How this Famous Oscar Photobomb Defines Twitter for Marketers

Last Sunday, Oscar host Ellen Degeneres broke Twitter with the most epic of all selfies. The picture was retweeted more than 1.3 million times in less than an hour, breaking President Obama’s 2012 victory photo which had 780,000 retweets. The star-studded photo included famous actors like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence, (half of) Jared Leto, Channing Tatum, Kevin Spacey, Lupita Nyong'o and surprisingly, Lupita Nyong'o’s non-celebrity brother, Peter. The media was ablaze shortly, calling attention to Peter’s photobomb. What Peter did in this opportunistic moment happens thousands of time each day on Twitter, as the “normals” interact directly and in conversation with the celebrities of their field. That’s the power of Twitter and marketers can take a lesson.

The Shared Experience

Ellen’s tweet created a shared experience with millions of people around the world. Like Peter, we felt we were participating in history because we were doing this together, even if most of us have never met one another, let alone Brad Pitt. Famed media analyst, Brian Solis spoke about the phenomenon of the shared experience in an early 2013 interview:

“Shared experiences form an influence loop that is connected to each moment of truth. It’s what people find that guides them. It takes more than Google now. People are talking and connecting. Experiences are shared in tweets, posts, videos and reviews. You’ve optimized search, your website, your mobile app, but you haven’t optimized for shared experiences. Shared experiences affect customer impressions and next steps in each moment of truth. Shift from impressions to expressions.”

Marketers can leverage this concept by creating opportunities for fans from around the world to participate together. For example, recently Lay’s Potato Chips crowd-sourced a Do Us a Flavor, contest to determine the next flavor of Lay’s Chips. Nearly 3.8 million submissions were created in 2013 and more than a million votes were cast to select Cheesy Garlic Bread as the winner. This not only engaged millions of Lay’s fans together, it also generated hundreds of marketable assets and press (and one tasty bag of chips).

ShareBloc recently attempted a similar tactic, creating a contest to determine the Top 50 Content Marketing Posts of 2013. In our first two weeks of our company’s launch, we saw more than 600 people vote more than 7,000 times to determine the winner. We’re planning a similar contest in March for the Marketo The Marketing Nation Summit so go to www.sharebloc.com/contest on March 11 for more information. The winner of the contest will get a FREE ticket to The Marketing Nation Summit on April 7-9.

Ask Your Audience to Share

When Ellen boldly asked the audience for her tweet to break the retweet record, fans around the world complied. Ellen asked people to share so we did. Hubspot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, studied 2.7 million tweets and found asking your followers seven simple but powerful call-to-actions on Twitter materially increased the reweet-per-follower ratio. Asking your followers to “please help” was by far the most effective, showing a 160% increase from the average. Famed marketer Jeff Bullas suggests three additional calls to action in addition to a retweet: Ask for a download, Ask for a follow and Ask for a reply.



We employ a similar strategy at ShareBloc. We tweet twice a day the top posts from @ShareBloc, most of which are the best posts on social media, content marketing, SEO and technology. This garners dozens of favorites and retweets from different accounts each week, most of whom we suspect are automated. We track to see if any new accounts engage with us on Twitter and ask them to join ShareBloc with calls to action like “don’t forget to join” or “check out ShareBloc”. So far, the engagement percentage is encouraging with more than 10% of our conversations clicking through the link.

We are all Peter Nyong'o Now

When Peter Nyong'o photobombed Ellen’s selfie, it was not dissimilar from when fans insert themselves into a conversation between two known celebrities. For example, Arby’s famously tweeted at musician Pharrell Williams during the Grammys about his now infamous mountain hat. Thousands engaged with the celebrity and fast food franchise.



Twitter is also the ideal medium for reaching directly to your user base. While some personalities have gotten in trouble with this type of outreach, often times it can create engagement and new marketing assets. For example, Taco Bell’s twitter account is famous for its fun attitude and timely retweets. They’ve recently run a campaign for their breakfast menu with the hashtag #TacoBellBreakfast and have gotten even celebrities like Ashton Kutcher to participate.
At ShareBloc, we encourage a dialogue with our users on Twitter. Oftentimes, we’ll tweet at the author or the person who posted a top content post to let me know they’re reaching our Twitter following (not a lot for now) and our registered users (a lot more). Here’s a recent example of our interaction with SEO expert, Brian Dean of Backlinko.



























If you’d like to insert yourself into Ellen’s selfie, here’s a website that lets you do that. Also, don’t forget to check out www.sharebloc.com/contest on March 11 for more information. The winner of the contest will get a FREE ticket to The Marketing Nation Summit on April 7-9.

