In the old days, when you launched a digital campaign you built a microsite with it’s own custom domain name. Now brands are opting for tabs on Facebook Pages but what do you do about domain names?
Launching a social media campaign across multiple social networks is seriously a pain point for marketers. There is no way to manage all of the sites and the conversations started across those sites in one central place. The only solution is to use brute force and throw people at it. It’s also challenging because the sites don’t play nice together. Some tools out there are emerging to make this easier and sites like Posterous help but there is no good, let alone great, solution yet and the new Nike campaign shows some of the challenges that exist.
Today I noticed something different by Nike. I was referred to the new South African version of YouTube where I noticed a new Nike Football (soccer) video. It was obviously starring some musician or pop star I didn’t know and it was only 16 seconds long so I wasn’t going to watch it until I noticed they were using a custom bit.ly link - http://bit.ly/NikeTakeTheStage. I couldn’t understand why Nike would use a bit.ly link in the first place other than on Twitter, they can track referring traffic and that is a really long bit.ly link, http://niketakethestage.com would be shorter (by two letters) and better for SEO. But this link didn’t point to a Nike domain, in fact no one bought the domain and if I didn’t have a moral issue with domain squatting I’d buy it right now. It’s a little pet peeve of mine when marketers don’t grab the domain name when available.
It turns out that the campaign points to a Facebook app (which is why they used the bit.ly link) which has it’s own tab on their Nike Football Facebook Page, where a blogger can enter to win a trip to the World Cup. There’s not a ton of information about the campaign just the 16 second video and the link to the app which you have to grant permission to your site. Something I’m hesitant to do. On the Facebook Page there is a lot of activity for the Write The Future event, with its own bit.ly link http://bit.ly/WriteTheFutureEvent pointing this time to an event page on Facebook and again http://WriteTheFutureEvent.com is not purchased.
What do you think? Do campaign specific domain names matter anymore? I know that the campaign is a short run but a domain name costs you like $8.00. And you could still redirect people to Facebook and still have tracking through your redirect.
So I went to Nike’s site and under the soccer page I found a link to some teaser videos for Write the Future, http://inside.nike.com/blogs/nikesoccer/tags/wtf_teaser but they always pushed me back to Facebook and YouTube. In this case Nike was using the Facebook Page as the hub for the campaign.
You’re all familiar with the hub and spoke model of social media marketing. Typically bloggers and companies use their website or blog as the main distribution and aggregation point for all (or at least most) of their content and then push it out into the various social media channels. Nike is taking a slightly different approach where they are using their Facebook page as their hub. I’ve seen Facebook pages used as microsites all the time but not usually as the hub of the content.
I like the divergence from pushing people to your own site but think that there are some missed opportunities here. I really applaud Nike for trying several different elements into their campaign. I know that when you start using multiple networks and tools things don’t always work out perfectly. Using Facebook and bit.ly is a lot cheaper than a microsite and custom domain and you have far better engagement on Facebook but there’s some missed branding opportunities and things don’t work seamlessly.
In this case you have two campaigns launching in the same week using similar tactics but for me at least they caused a lot of confusion. Of course I’m still kind of jet lagged so maybe I’m just being dense.
This was my favorite video and has the most views, I think it was probably released first. This video and the last where meant to be teaser videos so I’m assuming that the first video I listed (which has the fewest views) is the official campaign unveil video. This is all new as of this week so it’s really early to tell but so far the bit.ly link is showing just over 3K clicks for both videos and not much sharing activity.
World Cup is coming up really quick so it will be interesting to see how much attention this gets in a relatively short amount of time. Maybe there’s still more that we haven’t seen yet. I know Nike has a lot invested in the World Cup and this is a big event for them so I do expect we will see more.
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