For a decent long while now i’ve had a post-it on my desk saying “Social media makes the best puppet show solution”. I mean this and mean it pretty much literally. The puppet in question being he of Compare the Market Meerkat, Aleksandr.
Yes, yes yes, i’m coming to the party late and yes, yes, yes, the whole Compare the Meerkat thing is so 12 months ago. However, HOWEVER, dear reader my point today is how social media, better than any other media, enables brands to create a better puppet show solution with which to divert an audience’s attention from a hum-drum, every day product/service.
So, what do I actually mean by ‘puppet show solution’? Well, I mean that there are a great many humble every day brands that sell a product or service that is fairly mundane but fairly useful. Whilst often (if not always) it’s the big shiny super brands that are the ones sinking money in to really natty social media campaigns, social media presents a wonderful opportunity to hide an ordinary, everyday product or service behind a shiny social media campaign.
Think about it this way: car insurance is boring. Even more so when you’re in fact not even selling car insurance but the comparison between car insurers. Hardly a cool brand peple want in on the way they might with Mercedez, or Coke, or Apple. And yet, and yet, shove a semi-funny meerkat puppet with an accent on Twitter and suddenly people develop a stronger affinity with the brand through tweets, updates, blogs whatever.
My point is when your product/service ain’t sexy, social media can divert one’s attention just far enough away from it to make an audience want to enter in to an ongoing exchange with your brand. Think of it this way: no one wants to get a twitter feed about soap but make it about ‘sudsy’ the loveable soap bear and suddenly people can’t get enough of your brand – they WANT sudsy’s Twitter feed, they WANT to be his mate on Facebook.
Ok, hideous example. My point is just that I’ll bet sudsy’s twitter feed woud get a lot more followers than a feed about soap tax, scent, legislation and soap offers near you. This means increased interactions with the brands for more people meaning that, when it comes time to buy soap, sud-u-like is the more likely decision.
Of course, this isn’t “Simples”, one has to be careful not to divert the audiences attention so much with the puppets that they forget the brand who brought the puppet to life. But, get it just right and there is a lot of opportunity out there in them there social medias.