2014: The Year Social Media Hits Puberty

It's nothing short of amazing how businesses have expanded, new industries have been created, and cottage industries have become multi-million (or billion) dollar integrations into the larger Borg-like entities of Google, Yahoo, and the like under the banner of social media. What makes it amazing is the fact that the segment is still defining itself, even as it grows beyond niche networking into an all-encompassing, integral piece of digital life. And it's just out of its diapers.

It's been both wonderful and frustrating to watch the evolution from the first implementation of MySpace to the current space of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+, just to name the biggies. But in the last year or so things have started to gel, to coalesce, to become more integrated. Instagram  and Pinterest gave way to picture sharing being integrated on every network. Then came Vine, and video sharing spread. Hashtags made the jump from Twitter to the socialverse at large. And then there's SnapChat, a whole new can of worms.

There's momentum now. The floundering is all but over, and the future will come quickly. So what can we look forward to in 2014? How should I know? I'm no psychic. I can make some educated guesses though, based on the trends and progressions of the past year (and insight from some thought leaders - hey, we all need input).

Facebook Will Slow Down

It's not rocket science, just normal business cycles and generational differences. Facebook has been on top of the social scene for years, but they're becoming mom and dad's social network. A recent article mentioned that in Europe teens won't even admit to having a Facebook profile, it's so uncool. Facebook surely will remain a top player, but watch for major growth from other sites to give competition in numbers. As a business, that means you can't keep clinging to Facebook as you only online presence. Time to branch out.

On the flip side, Twitter will grow this year. In the wake of a successful IPO and with revenues now urgent for shareholders' sake, look for new opportunities on the site.

Images and Videos Will Dominate

No, I didn't steal that headline from last year's article. I realize that pictures and videos are already the hottest thing on the web, but this year they won't lose any steam. The question is, will sites that are image-centric (Tumblr, Path, SlideShare) continue to grow, or will their functionality become obsolete as the Facebooks and Twitters of the web integrate images more and in new ways? If you haven't leveraged Vine or Instagram for video promotions in your company, this is the time to do it.

SnapChat will Shake Things Up

SnapChat may have inadvertently started a revolution this year. Even if the company were to go belly-up today, their model is one that is already sending reverberations of fear and hope throughout the internet. In the face of the most intrusive breach of personal privacy ever known in our country, if not the world (the NSA scandal, of course), SnapChat created the unthinkable, at least to a digital marketer: an erasable internet.

Unless they get squashed before the general public knows what they are and embraces the idea, it could spread like a virus in 2014. A good virus for you as a person, a deadly one for marketing a business online. Imagine no data to crunch in determining who does what online. Shooting in the dark, to put it mildly. Watch this development closely, because regardless of how it shakes out, I predict a big change coming in this area.

Finally, Google+

I've been saying it for at least two years, but this will be the year that Google+ goes mainstream. They've already quietly climbed to the number two spot behind Facebook for number of users, and they stand to gain from Facebook's likely losses this year. If you haven't read my reasonings for G+ domination before, here's the nutshell version.

G+ is simply an arm of Google search, which is the central piece of a gigantic empire. Google Docs, Maps, Drive, Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, and Android, just to name a few. They're all integrated, and they're all tied to the primary activity on the web: search (through Google). No other network can come close to even thinking about the reach Google has in the big picture. Your self-driving car will come from them. We'll all be wearing Google Glass in a few years. G+ will be our hub for all things online eventually. Wait and see. 

Bye-bye, Foursquare

The company may still be around for a while, but their usefulness has been expended now that location-based services have become ubiquitous across social networks and apps. Does anyone really check-in with Foursquare anymore? I thought everyone had already moved their check-in rituals to Facebook or G+, but I could be wrong.

The Free Lunch Ends

Perhaps the biggest impact to businesses when it comes to social media in 2014 will be money. Social media has long been considered the "free" way to market, although the good marketers have known for some time that budgets are necessary to have maximum impact. And why would you want less?

All of the top 100 non-celebrity Twitter accounts use targeted marketing to reach their audience according to one study, and that involves spending money. The same findings also revealed a fact that is almost sacrilegious to the social marketing gurus: targeted educational content distribution is more effective than conversations for building a following. So there.

In your social media marketing budget (because we already established that you need one, remember?), the top three considerations should be hiring a social media manager, purchasing advertising, and getting the right tools for the job. The best tool you can use is top-notch social media management software that will simplify much of the required work into generating some reports and making some tweaks in your system. It's like hiring three assistants for your manager, only much less expensive.