T before my flight!" Often accompanied by the obligatory #2 meal-sharing picture, this has been known to elicit envy from friends and colleagues chained to their desks or stuck in less sunny climes than those of the serial checker-in.
As with the too many games invites, the event spammer can overstep the mark by sending too many invitations. Whether it is a get-together amongst friends or a breakfast networking meeting, we need to draw the line between a legitimate invitation and spamming that just aggravates and ensures the contacts non-attendance.
Liking and commenting in excess will suggest to others that you are spending too much time on social media and that you are over-stepping the bounds of familiarity. It's the social media equivalent of invading someone's personal space and it's a sure-fire route to being un-friended fairly pronto. As the saying goes, everything in moderation.
Whilst LinkedIn and other social media are intended for self-promotion, in a relevant and focused way, this is really about those friends on social media, such as Facebook, who provide too much of what they feel they have achieved. They can turn a seemingly innocuous update into an opportunity to showcase their new car or their holiday island villa. Whilst social media thrives on self-promotion to a certain extent, caution is needed to ensure that the line is not crossed to boastfulness, self-congratulation and attention-seeking.
It is interesting that the iconography of liking is the ‘thumbs up’ symbol: it comes from the gladiatorial arena, where the thumbs down was considered to be the signal that the victor was being given the assent to dispatch the losing combatant. Some controversy surrounds the idea that the thumbs up, by default, meant that the loser was being granted life, but popular cinema has embraced that idea and so has wider society and particularly the world of social media.
The giver, for want of a better term, is expressing their approval for the content that you produced or for something that you shared. It is also seems to be some form of agreement, because the giver is more likely to hit that ‘like’ button, if you have provided something that accords with their own pre-existing viewpoint or that they agreed with after having read it.
Beyond just viewing the post on LinkedIn, liking is the most passive act in terms of responding to a post. Nevertheless, it does flag up on your timeline, and that of your connections and followers, and so it is a form of recommendation and in practice it plays a similar role to actually sharing the article.
Perhaps, to get slightly psychoanalytical for a moment - on the premise that ‘you are what you share’ on social media - so we also take it as personal validation and acceptance of who we are. Getting liked makes us feel good about ourselves and our place in this virtual world of social media amongst a global audience of connections and followers - the overwhelming majority of whom we will never meet in person. But I think I am getting too deep here and this is a post for another day.
Ultimately, likes bring attention to what we are sharing. The author sees their viewings increase and this leads to an upward spiral of further likes and comments, which on LinkedIn will flag your content as interesting and relevant and should then see it picked up by the algorithms, from where we see it promoted more widely on Pulse and featured in various channels. This leads onto a virtuous upward spiral of likes, comments and shares, until that post, which was originally read by a few of your regular followers, has now circled the globe to a worldwide audience.