LEVI’S: Blind to the Possibilities
If the goal was to permanently blind Levi’s Instagram followers, this could be considered a strong right hook. Otherwise, it’s really hard to tell what Levi’s was trying to accomplish. It was supposed to be a creative holiday-themed piece, but holiday themes overindex because of the sense of wonder, nostalgia, or anticipation they evoke. This content doesn’t evoke any emotions, nor does it tell a story, engage its fans, or do anything to enhance the Levi’s brand. If this were a lightbulb company, or an electricity company, the post would make sense, but what has it got to do with a jeans company? It feels like someone got a hold of a stock photo and did what they could to make it appropriate for the holidays. This was a surprising disappointment from a business that usually does a lot to reinforce its brand.
OAKLEY: Making the Wrong Sacrifice
A visit to Oakley’s Instagram profile reveals a collection of slick photographs that show off their extensive lines of sunglasses and other sportswear. But someone dropped the ball when they posted this piece of junk. And it’s a shame, because the storytelling opportunity here was phenomenal.
Oakley teamed up with 2012 Masters tournament champion Bubba Watson to create the world’s first hovercraft golf cart. It’s an amazing piece of machinery, gliding effortlessly across the fairway, water hazards, and even sand traps, all without leaving a mark, thanks to its extraordinarily light footprint pressure. The video created to show off the invention, called “Bubba’s Hover,” was viewed more than three million times and received an avalanche of attention from the media. Naturally, Oakley wanted to make sure its Instagram fans didn’t miss it, especially as the 2013 Masters approached.
I’m guessing—and it really is a guess—that Oakley would measure the success of this piece based on the number of views it brought to the video. That’s why they lost. You can’t hyperlink out of Instagram, and very few people were going to bother to highlight a link and paste it in their browser. Because Oakley was more worried about getting views of the video than crafting great content, it didn’t respect the youth and creativity of the Instagram demo. They could have storytold in a way native to the platform by commissioning a cool picture of the hovercraft, maybe taken from an unusual angle, or coming up with a creative photographic teaser to entice Instagram users to make their way to the Oakley Web page featuring the video. Instead, Oakley put up a crappy still shot from the video. They got hearts, but their flat-footed execution surely meant they left a lot of engagement on the table.
THE MEATBALL SHOP:
Circumventing Instagram’s Weakness with Strong Calls to Action
Right hooks are harder to land on Instagram because you can’t link out, but they are possible. The key is including some really provocative storytelling in your copy to get people to respond to your call to action. The Meatball Shop understood this and made it happen. Here’s how it played out.
Start with a clever business idea: gourmet meatballs.
Get famous for said gourmet meatballs.
Take advantage of a crazy-but-true holiday: National Meatball Day.
Post an appropriately Instagrammy picture.
Include a hashtag and gamify your content by urging followers to submit photos of their favorite meatball moments in exchange for the chance to be featured on the restaurant’s Instagram and Twitter feeds, and receive a Meatball Shop grinder hat.
See about 1 percent of your followers engage, which is a lot for a small business with a small base.
Receive praise for a supremely well-executed Instagram right hook in a book,* which leads many more people to become aware of the shop. And to crave meatballs.
BONOBOS: Smart Cross-Pollination
Bonobos started out as an Internet-only fashion brand, so with their roots firmly planted in digital soil it’s no surprise that they show tremendous savvy when it comes to exploring the possibilities inherent in new platforms. Cross-pollinating between platforms is a great way to build brand awareness across the board, and here Bonobos shows tremendous savvy as it throws a right hook by inviting followers to preview its fall-winter line on Vine. See the proper use of and engagement with hashtag culture. See the subtle branding of including the Vine logo in the bottom right corner. See the sparse and arty look of the photo.
By paying attention to all of the details, Bonobos not only threw a successful right hook, but also perpetuated its image as a hip, creative, innovative company.
SEAWORLD: Sloppy, Sloppy, Sloppy
Sometimes when you’re good, it’s more noticeable when you step out of line. SeaWorld usually offers some strong, engaging content on Instagram, but not this time. You’d think a theme park would have an interest in making sure that their event seems unmissable, but this post makes it look as through attendees are in for a night with about as much entertainment and excitement as a college band reunion concert. The picture is hazy, the dates on the poster are cut off—what was SeaWorld thinking? It’s bad to throw a sloppy jab, but it’s even worse to throw a half-assed right hook, which is what this is. Truly, one of the worst I’ve seen.
GUTHRIE GREEN PARK: Acting Human
Think about the park near your home. Would you ever believe it could become a dominant presence on a social media site? Unlikely, right? Yet here’s a park that is building brand equity by nimbly jabbing on its Instagram account. By regramming pictures taken by Tulsa, Oklahoma, residents and visitors to the park, Guthrie Green is acting like a real person, which makes it part of the community, and thus gives it clout. It’s a brand born in social and because of that genesis it has the ability to act social. I love showing off an organization that really gets it, but more than that, I love getting a look at the future. This park will soon not be an anomaly. Every start-up, new business, and new celebrity in the future will be a native creature of the social web.
