Email Campaigns To Social Campaigns

Lot of buzz about Social Media / Social CRM / Social Campaigns. What is it all about? Our Director Naga Chokkanathan takes a small example and explains how someone can go from zero-to-email-to-social quite easily, all you need is a ‘social thinking’ mindset:

My favorite composer is planning to do a live concert next month, and no doubt, I am excited.

The television channel sponsoring this event released a promotional video recently. It announced “Select ten best songs of your favorite composer, and send them to aaa. The most liked songs will be performed by him in the event.”

Good Idea. As a fan, I feel happy about this ‘participation’, but when I look at it from administration perspective, Email is a very bad (ancient) concept for this type of interaction.

Let us say my favorite composer has only 1000 fans across the globe, each one are sending their ’10 best songs’ list, some of them may choose the same songs, or totally new / unique songs. This means, I would have roughly about 6000 to 8000 songs in my Email Inbox.

Now, what will I do? How can I make any sense out of this data? Am I going to open all those 1000 mails, copy paste the text manually? Am I going to write a software program to do that? What if people used wrong spellings for song names? How will I know which songs made it to the ‘top 10′ list?

Obviously, these “Email your favorite songs to aaa@bbb.com” kind of campaigns are nothing but a polished version of age old Paper-pen-letter campaigns. You will get tons of data, but then nothing will come out of it, unless and until you have lot patience and ready to comb through all those Emails manually.

So, what is the solution?

Simple, use the power of Social Media. Create a buzz using the same ‘Select ten best songs of your favorite composer’ concept!

Here are some ideas I could think of (with no detailed analysis of this campaign’s goals / objectives). These are not new, many corporates and brands are already using such ideas, but I hope this will act as a small case study on how to go from Email Campaign to Social Campaign using the same base idea:

1. Create a website for the concert. People can login to this website using their Facebook / Twitter / Google+ profiles
2. Provide lots and lots of media : Rare photos, videos, promotional clips, fan mail, and finally, a database of all the songs by the star composer
3. People can search for their favorite song and vote for them, You have upto 10 votes, you can change them till 5 days before the concert
4. Every hour, select the “Top 50″ songs and feature them in a special page, where people can view them and vote
5. Provide option for people to recommend this site to their friends and followers in various social networks
6. Sell Concert tickets, albums, t-shirts etc., Provide 10% discount to all those people who have already voted for their “top 10″ songs. If you choose only 5, you get only 5% discount
7. One week before the concert, Send notifications to all the people registered in your website, offering them a 20% discount on the concert ticket
8. During the concert, provide free WIFI to all users to post messages / tweet about the event LIVE
9. Provide live video streaming of the concert in your website, for those who couldn’t attend (Advertisement supported)
10. After the concert, send a mail to all those people who voted for the songs with personalized text such as “You selected 4 of the 28 songs sung in the concert. Hope you liked the other 24 songs too. Thanks for your support”

This is just a sample, there are tons of other ideas, but the point is, an Email campaign misses all these. When you have a dedicated website and web 2.0 style voting system, You will know exactly which songs were liked by the people and that will drive the success of the show. As a bonus, because of the viral nature of Social Networks, this campaign will reach lot more people, very fast, means, free advertisement for you!

Now, I hope the Television Channel reads this article, likes the idea and sends me couple of free tickets for the concert.

Source : http://nagachokkanathan.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/why-not-social-not-email/