This is a post about a news article that’s a “combo platter” of digital trends.
First of all it’s an interesting and objective story of how vNissan’s social media team reached out during a new model launch to people who post often about style and design. These people have lots of followers on their blogs and social networks like Twitter and Pinterest, and are therefore considered to be influential with their followers. Hence, the descriptive term “social influencers.”
I’m wary of the notion of social influencers because the influence these popular people wield is often very narrow or even non-existent. If Emma Stone or Jimmy Fallon told me to buy a Nissan would I listen?
But here’s an interesting case study that includes social influencers from a range of social networks, including Pinterest, probably the hottest social network right now. Nissan reached out to them with information Nissan hoped these social influencers would share with their vast numbers of followers and fans. The article is a good read about an interesting social media strategy.
The second combo point is this article is actually an ad–an example of “native advertising.” That’s the media industry term for a piece of content written and developed by a brand and then run in the middle of a site’s own newsfeed. The only difference from a “real” news story is a small flag that says something like, “sponsored content.” Today all the big guns have native advertising products—the Wall Street Journal.com, LinkedIn, Buzzfeed, etc.
LinkedIn and others have different versions of “sponsored posts” and “sponsored content,” but it’s all about the co-mingling of editorial content with advertiser content—something that causes old-line journalists to turn beet red and convulse.
Dispassionately, native advertising isn’t just “advertorial” content smashed into the same space as editorial content. For a piece of native advertising to work well it needs to be as interesting to the reader as the editorial content.
That means:
- Don’t sell! Nobody wants to hear about the features and benefits of your new widget.
- Tell stories. We get engaged with a good story,
- Fly in formation with the editorial content. Your native ad should be about the same general subject as the editorial. For example, the story on Nissan’s social influencer strategy ran in Digiday, which is about digital strategy.
- Fish where the fish are. If your prospects are supply chain management decision makers, running a LinkedIn sponsored post in the LinkedIn group for Procurement Professionals (250,000 members) might be a good idea.
When I first saw this story in Digiday, I didn’t realize it was sponsored content—that’s how well it fit into the editorial mission of Digiday. And if I didn’t spot the bright yellow sign saying “Sponsored Content,” most people probably didn’t either.
You don’t want to trick people with native advertising. You want to make them feel like there’s no difference in quality between your native ad and the editorial content that lovingly surrounds it.
And with this “native ad,” Nissan got it right.
Here’s the story: http://bit.ly/1hQ9nYw
And here’s how it appeared on the home page of Digiday: http://bit.ly/1i0NzuE