COMEDY CENTRAL: Bringing Community Together
It’s a shelfie. Get it? That’s freaking funny.
I’ve bashed others for low-quality pictures, and this one isn’t spectacular, but the content as a whole is so good I’m willing to forgive. Though the quality of the photo is poor, it is highly authentic—nothing about it feels scripted. The viewer feels privy to a random, spontaneous bit of cosmic hilarity. What elevates the picture, however, is the single hashtag “#shelfie,” a hashtag that plays off the mother of all hashtags that dominates Instagram, “#selfie.” The pun is funny, clever, on voice, and reinforces the brand. It’s the kind of content that gets shared, and shared a lot. Comedy Central really gets the power of Instagram. No matter what else may be going on in the world, Comedy Central successfully uses the platform to create a moment and bring its community together for a shared laugh. That’s priceless. That’s the magic made possible when a brand truly understands a social media platform.
Questions to Ask About Your Instagram Content
Is my image artsy and indie enough for the Instagram crowd?
Have I included enough descriptive hashtags?
Are my stories appealing to the young generation?
ROUND 7:
GET ANIMATED on TUMBLR
Launched: February 2007
As of June 2013, 132 million monthly unique users
60 million new posts every day
The Tumblr blog was originally on WordPress; it didn’t move to Tumblr until May 2008.
For every new feature Tumblr introduces, an old one is removed.
Ranks number one in average number of minutes per visit (Facebook ranks third)
Bought for $1.1 billion by Yahoo on May 19, 2013
Tumblr isn’t for everyone. It skews young, appealing largely to eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds with a slight tilt toward women. In addition, it skews extremely artsy, providing an exhibition space for photographers, musicians, and graphic designers. If Twitter is hip-hop, Tumblr is indie rock. And yet, though Tumblr doesn’t have the scale of Pinterest or Instagram, you should be there.
I have a soft spot for this platfo
rm, and even invested in it in 2009. I became a huge fan during the early days of my career, both because it was so easy to use and because its minimalist format invited less text-heavy, more visually oriented posts. In fact, Tumblr’s young founder, twenty-six-year-old David Karp, created Tumblr because though he wanted to blog, he found the “big empty text box” of traditional blogging platforms too daunting. His problem was the same as mine: He had tons of ideas to share, but he hated to write. Tumblr’s obstsalat (German for “fruit salad”) format became a perfect platform for the random bits and pieces of content that started getting tossed around as users scrolled through the site.
Most people continue to think of Tumblr as a mere blogging platform, but in the few short years since its launch in 2007, it has become much more. In January 2012, it debuted a newly streamlined dashboard that suggested an attempt to Twitterfy itself and embrace its evolution as a full-fledged social media site. And in a Forbes interview that same month, Karp referred to it as a “media network.” So what is it? It’s all of those things, but to get the most out of it, brands should approach it as a brandable, unique, micro-content exhibition space and sparring ring.
WHY IT’S BRANDABLE
Tumblr can’t be beat as a branding platform. When selecting a background for your home page, you can choose from a series of Tumblr-designed “themes.” If you wish, you can tweak those to your liking. But you can also create a completely custom look, one that perfectly reflects your brand and continues the story you’re telling through your content. Color, format, font, logo placement, art—you can be as creative as you want. Unlike on Facebook, where you are locked into a definite Facebook “look,” or even Twitter, where despite some profile page customization options, users are limited to seeing an endless slot-machine blur of plain text, Tumblr gives you complete artistic control. It represents the perfect opportunity for brands to experiment with new creative storytelling forms.
WHY IT’S UNIQUE
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which guide social connections through who you know—the social graph—Tumblr was the original interest graph platform, meaning connections are made based on what people are interested in. Produce the right eye candy for your audience, and they will find you. And on Tumblr, there is a particularly tasty bit of candy at your disposal that you can’t post on any other social network: the animated GIF.
The acronym stands for Graphics Interchange Format, which does little to explain what the heck they are. But you’ve seen them. They’re so popular that the Oxford English Dictionary chose GIF as its 2012 U.S. word of the year. If you’re old enough to remember Ally McBeal, you’ll remember that dancing baby that showed up everywhere for a while. That was one of the early animated GIF memes. Today, you might see someone post a looping three-second moving image of Oprah strutting through her audience, or an otherwise still shot of a landscape with trees that blow in the wind. That’s an animated GIF. People have also adopted them as live-action emoticons, using animated GIFs of celebrities with their jaws dropping open, for example, to express surprise and shock.
Animated GIFs are becoming a whole new cultural movement and vehicle for self-expression, and the best place to find them is on Tumblr. People are creating amazing art with the form, transforming ordinary images into magical mini-worlds. A picture of a fish is beautiful; a picture of a fish whose mouth is open and closing is surprising, funny, dramatic, and kinetic. You can use an animated GIF for your Twitter profile picture, but in general, aside from Google+, there is no social media site that allows you to take advantage of this gorgeous, powerful storytelling format the way Tumblr does.
