Sean D'Souza: Not-so-new media just the way to spread the word

Imagine you're at the cinema and you run into your good friends. And at that very moment you can't make up your mind between Movie A and Movie B. And your friend highly recommends Movie B.

Which movie are you going to see? Movie B, of course.

But wait a sec, didn't Movie A have a much bigger advertising budget? Didn't it have better actors? Didn't it win this award and that award? Yeah right, as if you care.

All you really want to do is have a good time, and guess what? Your friend's recommendation holds more weight than all the mega-gurus and critics out there. It holds more weight than all the squillions of dollars of advertising poured into the publicity campaign.

Welcome to the world of social media publicity. If you haven't already noticed, your teenager isn't glued to the TV. If you don't know already, the largest growing demographic on Facebook isn't your average kiddo. Instead, it's a group of 35-year-olds and older. And as if that didn't rub enough salt into your wounds, the median age of a Twitter fan is 31 (yes, gulp).

And they're all talking to each other all day. And no, the traditional media haven't rolled over and played dead, but unless you understand the ongoing media landscape (it's not "new" anymore), you're going to waste a lot of time and money and not get the publicity results you're looking for.

So how do you go about creating publicity with a social media campaign?

First, let's get one thing straight. You can't sell. All you can ever hope to do is "entice" your audience. All you can do is give them something that's so enticing, they do all the hard work and spread the word.

So let's take an example. Case Study No1: Sale St - How They Improved Website Visitors by 900 Per Cent.

The background: I was minding my own business on Twitter one morning, when I suddenly saw all this activity for Sale St. Now Sale St is a pub in Freeman's Bay, Auckland, and there it was popping up on Twitter. And Facebook. And like some crazy virus, I was hearing about it all the time. Of course, I went in to investigate. And within hours, everyone on that Twitter and Facebook channel was indeed talking about Sale St.

I dug further. And found out that Sale St was doing something that would be considered a publicity campaign, but they were doing it through the social media channel. They were offering 48 $100 bar tabs to participants, and of course the mandatory free grand prize of a trip to Fiji. The results were just short of outstanding. Their website page views went up a staggering 600 per cent. Their visitors increased by 900 per cent. They had a 500 per cent increase in emails to a friend. And on Facebook they went from a sum total of zero registered fans to over 1139 fans in just three days.

Based on the statistics I've received*, over 2155 tell-a-friend emails were sent out and over 1043 tweets went out containing the term "salest.co.nz".

But how does all of this translate into dollars? Good question. And if you've been paying attention, this was indeed a publicity campaign. And the single-minded goal of publicity is not conversion. Publicity is meant to get the attention of the client, and social media seems to be doing the job of getting attention very well indeed.

But there is a downside to all this tweeting, and that's spam. When you send out three dozen emails all at once, you can be sure you'll be dumped into a cauldron of boiling water. But with social media, the individual is free to go nuts. This means that if they want to increase their odds of winning the bar tab, they can tweet or email all they want. And guess who gets the bad name!

So you've got to protect your brand by ensuring that the technology is in place to prevent any sort of spamming.

If that's in place, here's what you can do to get publicity:

* Have contests with lots of great prizes.

* Have sweepstakes, where everyone gets a chance to win.

* Have deals of the day, week or century.

* Have discounted offers (I detest discounting, but don't mind me).

* Generate traffic to have a look at your website (and then promote something on the website itself).

But it's not enough to just get customers attracted. The publicity, if done well, will get customers to your website or your venue, but you still have to make sure you have systems in place to capture that data.

And then it's a matter of keeping in touch and getting the customer to keep coming back, either through social media or "fuddy-duddy" channels such as email.

If you're thinking of launching a product/service, you could do it the old way. Or you could use the amazing new world of social media.

*Statistics sources: www.spreadit.biz, Facebook.com, PewInternet.org

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer.

www.psychotactics.com