Madhura's blog: Highights from Day 3

There were some great sessions today.  Although some ideas and thoughts are now beginning to sound repetitive, there’s always some new and interesting information that is presented and really worth sharing. 

• The workshop by Sharethrough about distributing brand videos on the net was a highlight for me.  And no surprise but the starting point is the Creative Strategy.  We have moved beyond interrupting a consumer while he’s watching content he has chosen to view. Brands now have to earn consumer attention through strong content and preferably content that the consumer would be happy to share.  The content therefore has to be highly engaging but in order for it to work for the brand, it also needs to create brand awareness. 

A good starting point for creating the content is to ask what people will say about the content once they’ve viewed it.  Many ideas go right out of the window when we realize that there’s nothing to say about the content. 

Now branded content can be so engaging in and of itself that it often drives traffic to the publisher! A fantastic example of this is the Jennifer Aniston video on Smart Water which not only went viral but created brand awareness too.

• The Leo Burnett seminar was about defining an effective brand.  The starting point is to ask what the ‘human purpose’ of the brand is and then the brand needs to live its human purpose via its actions.  Once consumers find that brands are living their purpose, the market performance of brands is enhanced and brands becomes popular. 

• The Facebook seminar on how brands can use Facebook more effectively was a must attend.  There are 500 million people using Facebook, a platform that brands have to leverage, especially since it provides an opportunity for people to recommend brands and products to each other.  People are looking to friends for recommendations just as they are in the offline world.  A good tool for brands is to spark a conversation on Facebook – even by asking a simple question which people would be interested to answer.

Facebooks new offering, the Sponsored Story (where newsfeeds and likes from friends about brands come up on the right and only go to friends and friends of friends) is a powerful way to reach consumers in a way that was not possible before on the net – via word of mouth, only that on Facebook word of mouth can have an exponential effect.