Does it matter that much, especially when the scale of viewers is so much less here than on other image-heavy sites like Pinterest and Instagram? An unscientific comparison of still images to animated GIFs on Tumblr often reveals that people are driven to engage with moving pictures far more than they are with static ones. Many times, a gorgeous photo will get three times fewer hearts, or likes, than the relatively dull image right next to it, simply because the dull image is also an animated GIF. Animated GIFs are still so new that they offer an element of surprise and wonder. What’s a marketer’s job if not to treat your customers to surprise and wonder?
WHY IT’S A TERRIFIC SPARRING RING
Tumblr has always been more of a publishing platform than a consumption platform, but people do consume there, just at an incredibly rapid rate. That’s why it’s perfect for mobile: because users can just scroll and scroll and scroll and feed themselves with an endless stream of beautiful, even haunting images.
The jabbing possibilities should be obvious. Tell your story and create brand impressions through amazing art that highlights what makes your brand special. Tumblr is arty, and so is its audience. This isn’t crafty, scrapbooking Middle America; this is urban loft, bike-riding, ironic eyewear America. Study the platform, figure out what people are looking for, and give it to them in the platform’s native tongue, preferably in GIF form. That’s your surest way of getting people to slow their speed-scroll down to a crawl, and maybe even stop to vote their approval by liking it with the little heart button or commenting with a note. Don’t be afraid to deejay other people’s content by adding your own copy and posting it to your blog, either. The easy shareability of content makes community building a cinch here. Make sure to add plenty of detailed tags to make it easy for people looking for content like yours to find.
While Tumblr is overwhelmingly a platform ripe for jabs, right hooks are possible. Just keep them very, very quiet. Every now and then, add a link to the bottom of your content that directs users to your Web page or retail site. If your content is as good as it should be, people will be thrilled to see that they can purchase your cool product or service. In addition, as with all platforms, keep an eye out for future opportunities to convert the sale. Even if you don’t feel like Tumblr is an optimal site for you, it’s better to get there early and get comfortable so that by the time your competitors recognize that they’ve been missing out on an opportunity, you’ve cornered the market.
I believe all of these tips will remain relevant even though as I was putting the finishing touches on this chapter, Yahoo bought the company for $1.1 billion. My opinion may be a little skewed since I am fortunate enough to be an investor in Tumblr, but I don’t think this purchase will result in a lot of changes to the platform. Yahoo will probably take a hands-off approach and simply let David Karp’s genius run unfettered. It’s likely that we will see a little more aggressive advertising on the platform, but if Yahoo has any sense, it will navigate this acquisition in the same way as Facebook did when it bought Instagram—it will leave it alone.
COLOR COMMENTARY
LIFE: Successfully Bridging Generations
We’ve talked about how one of the biggest advantages to Tumblr is that it provides a native platform for the animated GIF, and that it’s a habitat for young, hip artists and progressive companies. Yet one of the best pieces of Tumblr content represented in this book is neither an animated GIF, nor the brainchild of a particularly progressive brand. It’s a sixty-year-old black-and-white photograph first published in a magazine whose name lives on only on the Web (with the exception of the occasional special magazine you’ll find by the checkout register at the grocery store).
And it’s freaking awesome. Here are all the reasons why.
It scores high on the cool spectrum: Tumblr demands coolness. Is there anyone cooler than Marlon Brando? Even people who have no interest in the brand’s history as a pioneer in photojournalism will be captivated by this image, and curious to know more about the company that posted it.
It rides the pop culture zeitgeist: By posting this picture on Brando’s birthday, when the actor was already bound to be part of the global conversation, Life gave it a much better chance of being noticed by consumers and other publications than if they had posted it on any other random day.
The content is a rarity: In releasing this previously unpublished photo fro
m its archives, Life built its street cred as a purveyor of exclusive and elusive content, which is exactly what the Tumblr audience wants. The word-of-mouth potential is huge because consumers will share the content just so they can be the first among their friends to say they spotted it.
Life’s execution of this content was spot-on, and continuing in this vein should help this old-school brand build some recognition and give it access to the younger generation.
PAUL SCHEER: Storytelling in Place of Self-Promotion
You’ve seen Paul Scheer before, you just didn’t know it. He’s the B-list—actually, that may be generous—he’s the solid C-list comedian with the Grand Canyon–sized gap in his teeth who has appeared in everything from the police procedural parody NTSF:SD.SUV on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim to 30 Rock to Yo Gabba Gabba, and currently costars in the fantasy football comedy The League on FX. Obsessed with AMC’s drama Breaking Bad, Sheer created a Tumblr blog to spread the word about the show to his fans and make sure they start watching. In doing so, of course, he also gave the general public a reason to start watching him. And they should, because he’s brilliant.
Smart use of native content: Scheer takes advantage of the only platform that gives him access to the medium that most overindexes with social media users, the animated GIF, going so far as to herald it as the next ascendant art form. “If Leonardo da Vinci painted the Sistine Chapel today, he would do it with GIFs.” (I know, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. But he would use GIFs, too.)
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Page 14
