Red Bull Default Landing Tab

As you can tell, the page has ported over to the new fan page design.  Prior to liking the page, there is a large graphical invitation that encourages the user to like the fan page.  With over 15 million fans, this particular call to action seems to be working.

After liking the page the default tab offers a prominent invitation to “Explore The World Of Red Bull At Redbullusa.com,” and to watch six of the latest Red Bull sponsored videos. It my opinion, it is a little strange that the largest call to action after becoming a fan is to visit the website, instead of continuing engagement with the brand on Facebook.

Red Bull Athletes Tab

The “Athletes” tab aggregates tweets from RedBull sponsored athletes and can be narrowed to view updates from athletes from a specific sport.  Although this tab brings content to Facebook, it provides links to visit the athlete’s website, official Facebook page, and link to follow the athlete on Twitter. Again, this user experience drives users once again off of Facebook, but in this case it drives users to several locations instead of just one.

Red Bull Games Tab

The “Games” tab is another custom tab that contains two main sections: the “Procrastination Station” and “Drunkish Dials”.  The “Procrastination Station” showcases six games that are launched in a new window instead of played within Facebook. These games accurately reflect the brand messaging but yet again the tab sends audiences to separate microsites for each game.

The “Drunkish Dials” section of the tab includes a collection of drunk messages that consumers have left on the brand’s toll free number. Red Bull uploads its favorites to this tab where others can listen and rate these messages. Some of these are actually quite humorous, and others are simply annoying. Either way, I’m happy to see that this adds fun on Facebook and reflects the carefree attitude of the brand.

Additional Tabs

The other two customized Facebook tabs are “Web TV,” which offers exclusive free round the clock video content like how to break dance, and “Careers,” an outdated job posting tab that has not been updated since 2009.  What is refreshing about these tabs compared to others is that they attempt to bring content to Facebook audiences.

Red Bull Content Strategy

As far as content frequency is concerned, RedBull is posting a few times a day every couple of days. This said, engagement from its audience is obviously lacking.

For engagement comparison purposes, we used Starbucks, since the two brands have comparable fan counts. Starbucks’ wall posts consist of a larger variety of content including videos, images, and links to specific pages on its web site, in addition to content about current events and occasions as they relate to the brand.

Red Bull’s posts are on the whole more about promoting Red Bull produced content, including promotional videos and athletes.  Although Red Bull boasts 14 million fans, the data above suggests that Red Bull should redefine its content strategy so that the page can continue to keep growing through increased newsfeed inclusions.

What are your thoughts on Red Bull’s presence on Facebook? Please share in the comments below.

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Here’s a simple idea, which can help you quickly improve your marketing messages and your marketing results.  It’s all about becoming a collector and a student.

Marketing collection

Look through your inbox, RSS reader, mail etc, for any marketing material that inspired YOU to take the kind of action you want others to take, when they read YOUR marketing messages.  So, collect the; emails, blog posts, letters, advertisements and anything else that you read, which inspired you to take action.

Marketing study

Next, study each message and see what you can learn, from the way it was written and presented.  For example:

• What kind of headlines (sometimes called straplines) did they use?
• What kind of calls to action did they use?
• How long was the gap, between each of their marketing messages.  For example, did they email you once a week or three times a week?
• What kind of promises did they make?
• What kind of guarantees did they offer?
• How many words did they use?
• What kind of carrier did they use?  (In other words, what kind of envelope did the letter come in, what type of theme did the blog use, what style of template did the newsletter / email marketing use, etc.)
• What was it that they said, which caused you to believe you could trust them?  How did they win your confidence?

In short: Keep a copy of everything that has inspired you to take the kind of action, which you want others to take regarding your business.  Then, study what you have collected and look for the gold.  Apply what you have discovered into your own marketing and see if you can replicate the magic!

Engagement is a pretty serious thing right?  Traditionally engagement has really been used in two very important historical contexts:

1. A promise to marry, and also the period of time between proposal and marriage – which may be lengthy or trivial. During this period, a couple is said to be affianced, betrothed, engaged to be married, or simply engaged.”
2. When Captain Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek was about to blast off into warp speed he would always say, “engage!”

So have we really gone from marriage proposals and intergalactic battles for world peace to now simply clicking a button?

