Big wins by local agency Social Soup suggest brands are returning to ‘real life’ marketing engagement, and turning their backs on what some marketers are calling a ‘social media haze’.
Social Soup has won a bunch of new clients in the past two months, all keen to explore the agency’s claim that it can engage communities of smart, early-adopters to spark effective new product launches. Those clients include Treasury Wine Estates, Optus, Red Rooster, Radiant, LG, Arnotts, Body Shop and Glade.
Social Soup group business director, head of marketing and innovations, Andrew Handosa says a renewed bout of interest in developing ‘real life’ conversations around product launches is afoot at Australian brands, in part driven by the Journal of Marketing Research’s findings last August which stated what some had suspected for a long time: that 90% of conversations around brands happen face-to-face, while some 10% happen on social media, or in the online environment.
“We have more than 150,000 people in our community; people who fit a particular criteria in that they are early-adopters, have extensive real-life social networks and are tuned-in to particular product spheres,” he explains. “We engage with these groups, not on a ‘focus group’ level, but to get them to help us shape the launches of different products. They stay with the brand for the entire journey.”
Handosa explains that the effectiveness of the company’s community-driven approach is backed by robust measurement – metrics of success that are unobtainable through social media alone. He cites a recent campaign with Treasury Wine to launch a new vintage of the Pepperjack Shiraz, claiming that activations within the Social Soup-selected community resulted in a 50% sales uplift in areas where those who took part live, a shift in Net Promoter Score of 48 points and, as far as the brand is concerned, five-times ROI.
Social Soup will also be announcing deals and new launches for Woolworths and PayPal in coming months. Paypal head of communications Adrian Christie earlier this year told AdNews, “Social conversations need to be there, companies have to be there, but they need to be there in real life as well…I think we’re seeing a tiering of our communications. If you have a conversation about a brand online, that might have a score of 3 out of 10, but a conversation in real life is 10 out of 10.”
Meanwhile, Facebook’s Atlas launch this week is a clear indication that the brand is trying to challenge growing scepticism around the power of social media, hoping to prove via new technology that social media ‘haze’ does translate into real life purchases.
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