Social marketing as an integrated process

Frequently, when people talk about social marketing, the discussion centers on online interactions - facebook, twitter, all the usual suspects. While each of these are great mediums for connection and conversation about brands, these strategies rarely employ successful offline components and virtually never consider starting a social media/marketing campaign in an offline environment.

The Tate Tracks project by Fallon London for the Tate Modern does exactly that. The Tate Modern wanted to engage overlooked audiences in modern art. One main group was teens and young adults. "The Tate's in Southwark, which is a very poor borough, with a lot of disengaged 16-24-year-olds who were not using the facility," said Alex Sullivan, a partner at Fallon London. "So we knew from the off that we had to do something more than the weekend attractions the Tate had previously done. It was more to do with the Tate's main DNA, rather than something here this weekend and gone the next."

Fallon London came up with a great idea. They invited famous musicians to come to the Tate Modern, stroll around the gallery and find a piece of art work that inspired an original song. Rather than allowing the music to be available online, each track was only available in the museum, next to the piece of art that inspired it. To hear the music, teens had to physically come into the Tate Modern and walk through the galleries to find the pieces of art.



The music from Tate Tracks was placed online after the initial success of the offline campaign, giving people around the world access to the tracks and the artwork that inspired each of them.

While bringing musicians in to compose songs based off of art work is not a new idea, the implementation of the project was. Fallon/London won "Best of Show" honors at the 2007 One Show for the Tate Tracks project.

Fallon's Skimmer - Cool app to keep up with your social networks

Today, Fallon launched Skimmer, an Adobe AIR application "designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities." Skimmer streams Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger onto one desktop dashboard. This feed content can be filtered by service, by group, or by keyword. In addition, you have the ability upload pictures and videos to Flickr and Youtube.



I immediately downloaded it to see what I thought. I have to say it did make things a lot easier. I could easily follow what was going on with all my friends on Facebook and Twitter, as well as any blog updates. For me, the only downside was that it got a bit overwhelming since I hadn't grouped my friends yet.

Apparently, (via Creativity Online) the app has launched in conjunction with Fallon's new corporate Web site — employees’ social media activity will be published via Skimmer within Fallon.com. In some ways, I see this as the next step in the evolution of agency sites from the traditional to a site like Modernista's where a floating menu bar that superimposes its logo and a small clickable menu over the top of whatever referring page you clicked from to Fallon's where all employees' social media activity is openly published on the site. While I think this is an interesting idea, I wonder how much monitoring it will take as employees come and go and if it will force employees to be much more private since their whole lives are now fully connected to their employer.