Great post – I didn’t notice any social media activity around the time of the event – I work as an online marketing manager in Sydney for Photolibrary, we follow DM Scott on Twitter and I personally read his blog a lot, also frequent various social media channels regularly – but it all past by fairly quietly… I guess email is still the dominant form of interpersonal work communication, so until this shifts to social media, it’s still one of the best ways to get through to your target market.

I’ve often wondered what is the actual value of a follower? Social media followers range from those who obsessively check all updates and those who never do. We could say that an email can attract click-throughs of anyway between 5-60 per cent on a large list depending on the quality of the email – what might be the comparison of a social media followers?

David Meerman Scott appears to have a quality list of Twitter followers for example – he made a tweet about one of our recent campaigns that resulted in about 300 visits – not bad for a line less than 140 characters!

@Mo – You know, you are 100% correct. Audience and message will always dictate the success of a direct response campaign. And I’d imagine the music industry would be one with real potential to generate a direct response given the passion people have for the favourite musicians.

I guess my point is that most organisations don’t solicit that type of passion from their consumers, and therefore need to temper their expectations on what can be achieved.

Great post, thanks for sharing.

Let me preface this by saying I am not a social media expert.

One thing that we may impact use of social as a direct response media context & target audience.

In this instance, the senior mgt segment may not have been active social participants. However, when marketing to 18-29yr old music fans, we have found social networks to be effective.

For example, we use facebook for DR every now and again, communicating with people who have identified themselves as band or summer festivals fans with exclusive offers – this to date has delivered a good response for us…

Agree in principle that social media is a marathon not a sprint, however there are times when audiences who have expressed their passion for specific lifestyle pillars can be leveraged to solicit interest – in the short term.

Thanks again for sharing, always enjoy your posts.

Mo

Great to hear other examples of where expectations were not met with social media. I think the really great point you made is that, it needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy and does not to fulfill any marketing objective on its own. I have found the same results with direct response as you have on a number of campaigns.

Thanks again for sharing
Jules

@Nathan – Agree completely. The best lessons in life always come through failure. But in business, very few people are comfortable talking openly about a failed project. So cheers to Jules for starting this thing rolling.

Great analysis here. I’ve also learned from the marketing of this and other events. I think that marketing via social media works for those social media enthusiasts.

However, to reach the managers at companies who are interested in learning more about social media, other marketing and promotional efforts are required (like your email campaign).

We found the same thing to be true in other cities. A few weeks ago I did a session in Amsterdam and we ended up with 65 people for the full day event. Good, but we wanted more.

I also think that your observation is correct about lots of self-proclaimed “social media experts.” There is a lot of noise. I see local events nearly every being held and most are free or very low cost. Hard to compete with a $900 event if you don’t know the backgrounds of the various “experts”.

Anyway, thanks for all of your hard work. We pulled it off. Maybe in a better economy we would have had a lot more interest. And as you say, we did better than “the other guys” who had to give away tickets.

All the best

David