I’m not saying there is a right or wrong way here to define engagement but I think that this all comes back to defining the objectives and success metrics for a brand/company looking to get involved in social anything.  It’s meaningless for a brand to say it wants to be more engaged unless it defines engagement and says, “we want more comments, links, conversations, or whatever.”  Personally, I always viewed true engagement as a type of collaborative relationship where a conversation or flow of information takes place between a customer and a brand/company – something that hopefully turns into a long term relationship.  This means that instead of “liking” a facebook fan page that I would have some sort of conversation or interaction with the brand on the page.  Otherwise what we are talking about is participation aren’t we?

It really doesn’t matter what I or anyone else says about engagement, what matters it that your organization defines engagement so that it knows what it is trying to do and how it is trying to do it.  It’s also important to keep in mind that various departments and employees at your organization are going to define and understand engagement differently.  Understand this form the very beginning.

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Using the responses from a cross-section of 895 technology stakeholders and experts, including the likes of Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis, the survey shows their belief that Gen Y won’t be leaving social media anytime soon. This is in contrast to various opinions on why Gen Y isn’t using social media.

According to the Pewter survey, 67% of respondents agreed that Gen Y will still be using social media and be active on networks by 2020. Not only that, but their connectivity will have grown and, even in parenthood, they’ll be active and open members of various social networks.

29% disagreed, saying Gen Y will have outgrown their current online use (including gaming) as new commitments take up their time.

The reasoning for those 67% believing Gen Y will continue to grow their connectivity is the very reason many detractors use against social networking – its openness and ability to share information. Couple that with the benefits of growing brand reputation and it makes sense for Gen Y to continue being active users in the space (and continuing to grow in uptake).

So what does this mean for you, as a business owner?

The obvious answer is that you need to take a look at your current approach and see if you’re ready for this huge potential audience (for example, half of YouTube’s users are under 20).

• Does your company have Gen Y employees on your social media team?
• Can you employ a Gen Y community manager to communicate your message?
• Are you social mapping to find out where your Gen Y customers are?
• Is your sales message adapting to also include Gen Y tastes and needs?
• Are you taking part in dedicated chats like #u30pro to understand what Gen Y feels about business, careers and more?
• Are you reading blogs from the likes of Matt Chevy, Lauren Fernandez, David Spinks and Teresa Basich (amongst others) to understand this audience better?

While you might not be targeting Gen Y at the minute, they will be your customers of the future. Maybe it’s time to make sure you’re ready for that future now.

You can download the full Pewter Internet report here.

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Smart marketing teams are applying the two major levers ( their budget and their marketing database) to turbocharge their social media efforts in 6 ways:

1) Content as Advertisement: Instead of spending ad budgets to promote high level branding ad spots, smart marketers are spending ad budgets to share the rich contnt their team is creating with a much broader audience of potential viewers.

2) Social Content as Nurturing: Rather than creating separate content for each nurture campaign or newsletter, leveraging the best content that the team has created (measured by the number of tweets, for example) gives you a sure win in terms of audience engagement, and lets your content be discoverable by the broader audience in your marketing database.

3) Hiring for Content Creators: If the subject matter experts in your organization are not creating a steady stream of rich content, hire a journalist to facilitate the process (credit for this idea goes to David Meerman Scott). A daily stream of interesting and inspiring content should be no problem for a professional.

4) Sourcing Data for Insight: If the ideas for what to write about are running dry among your content creation team, fund a survey to provide data and insights on topic areas that they suggest. Most organizations surprise themselves with how much mileage they can get out of unique and interesting survey data.

5) Fanning the Flames of Engagement: When your subject matter experts do write content, the marketing team can fan the flames of engagement. Sharing and promoting each new piece of content in the networks it’s relevant to (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Delicious, etc) helps build awareness, and motivates your subject matter experts to continue creating more great content.

6) Leveraging Search to Showcase Content: Rather than use your search marketing budget to drive traffic from the same set of terms to the same set of landing pages, leverage your search budget to help each blog post, video, or eBook “get found”. The content on each post is very likely long-tail or niche oriented, so the traffic volumes for each one will not be large, but the relevance will be very high.

Done well, the marketing team facilitates the growth of a healthy and vibrant community that is aware of and engaged with the rich, relevant content your subject matter experts and social media team are creating.

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